"I can't believe you!" Izzy huffs as she went around the room doing chores as Mortimer stood in the doorway with his hands up in defense. "What was I supposed to do, luv?"
Pleading with his wife, Mortimer insisted that everything was going according to plan, that he predicated once the couple hit the roadblock, they'll eventually grow wary and leave their village.
Angrily folding the clothes, Izzy scoffs, "Now, they want to talk to my dearly departed mother!"
The village small as it is, she heard from Marge who heard it from others that the visiting couple are trying to track down more information about the case.
"You canalwayslie, Izzy, it's a fashionable thing to do, especially in the cities!" Mortimer gestures as he tried helping his wife see clarity.
Seeing her distressed, he tried calming her down by bringing up how her mother acted when she told her how Mortimer was courting her.
"Ican'tlie, Morty, they have the book, if I say anything off the pages, they're going to know," Izzy brings up that if the visiting couple are insistent in reading the obscure book, she very well can't lie.
Stepping through the threshold, Mortimer got an idea as he suggested that Izzy plead ignorance, after all she was a baby when it happened.
Hell, Mortimer was barely one year-old!
"And mothers don't talk?" Izzy eyes her husband.
Sitting on their bed, Mortimer encourages his wife to sit down next to him, and through coercing she does.
"If they ask, just say you don't know anything, you always said your mother never liked talking about it, anyhow. It isn't like they're weirdos wanting to pilfer her things," Mortimer insists.
He brought up how his uncles and aunts never told him anything about the case, either, just warned him that he shouldn't be outside at night.
Feeling her husband's arm around her waist, Izzy rested her head on his shoulder, and as she did, she heard her husband ask, "Did you ever look at her notes?"
Izzy's late mother had been a renowned doctor in the village for years, having gone to Oxford and spent time in Dublin and Glasgow before returning to her childhood home to help serve the village.
She was always on everyone's case about their health, to the point she used to stick thermometers into Mortimer's mouth every time he visited their home, and her need to protect the village from even the common cold that had a hold over Izzy.
Thinking it over, Izzy remembered being curious and going through her mother's things, but she was always careful keeping it locked up so Izzy could never get her hands on it out of worry she'd hurt herself or worse.
"Oh, mother, always worried about something," Izzy recalls her mother growing up, to the point it was almost overbearing for her.
When that horrible case happened, it exasperated her worry.
"I remember she got on my case for eating too many sweets!" Mortimer recalled the times that he was besieged by Mrs. Loomis for his questionable eating habits at the time, that it was near impossible to visit Izzy because of her worry about his health.
Thinking it over, Mortimer then mustered, "Besides that, they're the only people we've had in this village that came because of the book. I think they're theonlypeople we've had that came through here as of recent!"
With the book being an obscure piece of media, nobody with the means of making a feature film or a TV special will suddenly come across it, remember it from a stray conversation, find it in an archive somewhere, and in return would make it less attractive for people to attempt it.
Helping Izzy with the remaining chores, Mortimer gets a call, and when he answers, he heard a man asking for Izzy.
When he tried to ask for some details about the man, having sounded unfamiliar to Mortimer, the man grew irritated as he insisted on talking to Izzy.
Prepared to give a tongue lashing, Mortimer was stopped by Izzy who took the phone from him and answered.
Back and forth, she talks to the man and from the bits and pieces that Mortimer was able to hear, the man heard from Marge about the couple.
"You act like they're detectives or something!" Izzy accuses the man.
Before the man began shouting, Izzy sharply cuts him off as she hisses at him that if he wants to make a fool of himself, he's welcomed to doing so.
"My mother wasn't afraid of you then,whyshould I be afraid ofyou, now?" Izzy huffs as she hangs up the phone before turning around to see her husband with a look on his face.
When he asks, Izzy sighs as she rubs her eyes.
"Who the bloody hell was he?" Mortimer wanted to know.
Lowering her hand, Izzy answers with a sigh, "Belfried."
Shocked, Mortimer responds with, "Sounded like he had a cold!"
Belfried was the younger brother to Constable Isaac, Marge's late father, and helped during the case as one of the constables at the scene of the crime but didn't stay in the village for long after the case was finished.
When Isaac died of a sudden heart attack two years later, that was when Belfried moved, and he hadn't shown his face in the village since.
Naturally, Marge stayed in touch with him.
While Izzy never met him herself, as is the case with Mortimer, she remembered her mother always fuming about him and his brother, though she was careful to never say why around Izzy.
Mortimer's father worked at the meat counter for the longest time, so he had run-ins with Belfried, and he didn't have many good things to say about him, either that much Mortimer knew.
"Why would he call you, then?" Mortimer raises his brow.
Shrugging, Izzy sighs, "He was fishing."
Raising his brow, Mortimer echoes, "Fishing, for what?"
Affirming with a nod, Izzy states that Belfried was asking her if she or Mortimer told the visitors anything.
She told him the same, she doesn't know anything, and that's that.
"She'd always say hell didn't want him," Izzy huffs. "Man is almost in his eighties, and he acts like a nitwit!"
In a huff, Izzy retrieved a bottle and a glass, pouring herself a drink, as she did, she hears her husband moving around behind her as he worked to put things back in the drawers of his writer's desk.
With Belfried calling them, it made the couple pause as they glanced at each other with confusion as they processed the phone call.
"I don't know why he even bothered calling me," Izzy shook her head as she shared a look with her husband.
Shrugging, Mortimer wonders, "Maybe he thought you knew something."
Affirming she didn't, Izzy sighed as she wondered if the word had already spread about Belfried calling her.
"Such as life in a small village, luv. I just don't get why he would call you. He never said anything when your mum passed away, did he?" Mortimer began thinking and Izzy replies that Belfried never even sent a postcard when her mother passed away a few years ago.
Not even Marge passing along a message of non-genuine condolences, either.
"I don't know, but I know my mother, if he's calling me, then that can only mean one thing," Izzy decided.
Gesturing, Mortimer implores her to tell him.
Turning her head towards him with the glass in her hand, Izzy says, "Something got under his skin."
And she believed it was the visitors.
"They don't strike me as detectives," Mortimer shrugs.
Suddenly, their conversation was stopped when they heard noises coming from outside their window.
Mortimer went to check as Izzy stood aside and when he reached the window that overlooked part of their roof, he saw large crows perched along the roofs of neighbouring houses.
"Oh, just crows," Mortimer says before turning around.