Written to the prompt U is for Uniform
Digging The Allotment
‘COPS HUNT MISSING ARISTO’ read one of the more down-market headlines.
Ella didn’t need a newspaper to let her know what the police were doing. They were on her allotment, trashing a year’s worth of growing and tending as they searched for a body. She watched, raging but helpless, as they ripped up sweetcorn, climbing beans and pumpkins. Now she’d have nothing to sell people for Halloween. No pumpkins, no profit.
And for what? They wouldn’t find anything – there was nothing there except the crops that she grew to supplement the family’s income and diet. All that effort. All that hard work ruined – because they didn’t believe her. And they weren’t using basic logic, either. They were looking for somebody who’d been missing for three weeks; her crops had been growing there for months. It was hardly likely she’d dig up all her precious plants – her precious income – bury a body underneath and then put all the plants back again.
‘We’ve been given information,’ the policeman had said.
Yes, and Ella knew who’d given it to them. Her sisters. Vicious, spiteful harpies, treating her like dirt and always scheming against her. They’d seen her hiding the expensive clothing, and they put two and two together and got six hundred and forty-eight, as usual.
‘Where’d you get all this then?’ they’d demanded.
She’d told them the truth, and they’d laughed in her face. And that’s what made her mind up that once this business was over, they’d be laughing on the other side of their faces, and – when the truth came out – she’d be laughing all the way to the bank.
The officer in charge approached her.
‘Find anything?’ she said pointedly.
He shook his head. ‘No.’
‘I told you you wouldn’t. But nobody listens to me.’
‘But you do have clothing matching the description and we have to investigate every lead, Miss Hardeep.’
‘That’s – not – my – name.’
‘Sorry?’
‘My name. The least you can do is get my name right. It’s not Hardeep, it’s Hardup. Cinderella Hardup.’
© Carol Carman 2024
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