Village Life

This week has been fairly eventful in the life of one of the nearby villages.

On Tuesday Norfolk police arrested a man about the suspicious disappearance of his wife, Emma Ward, who hasn’t been seen since the start of April. Since then the house has been taped off, and there’s always a police person sat outside it in a car. He’s been released on bail for the moment, but it’s all a bit “wait and see if she appears”. Her friends have put up a Facebook group, and it’s had coverage in the local media too.

It’s strange really – I walk past their house every day with Hound, and you realise afterwards that you haven’t seen two cars there for a while, but you don’t really think about it ’til something like this occurs. I do keep an eye open as I walk round, but still you don’t think about that kind of thing. I wouldn’t know either of them in the street – while I know some of the people in the village,and others as I walk round, I couldn’t put names to most of them, and I certainly don’t know their life histories. Maybe I should- personally I don’t think so, but there we go- but I don’t.

I’m not one of these “Oh, it’s so shocking that it happens near where we live” merchants – this kind of thing goes on wherever you live. It’s just it’s not the first thing in your head – “Oh, the car hasn’t been there. I wonder what’s happened to the owner”.

Of course I’ve mentioned it to the plod sat outside, that one car’s not been there for a while. In a fit of community spirit I even remembered that Google StreetMap had gone through the village a while back, and was able to give them a printout of the StreetMap photo of the house with the now-missing car in the driveway. (No numberplate, but it gives them a colour, make and model to work from) I’m sure they knew already, but well, I’d rather they got told thirty times than everyone assuming they’d got the information already.

My personal suspicion is that she’s dead. If she’d just disappeared then you’d think the husband would be the first person to report it, and to take far less than six weeks to do so. Not reporting her missing just makes you look so suspicious anyway, but the entire thing just strikes me as strange.

Ah, the intrigues of village life.