Fear in the Cotswolds Read online

  Fear in the Cotswolds

  REBECCA TOPE

  Dedicated to lifelong friends far and wide:

  Bobby in Bulgaria

  Flo in Chicago

  Sue in Canada

  Hilary in Australia

  Judy in New Zealand

  Cheryl in South Africa

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Maps

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  It was much smaller than a village – a hamlet, then. Hampnett was a hamlet. Thea played with the words as she drove along the A429 watching for the sign that would take her to her latest house-sitting commission. The bare trees that dotted the landscape, along with the short colourless grass, created a whole different world from the Cotswolds in their summer lushness. Now the palette was all greys and browns, as the low January cloud sapped light and clarity from the scene. It fitted her mood alarmingly well. After a dutiful Christmas and New Year spent with her recently widowed mother and an assortment of other relatives, she felt as drained as the surrounding countryside. The past months had been gruelling in a number of ways – the death of her father, the ending of her relationship with Phil Hollis, and a very difficult time with her older sister, Emily. She was ambivalent about the forthcoming house-sitting commission, which involved a month in this isolated little place, in the depths of winter.

  The tops of the round hills were indistinct, misty with the damp vapour settled on them. Shapes with fuzzy edges came and went along the roadside, as the small car climbed the gentle incline towards its destination. As always, the sheer unpredictability of what lay ahead of her was both enticing and unsettling. But this time there was a new element: an unwelcome feeling of apprehension. If it hadn’t been so foreign to her nature, she might almost call it fear. An insistent tightening of her insides, a faster-than-usual heart rate, a dryness in her mouth – her body was telling her that it was uneasy, however strenuously she tried to ignore it, and however irrational it might be.

  Hampnett had two approaches: one from the A40, which ran roughly east–west; the other from the A429, which crossed at an angle, south-west to north-east. The hamlet sat in one niche made by the intersection, to the west of it. At least, that was how it looked on the map. In reality, all awareness of the main roads disappeared within seconds, once you’d left them behind. Thea had experienced before the sense of passing through an invisible curtain into a different universe, as she approached a hidden Cotswold settlement. Temple Guiting, Cold Aston, Duntisbourne Abbots, and dozens of others, were all tucked away behind folds of land, invisible from any thoroughfares and almost forgotten even by tour leaders and walking groups. But Hampnett was closer to the bustle and security of the twenty-first century than most. It would be a ten-minute walk from the church to the A40, twenty minutes to the other road. The town of Northleach was almost within shouting distance. Yet another road ran Roman-straight to the west, only a few fields away.

  So why, she asked herself, with a questioning glance at the spaniel beside her, did it feel so very remote?

  Lucy Sinclair had been shameless in her explanation of why a house-sitter was required. ‘I’ve got to an age where English winters are intolerable,’ she said. ‘So I’m going off to the Canaries for a month.’ Her cat, donkey and five lion-headed rabbits all needed somebody on the premises, it seemed.

  ‘Lion-headed rabbits?’ Thea queried, trying to imagine such freaks.

  It turned out that they were fairly ordinary rabbits with a lot of fur in the head area and quite short ears. They were four does and a buck, of assorted colours and sizes – and surprisingly appealing. Lucy plucked one from its palatial quarters and thrust it into Thea’s arms. ‘This is Jemima. She’s very friendly. They all are, except Poppy. She scratches rather.’ The buck, named Snoopy, had his own cage, and sat looking somewhat sulky. Thea stroked Jemima, who was a blue-grey colour, with a frosting of a lighter grey.

  ‘She’s lovely,’ she said. ‘And quite heavy.’

  ‘You should feel Snoopy. He’s a monster.’

  Thea liked Lucy. In her late fifties, she was divorced and self-employed. ‘I fix people’s computers,’ she said, briefly, with a sideways look at Thea. ‘The last bastion of male supremacy, for some reason.’

  More relevantly, Lucy’s mother had died a year ago, leaving a substantial property for her daughter to inherit and sell for an astonishing figure. ‘Quite against the trend,’ she laughed. ‘Plus I get the state pension in another couple of years. I’ve never felt so rich, even when my ex was raking it in, in the Eighties.’

  The rabbits seemed an anomaly, even more than the donkey did. ‘It’s a long story,’ Lucy had laughed. ‘To do with my daughter and an allergic boyfriend.’ She rolled her eyes and sighed. ‘I knew it would happen, right from the start. Kitty got Snoopy first, before all the does, and I fell for him the minute I saw him. He’s getting on a bit now – you will take good care of him, won’t you?’

  But it hadn’t been the rabbits or the cat or the donkey that Lucy was primarily concerned about. There was an even greater reason for spending fifteen hundred pounds on a house-sitter. Leading Thea through the house to a conservatory at the back, she grimaced ruefully before opening the door. ‘It breaks my heart to leave him,’ she said. ‘After the life he must have had, it’s the last thing he needs.’

  A skeletally thin grey dog was curled on a bed in a corner of the room. Tufts of hair barely covered the skin. A ratty tail flickered as he lifted his head to gaze questioningly at Lucy. ‘Hello, Jimmy,’ she crooned. ‘This is Thea. She’s going to look after you when I go away next month.’ Thea reached down her hand for the animal to sniff. Politely, he touched it with his cool nose.

  ‘Jimmy?’ she repeated. ‘He’s called Jimmy?’

  ‘That’s what I named him. I don’t know what he was before. I found him at the side of the road, two years ago. He’s not as old as he looks. He’s a lurcher, so he’s meant to be thin. But his wits have gone. He’s not going to get any better now.’

  Oh God, Thea groaned inwardly. Just when it had been looking reasonably easy, this scrawny glitch had to gum up the works. ‘Will he be all right with my spaniel?’ she asked.

  ‘He’ll ignore her. He doesn’t have any problem with other dogs. It’s people who’ve betrayed him.’ Lucy stared angrily at the dog. ‘Has it occurred to you that the whole thing between humans and dogs is about betrayal?’

  Thea had heard a news report, only that morning, in which the soaring numbers of abandoned dogs had been presented as a sign of harsh economic times. Unable to meet their mortgage payments unless they made serious savings, pe
ople were giving up the dog – dumping it in rescue centres, for the most part. What must the poor creatures think – ousted from their beloved family, through no fault of their own, with no warning? ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That had occurred to me.’

  ‘It makes me sick.’

  ‘And yet I’ve met people who’d go without food themselves in order to make sure the dog or cat’s all right. The very idea of abandoning the animal is unthinkable.’

  ‘Right. Those are always the people one knows, aren’t they? It’s always some faceless moron from the city who doesn’t know how to make a commitment, who quits when things get a bit rough.’ If possible, Lucy’s expression grew even angrier. ‘But that’s rubbish. Everybody would do it. The difference is in the justifications they give. That’s not important to the dog, is it?’

  ‘Devoted old ladies break their hips, or die,’ said Thea mildly. ‘They’re forced to give up their dog then.’

  ‘I know that. But it still feels like betrayal when you’re on the receiving end. Don’t you see?’

  It was too much for Thea. She held up her hands in surrender. ‘So what’s the answer?’ she said. ‘Nobody should ever have a dog or cat, by that reckoning.’

  ‘Right,’ said Lucy again. ‘Exactly right.’

  ‘And then there wouldn’t be any dogs or cats.’

  The smile finally came, as Thea had trusted it would. ‘So take good care of Jimmy for me, will you? Make sure there’s always something that smells of me in his bed. Don’t let him run away.’

  Recalling a previous experience, Thea shuddered. ‘No, I won’t let him run away,’ she promised.

  The house was isolated, down a lengthy track that ran alongside a small copse, half a mile before the centre of the hamlet. Hampnett consisted essentially of a remarkable church and a farm, with a handful of other stone buildings scattered over the rolling ground to the north and west. Lucy Sinclair was the proud owner of a converted barn with three acres of land. The conservatory was a carefully designed addition, with no embellishments that might be deemed out of keeping with the local style. ‘I bought it twelve years ago, and oversaw the conversion myself. It would never suit anybody but me.’ Where most people had created huge airy spaces inside their mutated homes, Lucy had chosen to divide it into five or six modestly sized rooms. ‘Easier to heat,’ she said. ‘And who wants to feel as if they’re living in a barn?’ A lot of people, Thea could have replied.

  Now, on 6th January, Thea arrived nearly two hours before Lucy had said she would have to leave for Birmingham airport. Being in charge for almost a month was by far the biggest commitment she had made since she began the work. It hadn’t seemed nearly so demanding to watch over a homestead for a week or two – although she had experienced too many difficulties and alarms during most of her commissions to be complacent.

  Jimmy seemed even more decrepit than before, still huddled in his conservatory and showing very little interest in whatever might be going on around him. ‘He doesn’t like the cold,’ Lucy explained. ‘But he’s not happy in any other room than this. I think he must have spent his life outdoors. He gets agitated in the house. I built this specifically for him, but it’s not very easy to heat.’ Thea stared at her, open-mouthed. She built the addition for the dog? Was that possible?

  ‘He looks comfortable enough, and besides, winters aren’t as bad as they used to be,’ said Thea optimistically. ‘His bedding looks very warm.’

  ‘It’s felt,’ Lucy explained. ‘They use it in Mongolia, so it’s probably going to do a good job. I gather they’ve had massive snowfalls in New York this week, though. It often seems to get here a fortnight later.’

  ‘Lucky the main road’s so close, then,’ said Thea.

  ‘First get up my track. Even a quarter of a mile’s a lot of digging,’ Lucy laughed. ‘But I’ve filled the freezer with bread and milk and plenty of basics, so you should be OK.’

  It felt like a joke at the time. Thea shared the laughter at the idea of being snowed in. That never happened in Gloucestershire, did it?

  CHAPTER TWO

  The two hours they had together passed slowly, Thea wishing Lucy would hurry up and leave. She had already been shown the animals and the house, a list of important phone numbers taped to the door of a kitchen cupboard; it seemed a waste to have them both hanging around with nothing to do. Outside there was a sharp east wind, the sky a dense blanket of grey cloud. ‘My father always used to hate January,’ said Thea. ‘I think he got it from my grandad. He was a farmer and had to be outside in all weathers. I remember wondering how he could bear it, year after year.’

  ‘We’ve got soft,’ said Lucy. ‘I find myself feeling sorry for the poor sheep and other things outside all year round. And then I remind myself how daft that is. After all, in olden times, everything had to survive on what they could find. There haven’t always been people to bring them hay and mangolds.’ The last word sounded odd and Thea repeated it.

  ‘Mangels?’

  ‘You know – mang’l’worzels, like in Worzel Gummidge.’

  ‘No. What are they?’

  ‘Vegetables. Like sugar beet. Sheep love them. The farmer down the track gives them to the sheep, even now. I walk that way sometimes to watch them at feeding time. She scatters them in an old muck spreader.’ Thea watched the woman’s animated face, wondering at the childlike pleasure she was displaying at the thought of a farmer feeding her sheep.

  ‘How nice,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Can people eat them?’

  ‘Probably. Might be a bit indigestible. But we eat swedes and parsnips, much to the horror of the French. They’d be much better than nothing in a famine, I’m sure.’ Again there was a faint air of relish in Lucy’s voice, as if the idea of a famine was secretly rather appealing.

  At last it was time for her to go. ‘Look,’ she said, waving a cheque under Thea’s nose. ‘I thought I ought to give you half the money now, and half when I come home. Is that all right?’

  ‘Oh! I don’t usually – I mean, people generally pay me at the end.’

  ‘Well, I’m not “people”. I can’t leave you destitute for a whole month, can I? You’ll need to buy some food, and fuel for your car, and presumably pay your own bills at home. Here, take it. Otherwise I might spend it all on cocktails and gambling in the sunshine.’

  Thea heard this as ‘gambolling in the sunshine’, and giggled at the image. ‘Well, thanks,’ she said, trying not to show the small thrill she felt as she read the figure on the cheque. Seven hundred and fifty pounds – and that was only half the full sum. Lucy Sinclair had made no demur about paying her the fifty pounds a day that Thea had tentatively suggested was the going rate for a sitter who took up residence. It still felt like being paid for having a holiday and doing almost nothing, despite the many pitfalls she had encountered since she started the work.

  Lucy leant down and kissed Jimmy, then stood up with tears in her eyes. ‘Selfish cow that I am,’ she sniffed. ‘You will take good care of him, won’t you?’

  Thea drove her temporary employer to the station at Moreton-in-Marsh and waved her on her way. Driving back down the A429, she recognised much of the road from previous sojourns in the area. She passed Lower Slaughter just a short way off the road to her right, and then Cold Aston, a few miles further west. But she knew hardly anyone in either village well enough to count them as friends. There was a woman in Cold Aston, who she had first met a year ago, and again the previous summer – their relationship had taken some knocks on both occasions, and Thea was in no hurry to risk a third bruising encounter. And there was a man in Lower Slaughter; a man who had got under her skin more than she had liked to acknowledge to herself at the time. Knowing he was going to be so close by for the next month created a small flame of interest at the back of her mind. She had persuaded herself that there could be nothing between them, that the whole idea was folly – and yet, he had taken root in her consciousness, and intruded uncomfortably often into her dreams.

  She cruised u
nhurriedly down the hill to the crossroads, with Hampnett ahead and slightly to the right, Northleach to the left. On a whim, she turned right onto the A40, and then left into the small road leading through the hamlet, past the church and its neighbouring farm.

  Old man’s beard straggled over the hedges, adding to the general greyness of the landscape. The January light was poor, with a faint damp mist covering everything. She met no other cars, and saw no living creature until she had passed the minimal village centre and was approaching the turn for Lucy’s Barn. A few yards before the junction there was a man walking along the road, facing the oncoming traffic, so that Thea had to pull out to avoid him. He gave no sign of awareness that there was a car alongside him, although she was close enough to get a good look at his face.

  He was tall and thin, and somehow the same shade of grey as the surrounding winter hedges. There were deep lines on his face, which sported a straggly grey beard, and his narrow shoulders were slumped. Something about his loose gait suggested bony knees and fragile ankles. His longish hair flopped around his face, and his beard disappeared into a grubby-looking scarf.

  ‘I wonder who that is,’ she said to the dog beside her. Hepzie appeared as impervious to the encounter as the man himself had been.

  Preparations for the winter month in the middle of nowhere had been made carefully. For Christmas, Thea had requested DVDs, computer games and books. She had compiled a list of long lost friends and relations to whom she would write rambling letters. She would take things slowly, reading a daily newspaper and listening to the radio. And she would teach herself lacemaking – a secret ambition she had nursed for twenty-five years. Her sister Jocelyn had given her a lace cushion, two dozen bobbins decorated with beads, a book of instructions and several reels of cotton. It was magically tantalising, in its own cotton bag with large red flowers printed on it, and she was itching to get started.