Slaughter in the Cotswolds Read online

  Slaughter in the Cotswolds

  REBECCA TOPE

  Another one for Liz,

  celebrating 50 years

  of friendship

  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

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  CHAPTER ONE

  They had automatically lined up in age order – Damien, Emily, Thea and Jocelyn – along the front pew of the little church. Their mother, however, interrupted the line, squeezed between Damien and Emily, clutching tightly to a hand of each. The pale coffin, which Thea had seen recorded as being 5’10” by 16” on the undertaker’s card, stood on trestles only three feet away. Her father lay inside, his hands folded tidily across his stomach, his lips and eyes glued shut, his hair brushed in a style it had never known in life. Only the day before she had studied him for several long minutes in the undertaker’s chapel, fighting to convince herself of the normality of death. But there was no shaking the aching loss that arose from knowing she would never again breathe in his warm male smell, never again know the special quality of attention that he gave her and each of the others in turn. Richard Johnstone had enjoyed fatherhood from first to last. He had loved being a grandfather – the full complement of nine grandchildren in a pew of their own across the aisle from their parents could all attest to that. Even Jocelyn’s youngest, Roly, had insisted on being included. Emily’s three boys, a gangling teenage trio, were behaving with unusual decorum.

  That Thea had arranged the funeral with her daughter Jessica had surprised and unsettled some of the family. ‘Surely you never want to go through that again,’ Emily had said, reluctant to yield control. ‘Why don’t you let me or Damien do it? Or Mum. She’s quite capable.’

  ‘Anybody’s capable,’ said Thea impatiently. ‘I’m just saying I know the routine with the undertaker and may as well make use of that.’ Thea’s husband, Carl, had died in a car accident, two and a half years earlier, and she would never forget the calm kindliness of Mr Williams as she forced herself to make a long list of irrelevant decisions about flowers and whether the dead Carl should wear his best suit for the occasion.

  ‘Well I want to choose the hymns,’ said Damien unexpectedly. When his three sisters and mother all stared at him, he flushed and flapped a hand.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. I’ve been reading up on hymns, that’s all, in the past day or two. There’s something awful about nearly all of them when you look at the words.’

  ‘Right,’ said Jocelyn. ‘They’ve all got God in them.’

  Damien winced. It had been dimly apparent to them all that he had started going to church in recent years and involving himself in a weekly discussion group. Nobody had overtly referred to it, but it was dawning on them now that the crunch had finally come. ‘Well it’s just a short one,’ he went on, producing a folded sheet of paper. ‘I think it’s part of something longer, but these ten lines say it all. See what you think.’

  Thea took the paper and unfolded it. After a quick glance, she read the words in a self-conscious voice, making the lines sound glib and obvious:

  ‘Take the last kiss – the last for ever

  Yet render thanks amidst your gloom;

  He, severed from his home and kindred,

  Is passing onwards to the tomb.

  For earthly labours, earthly pleasures,

  And carnal joys he cares no more;

  Where are his kinsfolk and acquaintance?

  They stand upon another shore.

  Let us say, around him pressed,

  Grant him, Lord, eternal rest.’

  ‘Drat,’ said Jocelyn. ‘We were doing rather well until the last line.’

  Thea looked at her brother. ‘What’s the tune?’ she asked.

  ‘No idea,’ he admitted. ‘I think it would work with the one to “Jerusalem”. If not, we can probably fit it to something else we know.’

  ‘I don’t know any hymns,’ said Jocelyn.

  ‘Shut up,’ Emily and Thea said in unison.

  When Carl, had been killed, Thea had let herself be persuaded by her father to bring the whole funeral to her childhood home, where her family could support her. It was only fifty miles from Witney where she and Carl had lived. His colleagues and relatives made no objection to travelling the extra distance, if that was the choice of the new young widow. Carl had been buried in the same churchyard that her father was now to occupy. The graves were four yards apart. It was pleasing to think of them ending up so close. She suspected her mother eyed the plot with some wistfulness, seeing death as an easeful escape from the bother of being alive. Unlike her husband, Maureen Johnstone found it difficult to feel joy. There was always some worry, some irritation that spoilt it. ‘Your expectations are too high, my love,’ Richard would say. Thea had watched a thousand instances where her mother had nodded in rueful agreement, quite unable to do anything about it. People let her down and disappointed her. They forgot Mother’s Day, or gave her presents that were the wrong colour or size, or neglected to ask after her welfare. Or they timed it badly, wanting her to join a celebration when they knew perfectly well she was consumed with anxiety about Jessica’s choice of career or Emily’s sudden loss of weight.

  The interment was the usual awkward procedure, the horror of it obscured by the potential for farce. The sky was overcast but still the day was hot and the undertaker’s men uncomfortable in their black clothes. The coffin was heavy and despite long practice, the moment of lowering, with its absolute need for dignity, gave rise to stress. When it had finally reached the bottom of the disconcertingly deep hole, the family shuffled their feet and threw glances at each other. ‘Do we chuck soil onto it?’ Jocelyn whispered loudly. Thea tried in vain to catch the eye of the funeral conductor who stood to one side, and then shook her head. ‘Seems not,’ she muttered. As at Carl’s funeral she persuaded herself it was only in films that the practice existed, since no handy pile of clean dry soil stood nearby.

  The gathering afterwards, which Thea always labelled a ‘bunfight’ to herself, was the usual jolly event, relief buoying everybody up. Two cousins materialised, sons of Richard’s sister, not seen – at least by Thea – for a good twenty years. They had got fat and dull, both of them. Aged something like forty-seven and forty-nine, they seemed alarmingly old. Their own father had died five years earlier, and their position now as Top Generation seemed to have weighed them down. Brian was bald and Peter was grey and wrinkled.

  Emily was slender and poised, holding a wineglass carelessly, sitting on the arm of her mother’s settee. She watched her sons critically, now and then correcting one of them, or instructing her husband, Bruce, to do it on her behalf. ‘Tell Mark to tuck his shirt in,’ or ‘Hasn’t Grant had enough of those sandwiches?’ Thea’s older sister had always been bossy, maintai
ning a tight control over everyone in her immediate orbit. She had worked herself up through the Civil Service, despite according each son due attention in his early years, and keeping dozens of friendships alive with relentless emails and phonecalls.

  Thea and her elder sister had seldom been alone together, all their lives. Emily had been nearly three when Thea was born, and six when Jocelyn followed. Somehow it seemed she had never quite adjusted to these additions to the family. There had been her and Damien, brother and sister, nice and normal, and then for some bizarre reason, her mother had produced the two extra girls. The family dynamic had been constructed and maintained by Dad, by the man who loved babies and shared himself out so effortlessly. But even he had not always managed to placate Emily, who shared some of her mother’s tendency to dissatisfaction. Emily craved approval and respect, hating to be teased, forever suspicious of people’s motives. ‘Why didn’t Dad take Grant with him to London last week? He took Jessica often enough when she was that age,’ she would grumble to Thea, constantly watching for injustices and slights.

  Maureen had arrayed the sympathy cards on a side table, where people drifted to look at them. The sentiments, added by hand inside the cards, were uninhibited. Such a lovely man; Richard was always so helpful and patient with me; A good man taken much too soon; What a shocking loss! But nobody uttered such thoughts out loud, not here in his house, an hour after burying him in the deep dark earth. Here they twittered and smiled and drank wine and forgot the man who had brought them there. Thea watched and grieved and inwardly raged.

  ‘I had forty-eight cards,’ said Emily, coming up behind her. ‘I could have brought them with me, I suppose, but Mum wouldn’t know who half the people were.’

  ‘Forty-eight?’ repeated Thea in blank amazement. ‘How is that possible? I’ve had four.’

  ‘Well, I emailed everybody in my address book with the news, plus work – I just know a lot of people.’

  ‘I don’t know how you do it.’ Thea shook her head. It seemed almost indecent of her sister to outdo all the rest of them in such a way. Her cards undoubtedly exceeded the total received by the rest of the family. ‘My mind boggles.’

  Emily shrugged complacently. ‘It’s not so remarkable.’

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ Thea said at three. ‘I’m supposed to be in Lower Slaughter by now. Sorry, Mum, but it can’t be helped.’

  Her house-sitting commission was scheduled to run from a Friday for two weeks – a change from the usual Saturday. Not that it mattered to her: the days were interchangeable as far as she was concerned. Only the fact of her father’s funeral on the day she had promised to take charge had caused difficulties.

  Not lingering to bid goodbye to the cousins and friends, she kissed her mother, gave her younger sister a double pat on the upper arm, and left with a sense of escaping a situation that could only become more difficult as the hours went by.

  The drive to the Cotswolds passed in a blur. The grey day would have been depressing in any circumstances, but on the day of her father’s funeral it felt somehow fitting. The leaves had not yet begun to turn to autumn tones, and might not for another month or so, but the best of the summer was irretrievably over. Her insides felt heavy, turgid with endings. There seemed little to look forward to but worry and bother. Following this house-sit, there were two more already fixed: a September week in a bungalow in Stow-on-the-Wold and an unusually protracted commission in Hampnett in January, which was definitely not something to look forward to. She had done her best to refuse, but the woman had offered to pay her such a high fee that she felt she had no choice. It would finance a decent holiday next summer, if she could survive the wintry uplands of that particular area without going insane.

  ‘You’re a fool,’ said her ‘friend’ (she was never able to think of him as ‘boyfriend’ or ‘lover’ despite both labels being perfectly appropriate) Phil Hollis, uncompromisingly. ‘You don’t need the money. If you want a holiday, come to Greece with me and I’ll pay for everything.’

  Greece with Phil sounded fine, but she didn’t like the idea of letting him pay. Even after a year’s relationship with him, she clung to her independence. She still lived in her own Witney cottage, while he was in a Cirencester flat. They often went a whole week without seeing each other, and she was increasingly reluctant to make any changes to this pattern.

  The house she was guarding in Lower Slaughter was old – very old in parts – low-slung and neglected. The owners were a dying breed – Cotswold born and bred, he a gamekeeper and she a former postmistress, her Post Office closed three years ago, and naught to be said about it. Retirement had been forced on them both, and in an effort to compensate for the shock, they were taking themselves off to their son in Hong Kong. They left behind them a motley collection of dogs and cats, as well as a gaudy parrot and a large cage containing five ferrets. ‘I’ll be bringing my dog with me,’ Thea had said firmly. ‘She’s a cocker spaniel, very well behaved.’

  Cedric and Babs Angell shrugged this off as irrelevant. ‘Ours both be dogs,’ said the woman, referring to the animals’ gender. ‘They ain’t likely to mind a little bitch come to stay. Can’t vouch for Ignatius, mind. He can be funny about strange animals.’ Ignatius, it soon became clear, was the parrot.

  Babs had introduced her to the bird with some ceremony. ‘He belongs to Martin, our son, by rights. He brought him home one day when he was fifteen. Never would say exactly where he came from, but swore he wasn’t stolen. That was twenty-something years ago now. Taught him all kinds of daft things to say – you’ll hear most of them, shouldn’t wonder. Turns your heart over sometimes, the way he seems to understand what’s going on.’ She scratched the feathers of the parrot’s chest with a confident finger. ‘He’s a good old boy. Can’t tell you how fond we are of him, after this long time.’

  ‘How old is he?’ asked Thea, with the inevitable house-sitter’s worry that an animal might die in her care.

  ‘No idea. Martin claimed he was just a fledgling when he came, but he seemed more than that to me, not that I ever knew anything about parrots. But they live sixty, seventy years, so he’s in his prime.’

  This visit had been a fortnight ago, after an initial quick meeting a month or so before that, while in Temple Guiting with Phil. The owners had found most of her questions irrelevant and irksome. Routines, keys, visitors, phone calls – all were waved aside as minor issues. Past experience had taught Thea that there was almost certainly a central reason for employing her services that might not be instantly apparent. Given the feral nature of several of the animals, and the relative ease with which someone could have been asked to come in daily to feed them, there were grounds for wondering just what the point was.

  The house was surrounded by a reduced acreage, remnants of a much larger farm. Cedric had bought the house and the vestigial two fields from the farmer who had been brought low by agricultural misfortunes. He told Thea the story, as if it had all taken place a week ago. ‘Poor old Ralph, too stuck in his ways to keep up with the times. Silly sod sold up in a fit of panic, and regretted it ever since. Just missed the price boom. If he’d waited another year or two, he’d have got half as much again.’ He smiled smugly, still glowing from his good fortune after ten years or more.

  ‘Is he still alive?’

  Cedric nodded. ‘Got himself a nice enough place just beyond Moreton, market garden sort of thing. Never made much of a go of it, mind. Some people just don’t have the right outlook to make a success of things – don’t you find?’

  Thea knew, in a vague way, that farmers detested selling any of their land. They hoarded and competed and mortgaged in an effort to hang onto every inch of their property. Like little heads of state intent on expansion, they glanced hungrily over borders and boundaries and dreamt of acquiring each other’s forgotten corners.

  ‘Poor chap,’ she murmured. ‘What happened to the rest of the land?’

  Cedric’s face darkened. ‘There’s talk of building on the Six Ac
re field. It’s only a little way from the village, see – some bright spark snapped it up, on the off chance. Now they’ve got new houses going up in Lower Swell, there’s a chance he’ll get the go-ahead.’

  Uh-oh, thought Thea. What am I walking into here? She looked to Babs enquiringly. The woman was in her early sixties, with curly white hair and a body the exact shape of a pear.

  ‘Everyone got a letter from the Council Planning Office,’ she said. ‘They’re applying to build ten new houses on the field. Can’t see it, myself. Lower Slaughter’s not Lower Swell. This is in all the books – famous it is, for the way it looks. New houses would stick out like sore thumbs.’

  ‘Right,’ Thea agreed. ‘And surely –’ Thea knew a bit about planning laws, as did most rural dwellers. ‘I mean, that must be a change of use? There must be a County Plan that excludes it from development? Didn’t Ralph put a restriction on it when he sold it?’

  ‘Never crossed his mind, seemingly. Well, it wouldn’t, him not being the sharpest nail in the bag. Cedric’s not happy about it, but I tell him not to worry.’ She threw her husband a complicated look of impatience and solicitude.

  ‘Well, it would be a shame.’ Thea offered the remark more as a palliative to the unhappy Cedric than from any genuine feeling of her own. She was tempted to add something consoling about even if the worst happened it was a mere six acres out of hundreds, a mere ten new houses, in a region where there was still a lot of open space and greenery.

  After the historical explanations, the Angells informed Thea that she could use anything she liked out of the freezer. ‘Hope you like pheasant,’ Cedric chuckled. ‘I might be retired, but I still get my share of the bag.’