Echoes in the Cotswolds Read online

  Coming out of the bakery, she ran into the wheels of Buster Latimer’s pushchair – or was it a stroller? It was big, anyway, with padded armrests and complicated accessories designed to accommodate shopping and protect against rain. His mother looked small and breathless behind it. ‘Ouch!’ said Thea, having bumped her ankle as the vehicle competed with her for space in the doorway.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Bobby. ‘I always try to take this thing into shops and it never works.’

  ‘It’s worse than trying to cope with a dog,’ said Thea, following her recent train of thought.

  ‘No comparison,’ said Bobby, with some indignation.

  ‘Right. Well, hello again. How’s things?’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Um …’ said Thea helplessly. ‘You know …’

  ‘There’s been a murder, if that’s what you mean. I imagine you know all about that already. Everybody’s saying you’re always getting involved in that sort of thing. Hunter thinks you’re a jinx.’

  Hunter again – Thea was beginning to feel as if that man was somehow supernatural, popping up in conversation but never actually physically present. ‘He doesn’t know anything about me,’ she said crossly.

  ‘He does, though,’ Bobby contradicted. She smiled triumphantly, and added, ‘There he is, look. Why don’t you go and talk to him? See if you can put him straight.’ She was indicating with her chin, since both hands were fully occupied, a point somewhere in the square. ‘By that blue car, look.’

  Thea looked. There was only one man it could be, and he was so like her groundless mental image of him that she laughed. ‘What – him?’ She pointed rudely and the man became aware of being discussed.

  ‘Hey, Hunter! This is Mrs Slocombe, the house-sitter,’ Bobby called, far too loudly for the situation. The man was only twenty yards away.

  ‘We meet at last,’ said Thea, determined to stand her ground. Something about him brought all her defensive instincts to the fore. He was about five feet ten, with a big head and a lot of brown curly hair. He seemed to be in his early sixties. Like everybody else in Northleach, Thea thought wryly. Except for Bobby Latimer, she corrected. He approached quickly, and she held out her hand; he took it in a strong grip.

  ‘No need to shout, dear,’ the man said to Bobby. ‘You’ll have the whole town joining us.’ His voice was deep and musical, with the slightest hint of Gloucestershire. The condescension was breathtaking. It took Thea nearly a whole minute to realise who he reminded her of, and then she laughed again. Here was a British version of Donald Trump, if ever there was one.

  He seemed pleased to be the object of her mirth, preening as if he’d made a brilliant joke. ‘Mrs Slocombe,’ he repeated. ‘Pleased to meet you. Hunter Lanning at your service.’

  ‘Mr Lanning,’ said Thea, matching his tone and demeanour as well as she could. ‘I’ve heard a lot about you,’ she went on, suspecting that he was about to say the same thing.

  ‘Have you indeed?’ he said, with an ever-widening smile.

  ‘Mostly to do with your committee, actually.’

  Bobby Latimer was still there, having given up trying to get Buster’s carriage into the shop. She gave a sharp inward breath, warning Thea that she was on dangerous ground. But Thea was past caring. ‘Where’s Millie?’ she asked Bobby, as a way of showing how little she feared Hunter Lanning. ‘She told me it was school holidays already.’

  ‘Dance class,’ came the brief reply. Bobby was eyeing Hunter as she spoke. ‘It must have been Lucy who told her about the committee,’ she said. ‘Because it surely wasn’t me.’ She had become more American in her agitation.

  ‘No problem,’ said the man easily. ‘It’s not a secret, darling. The clue’s in the name.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Thea. For the past minutes her inborn curiosity had been stirring and then erupting. She found herself wanting to know it all. And one reason for that was that she had quickly identified this Hunter Lanning as a very probable participant in the killing of Oliver Sinclair. If he hadn’t done it himself, she strongly suspected that he knew exactly who had.

  ‘C-O-M. That’s the official name for it. The Club for the Open-Minded. A place where anybody can say anything they like without fear of persecution. Or even prosecution. Sounds obvious, but it’s a rare organisation these days that will allow such a thing.’

  ‘Oh.’ Thea frowned, thoroughly deflated by this assertion. The ground seemed to waver beneath her feet. ‘Well, I’m all for that, then,’ she said boldly, whilst wondering whether it was true. ‘What sort of things do your members say?’ Only in that moment did she recall Lucy’s attack – the committee was ‘fascist, racist and homophobic’ according to her. Her initial impression of Hunter was that this was indeed only too likely. In which case she was not all for it at all, obviously. Although … again the ground seemed insecure. ‘Do you have members with a wide range of opinions?’ she managed to ask.

  ‘Of course,’ he said, but he was looking at Bobby. Something unspoken was passing between them, with Thea receiving only the scrap ends of their attention. This merely increased her curiosity. Buster came to her aid with a shout of impatience at being left in a shop doorway. He had probably been promised a bun or something.

  ‘So what about the murder, then?’ she said, heedless of whether anyone else could hear her. There was a woman close by and two lads who looked about eighteen. Further away, between two parked cars, a couple were gazing raptly at the church. It was likely that all of them had caught the heavy word murder.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said Hunter, eyebrows raised. ‘I grant you there has been a death, the explanation of which is yet to be forthcoming, but nobody has said anything about murder to me.’

  ‘Well, they have to me,’ said Thea. Hearing herself, she winced. There was an echo of the way she had spoken to people in Cranham, a few years earlier. She had been insensitive and feelings had been wounded. She tried to soften her approach. ‘I mean – well, that’s not entirely true. It’s just that I know some of the police detectives on the case, that’s all.’

  ‘I expect they’ll soon figure out that it was one of his peculiar friends who killed him,’ said Bobby, with a glance at her child. No mother could be altogether relaxed when discussing violent death just down the road. However strenuously they all clung to the idea that good parenting was a rock-solid antidote to the lurking evils all around them, the sad facts were against them. Bad things could happen to anyone – even innocuous little Buster, in another couple of decades.

  ‘From what I hear, the poor lad was never going to make old bones,’ said Hunter. ‘I’m sure it’ll turn out that he simply took too much of the hard stuff. Usual story, I’m afraid. Nobody’s fault. Tragic for poor Kevin.’ He heaved a flamboyant sigh.

  ‘Did he live in that house?’ asked Thea, waving a hand towards the high street. ‘Ollie, I mean.’

  Hunter inclined his great head, and spoke softly. ‘Not officially, no. It’s been a bit of a scandal for a while now. The owners are from Poland, I believe. Bought the house as a secure investment – and who can blame them? They don’t spend a lot of time here … well, almost none, to be frank. So they let some young cousin or such use it for a shockingly low rent. The cousin appears to have been acquainted with young Oliver. They all come and go at random – no proper jobs, of course. I think they have one of those Airbnb arrangements that they go in for these days – which can cause all kinds of trouble with the neighbours. All very secretive and mysterious, which gets everyone windy, if you know what I mean.’

  ‘Did they create any actual nuisance?’ Thea asked. It was impossible to establish just how this man viewed the arrangement. He seemed to be speaking for the whole village, but nobody in particular.

  ‘They’re not really doing anything too awful,’ Bobby interrupted. ‘But people object to the influence, as they call it. Look at those two, for instance.’ She ducked her chin at the pair of young men now drifting towards the pub in the square. ‘They’ve been
working on the estate the other side of Hampnett – renovating buildings and that sort of thing. Normally they’d go down to Cirencester in the evenings, but once they got to know there were other young people at the Polish people’s house, they’ve taken to coming here instead. I don’t recognise them particularly, but there’ve been several like them drifting around. People find it unsettling.’

  ‘Are they all Polish?’ Thea asked. It was true that there was an element of drifting in the way the two were behaving.

  ‘Something like that,’ said Bobby.

  ‘Ukrainian, I believe,’ said Hunter.

  ‘Shouldn’t they be at work?’ Thea wondered.

  ‘Lunch break,’ said Hunter, and then thought again. ‘It looks to me as if they’ve been asked to come and answer some questions, and they can’t find where to go. The police have set up an incident room in the pub. As I’m sure you already know,’ he added nastily to Thea.

  Instead of defending herself, Thea was snagged by the mention of lunch. Not only was she seriously hungry herself, but it reminded her of something Faith had said. ‘Speaking of which, aren’t you meant to be having a lunch today? Faith said as much this morning. The committee was doing a lunch, she said.’

  He shook his head with exaggerated patience. ‘Today’s event does not include me. It’s ladies only.’

  ‘Good Lord,’ said Thea. ‘It just gets curiouser and curiouser.’ She permitted herself the tiniest hint of a sneer. ‘You sound like Freemasons, keeping the women out of the important stuff.’

  Hunter Lanning reared back, eyes wide. ‘Then you can’t have been listening,’ he snarled. ‘Since when did anybody characterise the Masons as open-minded? And, I might tell you, we play none of those tedious games concerning charitable giving. How many times have you heard them trying to justify themselves by talking of all the good works they support? In our committee we would never agree on which charities we approved of.’ He laughed scornfully and again glanced at Bobby. It seemed to Thea that there was a glimmer of unease as he did so. ‘For your information, the women requested their own events, on the grounds that there were topics they felt more comfortable discussing without men present. Nothing to do with sexism or segregation or whatever you might be thinking. And I doubt if it turns on matters gynaecological, either. Even the most free-thinking of women might hesitate to reveal her deepest beliefs and ambitions within a man’s hearing.’

  Thea was lost for words. Again, she felt there was no solid ground from which to argue with this man. She looked to Bobby for rescue. ‘Are you a member as well?’

  ‘Me? Oh, well, sort of. I go once in a while. But Artie – he’s my husband – is a lot more involved than I am. He thinks it’s great. He’s a great fan of the whole thing.’

  ‘Oh. Well …’ Thea looked at Buster. ‘I think he’s losing patience. I should go. I’m ravenous.’ She held up the paper bag containing her sausage roll. ‘And I ought to be getting back to my husband.’ Too late it occurred to her that this had not been very wise. From what she had gleant from Lucy, it seemed it would be better to keep the not-altogether-good folk of Northleach guessing as to her movements.

  They dispersed in three different directions. A flurry of rain hit Thea in the face just as she reached her car, parked outside Lucy Sinclair’s house. Dark clouds had gathered over the past few minutes, and she sat in the car eating her meagre lunch and pondering the day’s events. Faith, Lucy, Hunter and Bobby had all managed to fill in a number of holes in the story of the past day or two. But there were still legions of questions. The strange house in High Street became prominent in her thinking. A drug den? A hideaway for illegal immigrants? In some ways it seemed ideal for either purpose, until she thought of the unsettled locals and their suspicions. If anything seriously illegal had been going on, it seemed inevitable that some upstanding citizen would quickly report it. Rather, there appeared to be no actual evidence of wrongdoing – simply a sense that all was not well. And then, shockingly, the worst fears and suspicions had been amply confirmed by the fact of a murder in that very house.

  She started the car and drove away, feeling the eyes of Northleach on her, and wondering when she would be there again. She had made no promises to Lucy, who had seemed less anxious about her house than previously. But Lucy was no longer of primary relevance. Instead, she was compelled to discover more about Hunter Lanning, his committee and those who were a part of it.

  When she yet again drove through the Sezincote estate, the view was entirely different from before. The land seemed to shrink under the weight of the sky, the usual distance invisible. Rain was brewing, grey clouds rolling in from the north, along with a chilly wind. Even as she looked, the first drops began to fall. In barely two minutes, it was a downpour.

  Sitting at the traffic lights in Stow, she briefly considered turning round and going back yet again to Northleach. She wanted to make notes, to check certain names online, to make one or two phone calls, and be close at hand for Higgins or Barkley if the investigation escalated. Drew and the children would not be surprised, whatever she did. She had given them no assurances. In fact, she had not given anyone assurances, knowing better than to do so. She was essentially free from spoken obligations.

  But she was not free of unspoken ones. She was a wife and a stepmother. She had a dog, and a house to think about. Affairs in Northleach were tenuous and far outside her sphere of influence. For the time being at least, she knew she had to go home.

  The last stretch of road to Broad Campden was slick with rain, already forming puddles here and there. The Easter holidays were about to start. Drew had a lot of funerals – which would be badly affected by heavy rain. Everybody had their place, knowing where they should be and what they should be doing. Everybody except Thea, in fact.

  The spaniel greeted her with easy adoration, before she was through the door, and Drew gave a hurried sigh of relief as he came around the side of the house. ‘You’re back,’ he said.

  ‘I am. All present and correct. Is everything all right here?’

  ‘More or less. We just dodged the rain, and nobody got wet. There were forty-three people. It was lovely, actually.’ He smiled at the memories of his success. ‘Everybody admired the way it was done.’ Then his expression changed. ‘But tomorrow’s going to be a nightmare, though, with three to get through. None of the families like the idea of lowering the coffin, for a start. The twelve o’clock has got horribly whiffy. It’s all the drugs they give them.’

  ‘Right.’ Thea cut him off quickly. ‘He’s not in the corridor, is he?’

  ‘He was, but I’ve switched them round. I wish I hadn’t said I’d do them all in one day. What on earth was I thinking?’

  ‘We’ve been through all that,’ she told him sternly. ‘It would be very bad for business if you turned people away.’

  ‘Yes, but I could have done one of them on Saturday. Why didn’t I think of that? When will I learn to check my assumptions before I speak? There’s nothing sacred about weekends any more. Even people like Daphne Plant are loosening up about that now.’ He was referring to the mainstream undertaker, where he had once worked, and where he learnt the business. Unable to tolerate some of the less admirable features of the work, he had chosen to go it alone, setting up his own business in Somerset and charging very much less for a simpler service.

  ‘You see plenty of Saturday funerals these days,’ he went on. He wasn’t really speaking to her, Thea realised, with her thoughts still stubbornly fixed on the whiffy gent to be buried next day. In her mind’s nose she could detect the cloying smell of decomposition, even before she got into the house.

  ‘Oh well, too late to do much about that now,’ she said. ‘Is Stephanie home yet? What are you doing for the rest of the day? Not a lot, I imagine, given that it’s raining.’

  ‘The usual,’ he shrugged. ‘Only more so. And yes, Stephanie got in five minutes ago.’

  ‘Well, if you ask me it’s good that we’ve got the weekend free. You’re go
ing to need to unwind, the state you’re in.’

  ‘Are you going to be here to help me do that?’ He gave her a small-boy look that both irritated and amused her.

  ‘Probably,’ she said cautiously.

  Stephanie seemed subdued when Thea found her in her bedroom. ‘Awful weather,’ said Thea. ‘Let’s hope it improves for the weekend.’

  ‘Did you go back to Northleach?’

  ‘Yes, I did. I’ve been out all day. Are your clothes all right for one more day? You can wear the same skirt tomorrow, can’t you?’

  ‘It’s a bit dusty. I dropped my pen and had to crawl under the table to get it. The floor was filthy.’

  ‘You could wear trousers just for one day, then? It baffles me the way you prefer skirts. I thought they’d have been given up long ago. I remember all sorts of battles when Jessica was your age, with the girls all wanting trousers.’

  ‘Yes, you said. Trousers are too hot. And skirts look nicer.’

  It was a conversation they’d had several times. In a world where hardly any adult women wore skirts or dresses, it seemed perverse to Thea that schoolgirls insisted on them. At first she had blamed the headteacher, but it seemed that was mistaken. ‘I agree with you,’ she had said when Thea broached the subject. ‘But apparently we’re out of date on the subject. They all want to look feminine, I’m told.’

  ‘Not all,’ Thea had observed. ‘I’d say about a third of them have opted for slacks.’

  Mrs Metherington had sighed. ‘You would not believe how fraught the whole subject is these days. All I can do is leave everybody to make their own decisions. Any minute now there’ll be boys showing up in skirts, and we’ll just have to go with it. My worst fear is making an issue of it and ending up in the headlines.’

  Thea had sympathised and said no more – except to Stephanie. The child was growing fast, which meant regular purchases of expensive new garments. ‘I’m sure there’s more leeway in trousers,’ she grumbled.

  ‘Dad said you’d had a bit of a barney with someone in your class,’ she said now. ‘Is that right?’