Shadows in the Cotswolds Read online

  ‘He’ll have had some lunch on his own, and then he’ll have to come back for me,’ Mo pointed out. ‘Otherwise I won’t be able to get home.’

  ‘You could come with us,’ said Fraser. ‘I imagine I could stay with you again tonight if necessary.’

  Mo rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. ‘Yes, I imagine you could, Pa. My home is your home now. I thought we’d established that. But I can’t believe Jason would just abandon me.’

  ‘But my car’s at Damien’s,’ said Maureen, showing little faith in Jason’s reliability. ‘We’ll have to go there first.’

  Thea washed her hands of their complicated logistics, and wandered into the kitchen, thinking she might make herself a sandwich. Her spaniel went with her, plainly sharing her desire for some peace and quiet. ‘I suppose we’re being rather rude,’ Thea whispered to the dog. ‘But there’s a limit to hospitality, don’t you think?’

  Hepzie gave a slow wag and sniffed idly at the table leg.

  ‘Are you making some for us all?’ Her mother was in the doorway, watching the sandwich preparations. ‘I’ve hardly eaten anything today. I’m rumbling.’

  ‘There isn’t enough bread. I never reckoned on catering for a crowd.’

  ‘Don’t be so mean, Thea. Nothing that’s happened was what we expected. You have to rise to the occasion. Can’t you bake a few potatoes or something?’ The older woman went through the kitchen cupboards, bringing out pasta, tomato sauce, crispbread, along with jars of honey, Marmite and jam. ‘Look at all this!’ she crowed. ‘And there’s sure to be butter and cheese in the fridge.’

  Thea stood back and let her mother get on with it. She was being mean, she supposed, if there was an assumption that she was hostess to all the visitors. Somehow she could not persuade herself that the role was appropriate. She had been in the house for less than twenty-four hours when everything descended into chaos, and she was still trying to regain her balance. She might have been making sandwiches for a murderer – especially if Jason reappeared. The longer he was gone, the more he seemed the most obvious candidate for villainy. She might be next on his list of victims. Or her mother might. Fraser could be plotting to kill her, as revenge for her cavalier treatment of him fifty years ago. She had broken his heart and then forgotten all about him. It was not difficult to imagine that he had brooded over it ever since, intent on making her pay for the damage she had so carelessly done to him.

  Maureen’s efforts to provide sustenance were poorly rewarded. She carried a plate of fractured crispbreads spread with Marmite and scraps of cheese, back into the living room. ‘They’re a bit stale, I’m afraid,’ she laughed. ‘And they mostly broke when I tried to spread the butter on them.’ Mo took a scrap, but clearly found it unpalatable. ‘I could boil up some pasta, and put tomato sauce on it,’ Maureen offered.

  ‘Don’t bother,’ said Fraser tetchily. ‘We’ll go. We can find something in town on the way. I seem to remember a Co-op or something, down North Street.’

  ‘What about Jason?’ asked Thea.

  ‘He can fend for himself,’ said Mo. ‘He’s big and ugly enough to sort himself out. Anyway, I think we’ll find him out there somewhere. He could even be sitting in the car waiting for me. He does that, playing with his laptop. He loves his laptop,’ she added fondly.

  ‘The police …’ began Thea. ‘Surely …?’

  ‘What?’ Mo was challenging. ‘You think they think he killed that bloke? Why him? Why not any one of the five thousand people who live here?’

  ‘Good question,’ Thea realised. ‘Except …’

  ‘You’ve convinced yourself this all has something to do with our family, haven’t you? You’re putting down the poison against us in that detective’s mind.’

  Thea felt breathless at the injustice. Her thoughts lost any coherence they might have had, as she stared at the big confident woman. ‘No,’ she gasped. ‘Not at all. But that girl – Melissa. She came here, to this house, minutes before she was killed. Who was she? Why did she come? She knew about you all. And Reuben Hardy seemed to know something, as well. He was teasing us yesterday, making some sort of hint about Oliver and the rest of you. Fraser heard him – didn’t you?’

  Fraser was at the door, intent on departure, not listening. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he rumbled. ‘Every damned time I come here, there’s trouble. It’s that brother of mine – he casts a pall over everything he touches. He’s a jinx – we always said so, right from when he was little. He brings it all on himself.’ His eyes clouded. ‘And yet … you can’t help but feel sorry for him. He’s had a rotten life, poor old chap.’

  ‘Come on, Dad,’ urged Mo. ‘This isn’t the time for all that. Uncle Ollie’s perfectly all right, tucked away here with his birds. He’ll be back in a little while, no harm done.’

  Fraser heaved a great sigh. ‘Cedric was never right, you know. That’s where it all started. His mother dying the way she did, sent him off his rocker, and nobody even noticed until it was too late.’

  ‘Who’s Cedric?’ Thea asked her mother in an undertone.

  ‘The older brother,’ was the whispered reply. ‘Half-brother, actually. Inherited the business. Always been in the shadows.’

  Whoever he might be, if he was Fraser and Oliver’s older brother by a previous wife, he was probably well into his eighties and therefore scarcely relevant to any of the matters in hand. Mo seemed to feel the same. ‘Never mind Cedric,’ she said briskly. ‘That’s all being dealt with. We don’t have to worry ourselves about it. We’ve gone over all that.’

  ‘But I should be there,’ moaned the old man. ‘Not let Ollie carry it on his own. I could be lending him a shoulder, instead of playing silly buggers here.’

  Silly buggers seemed to Thea a somewhat dismissive way to refer to two brutal murders, if that was what he meant. Perhaps he was talking about her mother, or Mo, or the tepid quest for the missing Jason. Whatever he meant, there was an implication that somewhere there had been a plan, a covert agreement that involved Thea and Thistledown and possibly the murdered Melissa. Or so her muddled mind suspected. Because her mind was increasingly muddled. The Meadows family seemed to comprise a lot of very elderly men, living mainly in the past and suffering from a package of unpleasant feelings, including guilt for certain failures or misdeeds. ‘Who runs the business now?’ she asked. ‘Or has it been sold to that American outfit?’

  Mo gripped her father’s elbow and pulled open the door. ‘What’s that to do with anything?’ she demanded impatiently.

  ‘Nothing. I’m just interested. I’d have liked to talk a bit more about it. I have a friend who’s an undertaker, as it happens.’

  ‘Well, it’s still in the family. My cousin Henry runs it. He took over from Cedric a few years back. It’s doing very well.’

  Fraser gave the family bray. ‘Doing very well,’ he mimicked. ‘The bloody man’s making millions.’

  ‘Hardly,’ said Mo. ‘That is, only if he did sell it, and he’s not going to do that, is he?’

  Fraser mumbled something, and let himself be pushed down the path towards Vineyard Street. Thea let them go, past caring what would become of her mother, who might find herself stranded without a car, but who showed no sign of going back with the man she arrived with. Only gradually did this strike Thea as peculiar. ‘Are you staying, then, Mum?’ she asked.

  ‘I think I am,’ she said slowly. ‘There’s too much going on. I can’t just leave you, can I?’

  Fraser seemed oblivious to this abandonment. He did not turn back to see where his friend might be. ‘He doesn’t seem to have noticed,’ said Thea. ‘Not much of a boyfriend, is he?’

  Maureen smiled ruefully. ‘He’s not a boyfriend at all, Thea. It’s not like that. He just wants to be friends and relive his youth. He’s hardly conscious of what’s happening in the here and now. All he cares about is the distant past.’

  ‘Are you sure? It seems to me to be much more than that. You were full of him last week, and you introduced him to Damien. T
hat strikes me as pretty thick.’

  ‘Your father has only been dead a year. I’m not going to get thick with anybody. But it’s nice to have some company. He’s very interesting, once you get him started. Some of his stories about Australia are extraordinary. And he was so keen to meet you. It’s a shame it all went sour.’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Thea. ‘It all went completely rotten, didn’t it?’ She tried to kick-start her brain and work out what to do next. ‘And I’ve got to speak to Gladwin again. I keep remembering more about Melissa.’

  ‘And I remember a few things about that Reuben,’ said her mother, surprisingly. ‘Perhaps we should go together and see if we can find her?’

  It was an oddly endearing proposal, as if by simply walking up to the high street, they might stumble across a senior police detective. ‘She’ll be at the station by now,’ said Thea. ‘Trying to establish a proper course of action. Briefing the team, and so forth.’

  ‘Well, we’ll go there, then.’

  ‘It’s not that simple. For a start, they’ll be setting up an incident room, if they haven’t already. They’ll want us there, I expect, for a formal interview. And we can’t really expect it always to be Gladwin we speak to. She’s quite likely to delegate us to somebody else.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, Thea. You’re not making any sense. None of that matters, does it? If we’ve got important facts to tell them, we should go and do it, right away.’

  ‘I think it would be better to phone. That’s what I was trying to say. I’m sorry, Mum – my head’s not working very well. I can’t really decide what I should do, to be honest. For one thing, I ought to go and feed Oliver’s birds.’

  ‘Too late for that. They’ll have given up expecting anything by now. If you’re in that bad a state, you should come home with me. We can go in your car and that will solve my transport problem.’

  Thea mentally stumbled over the question of cars. Somehow, there seemed to be more vehicles than people. Where was Melissa’s, for one thing? And if Fraser went back with Mo and Jason, that left his car sitting out in Vineyard Street somewhere. She imagined Gladwin trying to marry them all up with their rightful owners the previous day, in an effort to identify Melissa’s. She didn’t envy her the job. She knew from past experience that people could be very devious when it came to keeping their motors away from the attention of the police.

  ‘I don’t think he ever said anything about his father being an undertaker,’ Maureen said, as if this was the topic they’d been discussing. ‘And I certainly never knew there was an older brother, until a few weeks ago.’

  ‘When? I mean – when didn’t he say anything? You told me last week that’s what the family did for a living.’

  ‘Did I? I meant when I knew him before. I’m sure I would have remembered that, if nothing else.’

  Thea was forced to accept that her mother’s situation took priority. If she wanted to talk about Fraser, then Thea would have to listen and listen carefully. ‘Sit down,’ she ordered. ‘I’ll go and put two of those potatoes in the microwave and we can have them with that sauce. The pasta doesn’t appeal very much. Don’t move. I’ll be one minute.’

  She was back within the promised time, sitting facing her mother across the hearth rug in Oliver’s sitting room. ‘So, let’s try and get to the bottom of this. Are you at all worried that Fraser might be pretending? That he isn’t the man you knew in the sixties at all? Isn’t there anything about him that you recognise?’

  The older woman pulled a face, indicating frustrated effort. ‘I remember a tall, fresh-faced boy, rather shy and tongue-tied. I can’t remember a single thing he ever said, but we did go to the East End. I remember the wet street and the shadowy corners where they say Jack the Ripper did his murders. It was a bit sinister, the way he relished it so much. I have an impression of talking about the war, at some point. The incredible damage it did, that sort of thing. You know – by then, people had mostly stopped talking about it in any detail. It was as if there was no more to be said. I remember thinking it was because we’d won, and were being modest about it. Not crowing or proud at all. Do you know, I’m still awkward with Germans, even now? It’s a terrible thing to have beaten somebody in a war like that. Where there were no half measures. Both sides did their worst, ignoring any rules. Just burning and bombing, night after night. It leaves appalling scars.’

  ‘Not so much modest as ashamed, then?’ remarked Thea.

  ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. They gave as good as they got. It was touch and go who’d win, even though nobody would ever say that openly. We were glad about the bombing of Dresden and Hiroshima. Really glad. We became heartless monsters, all of us.’

  ‘But that’s not getting us far with Fraser, is it?’

  ‘Probably not. But we’ve talked about this sort of thing, in the past few weeks. He makes me feel we’ve shared something, even if I’ve forgotten most of it. And I like him.’

  ‘Do you? I wonder why. He seems very ordinary to me.’

  ‘Yes, he is. And that’s what I like. He’s not interested in scoring points or showing off his wit. He’s just a quiet old man who wants to be loved.’

  ‘But Daddy didn’t score points,’ Thea protested.

  Her mother gave her a long look. ‘Not with you, of course. And not with any intention to hurt or belittle. But he did it, all the same. He always had to know best what was good for you children. He always had some better idea than mine. He manoeuvred me into my own little ghetto of housework and gardening. Everything else was his territory. He made me powerless in my own family.’

  Thea felt sandbagged by this analysis. Never for a moment had she seen the Johnstones in those terms. Her father had not possessed a malign cell in his body. ‘He was just a bit old-fashioned,’ she protested weakly. ‘He was just doing things the way his own parents had done them.’

  ‘I know,’ said her mother. ‘But that doesn’t really make it any better, does it?’

  ‘So Fraser lets you take charge? He defers to you?’

  ‘Not exactly. It’s probably too late now, anyway. I don’t want to be in charge. I wouldn’t know how. But I like the sensation of being needed. And consulted. He consults me. He wants to know what I think.’

  ‘And you like him. You don’t think there’s any possibility that he’s after your house and money, having seen you on Facebook and decided you were an easy target for a major con trick?’

  ‘No, Thea. I don’t think that’s at all likely.’

  ‘Or that he’s held a grudge against you for his entire life, because you broke his heart in nineteen sixty-two?’

  ‘That has occurred to me, I must admit. I do feel very bad for not remembering him properly. But he just thinks it’s funny. He thinks it means we can start again with a clean slate. He seems genuinely pleased to have a second chance.’

  Thea gave up. ‘Well, he’s gone off without you now, hasn’t he? I don’t think that’s very gentlemanly.’

  ‘Oh, but it is. He realised that you and I needed to have this little chat. And he knows I’m in safe hands. He explained some of it to me last night – we were going to tell you about it today. You see, he feels he’s let his brother down quite badly. For the moment, he can hardly think about anything other than Oliver. That’s where all his attention is, even if he isn’t showing it.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Gladwin’s mobile could offer nothing better than a promise to take a message and get back as soon as possible. ‘It’s Thea. I’ve remembered quite a lot more about Melissa. I think you might want to hear it. Let me know where and when, okay?’

  Leaving a message was deeply unsatisfying. ‘What if I forget it all again?’ she worried. ‘There’s so much rushing around in my head, I can barely focus for two minutes at a time.’

  Her mother had made two large mugs of tea and was slumped on the sofa, looking drained. Hepzibah had jumped on top of her, and they were enjoying a rare cuddle that made Thea feel excluded.

  With
the phone still in her hand, she tried to assemble her thoughts. The quest for an explanatory key was growing increasingly urgent. Loose ends and unanswered questions swarmed on all sides, with nothing to suggest a remotely credible pattern. One persistent motif came back to her: undertakers. The bodies had both been laid out as if for burial, the Meadows family were London funeral directors – a fact that suggested at least some kind of connection. And Thea knew an undertaker rather well. What better excuse – reason, she amended – to call him?

  She went upstairs with her phone, muttering something about seeing to the beds. Her mother took very little notice and the dog stayed where she was. Holding the gadget tightly, Thea realised that her hand was shaking and her heart pounding. Don’t be so silly, she adjured herself silently, resisting the message her body was trying to send her.

  She could text him instead. Perhaps that would be safer, less of a transgression. But how could she possibly word it? The story was far too complicated, the questions too imprecise. If he was in the middle of a funeral, she might leave voicemail, inviting him to call her back. If Maggs was listening, he could pretend she was someone else. If he never wanted to speak to her or think of her again, he could be cool and unresponsive. The shaking and thumping grew worse as she considered these alternatives.

  Just get on with it, her rational mind shouted. This is ridiculous.

  So she instructed the phone to make the call with a few little motions of her thumb, and stared out of the window as she listened to the rhythmic warble as it summoned him. Outside the leaves were yellowing, the grass dry and brittle. The last gasps of summer were going unnoticed at Thistledown, which seemed to Thea another shame, to add to those already accumulating.

  ‘Hello?’ came his voice, slightly wary, slightly breathless, entirely friendly. ‘I saw you on the telly.’

  She wasn’t sure whether to bless or curse the technology that had already told him who was calling. Wasn’t it a pity that surprises had become so difficult to find these days?