Echoes in the Cotswolds Page 18

  Lucy gave a half-choked laugh at this. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘If I let you stay tonight, how will that help anything?’ Thea asked, aiming for a calm and reasonable tone. ‘Will you want to stay another night after that, and then a week or a month?’ Reasonableness was rapidly evaporating, despite her best efforts. ‘You’ll be leaving your house vulnerable to whatever it was that worried you in the first place, won’t you?’

  ‘Things will settle down,’ said Lucy vaguely.

  ‘What about your operation? Have you got another date for that? Do they know what caused your collapse on Wednesday? And how can you expect to just stay here stranded without your car? I’ve got a family to run,’ she finished breathlessly.

  ‘I can help.’

  Now it was Thea who laughed, expressing the same kind of scorn and exasperation as Lucy’s had done. ‘No. Sorry,’ she said. ‘It’s not going to happen. Get your things and I’ll take you home. Just let me go and tell Drew what’s happening.’

  Lucy seemed to sink more deeply into the chair as if trying to root herself in it. Again, Thea noted how many social rules were being transgressed. You didn’t insist on staying where you weren’t wanted. To do so was both mad and bad. Police could be called to eject you. They called it ‘home invasion’ in America. Which made her think of the Latimers, who were at least neutral on the matter of Lucy Sinclair, as far as she could tell. ‘What if I call Bobby Latimer and ask her to keep an eye on you?’ she said, trying not to sound as if she was pleading.

  ‘Don’t you dare!’ Lucy flashed. ‘I told you – I can’t trust anybody in Northleach.’

  ‘Which is quite obviously ridiculous,’ Thea flashed back.

  ‘She’s scared, Thea,’ said Stephanie again, as if this trumped everything. ‘Can’t you see?’

  ‘But what’s she scared of?’ Thea demanded. ‘If her fear is baseless, then it’s neurotic and needs to be addressed by professionals. Maybe I should just take you back to the hospital,’ she said nastily to Lucy.

  The woman had begun to look deranged. Her eyes sparkled and she barely blinked. It occurred to Thea that she really knew next to nothing about the undercurrents running through Northleach society. And it was true that there had been a murder. That much was impossible to deny. ‘Let’s see what Drew says, then,’ she said, with a horrible sense of cowardly compromise. Thea Slocombe had never liked the notion of compromise, even when she had been Thea Osborne or Thea Johnstone before that.

  ‘He’ll say it’s up to you.’ It was Timmy who piped up, with total certainty.

  ‘I expect he will,’ sighed Thea. ‘And I say this is all completely unreasonable and unnecessary and the best thing for Lucy as well as everyone else is for her to go home. The sensible thing is surely to get to the bottom of whatever’s wrong with doing that. Specifically. Actual threats. Not just all this vague nonsense about not trusting people.’ Lucy was seriously rubbish at answering questions, she noticed. There were still quite a few from twenty minutes ago floating around the room.

  And before there could be any attempt at giving answers, Drew had come into the room. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘What happens now? I’m hungry.’

  Thea knew that time was running out. If she left it any longer, Lucy would have to stay, because it was late and dark and damp and nobody would want to drive through the Cotswold lanes on such an evening. ‘I’m trying to persuade Lucy to go home. I’ll take her now, and collect Chinese in Chipping Campden on the way home. But she doesn’t want to go, and won’t explain why.’

  It was annoying to observe the effect Drew’s presence had. Lucy sat up straight and felt for the handbag on the floor beside her. ‘Well, I do see your point,’ she said, far more meekly than she had spoken so far. ‘I expect I am just being foolish. Although the people at the hospital did say it would be best if I had somebody with me for a day or two. Just in case … Anyway, I feel perfectly well now, so probably it would be best …’ She looked forlornly up at Drew, who, to his credit, was clearly not being swayed. If the woman was willing to go, he certainly wasn’t going to stop her – as everyone in the room could see. ‘All right, then,’ she conceded. ‘If you don’t mind all that driving.’

  Thea did mind, and for a moment wondered why she thought it preferable to just making up a bed for the night and starting again next morning. But she had gradually come to the conclusion that she did not really like Lucy Sinclair in her new persona. In Hampnett she had seemed breezy and full of good humour. She’d rejoiced in her divorce from Kevin and shown extreme kindness to abandoned animals. But they had only spent an hour together, in total, and Thea supposed almost everyone could manage to be likeable for that long. Now there was so much unexplained, so many inconsistencies and phobias, that Thea could no longer be patient with her. The prospect of having her hanging around throughout the weekend was intolerable. ‘Come on, then,’ she said.

  The car journey was deeply uncomfortable, which Thea had somehow failed to foresee. It was not so much that Lucy was patently sulking, but that her thoughts were so intense that they made the air crackle. There was a constant impression that a great tirade was about to burst forth, but it never did. Thea had no problem with silence, as a general rule, but a brooding passenger on a dark evening drive was a whole different challenge. She went as fast as she dared, half hoping that Lucy would protest at the speed, which would at least be relatively normal.

  The final sweep along the A429 was achieved at almost eighty miles an hour. ‘I always like to go fast along here,’ Thea said, breaking the prolonged silence. ‘I know I shouldn’t. When I was house-sitting here one time, I realised how dangerous it is for wildlife and pedestrians. But I still can’t resist it when there’s hardly any traffic.’

  ‘Not great visibility, though,’ said Lucy tightly.

  ‘I’m pretty sure I could see headlights well enough.’

  ‘I would think it’s tail-lights you need to see, not headlights.’

  ‘True,’ Thea agreed with a small laugh. But she slowed down. It was less than half a mile to the roundabout where the road crossed the A40, and anything in front of her would be braking in another few seconds.

  They reached West End and Lucy’s house without incident, and Thea debated with herself whether or not she ought to get out and spend a few minutes ensuring that all was well. Common courtesy dictated that of course she should, but Lucy had forfeited quite a lot of that sort of thing by her behaviour that day. ‘I think I’ve left everything as I found it,’ Thea said, trying to remember whether she did in fact tidy the kitchen adequately. ‘I wasn’t sure whether I’d be coming back or not.’

  ‘Believe it or not, I have spent the past fifteen minutes trying to put myself in your shoes, and I can see I’ve messed you about. I took too much for granted. I thought we had a stronger friendship than it’s turned out to be. It’s a bit of a pattern with me, actually. I never seem to get it right. But you don’t have to look after me. Of course you don’t. Why would you?’

  ‘Well …’ said Thea weakly.

  ‘Just one question,’ Lucy cut through. ‘What does “nurse’s uncle” mean?’

  ‘Oh Lord!’ Thea groaned. ‘That was awful of me.’ She explained about her phone call to the hospital that morning. ‘And I called him “Nursey’s uncle”, with a “y” – which makes it even worse.’

  ‘Nursey,’ Lucy repeated. ‘That is rather awful. He was a really nice man, as it happens.’

  ‘Look – you will be all right, okay? The house is perfectly secure. Nobody’s going to be breaking in or harassing you. Keep the curtains shut and they’ll barely notice you’re here. Honestly, I wouldn’t be doing this if I thought you were in any real danger.’

  ‘That’s what people always say,’ Lucy muttered. ‘But you’re probably right. It’s easy to get worked up over nothing.’

  Except they both knew that it was not nothing, because – after all – a man had been murdered in the high street.

  Chapter Fif
teen

  Thea drove home more slowly, tempted again and again to turn back and rescue Lucy Sinclair. Had not fate been sorely provoked, with so many groundless assurances? Had Thea not behaved disgracefully in ejecting the frightened woman from the sanctuary of her own home? A home where there was no threat, nothing to fear, warm and cheerful – except for Drew’s glowering. There were endless questions she still wanted to ask Lucy. Why did she feel so uneasy in that quiet little town? Was there one person in particular she was afraid of? There was an implication from people Thea had met that Lucy had been critical, perhaps even antisocial. She had rejected Hunter Lanning’s wonderful committee, for a start. That alone might be enough to make her an outcast – although Bobby Latimer appeared to have a lurking sympathy for Lucy’s opinion of it. After all, Hunter had driven her to Oxford on Wednesday, which suggested a pretty low level of animosity. And what about Kevin? Were things still hostile between him and his former wife? Had Tessa taken against Lucy? All three of Kevin’s women still lived in the area, which would inevitably produce tensions. What about Ollie’s mother, who had to be at the heart of everything, at least in terms of the grief quotient being suffered? Driving back along the same increasingly familiar route, Thea let speculation run riot, along with regret that she might never find answers to the multiplicity of questions. Despite that frustration, it was better than worrying about what Drew was going to say.

  The arrangements for the Chinese meal ran smoothly, and it was ready for collection at the estimated time. She was dreadfully hungry, she realised, as the wonderful smells filled her car. It was barely five minutes before she got it home, to find the table laid and a bottle of wine in the fridge. ‘Wine!’ she said, when they were all seated around with their plates well filled. ‘Gosh!’

  ‘We’re celebrating having managed seven funerals in four days,’ said Drew. ‘At least, I am.’

  ‘Well, congratulations!’ she smiled, raising her glass. ‘I’m afraid I can’t pretend to have anything to celebrate from my week. All I’ve done is fill my head with a hopeless muddle and been mean to poor Lucy Sinclair.’

  ‘You were mean,’ said Stephanie.

  ‘But it’s better here without her. She wasn’t any fun,’ said Timmy.

  ‘No fun at all,’ said Drew. ‘It would be like having one of my funeral people to supper. Somebody whose husband had just died – imagine it!’

  The subtext, as Thea very well knew, was that work and family should be kept separate. If he could do it, with everything happening in the same house and tiny village, then why could she not manage? He could tolerate a little light house-sitting, if that was what she wanted, but he did not relish having it brought home and thrust under his nose. And she really couldn’t blame him. On the other hand, she would very much have liked to talk it all through with him. She would enjoy describing Faith-and-Livia, and the poor parenting skills of Artie Latimer. He had, she remembered, shown a certain amount of interest in Hunter Lanning and his open-mindedness. The problem was, she had gleant nothing more about the man since that conversation and so had nothing new to convey.

  ‘What if she gets murdered, though?’ said Stephanie, with a frown. ‘What if she knew there was some terrible danger, and that’s why she wanted to stay here?’

  ‘If she really knew that, she should go to the police. They’d protect her.’

  ‘They wouldn’t, though, would they? I mean – how would they? Probably they wouldn’t even believe her,’ Stephanie persisted.

  ‘Stop it,’ begged Thea. ‘Why are you guilt-tripping me like this? Don’t forget I was there all day, trying to understand what was going on. I couldn’t see the slightest reason for Lucy to worry. She’s obviously not ill. Even her back seemed a lot less stiff – maybe the hospital gave her something for it before she was discharged. It’s her own fault if she couldn’t make friends. You can’t expect me to take responsibility for that.’

  ‘Thea’s right,’ said Drew. ‘Just drop it, okay?’ He gave his daughter one of his looks, from under his floppy fringe. Drew’s hair was doing the opposite of most men his age. Where their hairline receded, leaving more and more brow, his seemed to be trying to cover his whole face. If he had it cut short, he looked all wrong and it grew back in unruly tufts. So he only went to a barber when it passed his eyebrows, leaving a perpetual look of a fair-headed Paul McCartney in about 1969.

  ‘Tell me about the funerals,’ said Thea, hours later than she had intended.

  That night she dreamed about Kevin Sinclair, who was spying on his son through a small window, watching him smoking some lethal and illegal substance while Hunter Lanning and Artie Latimer stood behind Kevin muttering that they’d known it all along. Clouds of blue and purple smoke billowed around Ollie’s head, and as Thea watched him, in the dream, he slowly sank to the floor and turned into a corpse.

  ‘It’s all about the drugs,’ she was saying to herself when she woke up. ‘It’s got to be.’

  The weekend was empty of any real plans. Drew wanted to go and talk to Andrew, and catch up with some paperwork. Stephanie was writing up a lengthy report about an experiment she and others were conducting at school, to do with photosynthesis. It had been going on all term and the family had long ago lost interest. Timmy was reluctantly learning a poem – something that Thea and Drew thought had been abandoned by schools long ago. The only way it was going to succeed was if the entire family learnt it with him. When Thea had mentioned this to her mother the previous weekend, Maureen Johnstone had been ecstatic. ‘We had to do that!’ she cried. ‘I’ve never forgotten all those poems.’ But it turned out that she had, with only a scattering of first lines still lodged in her brain. ‘He’s got a very old-fashioned teacher,’ sighed Thea. But she did in fact like the idea, and had even gone through a short phase of learning poems by heart herself, only a year or so ago. ‘Margaret, are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving?’ she would mumble to herself, now and then. But she could only get as far as the sixth line before her memory failed her.

  Tim’s poem was every bit as obscure as the Hopkins, it seemed to Thea. A sonnet by John Updike of all people, entitled ‘Iowa’. It didn’t rhyme and the scansion sounded wrong. But it had more than enough images to conjure the American West – which neatly dovetailed with another school project concerning history. Every line carried an idea that the old-fashioned teacher managed to pursue and elaborate to a remarkable extent. She had spent a week on fireflies, for one thing. And the transgressive reference to cigars made Thea happy. ‘I love the smell of cigars,’ she said.

  All of which meant that the family were quite nicely occupied on Saturday morning, and Thea had very little to do. Wash the school clothes, sew a button on one of Timmy’s school shirts, get some shopping in and maybe run the vacuum around. Hepzie’s hairs required regular removal from furniture and rugs if all four of the Slocombes were not to appear in public lightly coated with them. But those tasks, however conscientiously performed, could not possibly take more than a couple of hours. Even the supermarket, close by in Chipping Campden, was a quick job accomplished shortly before lunchtime.

  The sun came out in the afternoon and the dog made it clear that a walk would be in order. Stephanie was the default person to attend to this need, escorting Hepzie down the track to the big field at the end. Various crops came and went in this field, sometimes requiring walkers to stick to the path that ran through the middle, but mostly it was permissible to run all over it. After nearly two years, the Slocombes still had not met the farmer who owned it. There were never any animals on it, which made it a very restful recreation ground.

  ‘The thing about the Cotswolds,’ Drew once said, ‘is that there’s so much space. Even if you had a thousand walkers roaming about, one summer Sunday, they’d hardly even see each other.’

  ‘Even more so in the Lake District,’ said Thea. ‘Or the Yorkshire Dales.’

  ‘It’s because there are so many footpaths,’ said Timmy, preparing to share yet again his knowledg
e of the exact length of all the major pathways.

  ‘I should go with you,’ Thea said now to her stepdaughter and dog. ‘But I’m feeling lazy.’ In truth, she was hankering for enough undisturbed solitude to make a few phone calls. Drew had taken Timmy with him to see Andrew, because it was generally believed that Drew needed to spend more time with his son. ‘You said you’d take me to Northleach,’ Stephanie reminded Thea. ‘Isn’t that happening now?’

  ‘I don’t know. It might. I’ll keep you posted.’

  So Thea began with Caz Barkley. The young detective answered quickly, with undiluted friendliness. ‘I was just thinking about you,’ she said.

  ‘Have there been any more developments?’ asked Thea, putting great emphasis on the word as a tease. She still thought it had been a great exaggeration to use it for a crying child the day before.

  ‘Nothing concrete. Interviews. Background searches. The DI is seeing the father again. I think they called the girlfriend back. I’ve been on the Internet all day up to now.’

  ‘Did they find Jan and Nikola?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The Polish men who worked with Ollie – duh! Aren’t they the main suspects?’

  ‘They’re not Polish, Thea. They’re from the Ukraine and we interviewed them days ago. Didn’t I tell you that? And they work on the fruit farm down near Chedworth with a whole lot of others. Mostly it’s seasonal, but there are some who stay all the year round. They just hung out with Ollie in the evenings now and then.’

  ‘No, not them,’ said Thea impatiently. ‘There’s another pair who made films with Ollie. Ask Vicky. She told me about them.’ A sudden sense of frustration and urgency gripped her. Had the police really been stupid enough to amalgamate the two lots of East Europeans?