Echoes in the Cotswolds Page 19

  ‘But they went back to Poland last week. Why would we want to talk to them?’

  ‘I don’t know – doesn’t it seem suspicious to you? Why don’t you think they could have killed him and then rushed off to Warsaw or wherever, where you’d never find them? At the very least, they’ll know more than anyone else about the set-up in that house – how much time Ollie spent there and who else dropped in.’ She paused. ‘Why am I saying this to you when you must know it already?’

  ‘Good question. I don’t think either of us actually knows the whole story about that side of things. The Polish chaps are not on any lists of interesting persons, which is really all we need to know.’

  ‘But – what if they arranged for someone else to kill Ollie, on their behalf? What if everything was planned down to the last detail, with their tracks cleverly covered?’

  ‘As I understand it, there’s no suggestion at all of anything like that.’

  ‘Okay. So you have eliminated them, then.’

  ‘Yes, in a way. You don’t understand how it works. We’re really not stupid, you know. And neither are Jan and Nikola, by all accounts – so you got that bit right. One of them is head of a film department at a big university and the other one’s making a name as a director.’

  ‘And Ollie did film editing and had a Muslim mother and only just missed being an Olympic high jumper,’ Thea finished for her. ‘I know that much, at least. Plus, he was or was not on any sort of drugs.’

  ‘No, he was not. He might have smoked a bit of pot, and he wasn’t teetotal, but not a hint of anything stronger. Any suggestion otherwise is definitely false.’

  ‘It’s all about the drugs,’ said Thea, remembering her dream. ‘It’s got to be. That’s the only part that makes absolutely no sense.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense in itself.’

  ‘Well I hope it isn’t a secret any longer, because I think I might have mentioned it to Kevin Sinclair when I probably shouldn’t have.’

  Caz clicked her tongue, but did not sound too perturbed.

  ‘I doubt if that did any harm. We think it’s just a lot of hidebound villagers jumping to conclusions. When we ask them directly for evidence, they go all vague and say somebody told them that’s what was going on, but personally they’d never been too sure about it.’

  ‘Still peculiar, though. What about Hunter Lanning? He was so convinced when I saw him on Thursday. Not to mention Kevin Sinclair, of course.’

  ‘Remind me. Who’s Hunter Lanning?’ Thea could almost hear the worried cogs turning in Caz’s brain.

  Thea made the same tongue-clicking sound as Caz had just done. ‘He’s a big man in town. I think I mentioned him to you yesterday, and you can’t possibly have missed the fact of his existence. He’s in charge of the committee. Wake up, Sergeant Barkley.’

  The detective laughed, but Thea was aware that she might have gone too far. ‘Right. Yes. Nobody seems to think he’s important. I think DI Higgins might have interviewed him. We’re not stupid, you know. Why do I have to keep saying that?’

  ‘I never said you were. But I do think the Lanning man could be significant. He knows everybody. Everybody knows him. He runs the committee. Didn’t I tell you about him yesterday?’ She was almost shouting.

  ‘Thea – we don’t interview the entire town, you know. We set up the incident room as close as we can get to the scene of crime, and mostly wait for people to come to us if they think they can be useful. Just for a few days. It’ll be packing up tomorrow, I think. Other than that, we’ve spoken to the entire family, even the sister, who lives in Liverpool and is so disaffected she might not even come to Ollie’s funeral.’

  Thea savoured that fresh snippet for a moment, still feeling there’d been some oversight. ‘I can’t believe Hunter wouldn’t present himself,’ she insisted. ‘He’s that sort of person.’

  ‘It’s possible he did, but I don’t recognise the name. Or I didn’t – now, I think Higgins did speak to him, so you can stop nagging about him. I don’t think you did mention him yesterday, actually.’

  ‘Okay. So the sister – is she older or younger?’

  ‘Oh Lord. You never stop, do you? I think she’s younger. I think she was only a baby when the parents split up, and growing up with a single mother and a chaotic big brother was really no fun. She got out early and has hardly been back. These are just impressions from the briefing, remember. She gave a credible account of where she was last week, so she’s also not interesting.’

  ‘So – where has the investigation got to, then? It sounds to me as if you’ve crossed just about everybody off the list of suspects.’ The question had been slow in coming, and she felt a bit silly leaving it so late. ‘If I may ask.’

  ‘Let’s just say it’s a bit sluggish. There’s a mass of stuff to go through from the house – computers, phone and so forth, but nothing that really stands out as evidence. I was rather hoping you’d phoned to tell me you’d unearthed something new. I’ve learnt to assume you have, even when you don’t bother to tell us about it.’

  ‘Lucy Sinclair came here yesterday. She wanted to stay, but I made her go home.’

  ‘Was that as unkind as it sounds?’

  ‘Probably,’ Thea admitted. ‘I don’t think I’m very good at hospitality.’

  ‘But now she’s in Northleach?’

  ‘Right. And she could be hoping for a bit of police protection, because she’s scared, although I got the impression she wasn’t going to ask for it. She wouldn’t say what she was frightened of. I told her everybody in town would be jittery and it was quite normal and she should face her fears. I mean, she lived down a farm track in a converted barn for years, all by herself. Even I found that scary, when I was there in the snow. She can’t be a complete wimp if she coped with doing that.’

  ‘I’ll pass it on,’ said Caz. ‘Send someone to go and talk to her, maybe.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thea, feeling a flicker of satisfaction that was not altogether benign. Lucy had not seemed too enthusiastic at the prospect of talking to the police. ‘She can probably tell you quite a lot about Ollie, while you’re at it.’

  ‘Stepmother,’ said the detective, after a tiny hesitation. ‘What a family! I haven’t met the father, but he sounds quite a case.’

  ‘I’ve met him. And his current woman. They’re very shocked – all over the place. I felt quite sorry for them.’

  ‘But not for Lucy?’

  ‘Not very. I can’t see that she’s lost anything – but Kevin’s lost his child. Though I don’t think he knew what he’d lost till it had gone – to quote the song.’

  ‘What song?’ said young Caz Barkley.

  The conversation had done nothing to suggest what Thea should do next. The afternoon still lay before her, with all the nagging stereotypes of family life falling away. Timmy was not in the mood for a board game. Drew was still tinkering with his paperwork, which included bank statements, and eyeing the phone as if willing it to ring. ‘What if there are no more funerals all week?’ he said. ‘It might well go like that.’

  ‘Take the chance to catch up with other stuff,’ said Thea. ‘You could even go and see your mother. You’ll have to do that soon, or she’ll be wanting to come here again.’ The family was still shuddering from a visit several weeks ago. Drew’s mother had almost forgotten about him for years, especially after he married Thea – but then resurfaced eager to make up for lost time, when her husband died. It had been Drew’s father, apparently, who maintained the distance from his son, in some mangled psychological problem he had with the fact of funerals and undertaking. As it turned out, he was buried in a North Country field very much like Drew’s burial ground. ‘He wanted it all kept very simple,’ said his widow.

  ‘She’ll insist on coming at Easter, anyway,’ Drew argued. ‘I thought that was all fixed.’

  ‘It probably is,’ said Thea. ‘But I live in hope. Caz and I just decided that I’m a very poor hostess. Inhospitable.’

  ‘I’
ve known worse,’ said Drew comfortably.

  Now she hung around in his office, liking to be with him, whatever he was doing. She enjoyed watching him being methodical, which he generally was, while conducting a dilatory conversation. She had no reason to be anywhere else, after all. Drew was easy company, easily pleased and slow to complain. ‘Any thoughts about tomorrow?’ she asked him idly.

  He shook his head. ‘I wasn’t sure we were in any position to make plans, with things so unpredictable down in Northleach. I did wonder if you’d like us all to go there for lunch in one of the pubs. That would make a change.’

  ‘Oh! Really? Gosh!’ She savoured the suggestion, once she’d recovered from the surprise. ‘That would be great. Not The Wheatsheaf, though. I get the feeling it’s not really us.’ She pushed aside thoughts of the chicken she had just bought at the supermarket, and the inevitability of roast Sunday lunch and hardly anything else on most pub menus the following day. ‘I wonder if there’s anyone doing a carvery,’ she mused. That would be a compromise she could cheerfully live with. ‘I’ll check the websites and see.’

  Five minutes later she reported that The Sherborne Arms would most likely be their best bet. ‘Nothing at all pretentious about it,’ she concluded. ‘And they’re fine with dogs.’

  ‘That’s most likely the one in the sitcom I was telling you about. Maybe we should try and find it later on, and watch one or two episodes.’

  ‘Good idea.’ She was still wondering how she had failed to notice him watching a Cotswolds-based comedy series, and assumed she must have been lost in a book, ignoring the TV, which would not be unusual. ‘You mean doing the iPlayer thingy?’

  ‘Don’t pretend you can’t manage that. It’s pathetically simple.’

  ‘I wasn’t,’ she said. Her technophobia had long ago ceased to amuse Drew or his children, so she was making a bigger effort to move with the times. To date, she was only about ten years behind everybody else.

  The prospect of going back to Northleach accompanied by husband, children and dog made her uneasy. Would they just wander up and down the main street? Would she show them where the murder had taken place? No way did she want to bump into Lucy Sinclair, which would mean parking at the further end of town, and not walking along West End at all. The church would have a service on, most likely – though not in the afternoon. Drew was trying to take an interest and involve himself in her main preoccupation of the moment, but it was sadly misplaced – and she could not tell him so. Stephanie had already said she wanted to go there, after all. She might even have put the idea into her father’s head. There was, however, the Coln Valley nearby, with a string of enchanting little villages that nobody had heard of. Winson, Ablington, Yanworth, and then the very famous Bibury. The whole area was strewn with big beautiful houses, lovingly built and carefully preserved. Gardens, rivers, sudden vistas – the whole works in one small stretch of English countryside.

  ‘We can go for a long walk after having lunch,’ she said. ‘But only if Timmy can say that poem right through, and Stephanie finishes her botany project.’

  ‘That’s all sorted, then,’ said Drew with an expression not far off complacency.

  She made a conscious effort to dispel all thoughts of murder from her mind for the rest of Saturday. She had done it at Christmas, with moderate success, and that had been a killing within walking distance of the house. Northleach was twenty miles away – surely it could be out of mind? But it seemed not. Questions would not be repressed. What was Ollie really like? That was the main one. You should always start with a close analysis of the victim, but that was far from easy when you’d never met him. Not for the first time, she appreciated the magnitude and complexity of the task facing the police when trying to make sense of such a crime. However diligently you questioned those who knew the dead man, some of them would lie, some would forget and some would simply get it all wrong, with the best of intentions. For example, this bizarre insistence that Ollie Sinclair was addicted to drugs, when Thea was now fully persuaded that he never was. So who could have told such a powerful lie to the man’s father that he clung to the belief so tenaciously? It had to be more than an idle rumour.

  Kevin Sinclair was the person who kept recurring to her, as the one she should talk to again. She was uneasy with the way she had behaved with him on Friday, when he so badly wanted her input. He had seemed so genuinely bewildered, with his woman not helping very much, that Thea had not known what to say. In her experience, a great deal took place in the heart and mind of a newly bereaved person over the early days of the loss. Disbelief, denial, rage, guilt, despair, detachment, blame and bewilderment were just a few of the stages a person went through. Kevin might well be a different man on Saturday from the figure he had cut on Friday.

  She had forgotten where he lived, but she knew it wasn’t Northleach. She tried to recall any hints, but all she could remember was that he drove a lorry. His first wife, Sayida, was also in the area somewhere, but Thea couldn’t remember whether Vicky had named the place. Cotswolds villages and small towns numbered in the hundreds – or over one hundred, anyway. There were many names Thea still had never heard, and Drew was even less well-versed than she was. And neither of them could say for certain whether Winchcombe was north or south of Stow, or Moreton-in-Marsh east or west of the Slaughters. They were constantly consulting maps, until Thea suggested they pin one up on the wall somewhere and try to learn it by heart. The only one in the family who seemed to have a natural grasp of the layout was Timmy, because he was keen on the ancient pathways and canals.

  But She Who Knocks on Doors knew her limitations. She could not capriciously approach Kevin or Sayida or, really, anyone else, the way things stood. The police were deeply into their investigation, with their background searches and lengthy interviews. Caz had told her almost nothing when she phoned, but focused on learning what Thea might have discovered. Only if specifically requested to act as an informal investigator – and given an address – could she knock on any more doors. It felt like a dead end, with not so much as a hint of a suspicion as to by whom, or why, or even when the killing of Ollie had been perpetrated.

  It was Stephanie who broke the blockage down, without meaning to. Tired of her homework she had begun checking out some YouTube offerings, sitting with her tablet in the living room. Thea and Drew had both insisted she do all her online activities in plain view, to avoid the more obvious hazards associated with it. ‘We still can’t know everything she’s doing,’ said Drew. ‘She could be being bullied right under our noses. Or groomed.’

  ‘Unlikely,’ said Thea. ‘Though it might be easier if she was doing the bullying.’

  ‘What? My perfect daughter? What are you saying?’

  ‘We have to be prepared for anything,’ she had teased.

  ‘This Oliver Sinclair,’ Stephanie said now, out of the blue. ‘He was very handsome, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Pardon? How do you know that?’

  ‘He’s trending. Gone viral, pretty much. There’s a film of him doing his high jumping. And a whole lot about his life.’

  ‘Of course there is,’ said Thea, feeling old and foolish. ‘I saw some of it.’

  So Stephanie showed her a vast gallery of images, and a Wikipedia entry she had somehow managed to miss, and pages of condolences from athletes she had never heard of. Being dead, especially by mysterious and violent means, evidently brought you to extreme Internet prominence, however obscure you might have been in life. And Ollie had not exactly been obscure, Thea was beginning to realise.

  ‘Fancy you being right there, in the middle of it all!’ Stephanie marvelled. ‘And we had his mother here in the house. That’s awesome.’

  ‘Stepmother, actually. Not even that, probably, now she’s divorced from his father. I don’t know if it still counts then.’

  Stephanie gave Thea a worried look. ‘Does that mean you’d just forget about me and Tim if you left Dad? Wouldn’t you be our stepmother any more?’

  ‘I
’m not leaving Dad. You’ve got me for life,’ said Thea lightly.

  ‘I want to go there,’ said the child earnestly. ‘I want to see it all.’

  ‘We are going tomorrow. All of us.’

  ‘Are we?’ Stephanie frowned. ‘Why?’

  ‘Well …’ It was a good question, on consideration. ‘I think Dad wants to take an interest in where I’ve been most of the week. He wants to see for himself.’

  ‘No,’ said Drew’s devoted daughter. ‘He doesn’t really. He just thinks you want to go, so he says he’ll go with you – to be nice. You should tell him he doesn’t have to. We can go now, just you and me. There’s time, isn’t there?’

  ‘Not really. Not if I’m going to produce a decent supper for everybody. It’s three o’clock already.’ Stephanie rolled her eyes, which made Thea think she ought to take the idea more seriously. ‘And anyway, what would we do there? There’s not really anything to see. I’ve wasted enough petrol driving there and back so many times.’

  ‘But you were going to go again tomorrow.’ The logic was unarguable. ‘Which would be sillier than us going now. Dad and Tim would just be in the way. Hepzie as well. You can’t be a proper detective with a dog to consider.’

  ‘It’ll be dark before we know it.’

  ‘It won’t. We’re on British Summer Time now, remember. It’ll be light until after six.’

  ‘That still doesn’t give us much time. An hour or so, that’s all.’

  ‘More than that,’ Stephanie asserted confidently. ‘If we go right away.’

  ‘But Steph, it’s bonkers. What do you think will happen when we get there? For a start, I definitely don’t want to bump into Lucy again. I was already working out how we could avoid her tomorrow. Nobody’s going to be pleased to see me, come to think of it.’

  Stephanie was again attending to her tablet, looking for more information. ‘It says he was an instructor, making films about high jumping for schools and clubs and stuff. It doesn’t say he lived in Northleach, though. There’s a person here says he was a neighbour, but he’s put Cirencester for where he’s from.’