Slaughter in the Cotswolds Read online

  Babs threw up the lid of the stately white chest to reveal a jumble of meat in plastic bags almost to the top. Thea gasped in awe: there had to be easily fifty or sixty items to choose from. ‘Venison, rabbit, bit of lamb down near the bottom, bones for the dogs – but mainly it’s pheasant,’ said Babs.

  ‘Not many labels,’ observed Thea.

  Babs laughed scornfully and closed the lid.

  It seemed that the closest neighbour was a surviving farm, boasting a thousand head of sheep. The buildings were clearly visible from the back of the Angells’ house, two large modern barns and an older one stacked high with bright yellow straw in big circular bales. ‘Don’t let the dogs go over there,’ Cedric warned. ‘That Henry’s very twitchy about dogs getting among his sheep.’

  ‘But it isn’t lambing time,’ said Thea.

  Cedric shook his head. ‘Lambing’s not a worry, with them all indoors. Dogs’ll chase sheep any time of the year, if they get the mood on them.’

  Thea looked at Hepzibah and smiled at the image of the floppy-eared spaniel in pursuit of a large woolly prey.

  ‘They seem pretty friendly,’ she observed, eyeing Cedric’s two dogs.

  ‘They’re good old boys,’ Cedric agreed. ‘Not much of a life, but Babs insisted we have them as guards. They’ve got each other, and the chains are good and long.’

  ‘But presumably you untie them sometimes for exercise?’ The thought that the animals remained perpetually tied up was untenable.

  Cedric ducked his chin in a gesture of shame. ‘Not as often as we ought,’ he admitted.

  ‘So – am I allowed to walk them? I can’t bear to leave them tied up the whole time. It’s just not in my nature.’ She struggled not to sound accusing or critical.

  ‘If you must. But make damned sure they don’t get away from you, that’s all. Best take them one at a time, maybe. That’s the safest. Babs paid a pretty penny for that huntaway – she’s not going to take it kindly if he comes to grief.’

  ‘Huntaway?’

  Cedric indicated the short-haired dog, with black and tan colouring. His feet were tan socks on black legs, which gave him a characterful appearance. ‘They’re a three way cross – alsatian, sheepdog and something else. I can never recall what the last one is. Very good with cattle, so they say.’

  Various sketchy details were provided about dustbin day and the best place to buy milk and bread, and then detailed arrangements had been made for the Friday departure. Five days later, Thea’s father had died, and she had been on the brink of cancelling the whole commission. She phoned the Angells and told them what had happened. The horrified silence at the idea that she might not fulfil her promise was enough to persuade her she couldn’t let them down. ‘We’re not sure when the funeral is, but if we have it in the church, it’ll probably be the end of the week, which is quite quick these days.’

  Babs Angell had coughed, rather than attempt a response to this.

  ‘It gets very booked up at the crematorium,’ Thea elaborated. ‘People have to wait nearly three weeks sometimes.’

  ‘That’s a disgrace,’ said Babs. ‘Well, dear, I’m sorry for your loss. We only have one Dad, don’t we?’

  The kindness had made Thea cry, and she put down the phone after promising thickly to do her best to keep to the arrangement.

  * * *

  They had been gone several hours when Thea and Hepzibah arrived. The sun was casting low rays over the sheep farm at the back of the house, the earlier clouds having cleared in time for a few last moments of summer evening.

  The romantically named Hawkhill Farm stood on comparatively level ground to the south-east of the village of Lower Slaughter, the Roman-straight A429 a few fields away. The road slashed diagonally from Cirencester to Stow, as much part of the area as the butter-coloured buildings and the tumbling hills and valleys. Well-rambled footpaths criss-crossed at this point, the Slaughters one of the most popular attractions for tourists. Thea could see a marker post just beyond the corner of the Angells’ garden, showing where one of the paths ran. She found herself debating the pros and cons of having people in stout boots and rucksacks on their backs passing within speaking distance. She could position a garden chair under that handsome cherry tree and wave to passing ramblers. It might add a welcome air of sociability to her stay.

  Phil had known better than to offer to share this commission with her. Once she had convinced him that she was intent on continuing the house-sitting work, he had been forced to accept that he couldn’t be with her every time. Still recovering from a severely slipped disc in his lower back, he had missed too much work to be able to take time off so soon, anyway. The proposed week in Greece could not have happened until the end of September at the earliest, he admitted.

  And Jessica, her daughter, had made no suggestion of joining her, either. ‘Seems we’ll be on our own this time,’ Thea said to the spaniel, trying not to think about the long solitary evenings ahead. It was her own choice, after all. If she minded that much, she could get a proper job in an office and stop messing about.

  The livestock under her care seemed only mildly suspicious. The dogs had their own quarters in a stone-built shed set at right angles to the house, and were content to have their food provided by a new person. Feeding them was a simple matter of scooping dry complete nuggets from a metal bin into two large aluminium bowls, and presenting them to the animals. The huntaway was the more friendly, approaching her with a slow tail-wag, before politely consuming his supper. The other was black and white, with a long full coat and looped-over tail like a husky. Their names had not been disclosed, which Thea found made her feel more detached from them than she would otherwise have been.

  Three tabby cats sat on a flight of slate steps running up the outside of the barn to a door at the top. They made a charming picture, and Thea wished she’d thought to bring her camera. The door at the head of the steps had once been a corn store, ‘the granary’ Babs had called it. Now it contained discarded furniture and had been taken over by the cats. A small square hole had been cut in the door for their convenience. Thea gave them their complete dry food, in three cream-coloured ceramic bowls, and swiped her hands together. ‘Now there’s just the parrot and the ferrets,’ she said.

  The ferrets occupied yet another part of the property – a wooden shed at the back, approached by a weed-strewn path around the side of the house, or through from the kitchen and scullery. They too had pre-packaged food, comprising pellets of various colours and shapes. Mr and Mrs Angell must have quite a job keeping up supplies, she realised, imagining the car coming back from a cash and carry loaded with all the different bags of animal feed, and the subsequent distribution to the various sheds and rooms.

  The ferrets were restless, weaving their slender bodies round and round the cage, raising sharp pink snouts to sniff this strange hand that was feeding them. Thea had experience of ferrets – at the age of four, when visiting a small friend, she had poked a finger through the wire-fronted cage of the prize hob and had it savagely bitten. Not until Pauline’s father had arrived and pinched the animal’s tail had it released her. The screams had quickly become legendary. But Thea held no permanent grudge. She liked the streamlined creatures with their intelligent little faces. It came as no surprise that a former gamekeeper should keep them. They would still be used to start rabbits from their burrows, in places where rabbits were proving too much of a pest.

  Ignatius held the privileged position of being the only creature allowed inside the house. He had a large cage in a corner of the front room, and a perch close to the window, where he was invited to sit when a change of scene seemed in order. A slender chain attached his leg to the bar, giving him perhaps twelve feet of scope for flight or exploration. Ignatius made Thea – and her dog – infinitely more nervous than all the other beasts put together. He sat hunched in the cage, his head cocked cynically as she approached and attempted to introduce herself. Like people always did with parrots, she tried to entice him t
o speak. ‘What a pretty boy, then,’ she prattled. ‘Where’s your Mummy and Daddy gone, then? Will you be good for me and Hepzie?’

  The bird gave an inarticulate snort, and sank its head sadly into its chest.

  The bedroom was the second door on the right at the top of the stairs. Carrying Hepzie’s blanket, and followed by the dog, Thea went up soon after ten. She needed to process the day, the momentous event of her father’s burial, the ongoing issues of Phil and the future and money.

  She opened the door and suddenly the spaniel was yapping and leaping crazily at something inside the room. Switching on the light, bemused by the dog’s behaviour, she was aware of something flittering erratically above her head.

  A bat! Increasingly hysterical, Hepzie was straining every nerve to catch it, bounding in matching zigzags after the creature. Thea threw the door wide open, hoping the bat would leave and somehow find a way out of the house. Instead, it darted in swooping dives at the central light, seeming to be both attracted and repelled by it. Holding up the blanket, Thea strove to direct it out through the door, flapping encouragingly when it headed in the required direction. But it repeatedly returned to the light, and the irrationality of it began to seem oddly sinister. The dog’s incessant yapping made everything worse.

  After several futile minutes, she decided to try switching off the light in the room, and turning on the one on the landing, only to find that the now invisible bat darting around her head was intolerably alarming. It might catch in her hair, and cling there with its nasty little talons. Quickly she put the light on again, and renewed her efforts with the blanket. With Hepzie very slightly calmer, the strategy eventually worked and the flittering creature swooped out of the door and disappeared.

  Shaking, Thea slammed the door after it, and threw herself on the bed, hugging the spaniel to her chest. Already she foresaw the whole episode repeated, night after night, as she tried to oust the bat from what it might well regard as its territory.

  ‘Never mind,’ she said to the dog. ‘It’s only a bat. Until now, I always thought I liked them.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  It had taken her a long time to get to sleep, and when she did, she dreamt her father was still alive, playing with Hepzie and laughing. But to her own shamed surprise, she woke with an urgent desire for the dream not to have been true. She had loved him, even rejoiced in him at times, and yet now he was dead, she wanted him to stay that way. The Lazarus story came to her mind, with the horror of that raised corpse stumbling through the streets, repelling everyone he encountered. The dead, she concluded, really ought to stay dead.

  All of which led to a nagging feeling of guilt towards her mother. Not only had Thea abandoned her in her grief, but she had been infinitely relieved to have a good reason to do so. Despite the fact that she had experienced widowhood herself and might be expected to offer empathy and consolation in abundance, she knew her mother would adopt an entirely different pattern of mourning from her own. When Carl had been killed without warning in his early forties, Thea had been numb for weeks, and then so wracked with pain that she could scarcely function at all. Only her daughter and her father had been permitted anywhere near her, and they often proved to be intolerably irritating. Even a year afterwards, she had still preferred her own company, sinking into strategies that she had finally recognised as unwholesome – inventing ways to hurt herself in order to drown the emotional anguish. The distraction of the house-sitting had saved her, she believed now. She had met people with their own crises and losses, and slowly discovered in herself a hard-won wisdom that sometimes seemed to help.

  Saturday morning dawned uncertainly, streaks of grey across the lower part of the sky suggesting a possible build-up of rain clouds later. Hepzie had clearly not forgotten the bat of the night before. She worked around the room, sniffing hard at skirting boards and glancing up at the ceiling every now and then.

  The room was small, furnished with a single bed, chest of drawers and a round table covered with a cloth embroidered lavishly with honeysuckle and poppies. A hand-made rug was placed beside the bed, its pile pleasantly long and warm to bare feet. Thea had left her suitcase on the floor, still packed apart from pyjamas and spongebag. There was nowhere to hang clothes, and she wasn’t tempted to use the chest of drawers. Living out of a suitcase was no great hardship.

  Phil had managed, after several months, to persuade her to make much greater use of her mobile phone. A busy senior police detective, he would often fail to answer a call, which forced her to master the art of texting. Every time she did it, she felt she had stepped into a different world from the one she had expected to inhabit for the rest of her life. Part of her felt it was pure nonsense, sending a handful of words to a friend or relative or lover, simply to remind them that you existed and had not forgotten them. It was a typical British substitute for intimacy, which only served to emphasise to her that she was more than happy to maintain her independence and spells of isolation. But part of her had grown to enjoy the link it forged between them. She composed her messages carefully, using proper spellings and punctuation. He made no remark about this, for fear of deterring her from making contact, but he himself would use u for ‘you’ and even l8 for ‘late’.

  So now she picked up the gadget from where it sat on the round table and thought about her mother, not Phil Hollis at all. She ought to phone and see how the new widow was feeling. Now, as never before, family unity was called for. But instead she found herself keying in her sister Emily’s number. Safer, she thought, than intruding on a huddled hopeless mother who would not respond to bracing comments down a phone line.

  Emily answered warily, sighing with relief when she recognised Thea’s voice. ‘Thank goodness,’ she breathed. ‘I thought you were Mum.’

  ‘Why? What’s she been doing?’

  ‘Oh – you know. She wouldn’t let me stay the night with her, and then spent about two hours crying down the phone at midnight. I told her to take a sleeping pill, but of course there aren’t any in the house. I can see she’s going to drive us all mad for the next twenty years.’ Maureen Johnstone was seventy-two – another twenty years was entirely feasible.

  ‘Bad luck,’ said Thea, sincerely. It was bad luck for Emily that she was the default daughter that their mother chose to cry on. Jocelyn had escaped into her own teeming demanding family, and Thea had never been quite sympathetic enough for comfort. Her tendency to make logical comments highlighting the flaws in her mother’s arguments or pleas for support seldom went down well. Perhaps, she thought, it was Emily’s position in the family that had shaped her character, and really her essential nature wasn’t so uptight and controlling after all. It was an idle thought, since there seemed little that could be done about it, but it helped give her patience. ‘You ought to just take her at her word, and let her get on with it for a few days.’

  ‘I’m going to, don’t you worry. She has every right to be sad – but so do I. What about my grief?’ The last words emerged on a sob that sent chills through Thea. She hadn’t bargained for this. If she’d given it any thought at all, she’d concluded that Emily wouldn’t especially miss her father; had never seemed as close to him as Thea had been, and often found him irritating. Emily kept emotion on a tight rein. Thea couldn’t remember seeing her cry since she was thirteen.

  ‘Oh dear,’ she said feebly. ‘I suppose this is how it usually goes. We all have to retreat into our burrows and deal with it in our own way.’

  It was precisely the sort of sentiment that Emily could be relied on to agree with, in normal circumstances. But it seemed that a new normality was now in charge. ‘I’d really like to talk to somebody about how I feel,’ came the amazing reply.

  ‘Oh. Well, I imagine Bruce is the person for that, then?’ Emily’s husband was in fact a most unlikely counsellor, a man who left the room at a brisk trot at the first hint of emotional revelations – but Thea was making no more assumptions.

  ‘Of course not, you idiot. I want to come and
talk to you.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Well, sometime between now and Monday morning. I have to be at work then.’

  ‘It isn’t very salubrious here. There’s a parrot…’

  ‘Come on, Thea. Don’t give me that. If it’s good enough for you to live in for umpteen weeks, then I can cope with it for a weekend. The people need never know.’

  ‘I’m here for two weeks,’ Thea corrected her. ‘Not umpteen.’ The prospect of a visiting relative was far from unusual. People seemed to join her at most of her house-sitting commissions, for various reasons. They thought she would be lonely; they wanted to share the adventure; and in Phil’s case, he saw it as a chance to enjoy a brief holiday with her. But Emily was the last person she had ever expected to suggest such a move.

  ‘So?’ her sister prompted. ‘Did you say it was Upper Slaughter?’

  ‘Lower. It isn’t very far away. It’ll take you just over an hour, at a guess.’ Emily lived in Aylesbury, which Thea had always found faintly comic. ‘There’s a parrot,’ she said again, as if this was a crucial detail.

  ‘I don’t mind parrots,’ said Emily. ‘Why do you keep saying that?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly Thea remembered that she too was in grief for her father. She, as much as her sister or mother, had cause to be in a strange state, irrational and forgetful. She felt as if something would break if there was any hint of overload. She wanted peace and simplicity. The parrot, perhaps, threatened to become complicated.

  ‘Well, I’ll come after lunch then,’ said Emily as if it was all agreed. ‘I’ll bring an overnight bag, but I’m not sure I’ll stay. It depends how it goes. Tell me how to find you. What’s the postcode?’

  ‘I have no idea. Why do you want that?’

  ‘For the TomTom, of course.’

  The thing in the car, Thea realised. The device that was supposed to stop anybody ever getting lost again. What price adventure and fairytales now? The children of the future wouldn’t even understand the concept of not knowing precisely where you were at any given moment. ‘Well, I haven’t got the postcode. There are various ways to get here, but the easiest is probably to come to the middle of Lower Slaughter, turn left, up a narrow lane, and left again at the junction, round a bend and you’ll see a stone farmhouse set back from the road.’ She gave a few helpful landmarks, but said no words of welcome. She found that she quite badly did not want her sister to descend on her for a deep discussion of grief and loss. She had been quite pleased to have dodged all that, with the convenient timing of her latest commission.