Cotswold Mystery, A Page 5

  The thorough silence that met her confirmed her fears. The old woman was out in the town, possibly wearing only a nightie, given it was barely daybreak.

  Wondering where to start in her search, Thea walked into the middle of the street for a better view in the direction of the church. The only person visible was a small girl, holding a large bunch of flowers, waiting at the door of a house halfway along the street.

  Something about the figure clicked in Thea’s mind. Mother’s Day! Good God, it was Mother’s Day and Thea had completely forgotten to send her own mother a card. She groaned to herself, fighting the surge of feelings that the realisation gave rise to. Irritation at the whole stupid business was uppermost, followed by annoyance with herself and a sense of being burdened by the need to rectify the omission. She would have to telephone and listen to her mother enumerating the gifts and flowers the others had sent. Over the past twenty years or so, the importance of the day had burgeoned insanely. As children they might have made a card at school or remembered to buy a tube of Smarties between them, but there was none of this emotional blackmail that seemed so inescapable now. She ground her teeth in sheer exasperation. How much better it would have been to have forgotten entirely, until the day was safely past.

  And Yvette Montgomery – had she forgotten, too? Was she relying on her batty old parent to be unaware of the occasion? It was probably a safe enough gamble; and yet Thea wondered whether the old lady’s absence had something to do with it. Had she looked out of her window, and, like Thea, been alerted by some obvious little ceremony in the street? Unlikely, surely.

  Determinedly, she set out in search of her charge. Unless somebody had taken her into their house or car, she would presumably be in full view somewhere. After the collapse of the previous day, it was probable that she would not manage to get very far. Forcing herself to think, she came to the conclusion that the first place to start would be the mysterious Julian’s house – he had evidently returned from his absence and could well be treating Mrs G to a plate of eggs and bacon at this very moment.

  But Julian’s door was as firmly closed as before, and the interior just as silent, when Thea knocked. She tried again to peer through the front window, but could only gain the same shadowy glimpses of the room beyond as she had the day before. It seemed obvious that nobody was there.

  With the vague idea that Granny might have followed the same route as their walk of the previous day, she headed along the High Street towards the church. Then, realising it would have been impossible for the old woman to have got far in the few minutes since the buzzer had sounded, she turned back and trotted urgently towards the woods at the other end of the street. Past the handsome old houses on the right, and noting absently an ancient construction labelled the ‘Russell Spring’ she peered towards the trees for any sign of movement. Again, there was nothing. Time was passing and with it a growing sense of urgency and worry. She supposed she would have to cover the rest of the town, not resting until the old woman was found.

  Everything seemed quiet and closed up as she turned the corner and started down the hill towards the shop-cum-Post Office and the Green beyond. A car came up towards her, driven by a person she recognised as ‘Ick’ from the day before. The car was low-slung, very shiny and made a loud throaty purr as it slowed beside the coffee shop. The sort of car that turned heads, Thea registered dimly. Just the kind of motor such a flashy show-off would drive. He waved at her with a grin and she nodded back.

  Then all at once she saw her quarry, on the pavement close to the red telephone box, arm in arm with the middle-aged man called Giles. Giles who knew Julian, and believed him to be visiting his grandson, and who had claimed that Granny was ninety-two years old.

  Granny was wearing the same respectable trousers as the previous day, with a different top. Her hair was brushed and there was an irreproachable cleanliness to her face and hands. Her mouth carried a determined air, and her eyes flickered as if attempting to focus on a myriad of fleeting thoughts.

  Confronted by such a normal scene, albeit rather early in the day, Thea was aware of a dilemma. She could hardly grab the old woman and march her back home with an admonition to stay there. But she was being paid to keep watch over her, and to simply turn around and leave her to Giles’s care seemed irresponsible. So she strolled towards them with a smile.

  ‘Hello!’ she said. ‘Nice morning, isn’t it.’

  Mrs Gardner gave her an appraising look. ‘Do I know you?’ she asked.

  Thea sighed quietly, glancing at Giles for assistance. ‘We met yesterday,’ she said to the old woman, when it was clear that the man was not going to be of any use. ‘We went for a little walk, with my dog. The spaniel, Hepzibah.’

  The old woman showed no sign that this found any connection in her memory. She gave her head a little twitch, as if tuning herself to a different setting, and said proudly, ‘I’m having a day out with my friend. He’s taking me for a drive and then lunch. He says I can be his surrogate mother.’

  Thea laughed. ‘That sounds a splendid idea.’

  ‘And we’ve just been looking at the flowers on the Green,’ Granny elaborated.

  Giles Stevenson pushed out his cheeks in a rueful expression. ‘She came knocking on my door about twenty minutes ago, would you believe? Lucky I was already up. I like to get a bit accomplished at the keyboard early on, then I can enjoy the day with a clear conscience.’

  Thea had scant interest in Giles’s routine, just at that moment. Keyboard suggested something musical to her, and nothing more.

  ‘It’s rather cheeky of you,’ she said to her charge. ‘Especially on a Sunday.’

  ‘Mothering Sunday,’ the old woman responded sharply. ‘It’s special. Have you got a mother, dear?’

  Thea closed her eyes for a second. ‘Don’t ask,’ she begged.

  Giles chuckled – a pleasant gravelly sound which made Thea feel warm and grateful towards him. ‘So – you’ll be spending most of the day together, will you?’ she asked.

  He winked. ‘Let you off the hook, won’t it? Now, don’t worry. Gladys and I go back a long way. I’ll make sure she’s all right, if you want to go off somewhere for a bit. Give that little dog I’ve been hearing about some exercise. I’ll bring her back sometime after lunch. Mid-afternoon, let’s say.’

  Mrs Gardner leant against him, plucking at his sleeve like a small girl. ‘I never really had a son, you know,’ she confided. ‘It’s all a big pretend. I only had the two girls.’

  Thea had no answer to that, but she gave them a silent blessing, feeling buoyant with relief.

  Hepzie was whining inside the front door when Thea returned to the house. It still wasn’t even half past eight, she noted. Why was everyone out so early? Admittedly it was a fine morning, the sun warm enough to ripen buds and waken the hibernating, but it was a Sunday, after all. She resolved to indulge in a leisurely breakfast, using food from the Montgomerys’ fridge and marmalade from their store cupboard. She made coffee in their machine and found some expensive-looking pineapple juice inside the fridge door.

  But the inner buoyancy quickly deflated. Jessica! She was worried about Jess and whatever blunder she’d made at work. During her final year at university, the girl had gone for the assessment process for entry into the police. Thea had listened with mounting horror at the demanding exercises and interview that her daughter had willingly endured. The fact of a degree, she had been told, was regarded as barely relevant. A grim list of ‘competencies’ was produced, including ‘personal responsibility’, ‘resilience’, ‘respect for diversity’ and ‘problem solving’. How, Thea wondered, could her little girl possibly satisfy such requirements? Reading the prospectus over and over, she found herself questioning not just the practical demands but the jargon-ridden ethos behind them. ‘Do you really want to do this?’ she had asked, more than once.

  Jessica had been adamant. ‘Absolutely,’ she had insisted. ‘Trust me, Ma, OK?’

  ‘But if you want to be on
the side of right, you could be a lawyer,’ Thea had argued. ‘That would be a far better use of your brain.’

  Jessica had merely shaken her head and held up a hand to silence any further protest.

  And she had passed all the tests and interviews and assessments and medicals, only to find that the West Midlands training centres in Coventry and Birmingham were both full for the next year. After an earnest few days of phone calls, however, a place was found for her in Manchester, where she had begun her initial twelve weeks of classroom instruction the previous October. From there, she had moved to a police station in Salford for a further ten weeks of more active work under the watchful eye of Mike Hamilton, a tutor constable.

  Thea had tried to keep up with it all, but was aware that she had been less attentive than some mothers would have been, due largely to her deepening relationship with Phil Hollis. Phil himself had persuaded her to let Jessica fly free, finding her wings in the strange and murky world of the police probationer. ‘She knows how to find you if she needs you,’ he said. And now she did and she had and Thea was worried.

  * * *

  When she did finally leave the house with Hepzie, it was with an idea of exploring the Ditchfords – the group of lost medieval villages near Todenham, four or five miles away. Lost – although the more accurate term was surely abandoned or deserted – villages had been a passing interest of hers some years previously, discovered by accident during some idle reading. Her imagination had been fired less by the mundane detail of changing farming practices than by the slow disintegration of settlements which had once echoed to shouts and children’s laughter and the ringing of the blacksmith’s hammer. Thea had always possessed a sharp awareness of the fact that there was no inch of British soil that had not been trodden by human feet repeatedly for thousands of years. In the Cotswolds, where farmers had ploughed and harvested and husbanded their sheep, the evidence of this was overwhelming. Not a stone was in the position that nature had placed it, but every one had been used and reused for a cottage or a wall or a sheep pen, until it almost hummed with the traces of hands that had moved it and shaped it.

  She drove to Todenham and left the car in a layby below the village hall. A few clouds had gathered in the west, but it continued to be a thoroughly pleasant spring day. Grasping the map firmly, she located the footpath that led directly to the site of Ditchford Friary.

  Even though she knew there would be little to see, she was disappointed. Some indeterminate bumps and troughs gave rather too much imaginative freedom to conjecture the former existence of small houses, animal shelters and field layouts. She sat down under a hedge for a few minutes, trying to tune in to the lives of the long-gone villagers, with very little success. All she was aware of were birds preparing for the breeding season and a solitary rabbit loping carelessly across the middle of the bumpy field. Hepzibah failed to notice it, burrowing idly as she was amongst some stalks of dry grass left over from the previous year. Letting her gaze roam across the landscape, she found the photographs in Ron Montgomery’s study coming to mind. They had captured similar patterns of furrow and stone in the Gloucestershire countryside. Perhaps, she mused, he too had wanted to rediscover the long-gone settlements.

  She recalled other walks with the dog on earlier house-sitting assignments, and held her breath for a moment, fearing the sudden production of a body part or mysterious piece of cloth as a result of Hepzie’s burrowings, but nothing of the kind happened. It was Sunday morning – Mother’s Day – and spring had arrived on cue. It would be hours yet before Granny was returned by the attentive Giles, or company arrived in the shape of Jessica. She could stay out here until hunger impelled her back to Blockley. And even then, she could buy herself a meal at the Farriers Arms in Todenham, a few yards from where she’d left her car.

  But the prospect of sitting by herself in a pub – which might very well not permit dogs – was unappealing. Instead, at the end of a walk which she was forced to admit had been a somewhat negative exercise, she got back into the car.

  Before she could turn the ignition key, there was a rapping at the window beside her. Startled, she turned to find herself almost nose-to-nose with a woman wearing a headscarf, tied in the fashion favoured by the Queen some thirty years ago. Her skin was weatherbeaten, the cheeks red and chapped, the teeth discoloured. Making a frantic twirling gesture with her hand, the woman conveyed an instruction for Thea to open the car window. She started speaking as the gap widened. ‘Which way are you going?’ she demanded.

  ‘Er – that way,’ said Thea jerking her thumb over her shoulder. ‘To Blockley.’

  ‘You can give me a lift, then. Thank Christ for that.’ And she scuttled round the front of the car to the passenger door.

  ‘Is there an emergency?’ asked Thea, watching the woman push Hepzie unceremoniously out of her way. The dog jumped onto the back seat with no sign of resentment.

  ‘Sort of. I’ve got a flat tyre, and my son’s expecting me. I’m already about an hour late. I tried changing it, but the bloody spare’s buggered as well.’ She spoke with a west country lilt that must have been the normal accent for Gloucestershire not too long ago. Thea assumed her to be a local farmer, or at least someone who habitually worked out of doors.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘What? Oh, yes. He’s in Paxford. It isn’t far out of your way. You must think I’m rude, but we all give each other lifts around here. Just like in the good old days.’

  Thea doubted very much whether this was true, although she did recall the informative Giles also claiming that Blockley still retained a community spirit. She had no idea where Paxford was, either. ‘You’ll have to direct me,’ she said. ‘I’m a stranger here.’ She turned the car around with a few deft manoevres and set off down the lane, back the way she had come.

  ‘No problem. This is all because of blasted Mother’s Day. Doesn’t it make you sick? It’s like a KGB brainwashing exercise, the way everyone pretends to like their appalling old mothers all of a sudden.’

  Thea snorted her amusement. ‘Just what I was thinking,’ she said. ‘I forgot to send my mother anything.’

  ‘Do you have kids?’

  ‘One daughter. She’s coming over to join me later today. I’ve tried to train her out of observing any of the usual nonsense. She might bring me some chocs, I suppose.’

  ‘So what are you doing in Blockley? Staying there?’

  ‘I’m house-sitting, actually. I only arrived yesterday. I’ve got to keep an eye on an old lady who’s a bit – forgetful.’

  ‘Lost her marbles, you mean. It’s not old Gladys Gardner by any chance, is it?’

  Thea gave her passenger a quick look. ‘You know her?’

  ‘Everybody knows her. I know about you, as well. Knew you were coming, in any event. You’ve got your hands full there. How come you got away today?’

  ‘She’s been taken out to lunch by a surrogate son. I grabbed the opportunity to do a bit of exploring.’

  ‘The Ditchfords,’ said the woman, as if it was obvious.

  ‘You read minds, I see. Do you know my name as well?’

  The woman laughed. ‘I don’t think I have gleaned that detail, but mine’s Gussie. Short for Augusta, of all things. My parents were a good sixty years behind the times.’

  ‘Thea Osborne. Pleased to meet you.’

  ‘You were searching for the lost villages,’ Gussie stated.

  ‘That’s right. But I couldn’t really find them.’

  ‘Looking in the wrong place, duckie. You needn’t have come driving all over here – there’s one right under your nose.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Upton. You go through the woods at the end of the High Street, and there it is, not half a mile away. Been excavated, it has, unlike the Ditchfords. But there’s nothing to see now. Even when you know where to look, it takes more imagination than most people have to make any sense of it. But it’s better this time of year, before the crops start growing. They put
it down to oilseed rape most summers, and then you’d never know anything had ever been there.’

  ‘They can do that, can they? Grow ordinary crops over it?’

  Gussie shrugged. ‘Who’s to stop them? It’s private land.’

  ‘Well, I’d still like to have a look.’

  ‘Good girl. Got the map, have you? The one that shows all the paths and fields? It’s on there, clear enough.’

  ‘It’s back there, look.’ Thea jerked her thumb towards the ledge behind the back seat, where a jumble of objects was scattered. ‘Thanks for the hint.’

  ‘You’re welcome. It’s Blockley’s best-kept secret, some people think. Goes back a way earlier than medieval times, according to the archaeologists. And, you might say, isn’t quite as deserted as you might think.’

  Thea was reminded of the Barrow at Notgrove, close to the village where she had spent a week with Phil the previous autumn. That dated back to Megalithic times, but still retained its pull on the contemporary imagination.

  ‘So many of these lost places,’ she murmured.

  ‘They’re not the only thing that’s lost around here,’ said Thea’s passenger regretfully. For some reason, Thea found herself thinking of the missing Julian, and Granny’s plaintive quest for him.

  Paxford turned out to be little more than a fleeting knot in the road two or three miles east of Blockley. The sense of being in a time warp was as strong as in any Cotswold village, heightened by the bizarre retention of a large tin plate sign for Spillers Shapes over a defunct grocery store as well as a protruding notice advertising Hovis. It was less quiet than most, however, with a flurry of activity outside the Churchill Arms. ‘That looks popular,’ said Thea, thinking it rather early for lunch, still.

  ‘It gets reviews for the food,’ said Gussie carelessly. ‘Brings out all the townies – except they mostly can’t find the place. We’re not too big on road signs around here.’ Thea made a mental note to give the Churchill Arms a try one day during the week.