Deception in the Cotswolds Read online

  She passed Donny’s Lodge as she turned into the driveway of Hollywell Manor. There was a light on downstairs, and the front window was open. She glimpsed, without taking any proper notice, the back of a car parked around the side of the house. In the twilight, she gained no clear impression of its colour or make. Voices floated from the open window, which she took to be the television at first. The absence of close neighbours made it unobjectionable to anybody, she supposed, although it was rather loud.

  ‘No, I will not!’ came a man’s raised voice. ‘I’ve told you a thousand times, damn it.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake,’ a woman replied. ‘Calm down, will you?’

  ‘Don’t patronise me!’ he almost screamed. ‘Don’t be so bloody condescending all the time.’

  Thea realised that it was Donny’s shrill old-man tones she was hearing. Presumably Jemima had come to see him, and an argument had developed. Well, she thought – it’s none of my business, and she hurried up to the Manor, where her eager dog welcomed her as if she’d been away for a month.

  Chapter Five

  She ended the day with a glass of wine that she felt had been well earned. The geckoes were stirring when she paid them a bedtime visit. ‘I suppose this is the start of your day, not the end,’ she murmured to them. A greeny-grey tail flicked at her from behind a large leaf. She activated the water spray over the somnolent eggs, imagining the tiny reptiles curled inside them. It was sweet to think of the new lives quietly incubating, unaware of their future existence in captivity, at the whim of feckless humans. ‘Sleep tight,’ she crooned softly to them.

  Tuesday morning was another uncertain day, weather-wise. High white cloud almost covered the sky, but there were encouraging patches of blue here and there. Thea and her dog had woken early, slowly surfacing to greet the morning and learn more about the people of Cranham. Outside, all was quiet and still.

  Drew, she remembered, was coming that afternoon. The fresh-faced undertaker, who looked younger than his thirty-eight years. Drew was witty and bright, the best possible fun to talk to. It would be a treat to see him again.

  She pottered through breakfast before taking a circuit of the garden with Hepzie, her mind more or less empty as she savoured the new day. In a while, she would mash up some banana for the geckoes and do a bit of dusting in the big living room. She had bought everything she needed for the next day or two – bread, biscuits, milk, eggs and more meat for herself and the dog in the woods.

  The dog! That was her most urgent consideration for the coming morning. She should take more food for it – a much more difficult task in broad daylight, with the risk of being seen by passing walkers or cyclists. And the necessity of leaving Hepzie behind meant that she should go for another walk with her own dog, in a different direction. Suddenly she felt much busier, having forgotten for the moment her new responsibility.

  Most dogs only fed once a day, in her experience. Perhaps, then, the new mother could wait at least until the afternoon. That would leave Thea with a pleasingly lazy morning, reading, emailing one or two people and not much else.

  By nine-thirty she was activating her laptop and preparing to send short updates of her whereabouts to her daughter and mother. None of her family understood or approved of her career as a house-sitter. Jessica had joined her a few times, becoming involved in the adventures that so persistently befell Thea when she intruded into the complications that seemed to characterise small English communities. As a newly trained police officer, Jessica was often torn between roles and alarmed at her mother’s cavalier approach. But the girl was currently distracted by a demanding relationship, with little attention to spare her mother. ‘Besides,’ Thea had assured her, ‘I’ve demonstrated by now that I can look after myself, haven’t I?’

  The front door stood open, weak sunshine brightening the hallway, which Thea could see from the living room. She liked open doors and fresh air – something she was generally able to ensure in the Cotswold houses she looked after. Double glazing and complicated locks made her impatient, the way they created airtight boxes in which she felt suffocated. Whilst doing her best to follow specific instructions, she was quite relaxed about the matter of security in general. This infuriated Jessica, who reminded her mother that there had surely been enough incidents of violence and criminality around her for her to have learnt to keep herself safe. Thea just shrugged and said if somebody was intent on attacking her, a locked door probably wasn’t going to stop them. She pointed out that hardly anybody had offered her direct aggression, and that she was simply in the way most of the time. The vacuum created when somebody left their house often gave rise to opportunistic felonies, it was true, but Thea’s role to date had mainly been to bear witness and make sensible suggestions to the police.

  Or so she chose to characterise her career thus far. She conveniently overlooked the times when she had been seriously frightened, when the animals in her care had come to harm and her suggestions proved to be much less sensible than she cared to recall.

  Frowning at her computer screen, she composed a buoyant message for her daughter that would allay any lingering worries the girl might have. Weather tantalising, work not a bit arduous, great walks and much to explore. A bit telegrammatic, she decided, and added a few embellishments before sending it off.

  ‘Are you there?’ came a female voice from the hallway. ‘Hey – I need somebody, quickly.’

  ‘In here,’ Thea called back. ‘What’s the matter?’

  Jemima Hobson was standing in the doorway, breathing heavily. She must have run up the drive from the Lodge – a short but rather steep avenue. ‘It’s Dad. I can’t rouse him.’

  Thea did not react very quickly. She glanced at the large antique clock on the mantelpiece, thinking perhaps the old man had merely slept in. It was a few minutes after ten. ‘What do you mean? Have you been into the house?’

  Jemima shook her head. ‘The door’s locked. I banged and shouted, but there’s no sign of him.’

  ‘Haven’t you got a key?’

  ‘It’s at home. I never normally need to use it – he leaves the back door on the latch.’

  ‘Gosh! Isn’t he worried about burglars?’ She heard her own hypocrisy, in this question. Why should she assume that Donny was any more paranoid than she was herself?

  Jemima shrugged impatiently. ‘Not very, no. He hasn’t got anything of value in the house. I imagine any marauders would make directly for the Manor, don’t you?’

  Which wasn’t much more secure, Thea acknowledged silently. ‘Could he have gone out?’ she asked.

  ‘He only really comes up here, these days, unless Edwina takes him somewhere.’

  ‘Has he got a car?’

  ‘Yes, but he doesn’t drive any more.’ Jemima danced agitatedly. ‘Please come with me. We’ll have to break in.’

  ‘I don’t know how useful I can be,’ Thea demurred. ‘I’m not especially good at bashing doors in.’

  ‘At least you can be a witness,’ said the woman.

  ‘We could phone him,’ Thea suggested. ‘That should wake him up, if he’s overslept.’

  ‘I tried that already. Honestly, I am very worried. This has never happened before. He seemed perfectly all right yesterday.’

  ‘Well, I’d better shut the dog in, I suppose.’ She followed Jemima outside, and closed the front door firmly. Only then did she remember the argument she had heard the previous evening. ‘Were you here last night?’ she asked.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘I heard him shouting, and a woman answering him.’

  Jemima barely seemed to hear her. ‘Oh, come on. We have to get back. Tell me as we go.’ She began trotting down the drive towards the Lodge.

  Thea persisted. ‘It was about half past nine, I suppose. I was walking past and heard raised voices. He sounded quite cross. I thought it was you. I saw a car—’

  ‘I was not here last night,’ said Jemima, loudly. She slowed her pace and turned to meet Thea’s eye. ‘I was at home
.’

  ‘OK, I believe you,’ said Thea. ‘I don’t suppose it matters, anyway.’

  ‘Let’s hope not. Now – I’m going to bang as loud as I can. If that doesn’t work, we can go round the back and break the glass in the door.’

  ‘Did you say he doesn’t usually lock the door?’

  ‘Right. Not the back, anyway. The front’s got a Yale lock, which he mostly clicks down before bed. But the back just has a bolt, and he never puts it across. I couldn’t believe it when I couldn’t get in.’

  A lot of Thea’s energy was going into resisting all the insistent thoughts that were crowding into her mind. She had been here before – an old man lying on the floor, killed by an unknown attacker. She did not want to find the same thing again. She liked Donny and had looked forward to talking to him every day of her stay. ‘I hope he’s all right,’ she said.

  ‘So do I. He’s been threatening to take things into his own hands, but I never thought he’d really do it.’

  ‘What – you think he’s killed himself?’ The idea had not occurred to Thea. ‘Surely not! He was in such a good mood yesterday.’

  ‘The doors are locked,’ Jemima repeated. ‘That’s what worries me most.’

  She banged, as promised, and called ‘Dad!’ at a deafening volume. Then she fell quiet, and they both listened intently. Not a sound could be heard.

  ‘That’s it, then. Come on.’ Jemima led the way around the back. Thea noticed fleetingly that the car she had seen the previous evening was still there.

  The back door had a glass pane in its upper half, and without ceremony, Jemima took a brick to it. Then she reached in carefully and pulled back the bolt that secured the door. The women moved silently through the kitchen, and out into a narrow hallway that led to a living room and then a bedroom at the back of the single-storey house.

  ‘Dad!’ Jemima yelled again.

  There was no option but to proceed along to the bedroom, after a cursory glance into the front room. Thea followed Jemima’s lead, her mind almost blank as she awaited the outcome of their search.

  ‘This is his room,’ Jemima announced, unnecessarily. She pushed the door, which was half closed, and peered in. ‘Oh God!’ she cried. ‘This is just what I was afraid of.’

  It sounded odd to Thea – a stilted remark which did not match the situation at all. She pushed Jemima aside and looked for herself. Donny lay tidily on the bed, dressed in striped pyjamas, uncovered by sheet or blanket, arms by his sides, and a plastic bag over his head, fastened tightly around his neck with wide, brown, sticky parcel tape. A purple-hued face was inside the all-too-transparent bag, looking nothing like a human being. The bag was tightly welded to the skin around the nose and mouth, and Thea could see smooth cheeks and chin. At least somebody shaved him, she thought.

  A lot of clashing thoughts occurred to her at once. Donny had killed himself, as he had reportedly threatened to do over the past months or years. The person he had argued with the previous evening had somehow driven him to do it. He must have drugged himself before putting the bag over his head, because nobody could take suffocation so quietly as he appeared to have done. And his daughter Mimm was acting strangely. And she heard a voice in her head saying: Why doesn’t he just put an end to his misery, and do us all a favour? Philippe, son of Thyrza, would be satisfied, at least. As would Thyrza herself, if her own report of ‘animosity’ could be taken seriously.

  ‘We shouldn’t move him,’ said Thea.

  ‘No. He really is dead, you think?’

  Thea silently pointed to a dark patch at Donny’s crotch. The relaxation of all bodily muscles meant that bladder and bowel had released their contents just after death. Beyond that, the unnerving stillness in the room gave Mimm her answer.

  ‘Yes, he’s dead,’ she said. ‘Poor old Dad. I honestly didn’t think he would ever do it. Not alone, anyway.’

  More flickering thoughts crossed Thea’s mind along with a range of feelings. Helpless sadness was the primary one, and a violent regret that she had somehow permitted this to happen. You were supposed to stop people from killing themselves, striving to convince them that there was still hope, still pleasure to be had from life. All the media controversy about assisted suicide, which came and went through the years, altering emphasis and demanding a variety of major changes to the law, came back to her. In her teens, there had been a lot of discussion about the best methods of killing yourself – a topic that adolescents found deeply fascinating – with pills and plastic bags a favourite. People who helped their terminally ill relatives to die were advised to take this route. More recently, and quite bizarrely, the more affluent would-be suicides went to an expensive killing clinic in Switzerland to drink a toxic mix they could surely have acquired in the UK if they made the effort. But the main point always seemed to be that there ought to be another person involved, even when the central figure was entirely capable of mixing a drink and swallowing it, or pulling a bag over their own heads – as poor Donny had evidently done at some point during the night. It was a taboo subject surrounded by myths and emotions that carried very little rationality. It was assumed that nobody wanted to die alone, and yet the majority of people in hospitals and nursing homes hung on until the last visitor had left, before allowing themselves to sink into oblivion. Conversely, it was assumed that there were a lot of fates worse than death, and it should be made easier for people to curtail the process and cut to the final stage more quickly than nature intended. In Thea’s experience, this was a false assumption. As far as she could see, people clung to life ferociously when it came to the crunch.

  The arguments flashed through her mind, fragmented and contradictory, and all accomplished in a few seconds, like a dream that feels as if it lasted all night.

  ‘I don’t believe he wanted to die,’ she said softly.

  So why had Donny not clawed at the bag, ripping it from his face? Had he wound the tape so tightly because he knew he might change his mind? She tried to imagine the sequence of events, only to find several difficulties. If he had possessed the strength and clarity of mind to pull the bag down over his face, and fasten it so securely, this strength must have quickly deserted him when, after four of five breaths, there was no more air in the bag for him to breathe.

  ‘Was he alone, I wonder?’ she muttered aloud.

  Jemima made a kind of croak. ‘What do you mean? Of course he was.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right,’ said Thea quickly. ‘We’ll have to call the police. They’ll bring their own doctor.’

  ‘There won’t be a post-mortem, will there? He had a horror of post-mortems. It was all part of his general loathing of medical procedures.’

  Thea remembered Donny’s anguished description of his daughter’s body after the heart transplant. Something about being cut about like a piece of meat. ‘I’m afraid there will,’ she said. ‘If ever there was a case for one, then this is it.’ And wouldn’t Donny have known that, she wondered. Wouldn’t that have been one of the main reasons for avoiding this sort of death for himself?

  Jemima was making no move to call the authorities. She was rooted to a spot about a foot from her father’s body, her hands clenching spasmodically. ‘Can we take that bag off his face?’ she asked.

  ‘Better not.’

  ‘Why? It isn’t the scene of a crime, is it? There won’t be detectives and SOCOs and all that stuff.’

  ‘There’ll be an inquest,’ said Thea. ‘They’ll want an exact description of how he was found.’

  ‘It’s so awful,’ said Jemima flatly. ‘Just utterly awful. I can’t take it in.’

  ‘You said it was what you were afraid of,’ Thea reminded her. ‘As if you weren’t surprised.’

  ‘He talked so much about killing himself. He was morbid about it, discussing all the different ways of doing it. He gave me nightmares.’

  ‘Suicides hardly ever think about what it’s like for the people finding them.’

  ‘No. He didn’t think about that at al
l.’

  ‘But it looks as if he went ahead and did it. All on his own.’

  ‘Yes.’

  The women exchanged uncomfortable glances, nodding at each other’s words, glancing back at the dead Donny, breathing quick shallow breaths. Jemima’s hands were shaking, and Thea felt surging waves of anxiety in her guts. The death of a nice old man such as Donny was quite enough to account for such distress – of course it was.

  Somehow hours passed, and although it was not the first time Thea had been closely involved in a sudden death, she could not remember ever being in such a state of paralysis since her husband Carl had been killed in a car crash. She could not decide what to think; her emotions were so tangled they seemed to cancel each other out. Donny had said he wanted to die, and yet he had seemed so completely alive that nobody had quite believed him. What he had really wanted, surely, had been the same as everyone wanted – an easy, painless death, while still functioning mentally. A chance to say last words to those one loves, and set at least a few affairs in order. Not to dwindle by inches in a nursing home lounge, staring at the television and the same blank faces for months on end.

  The police had taken everything at face value: an old man with a debilitating illness, who had frequently spoken of his wish to die, had taken a well-worn route to oblivion. ‘Did he leave a note?’ asked the uniformed sergeant who attended the scene.

  ‘I haven’t found one,’ said Jemima with a frown. ‘That’s a good point, actually. I would have expected us all to have a letter from him. It’s the sort of thing he would do.’

  The police doctor made his tests before declaring life extinct and calling for the undertaker’s men to remove the body to the mortuary in Gloucester. Jemima used the Lodge phone to call Edwina, who was difficult to persuade to stay away. ‘No, you shouldn’t come,’ she said three times. ‘I don’t want you to.’ Then she called her husband on the farm to explain her prolonged absence.

  ‘And Toby,’ she sighed to herself. ‘I suppose I’ll have to tell Toby.’