Shadows in the Cotswolds Page 9

  Jumbled quotes ran through Thea’s head: And besides, the wench is dead was the chief one. And The past is another country; they do things differently there. Neither seemed to have much relevance, except to reinforce the impression that where her mother’s happiness and well-being were concerned, the past did have some significance.

  ‘So the DNA results will come back negative?’

  ‘If they come back at all. The woman said they’d only do a test if they couldn’t identify the body in the next day or two. They expect to find her car any time now. They’ve put little notes on all the ones parked out there, in Vineyard Street, asking the owners to call in and eliminate themselves from enquiries. Rather clever, actually. I’ve never known that to happen before.’

  ‘You’ve been involved in this sort of thing before, have you?’ Thea was sharper than intended, and she heard a small squeak of protest from her mother. ‘Sorry,’ she quickly amended. ‘That wasn’t meant to sound so …’

  ‘Competitive?’ he suggested with a forgiving smile. ‘Think nothing of it. Actually, no, I can’t claim to have been questioned by the police about a murder before. It’s not a pleasant experience.’

  ‘And not one you’d forget,’ said Thea’s mother softly. But soft or not, the comment effectively put a stop to the conversation.

  ‘Let’s have some tea and then go for a walk,’ said Thea a few minutes later. ‘We can go and look at Sudeley House from the outside. There are some lovely old trees. And we can’t just hang about here. There’s nothing to do.’

  The TV camera caught them totally unawares. They emerged onto Vineyard Street and turned left, before realising that filming was taking place. Assuming it would not concern her, Thea led her visitors towards the park, before finding herself in the camera’s line of fire, as it slowly panned across the allotments and the Thistledown acres. Instinctively she shrank from it. When it passed she breathed a sigh of relief and continued on in the original direction. But then, a minute later, after a brief consultation between the cameraman and a person with a clipboard, it began the same process again, starting with the barely visible roof of Thistledown, and drawing back to include the foreground, then the road, and finally the people in it. This time, Thea bent down to fiddle needlessly with her dog’s collar, hoping to keep her face averted. But she stood up too soon, and once more found herself staring down the barrel of a large lens.

  Chapter Ten

  Oliver Meadows had begged for a police safe house. ‘Witness protection,’ he said. ‘I need to feel safe.’ He looked out at the busy London street and shuddered. ‘I never feel safe in London.’

  The reaction had not been favourable. ‘I don’t think the situation calls for that, sir,’ said the liaison officer he had been allocated. ‘We’re not dealing with drug barons, after all.’ And besides, aren’t you just an old nonentity, who nobody’s going to care about enough to offer any threat? was the subtext.

  ‘But my testimony is going to ruin a man’s lifelong reputation. A pillar of the community, almost literally. He won’t take it quietly.’

  ‘Indeed not, sir. But don’t you think that if he was going to attack you, he’d have done it before now? Just get yourself a little room in an anonymous hotel – one of those near Paddington would be ideal – and nobody’s going to find you.’

  Oliver could see the sense in this, but the tariff of seventy pounds a night gave him pause. Nobody had mentioned anything about covering his expenses. He had volunteered himself as a witness almost a year earlier, and assumed this meant he’d have to pay his own way. The trial could last for two weeks, he had been told – possibly more if there were absences and delays, as very often happened in the legal system. He might be asked to remain within call for much of that time. He pined for his birds and the fresh country air. London gave him a headache. On arrival at Paddington the previous afternoon, he had booked himself into a hotel chosen at random in Norfolk Square, telling nobody at all of his whereabouts. He would hole up until Monday morning, using the time to steady his nerve.

  It was Sunday afternoon, and he was due to present himself the following day. The trial had been going for three days already, with tedious introductory detail that he had not been permitted to attend. His input would be significant, but not exclusively so. There were others, of all ages, finally finding the courage to speak out. It was by far the most terrifying experience of his quiet reclusive life – that is, since the original crime against him, sixty years before.

  The hotel room was very small, designed for the use of tourists who would be out all day seeing the sights. It had a bed, table, mirror, wardrobe, television and minute shower room. His suit was hanging on the rail in the wardrobe and a carrier bag of food sat on the table. He had been to the Marks & Spencer in the Paddington Station complex and bought a pork pie, two apples, mixed salad, a carton of milk and a bottle of wine. He could make tea and coffee with the tiny paper packets provided by the hotel. In the morning they would give him as big a breakfast as he could eat for no extra charge.

  He turned on the television, braced for it failing to work. The night before, it had flickered and faded unbearably, the colour turning to monochrome at sporadic intervals. But today it seemed to have recovered, and he anticipated a soothing episode of Countryfile with something approaching satisfaction.

  He was early. They were showing the news. The news was reporting a murder in a small town in Gloucestershire called Winchcombe. A murder of sufficient interest to find a slot on the national news, on a quiet September Sunday, it seemed. He watched with a sense of totally detached disbelief as his own front gate appeared on the screen, followed by the woman he’d employed to feed his birds. He knew it was her – he recognised the dog, as final confirmation. He had been worrying about that dog.

  He also recognised his brother Fraser, at which point his detachment turned to extreme rage. He had taken consolation from the idea that he could keep his Winchcombe life quite separate from the sordid events in London. Now, it seemed, they were set to collide, thanks to his blundering brother. He should have known better, he thought furiously, than to agree to a house-sitter already known to Fraser.

  The whole country, it seemed, had been watching the news that evening. The sheer caprice of it annoyed Thea the most. Some arbitrary decision by a television editor had turned what would normally have been a fleeting local story into a national headline. The fact that the victim was a pretty young woman made all the difference, of course. Thea already knew the consequences of a child being murdered and had no illusions as to the persistent power of the press, but this came as a surprise.

  The stroll around Sudeley Park had taken just over an hour, spent arguing over tree identification and letting Hepzie run loose. Somewhat to Thea’s amusement, her mother had collected a pocketful of conkers from beneath a huge chestnut tree. ‘They’re for Noel,’ she said defensively.

  ‘I don’t think they let them play conkers any more,’ Thea said.

  ‘Maybe not, but he can plant them and grow new trees, can’t he? That’s what he does. He’s got a proper little copse established already, didn’t you know?’

  ‘Has he? Where?’ Her sister’s garden was modest in size, and her five children had ensured that nothing but the most robustly prickly plants would grow in it.

  ‘He keeps it a secret. It’s common land, apparently. He gets them started in pots and then puts them in the open ground. According to Jocelyn, he’s got an amazing success rate. Noel is an amazing child,’ the fond grandmother added happily.

  ‘You’re not supposed to have favourites,’ Thea said sternly.

  ‘Too late. As the youngest of six grandsons, I think it’s permissible, anyway. He’s liable to get lost in the crowd.’

  There was little that Thea could say to this. In truth, young Noel was her own favourite of all the nephews and nieces, as well. Carl had similarly favoured him. ‘If we could order one like him, I’d be tempted to have a try,’ he said, with a wary smile. He had acce
pted that it was for Thea to decide on the size of their family, but sometimes he let slip his hope that one day it might swell to two children, rather than one.

  ‘Me too,’ she’d replied lightly. ‘But we’d just get a bad-tempered girl who wanted everything in her life to be pink.’

  ‘That would indeed be dreadful,’ her husband had laughed.

  Conversation on the walk was fragmented and inconsequential. Fraser strolled slightly apart, hands clasped behind his back, eyes mostly on the ground in front of him. He seemed neither cheerful nor miserable, but content to let events swirl around him, without any active involvement on his part. The fact of a large park practically on the doorstep gave Thea a sense of obligation. Whatever happened, she ought to make the effort to enjoy it. The towering trees, with the edges of some leaves crimped with the first signs of autumn, had clearly been there for at least a century. The general layout was reminiscent of even earlier times – she had read that there had been a deer park around the castle since at least the fourteen hundreds. The usual complicated history of destruction and rebuilding made it impossible to pin down precise dates, but she could very well imagine Jane Austen’s contemporaries taking the air on these very swards of well-kept grass, pausing on the same stone bridges for brief flirtations.

  Queen Elizabeth I had visited, even earlier. Then it had come to grief during the Civil War and languished until Victoria’s time. All this Thea dredged from her sporadic researches into the history of the Cotswolds, finding scraps of knowledge she had scarcely known she possessed. Whatever fate had befallen the castle, it seemed clear that the park had survived, if much diminished in size. The familiar sense of continuity struck her – the idea that human feet had walked the same spot for more than a thousand years. The fact that those feet might have belonged to Good Queen Bess, and other monumental figures, gave her a frisson of excitement.

  ‘Can’t we see the castle properly?’ her mother asked.

  ‘Apparently not. Just the roof, I think. There’s a wall round it. You have to book a tour if you want to see inside. I think it’s only weekends.’

  ‘Today is Sunday,’ her mother reminded her. ‘Can’t we give it a try?’

  ‘Feel free,’ Thea said. ‘But they won’t allow dogs. I’m not really in the mood for it, to be honest.’

  ‘You have to book in advance,’ said Fraser, with authority. ‘They call it a connoisseur’s day, or some such thing. I’m with Thea. We can come back some other time.’

  Maureen shrugged and accepted defeat. They walked on, past even bigger and more exotic trees. By the end of an hour, Thea could see that her mother was limping slightly, one knee starting to ache. Various friends had mentioned the possibility of a replacement joint, which filled Maureen with horror. ‘It’s nothing like bad enough for that,’ she protested, and made every effort to conceal the inexorable degeneration of the bones. When she bent to collect the conkers, she did it from the hip, making an angular figure, feet apart and the effort of straightening considerable. Thea could hardly bear to watch.

  When they got back, her phone had accumulated four missed calls, all of them from more or less predictable people. The realisation that she had already appeared on television and been recognised came as a shock. The callers all said it was their reason for phoning. They were, in order, her friend Celia in Witney, from whom she had drifted away in the past few years; her brother-in-law James, from whom she had also felt very distant recently; her daughter Jessica, who never watched television, but had happened to be at a friend’s flat when it was on; and her sister Jocelyn. Against her inclination, she called them all back to assure them she was fine, that the police had finished their questions, and she would remain in Winchcombe for at least another week.

  One person had not phoned: a person she knew watched a lot of television with his children, who would recognise her from the most fleeting glimpse. There was no message from Drew Slocombe.

  Oliver’s landline was busy, too. It rang five minutes after they got back to the house. Unsure of the protocol as to who should answer it, Thea left it to Fraser, who seemed unsurprisingly reluctant. ‘This is a nightmare,’ he groaned. ‘What am I supposed to say?’

  In the event, he had no difficulty. ‘Oh … Mo,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so … What? For heaven’s sake, don’t even think of it. There’s no space here for you to stay.’ He cast a wild look at Thea, who tried to retain a neutral expression. ‘Well, if you must but there’s absolutely no need … That would be better, I suppose … What does it have to do with him, anyway? He doesn’t even know Oliver … Yes, yes, I know you are. You’re very kind, dear. I’m sure you’re awfully busy …’ The conversation tailed off into monosyllables and he replaced the receiver. ‘That was Mo. She wants to come and see for herself what’s going on.’

  ‘When?’ asked Maureen. ‘Not tonight, surely?’

  ‘Fortunately not. First thing tomorrow. With Jason, God help us.’

  Thea felt the familiar sensation of being at the mercy of whoever chose to call at her appointed house-sit. She was a captive, forced to remain at her station and endure whoever might come and harangue her. There was, however, more than a flicker of curiosity about this Mo, this child of a Spanish mother who had been named for Maureen Callaghan, as her own mother had once been called.

  But before she could worry about the next day’s intrusions, there was a knock on the front door that gave her good reason to concentrate on the day in hand.

  Chapter Eleven

  Two people and a smiling young dog stood there. The golden retriever and its people, she realised. The man was much the same as he had been in the pub garden: insincere smile, calculating eyes. The woman’s hair was all Thea could recognise of her. The dog seemed much as before. ‘Hello,’ said the man. ‘Reuben Hardy – remember? And this is my wife, Jenny.’

  ‘What can I do for you?’

  ‘We’ve just caught up with what’s been going on, probably the last people in the Cotswolds to realise. We’re horrified, quite honestly. We came to see if we can offer any help, in any way. I mean – we only live two hundred yards away. We feel involved.’

  ‘It’s a bit more than that, Reu,’ his wife corrected him. ‘We’re in the silk mill building, actually,’ she addressed Thea. ‘I don’t know whether you’ve seen it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said Thea, still resisting any pressure to admit them into the house. ‘I was intending to explore properly today. Only—’

  ‘Of course,’ gushed Reuben, and Thea began to wonder whether he might be a minister of religion or something of the sort. He had the same unusual delivery and assumption of a kind of entitlement. ‘We do understand.’

  ‘I don’t expect you do,’ came Thea’s mother’s voice from behind her. ‘It has been a long day for us all, and we were hoping for a quiet evening. Exactly what you think you can do is a mystery to me – especially as you appear to have a dog with you.’ The animal was rubbing noses with Hepzie, amidst a lot of tail-wagging and sideways jumps. It was distracting, to say the least. Thea gave her mother a long admiring look. Plainly encouraged, the older woman continued, ‘The police have everything under control, and I’m sure you understand that we have been strongly discouraged from gossiping with anybody about the details of the terrible tragedy.’ She was improvising magnificently, since she had not exchanged a single word with a police officer, as far as Thea could recall.

  ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s so, but you must be feeling very much under siege. And being strange to the area, and so forth …’ The man was babbling, and Thea began to wonder about his sanity.

  ‘We were settling down to a quiet evening, hoping not to be disturbed,’ her mother repeated relentlessly. ‘There’s nothing we need to know about the area, thank you.’

  At least we haven’t let them in, Thea thought grimly. Once inside, she doubted they would ever leave. There was something very unsettling about them, with the woman at her husband’s shoulder, as if urging him on. Thea too
k a deep breath and took over from her mother. ‘This is ridiculous,’ she said. ‘You haven’t explained why you’re here, you ignore our requests for privacy. What do you want, exactly?’

  ‘We want you to know how vulnerable you are,’ said Reuben earnestly. ‘We were worried about you. That girl must have thought she’d be perfectly safe walking through the woods, when all the time …’ He swallowed painfully, and his eyes seemed to sink back into his head.

  Behind him, his wife nodded agreement. ‘The poor thing,’ she said. ‘Poor innocent creature. Just minding her own business.’

  ‘Well …’ Thea struggled to voice her unease at this assessment. ‘We don’t really know, do we?’ she finished feebly.

  ‘Know what?’ The question was uttered with wide-open eyes and a slight smile.

  ‘What she was doing in the woods. Where she was going. Who she was meeting.’

  ‘Was she meeting somebody, do you think?’ Jenny had somehow taken over from her husband, stepping forward into the light, while he faded out of it.

  ‘She said she was, yes.’ Thea felt tricked into revealing something she should not have done. ‘At least, I think she did. I only met her for a few minutes.’

  ‘Of course, there are evil people everywhere. That’s what we wanted to come and say to you. You have to be careful. Whoever killed that poor girl Melissa might still be out there, waiting to do it again. He’s probably mentally ill.’

  ‘Well …’ Thea floundered even more deeply. ‘I don’t think that’s very likely,’ she managed.

  ‘We’re worried about you,’ said Reuben softly. ‘That’s why we came.’ His manner seemed to have changed slightly, from the brashly grinning person he had been to a more nervous individual. ‘It’s a terribly shocking thing, after all,’ he added.

  ‘Yes,’ endorsed his wife. The puppy, which had been sitting watching Hepzie, suddenly jumped up and pawed at its mistress. ‘Oh, Blodwen, all right. You’ve been a good dog,’ she said, laying a loving hand on the animal’s head. ‘A very good dog.’