A Cotswold Ordeal (10 page)

Jeremy flushed. ‘Sort of,’ he mumbled. ‘They’re not illegal or anything. Not like
terrorists
. I mean, I can’t get too committed, ’cause I’m going for army training in September, and I gotta keep my nose clean.’ He smiled weakly at his pseudo youth-speak. His accent represented the complex conflict between generations and classes that afflicted many of his contemporaries. ‘It’s just local stuff, basically. They’re fighting to protect the country way of life.’ The words had quotation marks around them, loud and clear.

‘Good for them,’ Thea approved, albeit with some surprise. ‘I thought people your age all wanted night clubs and bowling alleys and nice big motorways.’

‘They do,’ interrupted Jocelyn. ‘These warriors must be very strange kids.’

Jeremy threw her such a look of contempt that Thea revised her assessment of him. There was much more to this lad than had first appeared.

‘Do the police know Nick was involved with them?’ she asked.

He waved an impatient hand. The police evidently didn’t concern him. ‘He was one of
us
, a good bloke. Brave, you know?’

Thea recalled the hunched solitary figure she’d glimpsed by the barn and wondered at this epithet. ‘Brave?’ she repeated.

‘Right. Go anywhere, stand up to anybody, would Nick. Made a fair few enemies, that way. Specially with these canal idiots.’

‘He was against the restoration of the canal?’

‘’Course he was. That’s the main campaign just now. Dreadful news for the environment, it’d be. Nearly as bad as that bastard golf course.’ The accent was into its stride now, the rhythms flowing more smoothly.

Thea did not permit herself to be distracted by the golf course. ‘But surely – canals are
good
for the environment? Water birds, new plants—’

‘Tourists, tree clearance, mega disturbance. You’re joking,’ he countered.

‘So – you think that was why he was killed?’ Jocelyn interrupted with the clear question, cutting through any further debate about the merits of canals.

He scratched an ear and stared at the ground for a moment. ‘It must be, I think. He’s made plenty of enemies. Somebody must have heard the Phillipses were away and used this place, thinking it’d be safely empty. Lucky you didn’t get in the way.’

‘You make it sound all done and dusted,’ Jocelyn put in. She’d moved a step or two towards him, as if for a better look at the eyelashes and sharp jawline. ‘Do you know who killed him?’

His colour heightened. ‘Of course I don’t. What makes you think that?’

‘You sounded as if you’d worked it out, that’s all.’

‘I’m not playing detectives. I just thought I’d come and see if you were okay. Not scared or anything. I mean – dead bodies aren’t very nice, are they.’

Thea had to abort a guffaw at the sheer Englishness of this remark. ‘I’m not scared,’ she assured him. ‘At least, not of the dead. I’ve never really understood why people think bodies would be scary. And even if I was, he isn’t here any more, is he? He’s in some mortuary in Cirencester, all safely locked up.’

Jeremy coloured again. ‘You’re doing it on purpose. Making fun of me,’ he accused. ‘I wasn’t suggesting you were scared of Nick – but if somebody killed him, then you’d be stupid
not
to be worried. If you don’t know what’s going on, or why Nick died, you can’t possibly know whether you’re safe or not. I only came because I felt sorry for you.’

Thea was almost seduced. ‘Did you?’ she challenged. ‘Is that really why you’re here? Or is it something a bit less altruistic? Like getting a kick
out of seeing the place where somebody died. Or checking up on a few things?’

‘Thea!’ Jocelyn protested.

Thea did not relent. ‘And what about your brothers – are they going to show up in a minute, as well?’

Jeremy’s head jerked back, his eyes widening. ‘What’s it got to do with them?’ he demanded.

‘I have no idea. But your mother said there were three of you, and talked as if you came in a package. I just wondered what we might have in store for us.’

‘Dominic’s working. And Simon’s gone on a school trip. Neither of them’s going to bother you.’

‘You’re the eldest, are you?’ Jocelyn asked.

‘No, actually. Dom’s twenty-three. And, if you’re so interested, he’s my half-brother. My dad was married before, and Dom’s mum died when he was two. Then he married my mum and they had me and Simon. Satisfied?’

It seemed to Thea that the boy took some satisfaction in giving this account of himself, like a much younger child might do. There was something in the story that pleased him, gave him confidence or security. It wasn’t hard to guess that it offered some sort of superiority over the motherless Dominic. And, she suspected, it said something about Valerie Innes as stepmother. That woman would be liable to play a whole host of damaging
psychological games as the only female in a family of men, with the result that each one would be perpetually alert to the chance of an advantage. Jeremy saw himself as scoring a point here, if she was not much mistaken.

‘And you’re off to be a soldier,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Whose idea was that, then?’

‘Mine, of course.’ He was huffy at her patronising tone.

‘Don’t tell me – you want to be in the SAS,’ she went on.

‘No, I don’t.’ He turned away. ‘I’ll go now, then. Sorry if I got in your way.’

Thea remembered his hypnotism of the geese. ‘It was nice to meet you,’ she said, before adding, ‘Do you often come here?’

He spoke over his shoulder, staring at the stable and the muddy duck pond. ‘I used to, but not so much lately. I like to visit Milo, mainly. He was ours, you see, but we gave him to Julia because Simon’s allergic to cat hair. I can’t see him around anywhere. He usually comes to greet me.’

Jocelyn turned to Thea for elucidation. ‘Who’s Milo?’ she asked.

Thea groaned. ‘Oh, God, Jeremy, I’m afraid there’s really bad news about Milo. It happened the first night I was here. He got run over.’

The boy’s reaction was startling. ‘No!’ he screeched, raising tightly-clenched fists to the sky.
‘That bastard! That bloody swine! I never thought he’d really do it. Where is he? What have you done with him? Is he at the vet’s?’

Thea sorted out the pronouns before replying. ‘No, no. He was killed. Surely you don’t think somebody did it deliberately? Why on earth would they? He was in the road – a car must have hit him early on Sunday morning.’

Jeremy shook his head vigorously. ‘It’s easy to make it look like road kill,’ he snarled. ‘They do it after badger baiting, all the time. Milo was murdered, the same as Nick. Have you buried him?’

‘He’s in the freezer,’ Thea admitted. ‘In the garage.’

‘Show me.’

Seeing no reason to refuse, Thea led the way to the part of the barn that housed the vintage Lamborghini, chest freezer and numerous cardboard boxes. Hepzibah ran ahead, nosing excitedly around the back of the car, tail wagging furiously. ‘Must be mice in here,’ said Thea. ‘I don’t expect she’ll catch anything.’

Jocelyn’s rat-phobia kept her hovering outside. Ignoring the dog, Jeremy marched ahead and threw open the freezer lid. Thea half expected – even hoped – the body of the cat would have disappeared, but it was evidently still where she’d left it.

‘In this?’ the boy said, lifting out the plastic carrier bag containing the corpse. Without waiting
for an answer, he peeled it open, putting a gentle hand in to explore the frozen fur.

‘I want a post-mortem done on him,’ he said, his voice cracking. ‘They’ll know then if he was killed on purpose.’

Thea grimaced. ‘We’d have to ask Julia first,’ she objected. ‘And somebody would have to pay – even if we could find a vet to do it.’

‘That’s no problem. My dad’s friendly with one of the top Ministry vets in Gloucester. He’ll get somebody to do it, no problem.’ He had the cat fully revealed by this time, and was laying it on the top of the freezer, finding it too cold to keep hold of. He bent over it, close to tears.

‘Poor Milo,’ he crooned. ‘Poor boy.’

Thea sought her sister’s eye, but Jocelyn was completely occupied by the vision of a frozen dead cat.

‘These things happen, I’m afraid,’ Thea tried awkwardly to console the lad. ‘I don’t think there’s any point in a post-mortem. If you insist on taking him with you, you’ll have to bury him, or take him to a vet for cremation.’

He took a jerky few steps away from her, and then back again. ‘We’ll have to see about that,’ he said thickly. Then, before she could stop him, he’d gathered up the defunct Milo and left Juniper Court at a run.

They sat on the minimal lawn with mugs of tea, and tried not to let the conversation get serious. The sense of waiting for something more to happen was strong, although neither mentioned it. Thea suggested a walk, but Jocelyn expressed a decided lack of enthusiasm. ‘Much too hot for that,’ she said. ‘And you’d only take me to see your infernal canal. I know you.’

‘There are forty-two locks on the whole stretch, you know,’ Thea said dreamily. ‘I remember that from my college course. I think there’s a flight just around here, of eight or ten. It climbs fairly steeply up to Daneway, you see.’

‘Shut up,’ said Jocelyn. ‘I don’t care.’

‘And then there’s a tunnel. A most wonderful and prodigious tunnel. It was the widest and longest in the country for a long time. Wouldn’t you like to go and have a look? The western entrance is only two or three miles from here.’

Jocelyn’s interest increased by half a notch. ‘Can you walk through it? I rather like tunnels, I must admit. I have very exciting tunnel dreams.’

Thea shook her head. ‘The roof’s fallen in by now. It’s been abandoned for a century or more. And I don’t think there’d be a path through, anyway. There never is with canal tunnels. The boatmen used to have to leg the barges through.’

‘Huh?’

‘They lay down on the roof of the boat, and did
a sort of sideways walking, against the wall of the tunnel, to propel the barges through. The horse met them at the other end.’

‘How long is it?’

‘Two miles or so. They had air vents at intervals. You can probably still see the tops of them if you know where to look.’

Jocelyn sighed. ‘There’s far too much history around here for my liking. Don’t you feel weighted down by it?’

‘Not at all. I like it. It makes me feel part of a sort of continuity. And it’s not obstructing anything. People can still do modern stuff as well.’

Jocelyn’s eyes hardened. ‘That isn’t true at all. They couldn’t put a nice convenient motorway through here, or build a very-much-needed housing estate of good cheap materials like concrete blocks. Living here is like being in the Dark Ages for normal people. Imagine me trying to cope, with five kids all wanting to be somewhere different. I’d spend my entire life in the car, crashing into people on the bends and killing dozens of unwary cats. Where’s the nearest shop? Or doctor? Or school, for that matter.’

‘There’s a school at Minchinhampton. It was right beside the church. I think it’s quite new, in fact. And there’s a pub in Frampton Mansell. That’s no distance from here.’ But then Thea remembered
her house-sitting commission in Duntisbourne Abbots, where there had been no school, shop or post office. Not even a pub in the village itself. There had been a riding school, and a church and a lot of silence. And if she was honest, this second venture into the area was not so very different in those respects.

‘Well, give me suburbia every time,’ said Jocelyn, who lived on the edge of Bristol, with a massive out-of-town retail park almost next door, and frequent buses to the city centre. ‘I can’t honestly see the point of all this carefully preserved countryside.’

‘You’re hopeless,’ sighed Thea. ‘It’s people like you who’ll be the ruin of this country.’

‘Not a bit of it. If everybody was like you, we’d all be living in grass huts with nothing to do but grow cabbages and go for senseless walks.’

‘And restore lovely old canals, because they’re still a valid means of transport, and one of the most benign tourist activities there is.’

‘Minority interest, pet. Like camping, without any way of buying milk or newspapers. And bloody hard work opening and shutting all those locks, into the bargain.’

Thea assumed her sister was enjoying the banter as much as she was herself. It kept them away from unsettling topics like domestic violence and close-at-hand murder, for a start.
And it restored the central pattern of their relationship to a familiar state. Knowing little of each other’s daily routines, reading habits, or significant friendships, they instinctively reverted to this sort of theoretical debate on almost every encounter. Anything that avoided the word ‘you’ was a bonus.

By four o’clock, Thea was already wondering when she’d see Hollis again. He couldn’t know that she had learned the identity of the dead man – so why had he not phoned her to bring her up to date? Because, she supposed, it would not be a high priority to him. Whether or not she knew the victim’s name would not advance the investigation an inch. Furthermore, Thea had finally started to understand that Hollis very much needed to keep her at one remove from the murder. He was not going to discuss it with her more than was absolutely necessary. They were not going to find clues together, or rush around the uptilted countryside, through tunnels, in and out of farmyards in pursuit of criminals. Not if he could help it.

All of which suited her perfectly. She would have loved to go along with it, ignoring the smells and stains and sadnesses of mortality and murder. She would relish some midsummer romance amongst the long grasses and slow murmurings of a hot July evening. She yearned for it, acknowledging to
herself that she deserved it after a year of mourning. She was ready for it. And she was tempted to believe she’d found the very man who could give it to her.

Why, then, did it feel so impossible? Such a distant unobtainable dream.

Because it was only a year and a bit since Carl died. Because her sister was there, wrestling with the breakdown of a long comfortable marriage. Because the man was a police detective and had work to do. Because thunder was forecast for later in the week.

She went to her temporary bedroom, to change from shorts and skimpy singlet to a pair of cotton trousers and a more respectable shirt. She sat on the bed for a moment, looking at the dragons stencilled on the walls, wondering at the care with which they’d been painted. Each one had a slight variation. The basic shape was consistent, done in white on the orange background of the emulsioned wall. And then delicate embellishments had been applied. Red, purple, yellow and blue touches, to the wings and tails and faces of the beasts. It must have taken hours of careful work, like painting on china. The result was a herd or flock of dragons, each one an individual with its own personality. Like horses on a circus roundabout, when they all had names and distinct characteristics. While Naomi had her ailing pony, with its needs and
anxiety-provoking difficulties, Flora had her dragons, who were never going to go anywhere, and never needed more than the girl’s imagination to bring them to life. Thea suspected there was a message in all this somewhere, if only she could find it.