A Grave in the Cotswolds (11 page)

‘And you are, madam?’ said the doorkeeper.

‘Thea Osborne. I was…um…at the scene when the body was found. My daughter is PC Jessica Osborne. I…well, I thought you might want to interview me as well.’

He scanned his screen and shook his head. ‘Doesn’t look like it.’

She hesitated, realising how foolish it would look to insist, under the circumstances. ‘Oh. Well, that’s all right, then.’

‘Unless you have information for us that you think will be helpful,’ he added.

‘No, not really,’ she said vaguely. ‘I didn’t ever meet him – the victim, I mean.’

The officer sighed, with barely concealed impatience. I was reminded of my own emotions when working at the funeral director’s, before I set up on my own. We would get ‘persistent viewers’ – women who had a taste for dead bodies, and would come to the chapel to view remote acquaintances. This policeman seemed to think that Thea was there from morbid curiosity, or an inflated sense of her own usefulness. Her role as mother of a young police officer cut no ice with him at all.

‘Don’t wait for me,’ I told her. ‘I’m sure you’ve got things to do.’

She met my gaze for a second, and I understood what a stupid thing I had just said. She had nothing to do but mourn her dead husband, walk her dog, and sit in an abandoned house for no good reason at all. But neither did she have any reason to wait for me. I had to be somewhere else, the moment I was permitted to make my escape.

Before she could leave the hall, her mobile warbled. Stopping in her tracks, she extracted it from her bag and looked at the screen. With an apologetic glance around the room – which everybody ignored – she put it to her head.

‘Um…yes, hello,’ she said in response to an opening remark at the other end. ‘That’s right… I have no idea…well, possibly, I suppose… That’s entirely up to you, isn’t it?… What do you want me to do, then?’ This last after a lengthy silence, during which I shamelessly stood my ground and listened, instead of proceeding to my interview. ‘No, not really,’ she was saying reluctantly. ‘All right, then. I’ll see you later. Bye.’

She met my eyes again. ‘The sister,’ she told me. ‘Judith Talbot. She’s heard about the trouble over the grave and wants to come and see for herself. She wants me to be here to explain what’s been happening.’

‘Does she know about all this?’ I waved a hand at the police activity.

‘It seems not. She did say she was going to contact you as well.’

‘And you didn’t tell her I was here.’

‘No. I thought you might want to keep your head down.’

‘Thanks, but I can’t really leave it all to you, can I? What time’s she due to arrive?’

‘Eleven or a bit after.’

‘I might as well stay, then. I guess I sort of owe it to her.’

Thea smiled, a much happier smile than the conversation warranted, and a long-forgotten little imp inside my chest turned one of his somersaults – which I had no control over whatsoever.

My interview with DI Basildon was peculiar, to say the least. Conducted at a formica table in the middle of the room, with a detective constable as witness, it felt oddly informal. The young detective made notes on an electronic gadget, which I found disconcerting. The inspector began by clearly informing me that I had made myself freely available to assist with enquiries into the murder of a certain Mr Maynard, and that I was jeopardising none of my rights by giving this assistance. For the first time, I wondered whether I ought to have asked for a solicitor to be present.

‘Please tell me in your own words exactly what contact you had with the deceased before his death, from the beginning,’ came the first stilted question.

‘Well, I suppose you could say it all started when one of your officers came to my home yesterday morning and demanded that I return here to Broad Campden to face a council accusation that the grave I had arranged was a trespass.’ I found myself stumbling over the language, trying to maintain an equally formal delivery to that of my interviewer. He watched my face and said nothing. ‘I did as I was asked, and met Mr Maynard at the grave. He told me that Mrs Simmonds had not been the rightful owner of that field, and that the grave would have to be moved.’

‘And…?’ he prompted.

‘Well, I argued with him. I thought he was being unduly bureaucratic and unreasonable.’

‘Did you threaten him?’

‘Of course not. What possible threat could I make against him?’

‘How was the matter left?’

‘Inconclusive. I assumed I would receive a letter from the council, and we would have to take it from there. I had some idea of checking ownership of the land, and the possibility that Mrs Simmonds had squatters’ rights over it. It’s a major exercise to move a grave, as you probably know.’

He then requested me to recount every detail of my movements in the thirty or forty minutes between leaving Thea and the others at the cottage, and rejoining them for our walk to the pub. Realising its importance, I put all my concentration into giving a full and frank report, with timings as precise as I could manage. I wished I’d been more familiar with the layout of the village, so as to be able to put names to the various locations. ‘I really need to show you on the ground,’ I sighed, as I tried to describe everything I’d done. ‘I walked across a field, roughly parallel to the Blockley road, then veered left out through a gateway – which was where the body was found – turned left up the road, and then stupidly turned right at the top, instead of left again.’

Basildon tapped his teeth with a pen. ‘But the cottage is actually
visible
from that junction,’ he protested. ‘We checked it this morning.’

‘I expect it is,’ I agreed. ‘But I hadn’t seen it from that angle. I just blindly followed Jessica’s car, having no idea where we were going to finish up. And when I went out again on foot, I crossed the main street to the footpath, which was what confused me. Coming out a different way, I somehow just assumed it was to my right. Everything looked new to me, and I wasn’t concentrating.’ I sighed. ‘I know it sounds stupid – but why would I lie to you about it?’

He raised both eyebrows at this, as if to say,
Why do you think?

‘Anyway, it can only have added about five minutes to my total time away. I realised quite quickly what I’d done.’

‘Mr Slocombe, sir, you walked a total of seven hundred and fifty metres, at a generous estimate. How did that take more than half an hour?’

‘I was on the phone. I was admiring the view. I took a wrong turn.’

‘Does that happen to you a lot?’ asked the detective blandly. ‘Taking a wrong turn, I mean.’

‘Not really. But I was thinking about my wife and things at home. I wasn’t paying proper attention.’ I still failed to grasp how I was coming across, in this naïve display of incompetence. I was under the impression that the simple truth was all that was required, so I doggedly repeated myself, in the hope that he would believe me.

Basildon raised a decisive hand. ‘Thank you, Mr Slocombe. Before we go any further, we’ll need to increase the formalities somewhat. I’m going to caution you, and offer you the option of having legal representation. I will need to take a number of samples from you. We will relocate to the police station at Cirencester, and a statement will be prepared for you to sign.’

Good God, what had I said? I wondered. ‘What? Now?’ I stuttered.

‘That’s right. We can take you in a car, and bring you back here afterwards. It won’t take more than an hour or so.’

‘So you’re arresting me.’

‘Technically, yes. In the sense that you don’t have any choice in the matter. But we won’t need to keep you in custody, so long as you undertake to keep us informed of your movements.’

‘Do you honestly think
I
killed the wretched man?’

He smiled wearily, as if everybody asked the same question. ‘That is not the point,’ he said. ‘We need to understand everything that took place in the hours before he died. You are clearly going to be very helpful in the investigation.’

‘OK – I’m already being helpful. Why do you need to arrest me? Doesn’t that run the risk of making me hostile? Wouldn’t it be better just to let me talk as we are?’

‘We need to be able to use whatever you might say as evidence,’ he said, and then went straight into the words of the police caution, which I had never expected to hear directed at myself.

Far from feeling hostile, I was bewildered and scared. Crazily, I thought of my expired road tax and bald tyres. I was already on the wrong side of the law, suspected by Jessica Osborne of being feckless and unreliable. What guilty secrets would this man unearth in the course of his questioning? The petty misdemeanours I had committed throughout my life loomed large in my mind. I had fudged my tax returns, plucking figures out of the air with no documentary proof. I had lied to relatives of the dead, in the interests of a quiet funeral. I had kept my children off school, saying they were ill, when we fancied a day out at Lyme Regis or Weston-super-Mare.

But I had not coshed Mr Maynard on the head with a large stone.

Chapter Eight

In the event, the formalities in Cirencester proceeded fairly gently. I was given an oral swab, which was mildly unpleasant physically and much more humiliating than anticipated. My fingerprints were taken, and my shoes whisked off into another room, exposing a small hole in the heel of my sock. My jumper and trousers were bagged up and labelled, and a new clean tracksuit provided in their place. ‘We’d like it back at some point,’ said DI Basildon. Mercifully, my shoes came back after ten minutes or so. The results of my interview in Blockley were typed up and produced for my signature. I read them through carefully first, and then signed that they were accurate ‘As far as they go,’ I said to the inspector. ‘I want to write in big red capitals – I did not kill Mr Maynard.’

‘We are well aware that you have not made a confession,’ he said stiffly.

‘I would have to be a psychopath to murder him,’ I continued. ‘I was annoyed with him, and worried about what would happen next, but it’s barmy to think that would make me kill him.’

‘I can’t comment, sir.’

‘You can check that I made the phone calls to my wife and colleague.’

‘Indeed,’ he nodded. ‘But you haven’t claimed that you spent the entire time speaking on the phone.’

‘I’ve told you the exact truth of what happened.’

‘So you were completely startled at the discovery of the body?’

‘Of course.’

‘We have a suggestion that you seemed quite unsurprised.’

‘What? Jessica, I suppose. She didn’t even look at me. Her mother and I stayed back, letting her do her job. Thea realised what was happening before I did.’

‘You had no idea what was going on?’

‘Of course not. How could I?’ I tried to recall my feelings, what I’d been thinking at the time, in vain. I fell silent, helpless to influence the way this man regarded me.

Then I was kept hanging about waiting for a car to take me back to Blockley, feeling increasingly like a wriggling bug on a pin, scrutinised through the implacable lens of the law. Everything I said seemed to increase my guilt in their eyes. My heart rate had sped to a painful level, everything inside me thundering with anxiety. Even my bowels were turbulent. It was all well beyond my control, and this was before I had even begun to consider the implications for my family and business.

‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ said a man behind me. He was in uniform, and I had not seen him before. ‘We can go now, if you’re ready.’

‘So I’m no longer under arrest?’

He blinked. ‘Haven’t they told you that?’

‘Not really.’

‘You’re still under suspicion, as I understand it. That means you’re bailed to attend any further interviews or proceedings. You are not at liberty to leave the country.’

‘I won’t leave the country,’ I promised him.

They took me back to my car. Only then did I remember that I was meant to be meeting Mrs Talbot for more questions and probable anger. I was sorely tempted to just leave it, and drive home as quickly as I could. But I had told Thea I’d be there, and I was only ten minutes late, surprisingly. The morning already felt as if it had lasted a couple of days.

She must have been watching for me, and came out of the house as soon as I turned off my engine. ‘How did it go?’ she asked, as if I’d been sitting an exam. She eyed the tracksuit critically, but didn’t laugh.

‘It was annihilating,’ I said dramatically, having found the word during the drive. ‘Completely annihilating.’

‘Oh dear. Come and have some coffee. The sister will be here any time. She’s even later than you. I’ve been playing with Mrs Simmonds’ coffee machine, so there’s plenty, and the power is still on, mercifully. The tracksuit is rather fetching, by the way. Much better than going home naked.’

‘I need the loo first,’ I said unceremoniously. Nothing in my gut was behaving normally, and there was a certain urgency to my need.

We waited for Judith Talbot in near silence. I could tell that Thea was curious about my experience as an interviewee, but she was deterred from asking by my bemused condition. Also, perhaps, she understood that I had had enough of answering questions for a while.

Before we had time to get restless, the visitors were upon us. They arrived in full force: not only the sister, but her older son and her husband as well. I focused on Charles, thinking he looked different from when he’d come to my Somerset office, a week earlier. A week which felt like a month or more. I looked at him, wondering what he was going to say to me. More than his parents, he looked hostile and accusatory.

‘You remember Charles, I suppose,’ his mother said, having registered my presence with a flicker of surprise. ‘And my husband, Oliver.’ The introductions struck me as superfluous, but she made them deliberately, as if it was important. I realised how little I knew about Judith Talbot – what she did for a living, whether she was older or younger than her dead sister, why her two sons were so vastly separated in age. Her hair was dyed a coppery colour and her figure was firmly in control. She seemed fairly intelligent, and more concerned than angry, for which I was duly grateful. Charles was a few years older than me, I guessed, a colourless chap who manifested very little in the way of thought or emotion on our first encounter. It had been Thea who mentioned the nasty divorce he was undergoing.