A Grave in the Cotswolds (12 page)

‘Of course. I’m pleased to see you again, although I very much regret the circumstances.’ I was automatically slipping into undertaker mode. I hoped I wasn’t unctuous or oily – rather, approachable and reassuring. Reliable and friendly. The undertaker’s role is to persuade people that although death is a really bad thing to happen, it isn’t the end of the world. There are routines and formulas for getting through it, which we ignore at our peril. Even when the burial is in a cardboard coffin in unconsecrated ground, there are still correct procedures to be followed, to ensure due dignity.

‘We need to know that the grave won’t be disturbed,’ she asserted, wasting no time. ‘The very idea is horrifying.’

‘I agree,’ I said. Forcing myself to concentrate, I went on, ‘How did you hear there was a problem?’

‘Susan Watchett phoned me on Friday evening. She said she’d been thinking it over, and got more and more uneasy about it all. She took her time to admit it, but after a bit she told me she’d reported it to the council. She just caught them, apparently, before they closed for the weekend.’

Thea gave a strangled gasp at this, which made us all look at her. Her eyes were wide with surprise. ‘But she
liked
it. She approved of it. She came here last week with her husband and talked glowingly about the whole natural burial thing.’

‘She can be like that – changes her mind from one second to the next. I learnt about fifty years ago that you can’t rely on Susan.’

‘You’ve know her that long?’ I queried.

‘We went to school together, in Chipping Campden. Susan, me, Greta, Helena. We always kept in touch.’ A dreamy look crossed her face. ‘Sometimes it feels as if you can’t escape your childhood – those friendships you make so carelessly when you’re eleven stick with you for life. All it takes is a Christmas card every year and the odd letter, and you’re in it for the duration.’

‘That’s nice, though, isn’t it?’ said Thea.

Oliver Talbot made a sound, suggesting scepticism. ‘Susan’s brought us a fair bit of trouble over the years,’ he said, in a voice I had scarcely heard thus far. He was a Scot, I noted.

‘Who’s Helena?’ asked Thea. I began to feel she was taking curiosity slightly too far. The conversation could go on for hours at this rate, and yet again I felt the demands of my family urging me to hurry it up and get back home.

‘Helena Maynard, she is now,’ said Judith easily. ‘Married to a chap on the council.’

She didn’t know. She had not watched local TV news or heard any gossip. It was twenty-four hours since the murder, very nearly, and still there were people who didn’t know.

Either that, or she was the best actor on the face of the earth. Stupidly, I kept my gaze on her face, not looking at her son or husband – who might perhaps have been less relaxed at this reference to the new widow. I missed any chance of catching a hint or clue to any knowledge they might have had. Thea, too, lost the opportunity.

‘But he’s
dead
,’ she said, recklessly. ‘He was murdered yesterday.’

Judith froze, then threw bewildered glances at her menfolk. ‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘Who do you mean? Nobody said anything about a murder.’

I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath, hoping that Thea would recognise that I needed her to remain silent. It worked. ‘I met him at the grave yesterday morning,’ I said. ‘About an hour later, he was killed. I’ve just got back from being questioned by the police about it. Obviously, given the situation, they regard me as being involved.’

The Talbots absorbed this information in three different ways. Charles rubbed his cheeks and chin with a chubby hand, swallowing hard and frowning in apparent confusion. His father coughed and sniffed as if a noxious gas had been squirted at him. As if information so stark and terrible was a physical substance capable of injuring him. And Judith uttered a high hysterical little laugh, her face turning pink and shiny.

‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I really can’t believe it.’

After that, there was a period of shocked questions and assertions that followed no logical thread. Charles said nothing, his eyes turned on some urgent inner musings which rendered him deaf to what the rest of us were saying. Gradually, Judith pulled herself back to the original reason for their visit.

‘But the grave,’ she said. ‘What about the grave?’

‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ I replied. ‘Nothing has been decided.’

‘But it was Helena’s husband who complained to you about it – is that right? You met him to talk it over. What did he say, exactly?’

‘He said your sister never owned the field, but rented it from the council. She couldn’t possibly have believed it was her property, or that she had any right to use it for her burial. He hinted that there might be some financial agreement we could make—’

‘Buy it from the council, you mean,’ interrupted Oliver Talbot. ‘Cheeky wee devil.’

‘Oliver!’ his wife rebuked him. ‘The man’s dead. Mind what you say.’

‘The village will have a field day over this,’ continued her husband, gloomily. ‘Our name will be all over the papers. Old Bill Kettles is going to be in seventh heaven, silly old sod. You’d think a body would have told us, all the same. Where’s yon Susan when she’s needed?’

Susan, I thought, had already done enough damage, by alerting the Talbots to the trouble over the grave. Although they’d have had to know eventually, of course.

‘Who’s Bill Kettles?’ asked Thea.

‘He was a friend of our mother’s. Makes mischief every chance he gets. Greta always liked him, but I couldn’t stand the old goat.’ Judith was almost back to normal, I noted, marvelling at the resilience of the human spirit.

‘Why wasn’t he at the funeral?’

Judith smiled smugly. ‘Because we didn’t tell him when it was going to be. Or where. I made Susan promise not to tell him, and Miriam Ingram likewise.’

I had forgotten the Ingrams. ‘Do they live here as well?’ I asked. ‘The Ingrams, I mean.’

She nodded. ‘Practically next door to the Maynards, as it happens.’

‘And were you at school with her, too?’

She gave me a narrow look, as if suspecting me of flippancy. ‘No, I wasn’t. She doesn’t come from round here. Graham does, of course – but that’s got nothing to do with anything.’

Thea laughed. ‘Gosh, I do love the way these connections work, especially in villages like this. Everybody knows everybody, all their secrets, all the old feuds and resentments. So many stories hidden just below the surface.’

Judith was visibly offended. ‘Stories?’ she repeated. ‘These are people’s
lives
. They might sound like funny stories to you, but to some of us they’re deadly serious.’

Despite her attack on Thea, I was warming a little to Judith Talbot, as she got into her reminiscences. At least she wasn’t attacking me for sloppiness over her sister’s grave.

‘You’re quite right,’ said Thea apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. And you must be feeling awful about your friend Helena. You’ll be wanting to go and see her, won’t you?’

Judith Talbot turned pink, all over again. ‘Oh!’ she gulped. ‘Well, not today. No, no. She must be overwhelmed with it all, if it only happened yesterday. She won’t want us crowding in on her. I’ll send her a card.’

I’d seen it many a time, the instinctive recoil from sudden grief and pain. Most people did it, afraid of saying the wrong thing, of being sobbed on, of entering a realm where naked emotion ruled and normal procedures were abandoned. I didn’t blame them – it was genuinely alarming if you weren’t used to it.

I definitely needed to take my leave. I told them so. ‘But we need to clarify the question of the grave,’ I added. ‘Why did your family rent the field in the first place, when it’s nowhere near the house? How far back does that go?’

Judith rolled her eyes to the ceiling and then looked at her silent son. He reminded me of Detective Paul, withdrawing from the conversation, gazing out of the window, chasing particles in his back teeth. Charles Talbot was abnormally disinterested, given the nature of our business. Two people dead, a disputed grave, a redundant house-sitter who still sat stubbornly in place like Horton hatching the egg – didn’t any of it capture his imagination?

‘I suppose we can tell them,’ his mother said, trying to obtain his agreement. ‘What do you think, Charles?’

He shrugged. ‘Don’t see why not,’ he muttered, for all the world like his much younger brother.

Judith took this as permission, ignoring anything her husband might have to say on the matter. ‘It’s no great mystery. My father had a horse, which needed a paddock. He rented that field a year before he died. That was seventeen years ago. I have no idea what the rent was, or how they paid it. For all I know, it was simply an annual standing order from the bank, and nobody gave it a thought. They probably forgot all about it.’

‘But your sister didn’t forget it, did she? She arranged for herself to be buried there, after all. And standing orders expire if the account holder dies.’ I had had enough of picking my way through the skeletal facts, making little sense of them, and yet it needed to be done. Somehow I felt sure the fact of Mrs Simmonds’ grave connected to the killing of Mr Maynard, although it would have been just as likely there were two parallel problems going on, neither of them looking at all good for me.

Thea was frowning, her eyes flickering in deep thought. ‘So, when did your mother die?’

‘Three years after Dad.’

‘Right. And Greta’s husband?’

Judith blew out her cheeks. ‘Marcus? God, he disappeared
decades
ago. They were only married for five minutes. No need to bring
him
into it.’

‘I never even knew him,’ offered Charles, from his seat by the window. He looked slowly from me to Thea to his mother. ‘Where’s all this getting us, anyway? I think we ought to go.’

‘Right,’ I agreed heartily. ‘I don’t think there’s any more we can do at the moment. The ball’s in the council’s court now. Once they’ve recovered from the loss of Mr Maynard, they might pursue it – or they might forget the whole thing. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

‘But the police were involved, weren’t they?’ Thea remembered. ‘They contacted you in the first place.’

‘That’s true,’ I agreed. ‘So?’

‘So, it’ll be on file, something to be followed up – especially now there’s a homicide as well. They’re not going to just forget about it.’

We all paused to entertain gloomy thoughts about what was to come. ‘Poor old Greta,’ said her sister. ‘I always thought she was being unrealistic to think she could get away with it. But she would just steamroller her way through, ignoring anything we said to her. It was the same when she joined that dopey community. We all said it could never work out.’

‘How long was she there?’ asked Thea.

Judith smiled ruefully. ‘Six or seven years altogether. I admit it was a lot longer than we expected. She helped to set the whole thing up, from the beginning. But it wasn’t all smooth sailing, not by any means. She was always fighting with one or other of the people there, complaining about their dogs or their noisy cars. Just one thing after another. They must have been so glad when she finally left.’

‘Who lived here, then? Who were the tenants?’ Again, I admired Thea’s sharp mind, deftly filling in the gaps in the story.

‘They were called Andreason, a youngish couple. I met them once or twice, that’s all.’

‘They didn’t come to the funeral,’ I observed.

‘No.’ Judith laughed grimly. ‘If they had done, it would have been to dance on the grave.’

‘Oh?’

‘They
hated
her. She threw them out, with minimal notice, when she needed to come back here to live, and they had nowhere else to go. Susan said there was a massive scene, right outside the house, with screaming and shouting, and all kinds of threats.’

‘Oh,’ I said again, rather wishing that it had been Greta Simmonds who had been murdered rather than the infuriating Mr Maynard, since here was an apparently obvious motive. ‘Judy,’ said Oliver warningly. ‘That’s nae quite true, is it? Greta wasn’t personally involved, which is how you made it sound. She had an agent handling it all.’

His pedantic delivery plainly annoyed his wife. ‘It comes to the same thing,’ she insisted.

He held up an admonitory finger. ‘And she did give the tenants fair warning. Anybody would have done the same as she did. She hadna any choice once the community people asked her to leave.’

‘That community sounds interesting,’ suggested Thea, who looked desperate to avert an argument. ‘Did you ever go there?’ She asked the question of all three Talbots, eyes wide with encouragement.

‘I did,’ said Judith reluctantly. ‘It was one of the first co-housing groups to be set up. They were a weird lot, talking in jargon most of the time. They pooled all their money and bought a big farm. All the barns and sheds were converted into little houses. Heaven knows how they got planning permission for it all, but they did.’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’ asked Thea.

‘Plenty of reasons. Dense occupancy. Change of use. Adverse effect on the local villages. There were about a dozen families altogether – nearly thirty people.’

‘You know something about planning laws, then,’ I said, noting her familiarity with the language.

‘Doesn’t everybody?’ she snorted. ‘I sometimes think that half our lives are spent wrestling with planners.’

Nothing had been resolved, but neither had I heard anything that made my situation worse, which was a relief in itself.

‘This house must be mine now,’ said Charles, unexpectedly. He looked around at the walls with new eyes, as if only then understanding his changed status. ‘She said she’d leave it to me. I still haven’t checked the will, but I can’t imagine there’ll be any difficulties. I’ll get onto an agent tomorrow, with a view to selling it.’

I frowned at him. ‘But you’re her executor. Surely you saw the will when it was drawn up?’

‘No, I didn’t. She told me where it was and the name of the solicitor, and said I wouldn’t need to do anything until after she died. We both thought that was twenty years away. It just goes to show,’ he added vaguely.