A Grave in the Cotswolds (30 page)

She had begun, it seemed, on Saturday evening, having dropped me back at home after our visit to the commune, after hearing much the same account of Mrs Simmonds from her old friend as I had from Roger. ‘They didn’t like her. She was a troublemaker, always complaining. But she did have one or two allies, who argued her case when she was asked to leave.’

She had enlisted PC Jessica in the project, checking legalities concerning alternative burials, for one thing. ‘But I could have told you all that,’ I protested.

‘I know. But there were several reasons for not asking you.’

A cold finger prodded my heart. ‘You thought I might have killed her, and then lied about the rules?’

‘I thought that others might think that, so you would be contaminated.’

I mused on this. ‘But facts are facts,’ I objected.

‘Yes, well. You were busy. There wasn’t time to talk it through with you.’

‘We had the car journey.’ To my recollection, we had spoken little during that half-hour or so on Saturday afternoon.

‘I wasn’t ready then. I had to think about it.’

She went on with her debriefing. She had looked up the Land Registry on the computer, and discovered that there were indeed anomalies in the ownership of Mrs Simmonds’ house, going back to the middle of the twentieth century. ‘It is still under review,’ she said. ‘The boundaries are very unclear, for one thing.’

‘And she really didn’t own the field?’ It was a frail straw that I was clutching at, but just then anything seemed possible.

‘Sadly, no. She didn’t.’

‘Did you check the legality of burying a body in someone else’s ground?’

‘I tried, but couldn’t get a proper answer. It’s some sort of trespass, that’s all I could discover. There are conflicting laws, and I don’t know which trumps which. Then I went to see the Talbots,’ she said. ‘That was this morning.’

Another unpleasant suspicion struck me. ‘So…did you have anything to do with this new idea that I killed Mrs Simmonds?’

‘I’m afraid so. But trust me, Drew. It’s all for a good reason.’

I was poleaxed. Was this woman mad? Did she in fact hate me and want to see me thrown into prison for decades? Her calm request that I should trust her made me feel I was completely at her mercy.

‘How
can
I trust you?’ I said. ‘How could anybody?’

She heaved a sigh. ‘I thought you might. I know what I’m doing, honestly. Just listen and I’ll explain.’

I did listen and she did at least partly explain herself, although I remained shaken and confused. Her logic was based on a very dubious theory of human nature, to my way of thinking. ‘You’ve been reading too many Agatha Christie stories,’ I said, when she paused.

‘No, I haven’t. I’ve been here before, Drew – that’s the point. I know how people behave under pressure. You have to push them into a corner, make them desperate.’

‘Isn’t that the police’s job?’

‘Yes, it is. That’s what interrogation is all about. Make them think there’s nowhere to hide, catch them out in lies and contradictions. Confront them with their own guilt – force them to recognise it.’

‘Nasty,’ I shivered. ‘Cruel.’

‘Definitely. It’s a cruel world.’

After all, I told myself, she did have relatives in the police, not least her assertive young daughter. She had been the girlfriend of a senior detective, and joined in a few of his investigations. She had glimpsed the cruel world that I could barely accept as real, despite my own brushes with violent crime. I had made excuses for people, even when they were shown to be killers. I had even tried to understand the man who had shot my innocent wife. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe it is.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘I’m not. I suppose I think cruelty is what gets forced to the surface under this pressure you’re talking about. It’s not a natural human trait.’

‘It is, though. Of course it is. It’s about power and hierarchies and maintaining your position. Just watch any playground.’

‘I thought we were short of time,’ I said, ducking the issue.

‘Don’t worry. We’ve got to wait here until half past eight.’

I had begun to understand that she really did have a plan in mind, that she was orchestrating a series of events designed to avert the exhumation at midnight. And that in her own thoroughgoing way, she was bringing me up to speed with what was going to happen.

‘So you went to the Talbots?’ I prompted.

‘Charles and Judith were there. I had a long talk with them, going over what they told us last weekend, and a lot more. I can’t tell you all of it now, but it was very interesting.’

‘Why did they agree to talk to you? What business was it of yours?’

‘I began with a grovelling apology for staying the night in the house with you, and telling the Watchetts that you’d been left the property. I guessed they had reasons for not wanting that particular fact to get out, and it turned out I was right. Anyway, that easily led into what I wanted to know.’

‘Which was?’

‘Oliver and Judith are very much in disagreement over the house, and whether or not to contest your inheriting it. Charles is on his mother’s side. Oliver…well, Oliver is an extremely important player in this game. We should have paid him more attention from the start.’

‘Do you think he killed Mr Maynard?’ I asked eagerly. ‘Something to do with old rivalries – her carrying on with the Ingram chap?’ I thought back to the argument in the pub. ‘Or something about that girl, Carrie, who’s such a mystery.’

‘Wait,’ she insisted. ‘I have to tell it to you in the right order.’

‘But what about Charles Talbot?’ I could not resist asking. ‘He didn’t look too happy just now.’ I thought again of the grooves in his face, suggesting inner torment as well as anger.

‘No. There’s some business between him and Helena Maynard, which I haven’t entirely fathomed.’

‘Business? Not an
affair
, surely? She’s his mother’s age, isn’t she? And I thought we’d decided it was Ingram, not Charles.’

‘We don’t know that for sure – it was only Oliver making a wild accusation. And she’s not so much older than Charles.’

‘Yes, she is. She must be. She went to school with Judith, remember.’

‘We haven’t time for this,’ Thea shook her head impatiently. ‘Let me tell it in my own way.’

She went on to describe her visit to the Watchetts, again ostensibly to apologise for offending them by sleeping in the cottage. ‘They weren’t so easy to mollify,’ she confessed. ‘She ranted about betrayal and loose morals.’

‘I hope you convinced her we didn’t do anything immoral.’

She laughed. ‘I didn’t have that much time to waste. It was easier just to let them believe what they liked, and get onto the important stuff.’

I groaned, thinking my reputation and marriage were actually fairly important to me.

‘Anyway, once I got Susan on her own, it all became very interesting. When she stopped to think, she wasn’t surprised that you’d been left the house – typical of Greta, she said, always trying to have the last word. She still rather likes you, apparently, in spite of everything.’

‘That was my first impression, when she came to the burial, but I thought she’d gone off me since then.’

‘And Greta’s choice of funeral was typical as well. Everybody says that. She’d have done it as much to upset the maximum number of people, as from any real concern for the environment or whatever.’

‘That can’t be true,’ I objected. ‘She really believed in ecological funerals and simple living. Look at that co-housing business. She must have joined them for strong personal reasons. She’s made the best provision she could to ensure that a natural burial ground be established here. Although,’ I added sadly, ‘if she didn’t own the field, it’s never going to happen, is it?’

‘She seemed to be vaguely aware of what I was talking about, but made no direct response.

‘She was a nice woman,’ she mumbled unhappily. ‘I wish I’d known her better.’

I nodded. ‘Have you seen young Jeremy again?’ I asked, from an automatic association.

She shook her head. ‘But I gather he’s back here now. Somehow or other, his mother persuaded him.’

‘Does she know he’s been at the co-housing place?’

‘No idea. Not relevant,’ she said, with a quick flip of her hand.

The clock on the dashboard was approaching eight, and I wondered how much more she had to disclose. I concentrated hard on the information she was imparting, trying not to interrupt or divert her from the thread she was following. I was still very far from grasping the final import, the logical conclusion of what she had discovered. Gradually, I found myself believing and, yes –
trusting
her. She seemed so clear and sure about it all. I began to feel hope and excitement instead of dread and despair.

‘But how did they rush through the demand for the exhumation so fast?’ I wondered at one point. ‘I’d have expected it to take weeks.’

She smiled, her face a strange shade of orange from the street lights. ‘Well, that’s where my influence with certain people came in handy. It helped that DI Basildon had come round to taking me seriously. That was mainly due to my friend Sonia Gladwin, actually. I called in one or two favours, as they say.’

I had an impression that she could have told me more – that her acquaintance with the police was even deeper and wider than I realised.

‘What a very tangled tale,’ I summarised, when she’d finished. ‘People lying about their ages, fighting over a house, neglecting their own children. And yet they all seem perfectly pleasant when you meet them.’

‘Right. I’ve learnt, from recent experience, that things that happened ages ago still rankle enough to make them do terrible things years later. People get stuck in certain positions, and never seem to be able to forgive or forget. And events from schooldays loom larger than most. It’s all so passionate and overwhelming when you’re sixteen.’

‘How on earth have you found all this out? It’s mind-boggling.’

‘Friends Reunited, for a start. And Facebook – that’s fantastic for linking people together. Everybody blithely reveals their entire past history for all the world to see. It makes me despair, usually, but for once it came in very handy. I think they’ve all been keeping in pretty close touch for years.’

‘But there are no huge secrets. For example, I assume Oliver really is the father of both Charles and Jeremy?’

‘Oh yes. Plus a daughter who has a degenerative disease and is in a care home.’

I had forgotten the invisible sister. ‘Ah, so that’s it,’ I said. ‘It sounds like a very sad story.’

I wondered how much of this was directly pertinent to our campaign. Surely Thea would know better than to waste precious minutes on idle gossip, and yet I couldn’t see where it was leading. ‘So?’ I asked.

‘So now I think I’ve built up the complete picture.’

‘And what happens next?’

‘We recruit an assistant,’ she laughed gaily. ‘And I think this must be him, right on time. Look – it’s half past eight.’

As if on cue, there was a rap on the driver’s side of the car, bringing Hepzie to her feet, with a few startled yaps. ‘OK, Heps, settle down,’ said Thea, opening the window. ‘Hello, Harry. What fantastic timekeeping!’

Chapter Twenty-Three

Harry was the elderly bearded bloke from the co-housing place, who had sat next to Thea at lunch. It took me some time to recognise him, and even longer to grasp that they had already started to hatch their devious plot over the soup on Saturday. I felt sidelined and even more betrayed. ‘Couldn’t I have helped?’ I whined. ‘If you’d explained it to me?’

‘Yes, I’m sure you could. But I wanted to keep it to myself for a bit. I’m sorry if that sounds bad, but there it is. I mean, I hardly know you really, do I?’

I swallowed. It felt to me as if we knew each other rather well – that we had meshed almost from the outset, easy together and on the same side. But it was true – we had not spent many hours in each other’s company. We had no real knowledge of how each other reacted under pressure – although I guessed that Thea had an idea that I might not be entirely reliable.

Harry was in the back seat with Hepzie and we were driving back to Broad Campden. Thea began to give instructions, like the top man in a bank robbery. The plan was bold and simple and terrifying. ‘They’re all in the same house, which is extremely handy,’ she said.

I found myself running through the story again, increasingly aware of the many gaps Thea had left in her reasoning. One major omission was Helena Maynard. I was still ignorant of how or whether she fitted into the picture, apart from speculation as to whether and with whom she had been unfaithful to her husband. But it was too late to ask any further questions, so I tried to concentrate on the tasks allotted to me by our leader, far from fully understanding precisely how everything was going to work.

The house was ablaze with light, upstairs and down. The Watchetts lived in a row of houses on the Chipping Campden side of the village, that looked as if they had once been owned by the council: solid, unimaginative, built to last, with good-sized gardens at the front, and no doubt also at the back.

Harry went first, while we waited in the car. He was to introduce himself as a close friend of Mrs Simmonds, from the co-housing group, come to express his regrets for not being at the funeral. He was to manifest total ignorance of the proposed exhumation, shock, horror and then a display of dawning understanding as he absorbed the idea that Greta might have been murdered. ‘Well,’ he would say, ‘I suppose I’m not entirely surprised, when I come to think about it – but from what I know of Greta’s life, it wouldn’t have been the undertaker who killed her. She had enemies far closer to home than that.’ This was designed to cause flurries of mutual suspicion amongst those present, and a heightened atmosphere.

‘Won’t the atmosphere be quite high already?’ I asked. ‘Under the circumstances.’

‘The higher the better,’ said Thea.

Harry had a scant fifteen minutes to achieve his objective, at which point Thea and I would enter the fray, claiming that we could not settle, knowing they all believed that I had killed their sister, aunt and friend. I would proclaim my innocence in a near hysterical mode – further heightening the atmosphere, hoped Thea. She would disclose her intimacy with senior members of the police force, and hint that she was aware of many aspects of Mr Maynard’s murder that had not been publicly revealed.