Deception in the Cotswolds (21 page)

‘We had no idea. I never read the thing, just taking it for granted it would come to me and Silas. With something for Edwina. She’s not even mentioned.’

‘That’ll be why she’s sick,’ said Toby, with a hollow laugh. ‘Sick as a parrot, most likely.’

Matthew echoed the laugh. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Serves her right for not moving in and doing the decent thing. Leaving the poor old bugger fending for himself like that, she should be ashamed.’

A silence followed, during which Jemima flushed and Toby stared into his empty beer bottle, twisting it in his hands. Thea wanted to make some comment on Jemima’s faithful visits to her father, when she had so many other claims on her time. Even Toby had appeared to be more attentive than the average
son-in-law
. Jemima spoke first.

‘Edwina did her best, Matt. You’re both being unfair on her. Dad would never have let her go and live with him. There was nowhere near enough
space
.’

‘I suppose his wife is the official next of kin,’ said Thea. ‘He would want to be sure she was well looked after.’

‘At least it comes to you when she’s gone,’ said Matthew. ‘And you have control of it now. It’s much the same thing, if you ask me.’

Jemima rolled her eyes. ‘I don’t think so. If she lives another ten years, there won’t be a penny of it left.’

Toby kept his gaze on the bottle in his hands. ‘She won’t, though,’ he muttered. ‘You know she won’t.’

‘She might if she’s moved to some palatial home that tends to her every need. There’s nothing much wrong with her physically.’

‘There is, though,’ Toby insisted. ‘You don’t go to see her, remember. Not like me.’

The Hobsons exchanged a long questioning glance. ‘They would have told us if she was ill,’ said Jemima.

‘It’s not something easy like that. It’s not cancer or angina.’

‘So what is it?’

Toby’s hands twisted together, the bottle abandoned. ‘Go and see for yourself. She’s not eating, for a start. She’s miserable and scared. She won’t be any better in a new place, either. Worse, if anything. Donny was daft to think money would make her any better.’

‘Did he think that, though?’ Thea asked slowly. ‘Or was he just making a point?’ She looked at Jemima, trying not to seem accusing.

‘Point? What point?’

‘Something about being looked after, maybe. If he felt he wasn’t being properly cared for, he thought at least he could make sure his wife didn’t miss out.’

She wasn’t prepared for the abrupt flare of rage from Jemima’s husband. ‘
Didn’t miss out
?
’ he repeated furiously. ‘What the hell do you know about it, Miss Interfering House-sitter? Mimm goes over there practically every bloody day, washing his sheets and leaving him everything he needs to eat, even when she’s got a thousand other things to do. She spoilt him rotten. What a damned stupid, mean-spirited thing to say.’ He turned from her in disgust, and she got shakily to her feet.

‘You’re absolutely right,’ she said, the words emerging jerkily from a tight throat. ‘I don’t know what I was thinking of. I didn’t mean it to sound the way it did. I’m terribly sorry.’ She looked at Toby, half hoping he would come to her rescue. ‘I’d better go.’

Nobody tried to stop her. She struggled to keep her head high as she went back to her car, all the while knowing she had been rude and hurtful. She was tempted to see the whole episode as Toby’s fault: he had paved the way for her, raising the question of just how well the older generation were being looked after. But Jemima had obviously been doing her best, and to suggest otherwise was wrong. She, Thea, had been wrong, whichever way you looked at it. Her words had emerged thoughtlessly and had been badly chosen. She had not meant to hurt anybody, but had not taken
enough care to ensure she didn’t. The family were still suffering from the shock of Donny’s death, still vulnerable to any suggestion of neglect or culpability. Despite the fact that she had only been trying to see things from Donny’s viewpoint, she had been grossly insensitive. Aware of the teenagers watching the whole episode with mute fascination, she got back in her car and drove back to Cranham.

At least she
tried
to drive back to Cranham. At some point she turned the wrong way, finding herself in the middle of Painswick, having failed to locate a small right turn in the twilight. Crossly she forced her attention onto the geography of the area, visualising how the various villages sat in relation to each other. Cranham was behind her, more or less. If she turned right and right again, she’d get there eventually. The road signs weren’t bad, on the whole. She’d been lost like this before, and had learnt not to charge heedlessly on, getting further and further away from where she wanted to be.

The right turn took her along a rising street of handsome old buildings to which she gave little attention. Lights were on in people’s front rooms, the curtains mostly still open, and she passed them feeling very much an outsider. She had no welcoming lights waiting for her back at Hollywell. Only a cellar full of geckoes who had no interest in the lives of human beings. And, of course, the dog. Hepzibah would be on Harriet’s best sofa, curled up trustingly, waiting for
the return of her mistress. Without her, Thea might have simply driven at random, hundreds of miles in a meandering excursion of England, easily reaching places like Nottingham and Stoke and Derby, if she kept on going, working off the bitter thoughts of
self-dislike
that filled her head.

Instead she concentrated, and found a sign mentioning Sheepscombe, which led in turn to a familiar approach to Cranham. The village hall welcomed her like a squat little friend, the common was still there, the hidden road to the Lodge and the drive up to the Manor were all just as before.

‘What a day!’ she exclaimed to the dog, which flew at her with absolute joy the moment she opened the front door. ‘What a bloody day it’s been.’

As soon as she opened her eyes, she knew that Sunday was going to be cloudless, hot and beautiful. It was June, and a high-pressure system had condescended to pay a visit for a change. Where in January this had led to hard frosts and icy roads, five months later it brought the sunshine that every sane person craved.

Drew was coming, she remembered, but not until she had enjoyed the hospitality of the Ferrier family – not an entirely appealing prospect after the previous evening. Who could guarantee that she would not alienate those people as well with some reckless remark? She couldn’t trust herself to say the right thing if they got onto the subject of Donny Davis. She had plunged too deeply into the matter of his death, and was starting to feel a real urgency to understand precisely what had happened to him. She had witnessed
too much, carelessly allowing herself to be present for too many crucial junctures, the discovery of his body being the main one, of course.

With every passing month, Sunday became less and less of a special day. It was still a surprise that people had no resistance to being asked to work on a Sunday just the same as any other day. Jessica had recently mentioned that a man had come to install her new Sky TV paraphernalia at 8.30 on a Sunday morning. You could phone an electrician or a plumber any day of the week now, as if they were all equal. Shops were open, call centres were manned, and nobody got a proper guaranteed rest.

Even Drew, she supposed, had to be on call every hour of every day. She had no very clear idea of just how he managed it, or how urgently he might be needed, but she had gained an impression of a man who could never fully relax, when she had first met him. At any moment, his phone was liable to go off and summon him to switch into undertaker mode, without warning.

So when a car drove up to the Manor at nine
forty-five
, she should not have been surprised to recognise DI Jeremy Higgins, who could hardly be exempt from Sunday working, either.

He approached her without speaking, searching her face intently. ‘Morning,’ she said, encouragingly. ‘What can I do for you?’

‘I hear you got into a bit of a disagreement, at the
Hobsons’ last night. So I came to find out what it was all about.’

She stared at him. Had there been CCTV cameras, with sound, linked to the Gloucester police station? Was one of the teenagers a police informer? Had Higgins himself been hiding under one of the tables?

‘How?’ she demanded.

It seemed her second guess was closest to the truth. ‘My daughter, Alice, is friendly with Helen Hobson, who Twittered all about it.’

The surprising thing was that Alice had proceeded to tell her father, surely. ‘You all moved very quickly,’ she said. ‘It was barely twelve hours ago.’

He brushed this aside. ‘So what happened?’

‘I thought you knew all about it.’

‘I exaggerated. Twitters are quite short. I think the exact words were:
Bad atmosphere at the Hobsons. Parents angry with visiting house-sitter woman. Fighting over Grandad Donny. Sick or what!’

Surprisingly succinct, thought Thea, who had yet to experience Twitter at first hand.

‘Well, it’s true, as far as it goes,’ she admitted. ‘I did make them angry.’

‘Can you tell me why?’

‘I didn’t
mean
to,’ she said childishly. ‘Toby was talking about Jemima’s mother, and I was just trying to see things from Donny’s point of view. I made it sound as if Jemima neglected him, but that wasn’t what I meant. I still feel awful about it. Obviously she
didn’t neglect him at all. But I think he wanted more from her. I think he really did feel he wasn’t being taken care of very well.’ She stopped herself, hearing the defensive note in her voice and fearing it might sound like whining.

Higgins thought about this. ‘You only saw him twice. You must be basing your opinions on very flimsy evidence.’

‘That’s true, but it did get quite intense, very quickly.’

‘From what people have told me, I got the distinct impression that he was fiercely independent. I thought the whole point was that he didn’t
want
anybody looking after him.’

She paused, aware of a contradiction. ‘That is true, up to a point, yes. But it was mainly hospitals he dreaded, and total dependency. It was all rather subtle, but I think he was a bit scared of Jemima, scared of asking too much and annoying her. She can be quite fierce. So can her husband. Actually, you know, I don’t think he wanted anything different from what everybody wants.’ It kept coming back to this, she realised.

‘Which is?’

‘To be in control of your own destiny, while at the same time feeling there are people who love you and who’d drop everything for you if necessary.’

‘Which Mrs Hobson would, I assume?’

‘If it really was necessary, of course. But I’m not
sure she’d be very gracious about it. She isn’t exactly
kind
.’

‘Ah – he wanted a
kind
person to be on permanent standby. I see.’

She shook her head gently, feeling exhausted by the effort of getting it right. ‘Everybody does,’ she repeated. ‘We all want that sort of guardian angel standing right behind us to watch over us.’

Higgins groaned dramatically. ‘Don’t get started on angels,’ he begged. ‘It’s all my girls ever talk about these days.’

‘Really? I thought it was vampires.’

He cast his eyes to the sky. ‘No,
no
. That’s so last year,’ he fluted, in a parody of a teenage daughter. Then he quickly switched back to serious mode. ‘I’m not sure where this is getting us.’ He smacked his hands together as if deciding to be yet more businesslike. ‘We still don’t know for sure whether this is a homicide enquiry.’

‘After all this time? Isn’t there a lot of pressure to just let it go, then? There has to be a deadline, surely?’

He shook his head reprovingly. ‘By no means. You ought to know that. It takes as long as it takes. The file stays open.’

‘But he has to be buried eventually. You can’t hold onto the body indefinitely.’

‘That’s a different matter. We’re releasing it tomorrow.’

‘And still no evidence of another person there when
he died? Even with all your forensics and DNAs and so forth? That must be conclusive in itself, I’d have thought.’

He took a long calming breath. ‘Thea – if I can call you that? – if you stop a minute to think about it, you’ll understand that when a person dies in his own bed, where he’s been visited by the same people over the past weeks and months, there will be traces of those people all over the room, without it having any sinister implications. Forensics is great for a lot of things, but in this instance, it isn’t worth bothering. Nobody thinks a total stranger broke in and killed him by taping a bag over his head.’

‘Which means it must have been Jemima or Edwina, in effect – if anybody, that is.’

He pursed his lips. ‘Plus two or three others, maybe. At least. He wasn’t short of people.’

She smiled. ‘He certainly made friends easily. I suppose Jemima’s children went to see him, and Toby, and probably little Tamsin. They all seem to have been fond of him, except—’ She stopped, mindful of her big mouth and the trouble it could cause.

‘Except …?’

‘Well, Thyrza and her son, Philippe. I don’t think either of them got on well with Donny. Philippe said some rather harsh things about him the first time I met him. I don’t expect he meant them. He’s nicer than I first thought. I’m invited there for lunch today,
actually,’ she added proudly, wanting him to see that
she
made friends easily as well.

‘Good,’ he said, with surprising emphasis. In a flash she was transported to Duntisbourne Abbots, two years earlier, when her brother-in-law had pulled strings to get her the house-sitting commission, knowing she might be useful to the police. Ever since then, she had nursed a secret suspicion that some of her experiences had been engineered behind her back, explaining the terrible things that happened, at least in part. She suppressed these thoughts as much as she could, preferring to believe in coincidence if possible. She embarked on each new job with the blithe hope that this time it would all be entirely normal and straightforward, but events somehow always conspired, even if the West Midlands police didn’t. If the people behaved, the dogs didn’t. Dogs had got her into a lot of trouble, one way and another.

‘I’m not going to spy for you,’ she said, with matching emphasis. ‘Not this time.’

He put up his hands, eyes wide. ‘Of course not,’ he said.

He only stayed a few more minutes after that, strolling into the lounge and admiring the wood panelling. ‘Nice place,’ he said. ‘She’s a lucky woman.’

‘I think she knows it. It’s very well cared for.’

‘She’ll have to find a new tenant for the Lodge now. She won’t like that.’

‘Donny must have hated renting, when he’d worked
all his life, and had his own house, and a pension. He must have assumed he was secure for life.’

‘And then his daughter’s illness happened. And his wife’s.’ He smiled, as if to say –
Look how efficient I’ve been in investigating his background.
‘They sold the family house to pay for all the medical stuff. Terrible luck.’

‘Maybe that’s why Harriet took him on. She felt bad about being so lucky herself.’

Higgins shrugged. ‘It’s possible,’ he said.

‘Donny’s left his collection of antique silver to be sold for Janet’s care – did you know? Funny, now I think of it, that he hadn’t sold it already, if she’s in such a bad way.’

‘Maybe he thought he might need it for himself,’ Higgins suggested, with a meaningful look.

Thea groaned. ‘Whatever he thought, he should have told poor old Jemima about it. He let her discover the contents of the will for herself, after he died. A bit mean of him, don’t you think?’

‘It’s my hunch he did tell her, or tried to, but she wouldn’t talk about it.’

She could have hugged him. ‘Yes!’ she whooped. ‘That’s exactly how it must have been. She would never let him talk about dying, or funerals or wills or anything. Seemed to think she was protecting him by being like that.’

‘It’s very common. More or less the norm, you might say.’

She blinked at him. ‘Don’t say that,’ she begged. ‘That would be awful.’

‘Why?’

‘It means everybody lives in fear and denial for most of the time. What a waste! What
dishonesty
!’

‘I must go,’ he said, already in the hall. ‘No time for philosophy just now. And you need to get ready for your lunch engagement.’

‘It’s not for ages yet.’ She sounded sulky, even to her own ears. A bit of philosophy would have been just the thing for a Sunday morning.

He would not be delayed, but as she followed him out to his car, he paused and said, ‘It’s not dishonest, you know. Not really. Didn’t somebody once say people can’t endure very much reality? That’s the truth of it. You shouldn’t judge.’

‘You sound just like Phil Hollis,’ she told him crossly. ‘But thanks for coming. It was kind of you – I think.’

He laughed softly and drove away.

Ten minutes later, Drew called her on her mobile. ‘Still on for this afternoon?’ he asked.

‘I am if you are. It’s a nice day for it. Where are you going – have you decided?’

‘It’s still under discussion. Do you have any fresh suggestions?’

‘Somebody told me about Painswick Beacon, near here, which might have more to offer, in a wild sort
of way. Bourton will be awfully touristy. I wondered whether we should meet there, say four o’clock? I don’t know how high it is. You might be a bit too tired for a steep climb. But they say the views are spectacular.’

‘I don’t know,’ he hesitated. ‘Kids aren’t too keen on views, in my experience. Isn’t there a place near you with a funny name – Prinknash, or something? Have you been there?’

‘No. It’s a Benedictine monastery, isn’t it? I expect they do have a café, but I doubt whether your children would find much of interest there. They pronounce it “Prinnash”, actually, just for the record. It’s practically on the doorstep here, but I don’t think it would fit the bill, from what I know of it.’ She was groping for everything she knew about the place, odd snippets gleaned from time to time.

Drew sounded disappointed. ‘We could have tea there and find somewhere for the kids to run about. I rather like monasteries.’

‘Well I don’t think I do, to be honest. I’d feel uncomfortable there, especially on a Sunday.’

‘Hmm. That’s a shame.’

She was doing it again, she realised with a sick feeling – riding carelessly over other people’s feelings. ‘I’m sorry, Drew,’ she said. ‘I’m being inconsiderate. We can go there if you really want to. Or stick to Plan A and go to Bourton-on-the-Water.’

‘No, no. You know best. Where else do you suggest?’

‘You could go to the wildlife park first, maybe? Furry animals never fail to amuse, after all. And then we can go and look at Painswick Beacon. Toby told me about it yesterday. It sounds great. It’s on the A46, just north of Painswick itself.’

‘OK, except I’ll have to go to Broad Campden at some point, I suppose. As cover.’

She felt a different chill go through her. ‘Cover?’ she repeated faintly.

‘For the tax man,’ he added. ‘I can claim back the cost of fuel, if it’s business-related.’

‘Oh.’ The suspicion, if that was what it was, slowly receded. ‘You’ll be doing a lot of driving, then. Can you fit it all in?’

‘I can if I set off right away. Assume the Beacon at four unless I phone you to change it. Is that all right?’

‘Absolutely fine,’ she said, wondering why she felt so heavy about it. She had been looking forward to it, eager to bring Drew up to date with all the local developments, but suddenly it felt doomed to embarrassment and complication. After all, Drew could not possibly be as pure and squeaky clean as she imagined him. And if he was, she herself was definitely not. Her flaws were becoming more and more evident to her: she was impulsive and insensitive and unworthy of Drew’s friendship. He was certainly decent and friendly, willing to give full attention to other people’s troubles, as well as sharing much of her outlook on the world. Quite how much they had in
common was only slowly dawning on her, forming a bond of friendship that she valued more highly every time she met him. But he was married, he had a fragile business that required most of his energy, and a person called Maggs who sounded like a kind of alter ego, welded to him in a fashion that Thea had not yet understood.