Fear in the Cotswolds (14 page)

She carried him back to his house, which was after all only two or three hundred yards away. But he had crossed a road, albeit a very little-used one, and got inside the church through the heavy oak door. He gave her no enlightenment as to where he was meant to be and how he had evaded the adults who should have been looking after him.

The house was deserted, and Thea assumed that Janina and perhaps Simon were, after all, combing the area in search of the missing child. The front door was closed but not locked, and she took him inside, anxious to get him warmed up. He was still shivering, and when she settled
him into a corner of a big red sofa, he looked horribly pale and drawn. The room was warm and tidy as if waiting for visitors to arrive.

‘I need to wee,’ said Nicky suddenly, and rolled off the sofa. He headed for a door next to the kitchen, and Thea let him go, trying to remember the usual level of competency of a four-year-old in that department. Her sister’s youngest was eight, and it didn’t seem too long ago that he had regularly wet his pants in times of excitement. She considered herself lucky that this one had waited until she put him down, rather than let go while still in her arms.

She heard the flushing of the loo, and then the pale child returned slowly, a frown on his face. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.

‘Thea,’ she told him. ‘I came to your party, remember?’

‘Oh yes,’ he nodded, with no sign of recognition. It was impossible to guess what was going on inside the little head, but it was easy to believe that events since Saturday had completely obliterated all memory of his birthday. ‘You came when George was dead.’

Even harder to grasp just what a four-year-old understood of death. They played games about killing on the computer, watched it in TV cartoons, heard references to dead animals and perhaps people. But to see an actual dead
person at that age was beyond the realms of comprehension, in this society at this time. Fears about the damage it would do must run riot amongst his family and teachers. Why, then, had he apparently been abandoned to lose himself in a church? How in the world could such a thing have happened?

‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘And you’ve been looking for him today, have you?’

‘Janina said he would go to the church,’ he nodded.

She must have meant his funeral, Thea supposed. The au pair had presumably been trying to explain the process, in an effort to reassure and inform. People these days believed it was important to keep children abreast of events, not to exclude them and lie to them. Thea approved of this, herself, but in this instance she suspected that Janina had gone too far. Or had failed to anticipate the effect of her explanations. And what, if anything, had Nicky been told about his mother?

She began to feel awkward in her role as rescuer, making free with someone else’s house, and in sole charge of a traumatised little boy. She should summon somebody – especially if there was in fact a desperate search party out there looking for Nicky. But the only call she could think to make was to the police, and that
seemed ill-advised, until she knew more. If Nicky had not been reported lost, then there might be repercussions for those who had allowed him to wander away unnoticed. It would be doing Simon no favours to add this charge of neglect to his other worries.

But as she sat beside the child, having found him a sweatshirt and made him a drink of warm milk in the microwave, she began to wonder about Simon. What father would be so careless, whatever the circumstances? She thought about her own father, always so mindful of his children’s welfare, and Carl, who had devoted himself to Jessica when she was Nicky’s age, taking her for long country walks and carrying her home when she was too exhausted to move another step. She might have heard stories of men who forgot to collect their kids from school, or left them for hours in a car – but she had never experienced one of them at first hand.

After half an hour, she knew she had to make a move. Her dog would be restless, she herself was getting hungry, and Nicky was in obvious need of a familiar pair of arms around him. She had switched on the TV and they were watching something mindless as a distraction, when the doorbell rang.

Carefully, with her heart thumping nervously, Thea went to answer it. A woman she recognised
stood there, with a small girl at her side. ‘Dorothy!’ Thea remembered. ‘Aren’t you Dorothy?’ The argumentative child from the party – one of Nicky’s little friends. It explained nothing, but she was very glad indeed to see them.

‘Have you got Nicky?’ the woman burst out, before Thea had finished addressing the little girl. ‘He hasn’t been at nursery all morning. Bernard was supposed to collect him.’ She grimaced with that familiar look of wives who found themselves saddled with unreliable men.

‘Yes,’ said Thea shortly. ‘But there’s nobody else here.’

‘Thank God for that.’

‘I
told
you, Babs,’ said Dorothy. She looked at Thea, woman to woman. ‘Daddy forgot all about it. He doesn’t listen, you see.’

Dorothy was at least six – old enough to be in school. But a closer inspection revealed a crusty nose and red eyes indicative of a nasty cold.

‘Can I have a quick look at him, do you think?’ asked Barbara. ‘I was
aghast
when I realised what must have happened. I would have sent Bernard to abase himself, but what’s the point. He’s had Philippa on the phone to him half the morning, God help us, so he’s in no state to deal with nursery matters.’

‘Come in, then,’ said Thea, with an exaggerated
version of the odd pang she always had when making free with other people’s homes.

Nicky was still on the sofa, his eyelids flickering as he dozed off to sleep. Barbara took one look at him and retreated back to the hall, Dorothy following her.

‘I really am terribly sorry. Where’s the au pair? Have you been here with him all morning?’

‘I found him in the church,’ said Thea brutally. She gave a brief account of events, experiencing afresh the shocked alarm at finding the small child all alone in the cold. ‘Heaven knows what would have happened if I hadn’t gone in there. I’m not sure he could have opened the door again by himself. He might have been in there for
days
.’

Barbara shuddered. ‘Let’s hope someone would have thought to look for him there, once they realised he was missing. And where
is
that girl?’

‘I have no idea. I suppose I’ll have to stay here until somebody comes back. I assume Ben’s at school as normal?’ She still had no clear idea of what the original plan had been that day, or how Bernard had so comprehensively failed to play his part in it.

Barbara shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I’ve been concentrating on Nicky. Bernard took Wilf to nursery this morning, and apparently should have taken Nicky as well. But he got distracted
somehow, so I only heard about it later. Then he had to go and see someone, so I was left with madam here.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘It never occurred to me that kids could be so
complicated
,’ she complained. ‘I thought I’d escaped all that business. All my own fault, I know, for falling for the silly old sod. Terrible what a moment of weakness can lead to.’

Thea laughed, liking Barbara more by the minute. ‘I expect there are compensations,’ she said, eyeing the self-possessed Dorothy.

‘Oh, Dottie and I get along marvellously. She makes everything worthwhile.’
And she calls you
Babs
, Thea thought. Somehow that did suggest a good relationship.

‘You do seem rather alike,’ she observed, wondering about the absent Philippa.

‘So Bernard says. Well, we’ll go, if that’s all right. Dottie’s not supposed to be out, by rights. She’s got a stinking cold.’

At the door, Barbara turned back, and said in a low voice, ‘You have heard what happened to his mother, I assume?’

‘Mmm,’ Thea nodded briefly, reluctant to speak about Bunny in front of the little girl. ‘I assume that’s what all this is about. Simon and Janina must be – I don’t know, helping with investigations, or something.’

Barbara widened her eyes. ‘Appalling thing
to happen. That’s what Philippa was on about to Bernard, apparently. Ranting about nowhere being safe, and were we looking after her children properly. Bloody nerve! If she cared all that much, she’d look after them herself.’

This was definitely not for Dorothy’s ears, and Thea put a quick stop to it by ushering her visitors out to their car, and closing the door on them. After they’d gone, she arranged a rug over the sleeping Nicky, and briefly considered running back to the car to rescue her dog. How stupid of me, she thought, not to ask Barbara to at least do that for me. As it was, she had no way of knowing how long she might have to stay in post – minding a little boy, when she was being paid to mind a dog and a donkey and a barn.

It was clear that somebody had dropped poor Nicky in the process of handing him from one person to another earlier that morning. Had he been sent outside to wait for his lift, all on his own? Why had he not been wearing a coat, if so? And where on earth
was
Janina?

Part of her wanted to punish the useless Bernard for sheer criminal incompetence, but a larger part simply wanted to forget all about him, so she could concentrate on Nicky.

She sat down on the sofa with Nicky and tried to think. The apparent neglect of the child was much less culpable than she had first thought.
Bernard had been trusted to do as asked, and if Nicky had been allowed to stand by himself at his own front door for a few minutes, that was hardly a crime. When the man never arrived, the little boy had walked up to the church, and stayed there all morning. At some point he had shed his coat, but no real harm had come to him. Janina or Simon had been unavoidably delayed somewhere, and would have assumed that Nicky would be taken home with Dorothy and given some lunch and kept safe until collected. Sorted!

At least…a scenario that would have made perfect sense fifty years ago was no longer so convincing in an age where children were obsessively supervised for every second of their lives; where everybody phoned everybody else on a mobile phone, to impart the vital information that they had just walked from the kitchen to the living room, that one person had eaten a slice of bread and the other was wearing a bright blue jumper. None of this had happened that morning, and it seemed inadequate to simply remind herself that Janina was Bulgarian and maybe they did things differently there.

Thea herself would have dearly loved to make some phone calls that would resolve everything, but she could think of no one to call apart from DS Gladwin, and that seemed excessive. She considered taking Nicky with her back to Lucy’s
Barn, and might have done if he’d been awake. As it was, it seemed unkind to disturb him, or to transport him while asleep and then let him wake in a strange place with a comparatively strange person. And soon there would be the additional problem of his older brother. School would be finishing in a couple of hours, and there would be another little boy to worry about.

Perhaps she could phone the school. Simon and Tony had been there the day before, discussing how the news of his mother’s death might affect Benjamin. It had left an impression of a sensible caring establishment that might have good advice to offer. And if this was a remotely normal family, there would be a piece of paper somewhere prominent with the phone number on it. She got up and went into the kitchen. There, as hoped, was a small crowded noticeboard above the telephone, boasting a sheet with Northleach Primary School’s letterhead. Without pausing to rehearse what she would say, Thea lifted the receiver.

A friendly sounding woman responded, and Thea found herself unable to form a lucid sentence. ‘Oh, yes, hello,’ she stammered. ‘My name is Thea Osborne, and I’m phoning about a little boy called Benjamin. He’s six. I’m afraid I can’t remember his surname.’ Then her eye caught another piece of paper on the board, addressed to a Mr S Newby. ‘Oh, I think it’s Newby. Yes, yes,
Newby. Sorry – I’ve only met them recently.’

‘Ben Newby…yes,’ said the woman carefully. ‘What about him?’

‘Well, you know about his mother being killed, of course.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘Right. Anyway, I’m here at the house with his brother. There’s nobody else here. I need to go soon, actually. It all happened by accident – Nicky’s lift didn’t come to take him to nursery, so he went up to the church, and I found him. I need to contact his father or the au pair.’

The woman was admirably calm, given the stream of irrelevant information she had just been treated to. ‘Janina usually collects Ben. We have no note to say today will be different.’

‘Good. That’s a relief. But I think you might find she doesn’t appear. What would you do then?’

‘Phone Mr Newby, I suppose.’

‘Yes! So do you think you could phone him now, and tell him there’s a problem with Nicky? I’m not sure you can rely on Janina.’

‘All right, Mrs…um…Osborne. Thank you.’ The wariness was palpable, and Thea could hardly blame the woman for it. The murder of the mother of one of her charges had to be considerably outside her comfort zone.

Thea felt little better afterwards. The question of Janina loomed largest in her mind. Had
the girl simply bolted at the news of Bunny’s murder? Had the involvement of the police scared her away, for complicated reasons of her own? Perhaps she was working illegally, or in possession of hard drugs, or simply scared of the forces of the law. And yet she had seemed unfazed by the earlier attentions devoted to the death of George, Thea remembered. Hadn’t Janina simply stood by, seemingly quite relaxed? All of which suggested rather insistently that the Bulgarian girl might just have been responsible for the death of her employer.

It was half past one, and she was hungry. Both the dogs under her care would be needing her. She went to the front door and listened. Yes…Hepzie was yapping, up in the car. It was more than Thea could manage to leave her there any longer, and taking great care not to lock herself out, she trotted quickly up to the church parking area and threw open the car door. The spaniel climbed out with dignity, ignoring the cold water underfoot. She went to a patch of grass and relieved herself, as if she’d been confined for twenty hours, not one and a half.