Fear in the Cotswolds (18 page)

‘At least they’re young enough to avoid the worst of the turmoil. I mean…I don’t suppose they’ll be taken to the funeral or anything of that sort.’

‘I don’t know.’ Thea’s mood had darkened again during this exchange, and her opinion of Lucy had similarly changed. She allowed an audible sigh to escape. ‘But don’t you worry about it. Your dog’s fine, and the baby rabbits
will be at their most adorable when you get back. Oh…one last thing.’

‘Yes?’

‘Why do you call your neighbour
Old
Kate? She’s not old at all.’

Lucy giggled. ‘Oh, that’s just my little joke. She’s a week older than me, you see. Nobody else uses it. You haven’t been calling her that, have you?’

‘Not to her face, obviously.’ But, yes, in my own head, she added silently. She felt disproportionately cross about the explanation, as if she’d been deliberately misled. ‘You and she are friends, then?’ she went on.

‘Not really. We began well, when I first got there and bought the barn off them, but we don’t have much in common, to be honest.’

‘Oh. Well, she’s been all right with me.’

Lucy seemed increasingly eager to curtail the call. ‘Just so long as the weather bucks up by the time I get back, I’ll be happy,’ she breezed. ‘I’m beginning to wish I’d signed up for two months, instead of one. Do you realise it’s almost halfway already?’

‘Yes,’ said Thea. ‘I did realise that.’

It had to be the time of year, she assumed, that caused the repeated bouts of self-analysis. That, and the hours of solitude, and the imminence
of her birthday. She found herself wondering just how nice a person she really was, and how other people perceived her. Only once or twice in her life had she experienced the blind terror that came with loss of regard from a social group. The first had been at school when she had objected to a collective decision to boycott one teacher’s lessons. She had stood alone, stubbornly solitary, and suffered agonies in the process. Some of her fellow pupils had never spoken to her again. The second had been when she and Carl had unwisely joined a local babysitting club, only to discover that there was a branch devoted to wife-swapping. Several of the husbands made no secret of their attraction to her, and she had turned deeply puritanical, telling an assembled group just what she thought of such practices. Pulling moral superiority was never a good idea, she had discovered, and again there had been frosty ostracism from all sides. Her stomach churned as she remembered how frightening it had been to stand alone. Carl had supported her, but he didn’t have to meet people in the shops and outside the school gates as she did.

The fear came from a mismatch between the person she knew herself to be, and the one other people thought they saw. It was like Bunny Newby, who had apparently seen herself as a successful businesswoman, adequate wife and even perhaps
an acceptable mother. Janina’s accusations had implied that her employer was too stupid and blind to understand what she really was. The air of frustration in the au pair surely arose from this failure to make Bunny understand the error of her ways. Not for the first time, Thea wished she had at least met the woman. Getting to know a person after they’d died was a futile exercise – and yet she could not prevent herself from trying.

She had spoken to four very different women that day. Only two of them had actually known Bunny, and they seemed in some sort of accord as to her essential character. But the people who knew her best – Simon and Janina – had actually told her very little. Was that because they had conspired between them to kill Bunny? The situation pointed strongly to that scenario; it was by far the most obvious solution to the investigation, and it seemed that the police were acting on that assumption. But then what about George Jewell? George who had killed himself, or at least allowed himself to die in the snow without a struggle. What had brought him to such a point?

It was time for bed at last, after a day that felt interminably long, looking back on it. The late TV weather forecast warned of abrupt falls in temperature, with resulting ice. All that melted
snow outside would freeze over and transform the world into a skating rink. Thea sighed and tried to dismiss images of her car sliding into ditches, and herself slithering across the yard, trying to carry water to the donkey.

Tomorrow would be Thursday, and Thursdays were often good. In the illogical way of it, there were still associations with a school timetable that offered all her favourite subjects. The memory came back trailing all the feelings of thirty years ago. Something about the calm organisation of it all had delighted her beyond expression. There had been double history after the morning break, which most pupils had found outrageous, but which Thea had loved. On Thursdays she had been able to spread herself, immersed in the attempt to transport herself back in time. History for her had always been the ultimate romance, the glimpses of events and people long gone like flashes of paradise or fairyland.

Tomorrow, then, she would seek to assist the admirable Gladwin in her investigations.

The forecast had been right, and the first thing that happened when she went out the next day was that she fell over. It was so close to the scene she had imagined the night before that she wondered for a moment whether she might be dreaming. But no – her wrist was hurting where she had landed on it, and she was definitely sitting on a hard concrete surface that was glazed with ice. Hepzie was nuzzling her in concern, while Jimmy, who had been on his way to his toilet patch, merely stood patiently waiting for instructions.

The slippery surface was worse than she had imagined. Ice coated almost everything in sight,
making progress even more difficult than it had been in the snow. ‘This is ridiculous,’ Thea muttered, as she scrambled to her feet, looking around for something to hang on to. The donkey would be waiting for his fodder, likewise the rabbits. She had no choice but to get on with it, sliding her feet over the ground as if wearing skates. Keeping her balance required great concentration, until she reached the paddock, where the winter grass broke up the ice and made things easier. Hepzie loyally accompanied her, not understanding the difficulty. So what if a foot slithered sideways every now and then?

To get the donkey fed and watered took at least as long as it had on the snowy days. The ground was hostile beneath her feet, frozen into uneven lumps and bumps that threatened to turn her ankle if she didn’t take care over every step. It was exhausting and annoying. This was not the life she had imagined for herself, even three years ago. Something had gone wrong somewhere, and she found herself getting cross at this realisation.

But then she went to see the rabbits and her mood changed. This twice-daily visit had become a small treat that she looked forward to more every time. The babies were now fully covered with hair, and she could see their colours clearly: mostly white with patches of bluey-grey, like their mother, but one a delicious
meld of black and brown and another that reminded her of butterscotch pudding – brown with hints of ginger. Their dense furry nest was slowly disintegrating as they became more active, making it possible to watch them without disturbance. There were even moments when Thea wondered if she could adopt one of them as her own – until she remembered that she was so often away that the poor thing would need a sitter itself, while she was sitting other people’s animals.

The cat was becoming increasingly friendly as the days passed. Initially very wary of the spaniel, it had kept mostly aloof on the upper surfaces of the furniture. But this morning it had followed Thea outside, and was delicately tiptoeing around the yard before disappearing into the field to the south. Gone for a bit of hunting, Thea supposed, admiring the independence of the creature.

By ten o’clock, she had finished her work, including a thorough clean of the kitchen. Her wrist was still sore from the fall, but it worked normally, and she chose to ignore it. Persistently, ever since she had got out of bed, her thoughts had been on George Jewell and Bunny Newby. She tested every imaginable connection between them that might have led to their deaths within, it seemed, a few hours of each other. They had lived in adjacent houses; George had been
friendly with Janina and the boys; and somebody had moved George’s body for reasons that remained exasperatingly obscure.

There were too many holes in the story for a thorough analysis. She had not been able to get a close view of how people reacted to the news of a murder, other than Simon and Tony’s appearance in Northleach. And, she remembered, Simon and Janina’s behaviour on Sunday when George had been found. She paused to rerun that scene, wondering for the first time at the relative calm the two had displayed. Had it been for the sake of the children, or had they in fact already known George was dead? Neither had shown any real sorrow – but she knew that this was often the case. Shock tended to obliterate everything else, for the first few hours. It was as if the truth had to work its way through several layers before it reached a nerve. And then, before that could happen, the news of Bunny’s murder must have overlaid all thought of George, especially for Simon.

She wished she knew where exactly Bunny had been found. It was unfair of Gladwin not to share the full facts with her, she felt, when she’d been acknowledged as an important element in the investigation. She knew that modern policing relied more and more heavily on forensics, tracing microscopic clues back to one database or another,
pinning down the killer by a relentless scientific process that took a lot of the guesswork out of the whole business. Soon the need for detectives would disappear completely, if the new generation of computer geeks had their way. But in George’s case at least, the forensics had to be ambivalent, if not completely useless. Evidence would have melted away along with the snow. Whoever had moved his body had done a fine job of confusing the whole case. George could have been very cleverly murdered, but if so, there was little chance of it ever being proved. But the killing of Bunny had not been especially clever, from the sound of it. Only the presence of the snow had concealed the body for two or three days, where it might otherwise have been found almost immediately. The killer had been lucky, then.

She missed Phil. He was the real gap in the story. If they had still been together, he would have shared the details with her, unable to resist her eager interest, content to allow her into the investigations. Without him, she was just a confused bystander, contributing nothing because she was restricted to the sidelines. And that was a waste. She was sure she could help in some way. Hadn’t she unearthed the detail about George taking the children to Old Kate’s farm? Wasn’t that immensely important in forging a link between the two victims?

Which left her with two options: either shut up, sit back and forget the whole thing – or find a way to get more involved. Obviously there was no contest. How else was she to get through another two weeks in this desolate place?

But how was she to do it? She thought back over earlier experiences, where she had marched boldly up to the door of suspected killers and confronted them with her suspicions. At least, she amended conscientiously, she had
sort
of
done that. Generally she had found more circumspect methods of persuading people to admit their guilt. More than once she had been completely wrong in her conclusions, anyway. She had even been tempted to help the guilty person to conceal the truth from the police, now and then. It was no light matter, after all – not a mere puzzle placed before her to while away the time. Murder carried with it a large dose of horror, despair, trauma and fear. It ought not to be something she relished – and yet a part of her responded in just that way. She had discovered a knack in herself which had more to do with an absence of squeamishness than any great desire for justice. And until she arrived in Hampnett, she had believed herself to be unusually fearless. Where most people would dive for cover and
block their ears, Thea Osborne had waded into the fray. But ever since that morning last week when she had seen the footprints in the snow, she had been undeniably frightened. From feeling apprehensive and nervous in the first moments in the isolated barn, she had progressed to real gut-wrenching fear. And once one thing had scared her, many others flooded to join it, until the churning in her insides had become almost constant. As soon as one fear had been tackled and allayed, another arose in its place. That too, she believed, was due to Phil. Phil not being there behind her, covering her back, folding her in his arms, laughing at her and listening to her – that made all the difference in the world.

She had made the acquaintance of two households: the Newbys, and Old Kate and her even older father. She tried to visualise her reception at each of these if she paid a social call that morning. The Newbys were in shock and grief at the loss of Bunny – a situation that might work in Thea’s favour if she arrived offering practical help and advice. But there was still the unpleasant reality that Janina and Simon might actually have been responsible for Bunny’s death. They would, if so, have to pretend to feel sorrow when they had actually got exactly what they wanted. Thea did not
wish to be at the receiving end of such deception and betrayal. She would make a rotten detective when it came to this particular family, because she
liked
them. And she hated the idea that the two remaining adults in the lives of Nicky and Benjamin might be incarcerated for a decade or more. Yet again, her bowels spasmed at the prospect of witnessing such complications that could only result in misery.

Kate and her father were busy. All day, every day, there was work to be done. The very briskness of it made Thea feel weak and useless. What would be her reception if she turned up again with no adequate pretext? It was not an appealing idea.

All of which left a blank, until she recalled Tony Newby, the photographer. He who had a cold and was self-employed and lived in Turkdean and might be susceptible to a visit from a friendly female bearing…bearing a basket of calves’ foot jelly and fresh figs under a red-chequered cloth. Not quite, but she might be able to construct an offering that would justify paying him a call. After all, his chill was in part her responsibility. She had called him out in the snow on Saturday morning, which was apparently the source of his illness. He’d looked as if he was catching a cold then, now she came to think of it.

She found ‘Newby, AJ’ in Lucy’s telephone
book, which gave the name of his house in Turkdean as ‘Forsythia Cottage’. Precise location could be left until later. She noted the telephone number and added it to the directory in her mobile. If she couldn’t immediately see the cottage when she got to Turkdean, she could phone him for directions then. How simple it was to find people, she mused, even in these paranoid times. There had been previous occasions when she had needed to pay calls on people involved in village conspiracies, without warning, and it had seldom presented any real difficulty.

She remembered being with her father on a drive to Leicestershire, when she had been six or seven. He had often taken just one of his children along for the ride when he had to go on one of his trips. The ostensible purpose had been work related – something wrong with a machine, he would say, vaguely, leaving nobody much the wiser. But this time, he also planned to pay a surprise call on a cousin he hadn’t seen for years.

The cousin’s name was Lancelot Jones, which helped considerably when it came to finding him – necessary because he had moved house and nobody had thought to keep a note of the new address. All they’d had to do was call in at the post office in the small town they remembered he had gone to, and within moments a full set of
instructions had been provided by the delighted woman behind the counter. No hesitation, no suspicions that Dad was a hit man or someone set on long-harboured revenge. Probably the presence of a small girl made a difference. In any case, Lancelot had been happy to see them, and gave them sandwiches with oily fish in them that Thea could never remember without feeling sick.

The Internet had replaced the post office in recent times, but with much the same levels of usefulness. Anybody called Lancelot Jones would almost certainly jump out, with email address, or even a landline phone number. People
wanted
to be found, on the whole – especially if they had a service to offer or something to sell.

And so she finally got herself there. Forsythia Cottage was readily located at the end of a short row of houses; small, neat and set back some way from the road. Without pausing to consider how intrusive her sudden appearance might seem, she walked up the path and rang the doorbell. It was almost eleven in the morning, on a Thursday, and most people would be at work. If Simon hadn’t mentioned that Tony was laid up with his chill, she might never have taken such a step.

But it turned out to be justified. The man she remembered from the main street of Northleach,
telling her that his sister-in-law had been murdered, was standing in the doorway, the door only partly open, wearing a red dressing gown. His feet were bare. ‘What do
you
want?’ he said, making no effort to conceal his awareness of who she was and where he had seen her before.

‘I heard you were poorly, so I came to see whether I could do anything for you.’ It remained an oddly Victorian notion, even now she was here. ‘I would have brought you some calves’ foot jelly, if I’d known where to find it.’

He did not laugh, or even smile. ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘What am I to you?’

‘A distraction,’ she flashed back.

Still no smile, but he did roll his eyes in an exaggerated way. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well I guess I’ll have to let you in.’

The interior of the house was bare of any superfluous decoration. Unlike most dwellings, it seemed larger on the outside than the inside. A main living room evidently served for eating, relaxing and working. Thea sought in vain for displays of the photographer’s work. The only area of untidiness was a large computer desk with an expensive-looking A3 printer standing next to it. Catalogues, packs of paper, ink cartridges and several cables formed a small pool of chaos in an otherwise pristine room.

‘I’m not especially ill,’ he said, as he offered
her a place on a cream-coloured two-seater sofa. ‘I just didn’t think I should go out again in the cold for another day or so. I’m working.’

‘Any more police commissions?’

He went very still, and looked away. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not doing that any more.’

‘I don’t blame you,’ she assured him. ‘Not when you might have to take pictures of your own dead sister-in-law.’

‘They wouldn’t have let me, anyway. I’m too closely related.’

‘Oh.’ Of course, he was effectively part of the Newby household. Hadn’t he been taking care of his wretched brother when the news of Bunny’s death had emerged? Hadn’t she discussed him with Simon? And yet, all along she’d imagined him as detached, on the outside of the intimate circle of the bereaved. This had to be because her first encounter with him had been as a member of a police team – she associated him more with Gladwin and Phil than with the murder victim.