Fear in the Cotswolds (24 page)

Hepzibah could not understand why her mistress switched on the light at three in the morning, went downstairs to warm some milk, and then spent over an hour with the little things in the box by the bed. She knew she was banned from going near them, and was quite happy to obey. They smelt of people, now, and a hint of sheep from the stuff they were lying on, and besides, she had never quite got the taste for killing things. Huffily, she turned her back on the proceedings, and curled up tightly on top of the bed.

Thea dreamt of dogs with great sharp fangs, and a great herd of huge Hereford bullocks crowding
around her as she tried to prevent them from trampling on an unruly collection of kittens. A child was being crushed amongst them, too, but Thea had no way of reaching him. She woke with a powerful sense of helpless panic.

The rabbits had an early breakfast, at seven, the process taking a mere fifty minutes this time. All six were alive, but two seemed worryingly limp. The inexorable routine of feeds every four hours or so was already beginning to feel like an impossible burden. One website had suggested that solid food could be introduced at just over two weeks, which was a hopeful idea. There was nothing to be gathered outside in January, but lettuce, cabbage and carrot could be bought easily enough.

But her thoughts were mainly on the Newby family. Simon had taken over the parental reins, at last, but nothing else was resolved. Benjamin had been emphatic that he could not reveal his secret to his father, but had seemed relieved when Thea told him that she might be able to make things all right, at least as far as weighty secrets were concerned. She had repeatedly assured him that nothing was his fault, that things would sort themselves out without him having to do anything. He had smiled bravely and returned his attention to the telly as if the exchange between them had never happened.

Donkey, rabbits, Jimmy – they all had to
be seen to. With no time for coffee, Thea was outside attending to her duties, trying not to feel resentful. Lucy had paid her well to act as substitute, and she had no grounds for failing. True, it had been Lucy’s carelessness that led to the birth of the baby rabbits; Lucy’s dog that had killed Lucy’s doe. But it had been Thea who let the dog see the rabbit – something everybody knew was liable to lead to tragedy.

She was halfway across the donkey’s paddock before she saw him. A man was standing in the shadowy opening of the shed, his arm around the animal’s neck. A cold hand fingered Thea’s heart, her guts did their familiar spasmodic dance, and her throat went dry. There should not be anyone there. Childishly, she repeated this fact to herself, and remained on track to confront him. ‘Hey!’ she called, her voice much less strident than intended. ‘You shouldn’t be here.’

He faced her with a slow melancholy smile. ‘Oh, hello. Sorry. I came with some carrots for him. We’re old friends. Lucy knows I visit sometimes.’ He indicated the camera hanging round his neck. ‘He’s very photogenic.’

She let it go, reassured by his smile and the friendly attention he was giving the animal. ‘Did Simon ask you to help out with the boys?’ she asked him.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said carelessly. ‘But I won’t be
needed until lunchtime, when I’m to collect Nicky from nursery. I felt like a bit of fresh air, while it’s dry. They say it’ll rain later on.’ There was a flatness to him that reminded Thea of the woman, Philippa. The shock of a sudden death and its aftermath, that only seemed to escalate in the first few weeks.

Her mind was mainly on the baby rabbits, and Jessica’s promised visit the next day, with a few spare thoughts for Janina, Gladwin and little Ben. Tony Newby wasn’t even on the list. ‘Well, let me give him some hay and get on with my other jobs,’ she said. Should she be offering him a mug of coffee? Somehow she thought not.

‘OK. I’ll be off in a minute.’

She went back to the house, preparing herself for another bout of bunny feeding. Bunny – for the first time she made the meaningless link with the dead woman’s name. One of life’s small, silly coincidences that made you smile and wonder whether there might, after all, be some vast cosmic pattern to it all.

With no prompting, Gladwin turned up at eleven, bouncing down the track too fast and slewing the car to a stop. ‘I absolutely should not be here,’ she panted, ‘but I couldn’t resist. After all, this is the centre of the investigation – I can swing it with my conscience, just.’

‘You’re the second visitor of the day,’ said Thea, and recounted the odd discovery of Tony Newby in the donkey shed.

‘What time was it?’

‘Just before nine, I suppose. I was a bit slow getting going, after being up in the night with these little scamps.’

Gladwin went strangely still and thoughtful. ‘Seems peculiar,’ she said. ‘Do you mind if we go over there for a look?’

‘Of course not…but why?’

‘We need to find Mrs Newby’s mobile. It’s a key factor in the whole story. Of course, it’ll be in a skip or a river by now, but I suddenly got a bit of a hunch.’

‘You’ve been fixated on that donkey all along,’ Thea accused.

‘It’s not the donkey I’m thinking about,’ said the detective.

In the shed, Gladwin began running her hands along the top beam of the walls, where there was a cobwebby ledge. Thea watched her with growing scepticism. In the corner of the area where the hay was kept, where the donkey was barred from going, a plastic bag slumped innocuously. What was in there? she found herself wondering. It looked empty, crumpled and abandoned. A blue and white sack, made of the sturdy plastic designed to keep rodents out. When full, it had apparently
contained sheep nuts. She could just read the word ‘Ewe’ in black letters. ‘That wasn’t there before,’ she said.

‘What?’ Gladwin looked over her shoulder, her hand still reaching up to the ledge.

‘That feed bag. It wasn’t there before.’

In one fluid leap, Gladwin pounced, dragging the bag from its corner, and shaking out the crumpled sides. Then she reached inside.

She brought out a metal cylinder, which turned out to be a biscuit tin – one that had contained a stack of round cookies: the kind sold at Christmas by fancy food shops in Stow or Cirencester. She prised off the lid, and peered into the interior. With two fingers, she withdrew a rolled piece of paper.

‘It’s like a treasure hunt,’ said Thea daftly.

‘Listen to this,’ said Gladwin, in a small voice:
‘
Dear Tony…by the time you read this I’ll be
dead. You might guess the reason for it. That
dreadful woman has been at me again, worse
than ever, and I simply can’t take any more.
I’m afraid I actually hit her earlier today – 
quite hard, as it happens. She’ll recover. People
like her always do. But I’ve burnt my bridges
now. She’ll raise hell when she comes round.
So, Tony, I’m taking advantage of the snow. I’ll
walk over to you, and pop this through your
door. Then I’ll take some Scotch and finish
myself off with hypothermia. It won’t take
long. I’m rather looking forward to it. But I’m
not too keen on the damage the crows might
do to me, so would you be a sport and shift me
home again, after the event? Leave it till nine or
ten in the morning. Don’t try to save me, Tony.
That would be cruel. I’ll give you a clue – start
from Donk’s shed. Lucy’s dear Donk can be my
last living contact. Romantic fool that I am.

‘Thank you, Tony, for your understanding
and affection. I regret that I never responded.
Damaged goods, me. Very damaged. But not in
the way that vile woman said. They might believe
her, though…

‘Goodbye, my friend. Have a good life.

‘George.’

Thea said nothing, repeating the lines to herself, seeing the final scenes and her own part in them. How narrowly she had missed everything, how close she had come to saving George, and catching Tony as he moved the body.

Gladwin looked at her, and then said, ‘There’s another line at the bottom, in a different pen. Different writing. It says, “I love you, George”.’

‘So that’s it then, is it? Tony found the letter on Friday morning, went to George’s house, found Bunny’s body, chucked her in the ditch and then went for George. But why dispose of Bunny like
that? And take her phone – I assume that must have been him?’

‘Well, it’s not here, but yes, I think we can make that assumption. But Thea… George didn’t kill Bunny.’

‘What?’

‘She had a blow to the head which didn’t kill her. The pathologist had his doubts, but had to do tests first. Now he says she was alive for several hours, and was then choked to death. Possibly smothered. Tony didn’t find her dead – he deliberately killed her.’

Thea’s eyes widened. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

‘Indeed.’

‘It’s so unfair, though, don’t you think? Two men who seem altogether decent, both driven to the end of their tether by a thoroughly nasty woman.’

‘Since when was anything fair?’ said Gladwin.

Saturday afternoon was spent with the animals, as usual, everything imbued with a sense of sadness and futility. Gladwin had gone off with her Exhibit A to arrest Tony Newby, in the process further compounding poor Simon’s problems. Outside it was drizzling, in that maddening English fashion which was neither one thing nor another.

Then Lucy’s phone rang, and Thea braced herself to explain yet again that no, there was nobody here who could fix their computer.

‘Thea?’ came a familiar voice, crystal clear. ‘It’s me, Janina.’

‘Hey! Hello. Did you get home all right?’

‘Oh yes. In spite of twenty centimetres of snow. In Bulgaria, snow is not a problem.’

‘Right. And how’s your mother?’

‘She is not well, but quite cheerful. Of course, her treatment will cost us all our money – everything I earned in England will be gone in a week. My father has been trying to borrow from his friends, but nobody has much.’

‘That’s awful.’

‘Yes. Many things are awful. How are Simon and the boys?’

‘A lot’s happened since yesterday,’ she began tentatively. ‘They know who killed Bunny now. They arrested him a little while ago.’

‘Not Simon?’ The voice was hollow with dread. ‘Please not Simon.’

‘No, not Simon. It was Tony. Because Bunny was being so rotten to George. I expect you knew about that?’

‘Poor George. She was afraid of him, you see. The way he looked at her. He could not hide what he thought.’

‘What
did
he think?’

‘That she was a fool. That she did not deserve those sweet boys. That she could do nothing but harm in everything she touched.’

‘And you thought the same, didn’t you? You said so, the first time I met you.’

‘We all did. Tony, too. And even Ben was
beginning to see that she was not worth very much.’

‘How ghastly for
her
,’ said Thea. ‘Don’t you see that? You all pushed her into a corner, and made her worse. She had to find a scapegoat, to make her feel better.’

‘Yes, I understand it now. I understand why George might take the force of her feelings. But I don’t see why Tony—’

‘Because he loved George, and hated what she was doing to him. And it got a bit more complicated than that, at the end. She made very specific accusations.’

‘Oh, I understand. That came from the Philippa woman, her friend who left her children, and then blamed everyone else for her own behaviour. She is the one who first talked about paedophiles. She made Bunny see everything even more darkly.’

‘It’s all so
sad
,’ said Thea.

‘Yes,’ agreed Janina, speaking from snowy impoverished Bulgaria. ‘Yes, everything is sad.’

Sad, but no longer frightening, Thea realised, at the end of the day. The sensations of fear had subsided so gradually that she did not notice they’d gone until bedtime. When she got up on Sunday, the baby rabbits were all still alive, and had begun to nibble tentatively at the shreds of cabbage she gave them. Outside, the sun was
shining, and the temperature had risen to a heady five degrees. Around the edges of Jimmy’s toilet patch there were daffodil spikes poking a full four inches above the ground. Under an apple tree at the end of the garden a semicircle of snowdrops had produced fat buds as if by magic. Tony Newby would be receiving fair treatment at the hands of the police, encouraged to disclose the full truth of what had happened over that snowy night. Simon’s children would be given as much cherishing as was humanly possible, women emerging from amongst family and friends – and perhaps a new nanny as loving as Janina had been. Like the little rabbits, they would survive and grow, which was at least a start.

All of which left her with her own life to consider. Where would she go next? Would she find the courage to embark on a fresh house-sitting commission, or had this wintry experience deterred her from ever doing it again? She thought back over the places she had been – Blockley, with its tilted streets and ancient field systems; Frampton Mansell, with its historic canal and mysterious woods – places she would never have got to know without the house-sitting work. But there were no fresh jobs in her diary – she had advertised during November, but nothing had come of it. People were cutting back
on holidays, and the cost of a sitter on top of the other expenses was less affordable now that money was tight. Perhaps, after all, she would find herself a proper job, become self-reliant and in the process acquire something closer to normality in the eyes of people like Old Kate.

Jessica and her mysterious ‘friend’ were due to arrive soon. The prospect of this diversion was entirely welcome. She could lose her worries in the maternal role for a while, taking them to lunch and encouraging them to talk about their own concerns.

The car came warily down the track, as if unsure whether it had taken the right turning. Hepzie gave her single
someone’s coming
bark, and went to the door. Thea let her out, following slowly, and watched as her daughter drew in beside her own car. From the passenger side, a man emerged, standing uncertainly, looking over the car roof at Thea.

He was tall, with broad shoulders. And he was black. When he smiled, his teeth shone bright against the dark skin. ‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Mum, this is Paul. He’s a detective sergeant.’

‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Thea, with a smile. ‘Come in and have some coffee.’