Fear in the Cotswolds (9 page)

Again the same question arose – wasn’t it
impossibly risky to take a dead man into the centre of the village? Perhaps, she thought doubtfully, she was merely following the tracks of an enterprising wood collector. Someone who had gone to the clump of trees to gather dead boughs and take them home for the open fire.

But she carried on with her quest, following the parallel lines in an almost hypnotic state of mind. Her nose was cold, and even through her gloves her fingers had gone numb. Her legs felt heavy, the muscles down the back of her calves complaining at the weight of her boots and the clogging resistance of the snow.

And then she was onto a paved road, with well-tended hedges on both sides, signs of a few walkers and animals under her weary feet. The snow was still very evident, but there were signs that a car had turned around on the spot where she stood. It was a cul-de-sac, with a scattering of houses on either side. But it was not until she saw the church tower directly ahead that she understood that she had emerged into the very heart of Hampnett.

She walked on a few yards, still following the marks of the sledge. Abruptly, she found herself beside a small opening to the left, a little gate standing open, revealing a virgin patch of garden in front of a very small cottage. There, miraculously, were the sledge tracks again, with
the footprints between them, heading right up to the front door along a pathway between two areas of garden.

It must have been somebody scrumping firewood, then, she thought with a pang of disappointment. Nothing to do with the dead man, after all. She was no further forward, and had just wasted a lot of time getting cold and lost for no good cause.

But then she noticed the door was ajar, which seemed strange in this security-conscious time and place. And the sledge was nowhere to be seen. And she could hear voices that sounded for all the world like young children.

Cautiously, she approached the little house, listening intently. She pushed the door wider and went in, transfixed by the scene in front of her in the shadowy room.

There was a jumble of humanity on the floor which took a few moments to distinguish. A body was on its back, legs drawn up, hands clutched in front of its chest. Two smaller people knelt on either side of it, and Thea slowly recognised Benjamin and Nicholas. Then she saw a straggly beard, and narrow shoulders, and made two distinct deductions. This was the body she had seen in the field, and the body was of the man she had met in the road, over a week before.

‘What happened?’ she cried, in a state of appalled surprise.

The boys looked at her as if an angel had
arrived to save and terrify them. ‘It’s George,’ said Nicky. ‘He’s frozen dead.’ The older boy simply stared at the lifeless face, his mouth open, his skin a greenish white.

Thea approached the tableau gently, aware of a host of conflicting imperatives. ‘Where’s Janina?’ she asked, desperate at the idea that these young children had discovered a body all on their own.

To the boys this was entirely irrelevant. ‘It’s
George
,’ Nicky repeated, with the exasperation of a child being wilfully misunderstood by a stupid adult.

It unquestionably was the same man. Thea had established that in the first glances. The beard, the narrow shoulders and long legs were all entirely familiar.

‘You two have to go home, right away,’ she said with gentle authority. ‘I’m going to telephone the police and they’ll take him away. Has your mum come home yet?’

Benjamin made no move from where he knelt. His mouth was working, but no words came out. In contrast, the younger boy was hyperactive, jumping up and trotting to the door, turning back and jigging on the threshold.

‘Ben?’ Thea coaxed. ‘Get up now. I need to take you home.’

Not until she laid a hand on his shoulder did
he move, and then it was more of a flinch than a genuine response.

‘Where’s Janina?’ she asked again.

‘Gone for a walk,’ said Nicky.

‘And Daddy?’

‘He’s on the phone.’

It seemed futile to enquire again after their mother. If she had indeed returned, then wouldn’t she have been with her children, after so many days of absence?

‘OK. Well, we have to go – now.’

‘Is he…? Will he…?’ Ben’s cracked voice emerged in a whisper.

‘He’s dead, Ben,’ said Thea. ‘He’ll have to be taken away. He won’t get up again.’

‘He won’t ever talk, will he?’

‘No. He’s gone for ever.’

‘Has
Mummy
gone for ever as well?’ asked Nicky, still jiggling.

‘No, of course not. Maybe that’s who Daddy’s talking to on the phone. Let’s go and see, shall we?’

She held out a hand to each, and slowly Ben got to his feet, a deep frown marking his brow. ‘You don’t know,’ he said. ‘You don’t know where Mummy is.’

‘That’s true. But I’m sure she’ll be back any time now.’

‘Yes,’ said Nicky confidently. ‘Yes, she will.’

Ben said nothing.

It turned out that the boys’ house was literally next door to the cottage. Thea reproached herself for being so slow to work it out. Finally, she could see how the two approaches she had so far made to the village centre could in fact converge.

Out in the trampled snow, they turned left and there was the house that Thea had been in only the previous afternoon, twenty yards away. It was in no way startling that Nicky and Ben had been allowed to walk along to George’s cottage, apart from some slight danger from traffic. Cars evidently did come past, but hardly enough to present much hazard.

Simon was in the kitchen, the room full of the smell of roasting pork and apple sauce. Lunchtime, Thea realised. She’d been out all morning, and it would be dark again in less than four hours. And she might have to walk back to the barn as before, her nervousness drastically increased by the bizarre knowledge that somebody had dragged a dead body across several fields in deep snow, two days earlier.

‘Hey, boys, there you are!’ The tone was forced, in a very poor piece of acting. Even before hearing the news, Simon was suffering from some profound worry or shock. He looked at Thea with a frown, as if trying to remember where he’d seen her before. ‘Hello?’ he queried warily.

‘George is frozen dead,’ said Nicky, loud and clear. ‘In his house.’

Simon puffed a breath of amused disbelief. ‘Surely not,’ he protested. ‘His house might be draughty, but it’s not
that
cold.’

‘It’s true,’ said Thea urgently. She was bursting to recount the full story about following the sledge tracks, and having seen the man earlier, walking along the road. But the children inhibited her. It was one thing for them to absorb the simple fact of death, quite another to introduce a sinister figure lurking out in the fields, behaving alarmingly. ‘We’ll have to call the police,’ she added.

Simon closed his eyes and leant back against the kitchen worktop. ‘What?’ he muttered. ‘What are you saying?’

‘Where’s Janina?’ Thea demanded. She had the feeling she was going to need help in dealing with this.

‘Here. I’m here,’ came a voice from behind her. ‘Hello again.’ She was unwinding a long woollen scarf from her neck, and then pulled off a matching knitted hat. Her dark hair frizzed out untidily, and her cheeks glowed pink from the cold. ‘Am I late for lunch?’

Only then did she scan the four faces in front of her, and understand that something had happened. ‘Is it Bunny?’ she asked, with an
undisguised note of contempt. ‘Is she still trapped by the snow?’

Simon made a soft bleat of protest, but Nicky drowned him out. ‘It’s George,’ he said, importantly. ‘He’s frozen dead.’

Janina blinked, and inspected all the faces again. ‘No,’ she said. Then she met Thea’s eyes and found confirmation of the story. ‘Good God,’ she gasped.

‘The man in the snow,’ said Simon slowly, also seeking Thea’s gaze. ‘Was that him, then?’

‘Almost certainly,’ she said. ‘Although I didn’t see his face properly. Look…we really do have to call the police.’

‘Yes, yes. Well…you do it. You’ve seen him. You’ll know what to say.’

Reluctantly, Thea nodded. Already she could imagine how the conversation would go: the bland failure to grasp the important background story on the part of the girl who took the initial call, the difficulty of describing the exact location, the endless bloody
snow
obstructing everything. ‘I’ll phone Phil,’ she decided. ‘He can find the man who came on Friday.’ Foolishly, she had made no mental or physical note of his name, and was not about to face the complicated business of identifying him to the same uncooperative female she knew would be on the end of the phone. Then a memory popped up. ‘Your brother!’ she said.
‘He’ll know who it was. It might be simplest just to get hold of him.’

‘Tony? No good. He’s gone home to nurse his cold. He’s not answering the phone.’

‘You’re joking!’

Simon shook his head ingenuously. ‘No. He gets like that when he’s ill. He wouldn’t be any use to us, believe me.’

Thea shook her head impatiently. She was acutely aware of the two small boys listening to everything that was said, with Janina still holding her hat and scarf, her face a picture of bewilderment.

‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ Thea grabbed at the phone and keyed the number of Phil Hollis’s mobile, which was still clear in her memory, despite not having used it for some weeks.

He answered quickly. ‘Hollis,’ he barked.

‘Phil, it’s Thea. Um…I’m phoning from a house in Hampnett. I’m afraid there’s a dead man next door.’

‘Oh yes?’ His calm was ominous. Undercurrents of irritation and worse were detectable. She could hear him thinking she only came to him when there was trouble, and that this was a kind of trespass on their former relationship.

‘Listen,’ she urged him. ‘I found the body on Friday – there’ll be a record of it. Two police officers came out, in all that snow, and when I
showed them the place, the body was gone. Well, now I’ve found it again. It’s a man called George and he’s in his own house, here in Hampnett.’ Despite herself, she felt rather smug at this impeccable summary. ‘So can you find who it was who came out, and see if he’s on duty today? It would be best if the same man came again. He was a sergeant.’

‘Why? Why should it be the same man? What’s his full name?’

‘Hang on.’ She held the phone away from her head, and asked Simon. ‘Jewell,’ he supplied. ‘George Jewell.’

Thea relayed the information, aware that the police were always glad to have a name to hang everything on.

‘Why are you calling
me
?’ he wanted to know. ‘It’s a 999 matter, surely.’

She tried to explain to him that she’d just thought it would be so much preferable not to have to start all over again with a fresh face. That there was somehow something dreadfully
embarrassing
about being the person to summon the police. Something out of kilter and awkward. Phil stopped her.

‘All right, I get the idea. I’m off duty, actually,’ he said. ‘And Thea…this has to go through the proper procedure. You’ll have to call 999 to get it logged in the proper way. I can’t pretend the story makes a lot
of sense, the way you’ve told it, but I’m sure it will all become clear. You’re not suggesting anybody killed him, I take it?’

‘Well, no. He seems to have died of exposure, out in the snow. But, Phil—’

‘Sorry, but my food’s getting cold. I was just sitting down when you rang.’ And he dismissed her with no further ado. She felt choked with the pain of rejection, as she put the phone down.

‘So?’ demanded Simon. ‘Are they coming?’

‘Not yet. I’ve got to make another call.’ She swallowed down the cold sensations of foolishness and abandonment and made the call, speaking briefly to the young man at the call centre, who showed admirable concern and understanding.

‘There’ll be somebody with you in twenty minutes at the most,’ he said.

Same constable, same doctor, different sergeant. Pity about the doctor, Thea thought, seeing the identical irascible expression on the man’s face as there’d been on Friday. She took them to the cottage, leaving Simon, Janina and the boys behind. Simon was fidgeting about his pork, turning the oven down to its lowest setting and bemoaning the spoilt and soggy sprouts.

‘Is that his wife?’ the constable asked Thea softly, as they walked.

‘Au pair,’ Thea told him. ‘From Bulgaria. The wife’s stranded by snow somewhere.’

‘Oh? Like where?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Most of the country’s OK, you know. It’s mainly confined to Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. If it was any other month of the year, we’d probably have floods. We might anyway, when this lot decides to melt.’

There was no time to pursue the topic before reaching George’s front door. ‘This is the bloke you saw in the field on Friday, then,’ the new sergeant said, showing himself to be impressively well briefed.

‘I’m sure it is, yes. I tracked him here, you see.’

‘Pardon?’

She explained about the marks left by the large sledge. ‘At least I suppose that’s what it must have been. Something with runners.’

‘How far was it?’

‘I’m not sure. Half a mile or so, I would guess. I had no idea it would end up exactly where I was yesterday. It’s a big coincidence.’

‘Not really,’ judged the sergeant. ‘Not much of a village, is it? Nowhere else to go but this little bunch of houses.’

‘No sign of violence, then?’ The sergeant
turned his attention to the doctor, who was kneeling beside the body, delicately removing instruments from his case.

‘Not for me to say,’ muttered the doctor.

‘So can we remove him?’ the police officer continued patiently.

‘No photographer this time?’ asked Thea.

‘We could call one if we thought it necessary, but that’s only for the scene of a crime, basically.’

‘So you assumed on Friday that there’d been a crime?’

‘Not as I understand it – though I’ve not seen the report. It was probably down to the snow, see. After you said how hard it’d be to reach, they brought the whole team just in case. Normally it’d just have been the two officers and a doctor.’

‘Right,’ nodded Thea. ‘But isn’t it a crime to move a dead body without reporting it?’

The man pushed out his lips thoughtfully. ‘Technically, yes. It points to something not right. There are questions to be asked, that’s for sure.’

‘Yes.’ Thea had only just begun to address some of these questions, most of them beginning with
Why?
‘But meanwhile you think it’s OK to remove him now?’

‘Probably. Do we have an identity for him?’

‘George Jewell. This is his house. Simon next door knows him.’

‘When was he last seen alive?’

‘
I
don’t know.’ She began to feel like a fraud, taking over the way she had. ‘I’m not really the person you should be speaking to.’

‘Oh, I think you are.’ He smiled knowingly. ‘You’re involved in this, Mrs Osborne, right up to the neck.’

An hour and a half later, they drove her back to the top of the lane, regretting that it still wasn’t possible to get the car all the way down to the barn. ‘Time you got that snow cleared away,’ said the constable, who had been unnaturally quiet throughout.

‘Tell the council that,’ snapped Thea, who was tired and damp. Her feet were unpleasantly cold, and her gloves had been so soggy that she hadn’t wanted to put them on again. And she was hungry. Simon had offered her a share of the belated roast, which she had declined.

‘Not a public road, is it?’ the young man asked. ‘Nothing to do with the council.’

She had wondered whether Old Kate had found time to bring up her tractor and some sort of implement for pushing snow aside. Too much to hope that she’d have come and done the job while Thea had been out, it seemed.

Everything was quiet at the barn, the sky a heavy grey, and the white of the snow increasingly tainted by tracks and the gradual reappearance
of the layers beneath. In the donkey’s paddock there were signs that he was losing patience with the altered state, and had been pawing his way through to the scanty grass he had been accustomed to nibbling. The animal itself was standing with his back to the barn and its yard, staring down the hill to the bottom of his territory. Obviously the poor thing was unsettled and probably bored.