Shadows in the Cotswolds (11 page)

‘Yes it is, but you’re free to put stuff out for them, on that feeding station thing. That’s the trouble with feeding wild birds – they get to rely on you, and you really shouldn’t stop.’

‘Even at this time of year, when there must be loads of stuff out there for them?’

‘As I understand it, yes. Besides, a lot of the seeds and berries are almost finished now. It’s July and August when the real bounty happens. I’m no expert, but I think they’ll be feeling the lack of your fat balls and stuff.’

‘So I can’t go into the hide, but I can go to the feeding station?’ Thea clarified.

‘Right.’ Gladwin patted Thea lightly on the shoulder. ‘Now, what are we going to do about your mother?’

Thea was silenced by this abrupt change of subject. She opened her mouth and closed it again. Did the police believe her mother was a suspect? How was that possible. ‘Er …’ she managed.

‘I mean, with this mystery man from the past. She’s got to establish beyond doubt that he is who he says he is. There must be some way to do that.’

‘Are you offering to help?’

‘I might be. When all this is over.’

‘But you don’t think there’s a connection?’

‘There’s the same connection that we’ve encountered before,’ sighed the police detective.

‘Oh?’

‘You, Thea Osborne. Once again, the connection is
you
.’

Mo and Jason were only slightly early, arriving at ten, which meant that Thea had nearly an hour with her mother and Fraser, in which they talked awkwardly about trivial matters. Thea asked Fraser to describe more of his years in London before going to Australia, in a vague attempt to establish his credentials. He answered cordially, explaining that he had become a land surveyor, scoping out likely routes for new roads and railways, operating such equipment as theodolites and mastering advanced geometry. He had married Domenica, who came from Toledo, after knowing her for only three months. She was fiery and adventurous and wanted to see the world. Going to Australia had been her idea. Mo had been three when they set sail in classic migrant fashion, and another baby was on the way. ‘It miscarried on the ship,’ he said briefly. ‘It
was really dreadful for poor Nica. She took years to get over it.’

‘And you never had any more?’

‘We never did,’ he smiled sadly.

On the face of it, he was being open and frank, answering the questions in a relaxed easy manner. Only when she thought about it did Thea spot the gaps. Where exactly had he worked? Where had he grown up? She tried to flesh out the picture. ‘Do you remember the war?’ she asked. ‘You must have been about five when it started.’

‘I was exactly five years and one month,’ he responded. ‘And I was just shy of eleven when it ended. I remember it very vividly, of course. I’m sure your mother does as well.’

‘Were you in London all the way through?’

His expression hardened slightly. ‘Oliver and I were evacuated for a few months, but we both behaved so abominably that they sent us back. My mother was even more traumatised by it than we were, I think, looking back now. Even those few months disrupted our family so violently that we were permanently changed by it. Oliver more than me, I believe. He felt she had deliberately betrayed us, and I think he held it against her for the rest of her life.’

‘That’s tragic!’ Thea exclaimed with genuine distress. ‘People do such terrible things to each other, don’t they? In the name of the greater good, and all that.’

‘It was certainly well intentioned,’ he nodded. ‘And life in the Blitz had its own ghastly consequences. We saw things that small boys ought not to have seen. The worst thing, actually, was the dog.’ He gave Thea’s spaniel a look, as if being deliberately reminded of something dreadful.

‘Dog?’ Thea encouraged reluctantly.

‘It was the domestic pet variation on evacuation, in a way. They had them put down, in case there was an invasion and the Germans tortured them. That was what my mother said, anyway. We had a golden spaniel called Spike. My brother adored that dog – you know how boys can be about their pets.’

‘So she really
did
betray you,’ Thea summarised furiously. ‘How could a mother do such a thing?’

‘As you said – she thought it was all for the good. She thought that was what she had to do. People will do the most appalling things for the most flimsy of reasons. They’re very suggestible.’

‘Stupid, I call it,’ said Thea flatly. ‘Just plain stupid.’

Fraser Meadows showed signs of exasperation. ‘You can’t judge if you weren’t there,’ he said. ‘That isn’t fair.’ Then he brightened. ‘But it was different for your mother. She was living in leafy Oxfordshire and never heard a bomb.’

‘Not entirely true,’ corrected Maureen. ‘We saw a lot of bomber planes, and one or two let their bombs drop not far from us. Nobody seemed very worried about it, though.’ Her eyes glazed as she relived those
distant days. Seventy years ago, Thea calculated, near enough. To her it was like a completely different world. With different ideas of right and wrong, she suspected, as Fraser had implied when telling her about poor Spike.

The conversation had strengthened her appreciation of her mother’s dilemma. Fraser Meadows was almost entirely credible. But then conmen always
were
credible. That was the whole point. They had a knack of making you like and trust them. Fraser was sometimes obviously trying hard to be nice, but at other times he seemed to be genuinely relaxed and spontaneous. There was no hint of calculation in his eyes. He seemed concerned for her mother’s well-being, and mildly embarrassed by his lifelong fondness for her. But as acting parts went, it had to be a relatively easy one to play. A few basic background details, which Maureen had almost certainly given away on Facebook or Friends Reunited, careful listening as she chatted about family, and one or two inspired guesses, and he could easily be convincing. Bodies changed dramatically over a lifetime, after all. Accents, even mannerisms, modified. And if he was fooling Maureen Johnstone, he must surely be fooling Oliver Meadows, and his own daughter, as well. Or was Mo another impostor, sharing the deception?

‘Reuben Hardy said you had a dog,’ she said suddenly. ‘Last time you were here, visiting Oliver. Reuben said you had a dog. Where is it now?’

‘It wasn’t mine.’

‘So whose was it? Mo’s?’

‘No, no. Mo never liked dogs much. Takes after her mother in that.’

‘So …?’

‘It’s a long, irrelevant story.’

Thea felt a great desire to push it and demand every detail, but her mother repressed her with a look. It probably was, after all, irrelevant.

Mo turned out to be a faded beauty. She had silver streaks on her temples, a startling dead tooth at the front, and thick black eyebrows. The tooth was the most disconcerting feature. It was dark brown and looked alarmingly loose. It made Thea think of Albanian peasants or Moroccan crones. The woman looked as if she was about to emit a loud cackle or curse. Jason was almost equally surprising, with a pot belly and dense grey beard. As relatives – or near relatives, in Jason’s case – of the very civilised Fraser, they were entirely unexpected in every respect.

But they both spoke with standard English accents, seemed impressively concerned for the welfare of all three people at Thistledown, and duly acknowledged Hepzie. The spaniel took to them immediately, and curled up at Mo’s feet when she sat down on the living room couch. As far as Thea could see, the woman nursed little or no animosity towards this particular dog.

‘So, who’s this woman that got herself killed?’ Jason demanded, within the first five minutes. ‘Have they worked it out yet?’

‘Not as far as we know,’ Thea said cautiously. ‘She told me she was Fraser’s daughter.’

‘Well, that’s me, and I’m not dead,’ said Mo, emphatically. ‘No other daughters out there, eh, Dad?’

‘I think I can safely say not,’ he asserted. ‘I thought to begin with they were telling me you’d been murdered. I didn’t know what to think. I mean – I’d only seen you a day or two before.’

Mo snorted, and began a close inspection of Thea. ‘So this is my stepsister-to-be,’ she said cheerfully, greatly to Thea’s alarm. ‘Pleased to meet you.’

‘Um …’ Thea floundered, throwing her mother a pleading look, and recollecting for the first time that Melissa had made her think something very similar. ‘I …’

Maureen forced a laugh, from the doorway. ‘Not quite,’ she demurred. ‘That is, nobody’s said anything …’ She took a step backwards, towards the kitchen, as if trying to escape.

Fraser coughed self-consciously. ‘Steady on, Mo,’ he advised. ‘You’re not getting rid of me that quickly.’

‘Aw – shame!’ grimaced the woman, with
self-mocking
exaggeration. ‘Still, worth a try, I suppose.’

Mo, Thea reminded herself, had grown up in Australia, despite the absence of an accent. That might explain the brashness, the complete lack of shyness or
hesitation. She had a loud laugh and used it often.

‘I gather you’ve got three daughters,’ she said, when the conversation flagged.

‘Too right,’ agreed Mo. ‘For my sins.’ Then she laughed. ‘No, they’re good girls, all of them. Never caused me any grief. Give them a few years and I’ll be a granny two or three times over, I shouldn’t wonder. That’ll be a thing – Granny Mo.’ She laughed again.

‘And great-granddad Fraser,’ Thea pointed out, hoping to draw him back into the centre of things. Somehow the whole exercise felt as if it centred on him; as if it was designed to explain something. The stepsister remark could have been it, perhaps. If so, it was very much not what Thea had wanted to hear.

‘Yeah,’ Mo muttered, as if that was hardly relevant.

Thea’s mother had appointed herself maker of coffee, and she came in with a laden tray, dispensing mugs of perfectly brewed real coffee. When it was finished, which took all of a minute and a half, Jason slammed his mug back onto the tray and gave himself a little shake. ‘Well, if you good people will excuse me, I’m off for a look at the railway museum they’ve got here.’

‘Is it open on a Monday?’ Thea wondered. ‘They often aren’t.’

‘I don’t mean the actual
museum
,’ he corrected. ‘I mean the station and trains they’ve got preserved, out on the Gretton road. I’ll drive up there and have a look round, see what they’ve got. Always like to see
the big old steam engines, every chance I get. Lovely things!’ he sighed nostalgically. ‘Wish I’d been around when they were operating.’

‘I gather you’re in favour of the new high-speed abomination,’ Thea accused, before she could stop herself.

He visibly resisted the challenge to make it a serious argument. ‘I sure am,’ he said in a joke American accent. ‘Have to move with the times. And the engineering’s going to be a miracle. Imagine it – it’ll be like flying through the countryside.’ He spread his arms, and made a whooshing sound. ‘It’s great that trains are still going to be around, right through this century. Pity the Yanks haven’t got the same idea.’

Thea was torn. Obviously trains were easier on fossil fuel consumption, and altogether less of a hassle to use than planes. But she completely failed to see much, if any, environmental benefits to a slashing new line carving up the hills and vales and woodlands of Middle England. ‘I think it’s horrible,’ she asserted, with her usual emphasis. ‘Absolutely horrible.’

‘That’s what they always say about new things,’ he dismissed. ‘After a couple of years, everyone’ll wonder what the fuss was about.’

‘Well, I for one still think it’s never going to happen. Too many powerful people are against it.’

‘We’ll have to see, then, won’t we?’ said Jason calmly.

‘I’ll be dead by then, anyway,’ said Fraser, as if the idea held quite an appeal for him.

The stark word brought them back to the present reality, and Thea’s mother sighed. She looked at Thea. ‘Presumably they still don’t know who she was – you’d have told us if they did.’

Nobody pretended not to understand what she meant. Mo raised her eyebrows for a moment, but lowered them again, as if the details were unimportant.

‘Thea saw the police detective in charge of the case, earlier today,’ Maureen explained. ‘They went off somewhere, just the two of them.’ There was a thread of reproach in her tone.

‘They haven’t identified her yet,’ Thea confirmed.

‘Not even found her car?’ Fraser asked.

‘Nope. They worked late into the night on it, but nothing’s come up.’ She met his eyes, silently acknowledging that they both had to be careful. There were elements of their exchanges with Gladwin that they were not supposed to disclose – Fraser perhaps more so than Thea. The knowledge was divisive, preventing a cohesive discussion of all known facts. There was no sense of a team diligently assisting the police. Rather, they were flotsam, scrappily floating around the periphery of the investigation, waiting for light to dawn and explanations to be given.

‘Well, I think you should come home with us,’ Mo suddenly said to her father. ‘It’s not nice here, with a murder just outside. Uncle Oliver’s just a crazy old
hermit, living in a place like this.’ She looked at Thea. ‘You’ve been given the short straw, seems to me. What’s the sense of asking somebody to come and feed birds, anyhow? Why not just close it up and go home? That’s what I would do. That’s what we came to tell you.’

‘You don’t like this place?’ Thea repeated. ‘But it’s lovely. The town is utterly beautiful. It’s
all
beautiful.’

‘Can’t see it myself. Seems dark and gloomy to me, with all these trees. And the people – most of them with more money than’s good for them. We came past that Stow place – all antique shops and American tourists. It’s not
real
.’

‘Well …’ Thea attempted. ‘It’s old-fashioned, I suppose, compared to the Home Counties. But you’ve got all that terrible traffic, ruining the towns. And so many houses everywhere. This is still so unspoilt. There’s so much
space
.’

‘Pity the new train can’t go through here, then,’ said Jason, who had yet to go and look at his steam engines. ‘If there’s plenty of space.’

Thea looked at him as if he’d uttered a terrible blasphemy. He laughed at her. ‘Only joking,’ he said. ‘Even I can see the engineering would be a nightmare. There’s hardly a level mile anywhere in the Cotswolds. There’d have to be about a dozen tunnels.’

‘I’m not coming home with you,’ Fraser told his daughter. ‘Maureen and I are staying here another night, and then we’ll go back to her place for a few days. We’ve got it all decided.’

Thea looked at her mother, who was nodding placidly. ‘When was this decided?’ she asked.

‘Oh, all along, wasn’t it? Isn’t that what we said?’

‘I didn’t think it was definite. I understood you were only here for
one
night.’

‘I’m off,’ Jason announced, finally putting his words into effect, with a glance at his watch. ‘I left the car in a little backstreet.’

‘Oh?’ Thea frowned at him.

He grinned. ‘Habit,’ he said. ‘Had a little disagreement with the insurance people, and like to keep it inconspicuous, if I can. Not easy, with all these cameras and gadgets they’ve got these days. But I knew the rozzers might be hanging around, so I just took a sensible precaution.’

Thea met Fraser’s eye, and remembered his ‘rough diamond’ remark. Jason’s careless disregard for the law was both startling and oddly endearing. ‘Anyway,’ he went on, ‘just give me a couple of hours and I’ll come back in time for lunch. Are we going to the pub?’ He looked brightly around at the four people, like an expectant dog waiting for its dinner.