Trouble in the Cotswolds (The Cotswold Mysteries) (21 page)

‘Don’t ask,’ said Cheryl, with a little rictus of disgust.

Richard had slumped against the horsebox, looking close to tears. Edwin was watching him carefully, like a bodyguard waiting for a suspicious move. He
was
a sort of bodyguard, Thea realised, with the horse the subject of his protection. ‘I am asking,’ she said. ‘So will the police, because I assume it explains why Natasha was murdered.’

The two Callendar brothers stared at her in blank amazement. ‘You’re joking,’ said Ralph, after a moment. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘It seems obvious,’ she said, more defiantly than she felt.

‘Well, it’s not. If you think Richard’s crazy experiments were important enough to warrant killing
somebody, you’re even crazier than him.’

‘He seems to be pretty serious about them,’ she argued. ‘Look at him.’

‘Let me tell you exactly what he was trying to do, then.’ Ralph was as patient and polite as ever, despite his brother’s obvious wish to get moving. ‘His thesis is all about storage and preservation of body parts and blood, essentially. Which is what our business is concerned with, as you probably know. Sally’s foal isn’t biologically hers. It was implanted in her – embryo transfer, they call it. That’s not unusual in itself. But Dicky had been experimenting on the semen beforehand, using various gels and suspensions and I don’t know what, to see how long each batch would survive. He got Natasha to look after another foal embryo that he thought was the key to success. The idea behind it all is to avoid having to freeze the semen, or use any system that requires electricity. He’s been doing work with sheep and cows and things as well. It’s all very worthy stuff, designed to help developing countries improve their livestock out in remote areas where they can’t reliably freeze anything. With me so far?’

Thea nodded doubtfully.

‘Anyway, he came up with this magic mixture that seemed to keep the sperm alive for over a month in perfect condition. Great, we all thought. Clever old him. But then he pulled a fast one on us, and used this experimental sample on poor old Sally, without
permission. She’s been used as a surrogate a couple of times now, with another mare’s embryo implanted. It’s established practice, nothing sinister about it. But young Richard here has been playing a Doctor Frankenstein game with the gametes, testing out his new invention. We didn’t find out until months later, long past the point where we could do anything about it. It’s incredibly stupid of him, as my mother tried to tell him. It’ll invalidate his findings, apart from anything else.’

‘It will not,’ said Richard hotly. ‘Everything’s been recorded and monitored. There’s no room for any doubt as to what’s been done.’

‘You deceived us. You knew we’d never have given you permission to switch embryos the way you did.’

‘I
had
to,’ Richard whined. ‘The whole thing has to be tested for real.’

‘So what’s the problem?’ Thea wanted to know.

‘We don’t think the foal’s normal. It was scanned six weeks ago, and its head looks misshapen.’

Thea shuddered. ‘Poor little foal. But why take the horse away like this?’

‘We’re taking her to a top vet near Oxford who’ll keep a close eye on her. Costing us, of course. Plus we need to keep the whole thing quiet. There are breeders out there who’d use this to blacken the Callendar name and put us out of business.’

Thea looked at Richard as if she’d caught him in an unspeakable act of depravity. ‘It sounds utterly foul,’ she spat at him.

Edwin put up a hand. ‘Enough,’ he said. ‘This is wasting too much time. We’re going. Now. Cheryl – you can follow us.’

Thea couldn’t let it drop there. ‘What does
she
have to do with it?’ Ralph’s explanation had done nothing but raise a host of further questions.

‘Another time,’ Edwin called over his shoulder. ‘We’ll explain it another time.’

‘No, you won’t. You’ll explain it now,’ came a new voice from across the street.

It was Drew, who looked as if he’d been standing in the doorway of the Shepherds’ house for some time. In the shadowy street he was barely visible. ‘You’re not the only one who wants to have this settled, and get on with Christmas,’ he said, walking towards the group. ‘A woman’s been murdered, and you all’ – he looked from one person to another – ‘
all
of you have explaining to do. Best get it over with quickly.’

‘And just who do you think
you
are, to give us orders?’ demanded Cheryl.

Another voice came from a point just beyond the Range Rover. ‘He’s a very clever chap who called us twenty minutes ago,’ it said. ‘And we’ve been here quite a while, listening to what you had to say.’ DI Jeremy Higgins materialised from the shadows, accompanied by another man who Thea took a moment to identify.

‘So?’ Edwin challenged, in a voice gone oddly husky. ‘So what?’

‘It explained quite a lot – filled in quite a few blanks,’ Higgins said.

Thea felt surrounded. On all sides were men who understood considerably more than she did.

‘Drew?’ she turned to him, reaching out an automatic hand to touch him. ‘Do you know what’s going on?’

‘Sshh,’ he said, which simply bewildered her all the more.

‘Mrs Osborne,’ Higgins addressed her directly. ‘We think you must be the key to much of this. Specifically, to what happened here on Saturday. You were on the spot. We think you saw and heard enough to constitute evidence, without fully realising it.’

‘Mrs Callendar?’ she said uncertainly. ‘Do you mean when she went next door? I did see her with something. I told Gladwin. But that was the day
after
the murder. I suppose it was her, all the same. She’s arrogant enough.’

She forced her mind to examine the idea. Marian Callendar did seem a likely killer. Hadn’t one of her sons implied that she was against Richard’s experiments, which would put her against Natasha as well? And she could so easily have made her husband’s death seem an accident. ‘But she wouldn’t kill Eva, would she?’ she said aloud. Nobody seemed to understand what she meant.

She wrapped her arms around herself, aware for the first time of how cold it was out there without a
coat. She visualised her warm jacket, hanging in the Shepherds’ hallway, and how comforting it would be to have it around her now. She almost asked Drew to fetch it for her. Then her mental image expanded slightly, to include the coat hanging next to hers. It was blue, with big buttons. She had seen it that morning, without any conscious registering of significance. But something strange about it had stuck in her subconscious. It ought not to have been there, because it hadn’t been there on Friday, when Gloria and Philip departed. There had, instead, been a brown gabardine mac that looked as if it was used for gardening.

‘The coat,’ she said out loud. ‘Go and see the blue coat.’

‘What?’ Higgins blinked, half excited, half bemused.

‘In the hall. Next to mine. Ask Drew.’ She wasn’t sure why she couldn’t just go and get it herself, except that her legs had gone heavy and she felt weirdly breathless. Higgins didn’t move, but kept his eyes on her face as if waiting for more.

‘Saturday,’ Thea murmured. ‘Before Natasha was killed. I fainted. Then I was dizzy. I couldn’t think properly. It was
you
.’

Everyone followed her wavering finger. The person indicated stood firm, chin held high, saying nothing. ‘I remember,’ said Thea, greatly surprising herself. ‘The coat. It was blue, then brown. The blue one is wrong. There must be blood on the brown one. The coat—’ and for the second time in her life, she fainted.

But this time a man caught her and lowered her gently to the ground, mumbling reassurances. He felt big and warm and strong. It had to be Drew. Of course it was Drew. She even came close to saying his name as she emerged from the same pinkish cloud as before. But it didn’t smell like Drew. So it had to be Higgins, then. Higgins was a policeman – it would be instinctive for him to jump forward and catch a fainting woman.

Then she opened her eyes.

It was the other man, the one with the waistcoat and the old-fashioned pomposity. It was Dennis Ireland, holding her close and warm and smiling down at her. She felt small against his broad chest, and quite deliciously safe.

Around her things were happening that she couldn’t make sense of. It was dark. A man was shouting. A dog was barking. A horse was clattering its hooves on a metal surface. ‘Mrs Osborne? Thea?’ Another voice was overlying that of Dennis Ireland. ‘Can you hear me?’

‘Jeremy,’ she nodded. ‘I’m all right. I must stop doing this. It’s embarrassing.’

‘Thea?’ A third man was there somewhere. The man she’d wanted to be the one to catch her.

‘Drew. What’s happening? Do you understand any of this?’

‘It’s all right. We’re going into the house. They’re making an arrest.’

It wasn’t the explanation she’d sought, and she wasn’t sure she could get to the house with any vestige of dignity. ‘Oh,’ she said weakly.

Against all her wishes, she was carried back into the Shepherds’ living room and placed carefully on the sofa. More time passed, and people came and went. When she finally surfaced, she could locate only Drew and Timmy in the room with her ‘What time is it?’ she asked. For some reason, that seemed a very important question.

‘Half past five,’ said Drew. ‘It’s half past five.’

‘Oh dear,’ she moaned. ‘It
can’t
be that late. You’ll have to go. And Edwin’s going to get into awful trouble with his wife.’ Scraps of conversation returned to her, the crucial and the trivial impossible to differentiate. ‘What about Marian? And Juliet? What about the other deaths? Please will somebody
explain
.’

Nobody did. She struggled upright, but didn’t leave the safety of the sofa. She was aware of a small boy and two dogs all watching her with round eyes. ‘It’s okay, Tim,’ she laughed. ‘I’ll be fine in a minute. It’s just because I’ve got flu.’

She was angry with herself at having missed a whole lot of important developments. Frustration gripped her and she sat up straight. ‘Who are they arresting?’ she asked Drew.

‘Richard,’ he said.

‘
What?’
It was so totally unexpected that she almost fainted again. ‘Why? It can’t possibly have been him.’

‘Listen,’ he said, with poorly concealed urgency. ‘The Callendar woman phoned here while you were outside. She wanted to know if we’d seen Richard, so I told her some of what was happening outside. She said he was a dangerous lunatic, in effect, with a Frankenstein complex. He’s been breaking any number of laws in his research and she’s been trying to stop him. Natasha and Douglas had been taken in by him, but she’s now got a vital piece of evidence, and has contacted the police about it.’

Slowly, Thea compared this splurge of revelations with what she already knew. It fitted with reasonable credibility. ‘So?’ she encouraged.

‘So I told her she should call the police and tell them he was here – which she did.’

‘Did you mention her sons as well?’

‘No. I thought it best to keep things simple.’

Thea smiled weakly and nodded.

Drew continued, ‘And then you raved about coats and pointed at Richard, and that seemed to be all they needed.’

‘I
didn’t
,’ she almost wept. ‘I didn’t point at Richard. It wasn’t him, Drew. It has nothing to do with him.’

He gave her a severe look which perversely made her want to laugh. ‘You did, Thea. You pointed right at him and said you remembered his coat. Or some such thing. Then you fainted and Richard tried to run away and the two brothers caught him and the horse got all excited. You missed rather a lot, actually.’

‘You got it all wrong,’ she moaned. ‘You got completely the wrong person.’

Then Timmy began to cry, for no apparent reason. Drew went to him in concern. ‘I want to go home,’ the child sniffed. ‘We need to go home, Daddy.’

‘He’s right,’ Drew announced. ‘Okay, Tim. We’ll go in just ten more minutes, I promise. We’ll fetch Stephanie and you can hang up your stockings, and have a lovely sleep, and tomorrow will be Christmas.’

‘But
Thea
should come as well. We can’t go without Thea. She’s poorly, like Stephanie.’ And his tears flowed afresh.

‘Ah,’ sighed Drew, as if an important secret had finally been revealed.

‘I can’t come, sweetie,’ she said. ‘I can’t leave the dogs and rats and everything. I’ll be all right.’ She remembered a warm chest and a strong arm. ‘There’s that nice man next door. He’ll watch out for me if I get poorly again.’

She stood up, hardly knowing what she meant to do, and went to the door. The loo – she needed the loo, that was it. There was a small one near the front door and she headed for it.

Before her was the blue coat, hanging from its hook as she’d remembered. It seemed to glow with significance. She could visualise its owner inside it. Another coat, brown and probably bloodstained, must be missing. A coat that belonged to Gloria Shepherd, and which had been there on that first afternoon. She
almost forgot where she was going, but then decided that whatever happened next would happen better on an empty bladder. She used the thirty seconds productively, rerunning the events of Saturday and the next two days, and the probable motives behind them. When she came out, most of the story was clear in her mind.

‘I need to go to Wood Stanway,’ she announced to a startled father and son. ‘Now.’

‘You can’t go anywhere. Don’t be ridiculous,’ Drew snapped.

‘I can if I want.’

‘You can’t, actually. Neither can I, as it happens. Look outside.’

The street was bathed in a strange unnatural light, when she went to look. Numerous people were gathered around a large horse, the group taking up the entire width of the street. Police cars were positioned to prevent any traffic in either direction. ‘What is it?’ Thea asked. ‘What are they doing?’

‘The horse is in labour. They had to get her out of the box and keep her as calm as they can. It’s been half an hour or more. She’s worth thousands. They don’t want to take risks.’

‘Bit late for that. Poor thing. If the foal’s deformed, she might not be able to deliver it. They won’t do a caesarean there in the street, will they?’

‘I wouldn’t be surprised. That woman’s a top vet, apparently.’

‘It’ll be Toby’s mother,’ she muttered. ‘He told me about her.’

‘So what’s this about Wood Stanway?’ Drew was pacing the floor, looking pale and angry. ‘I can’t decide whether you’re delirious and raving, or what. You haven’t made much sense in the last hour or so.’

‘I’m entirely lucid,’ she told him. ‘Which surprises me as much as you. It’s still not completely clear, but I do know who killed Natasha, and I think I know why.’

‘Not Richard?’ His expression contained confusion and a lurking hope – probably that she would revise her previous rejection of this proposition.

‘Absolutely not Richard. I need to check something on the Internet. Where’s my Blackberry?’

‘In your bag, I suppose.’

She clumsily accessed Google, and found her way onto the site for the local weekly newspaper. ‘Found it!’ she triumphed, after barely three minutes. ‘September 12th. Meeting of local highways and byways committee. Diversion of the Cotswold Way, at the request of a Mrs Bagshawe. Passionately opposed by walkers’ groups … dum-di-da … yes. I think that’s it.’

‘Oh, look!’ Drew had gone back to the window. ‘I think it’s born.’

‘What?’

‘Come here,’ he ordered. ‘See for yourself.’

She took her phone with her, but forgot it as the small miracle presented itself outside. For the moment she had lost sight of what day it was. ‘Oh, gosh!’ she
exclaimed. ‘It looks okay, doesn’t it?’ The foal was lying beneath its surrogate mother, folded leggily, shaking a head that seemed only marginally larger than normal. All the people stood back, apart from the vet woman who knelt beside the new baby but did not touch it. The mare looked around for the source of her recent discomfort and hard work. When she located it, she turned and began to nuzzle at it. Thea, as well as everyone else, held her breath. The foal successfully got to its feet at the second attempt, and aimed itself determinedly at the invisible udder.

‘Ahhh!’ breathed Thea. ‘Look at that.’

‘The road’ll be clear again in a few minutes,’ Drew said, his voice unsteady.

Thea didn’t reply. Her mind was overflowing with scattered fragments of understanding, distractingly competing with each other. ‘It’s nothing to do with the horse,’ she said loudly. ‘The horse is a red herring.’

Timmy pulled at her arm. ‘How is it?’ he demanded. ‘A herring is a fish, not a horse.’ He shook her, demanding an answer. ‘Tell me,’ he ordered.

She ignored him and muttered out loud. ‘But why were they meeting Cheryl here? That makes no sense. What did she care about foals and biochemistry? Why was she going with them?’

‘Thea, we really have to go. But I need to know you’ll be all right, first. Promise me you won’t go out anywhere. You’re not fit to go driving around in the dark. Let it all wait.’

‘Wait till when? It’s Christmas Day tomorrow.
Christmas Day.’
The enormity of it seemed to swamp her. You couldn’t confront a killer on Christmas Day. She slumped in defeat. ‘Maybe you’re right. I don’t seem to be very logical, do I?’

‘So will you promise?’

‘I suppose so. Am I allowed to make phone calls?’

He didn’t laugh or even smile. Instead he groaned. ‘Oh, God – I can’t just go off and leave you like this. How can I?’ He wrapped an arm around Timmy, as if somehow mistaking him for Thea. ‘But how can I
not
?’

‘Don’t be silly,’ she said stoically. ‘There’s really no problem. The minute they let you, you have to be out of here.’

When the knock came, a minute later, they both assumed it was a police officer telling them that things were being tidied up outside and normal life could resume very soon.