by Rebecca Tope
‘You are Thea Osborne, aren’t you?’ the woman went on impatiently. ‘Surely you know me? It’s only a few years ago. Winchcombe – remember? Where there were those horrible murders.’
Thea did remember Winchcombe and the murders, mainly in association with Drew, because Karen had just died and neither Thea nor Drew knew what to do next. ‘I’m Thea Slocombe now,’ she said, still unable to put a name to the face in front of her. ‘And I live in Broad Campden.’
‘Really? Well, I’m still Priscilla Heap, older and not a bit wiser. I gather there’s been some trouble over here in Northleach? Don’t tell me you’ve got yourself involved yet again?’
Priscilla Heap … horsey, lonely, nervous of dogs … the memories slowly came into focus for Thea. ‘Gosh, yes,’ she said belatedly. ‘Now I remember.’
‘Such an awful time. Such misery – I’ll never forget it.’ She threw a look of mild reproach at Thea, who so obviously had forgotten much of it. ‘And now there’s news of another killing,’ she repeated, as if unsure that Thea had heard the first time.
‘Yes,’ said Thea. ‘And yes, I do know the people concerned, slightly. Er – I think you’re wanted,’ she finished, seeing the group of sightseers all standing close by, clearly waiting for Priscilla.
‘Oh! I’m supposed to be showing them round the church. It’s a little freelance job I picked up. They’re from Belarus,’ she added in a whisper.
‘Gosh!’ said Thea. ‘Do they speak English?’
‘Surprisingly well. You know how it is – pretty much everybody speaks, or at least understands, English, while we can barely cope with a few words of French. And I still haven’t worked out exactly what their native language is. Anyway – it was good to see you.’ The expression on her face did little to confirm these words. Thea sympathised. She had not wanted to be reminded of events in Winchcombe either. It was one of the murkier and more distressing of all her brushes with violent killing. And the echo of past horrors was unsettling. It brought to mind another buried memory – of events in Snowshill, which had been even worse than Winchcombe in some ways.
In the interests of exercise as much as anything, she carried on along High Street, and past the house where the body had been found. There was police tape across the front door, but nothing else to see. More recently-created smaller roads branched off on both sides, and Thea was aware that there was a hinterland that she had never seen. High Street mutated into East End and eventually met up with the A40 on a straight stretch that made a mockery of the old turnpike as it rambled through the town. That turnpike, Thea knew, had been thronged with traffic three centuries ago, the road rutted and deep with the dung of horses, cattle and sheep. No potager would ever lack for fertiliser in those far-off days.
The weather was turning milder with each passing day, spring bulbs filling the gardens in the few houses with space between the front door and the pavement. But there was little sign of any horticultural activity. Cars passed sporadically, but the pavement was almost deserted. Priscilla Heap’s group of Belarussian tourists was the morning’s main excitement, it seemed. The atmosphere was soporific, lulling Thea into a state of mental idleness that she could not easily climb out of. ‘This won’t do at all,’ she muttered to the spaniel. ‘We’ve got to find someone to talk to.’
The choice lay between Bobby Latimer and Faith-and-Livia, as far as she could see. Bobby might have news of Lucy, although Thea had assumed that she herself would now be the first point of contact, having been the one to actually visit the patient. There surely had to be high emotion and considerable activity caused by the killing of Ollie Sinclair, going on invisibly somewhere.
Idly walking along the street now seemed futile, and unlikely to make anything happen. One of Thea’s habitual methods of delving into the background lives of those associated with a murder was simply to go and knock on doors. Failing that, there had sometimes been good results from sauntering through villages, but it was much less reliable, especially in inclement weather. ‘So let’s knock on a door,’ she said to Hepzie, and turned to go back into the centre of town.
But then all her conclusions were abruptly turned on their heads. A large car pulled up beside her and a purple head poked out of the passenger window. ‘Hey!’ said Tessa, friend of Kevin Sinclair.
‘Oh – hello,’ said Thea, uncertainly. Should she offer condolences? She bent down to look at the driver, who was indeed the bereaved father. ‘Mr Sinclair,’ she said.
‘You heard about our Ollie.’ It was a flat statement from a man who had been transformed into a grey-faced wreck, in two short days. All three of them focused on the house, a few yards along the street.
‘I’m so sorry,’ said Thea, trying to make the words sound sincere. ‘It must have been a terrible shock.’
‘You can’t imagine,’ said Tessa. ‘It’s like the world just stopped.’ She turned to Kevin almost warily. ‘We can’t settle to anything.’
‘You’re in with the police, right?’ Kevin stared hard at Thea. ‘That business in Hampnett, when you were watching over the barn – chap was killed in the snow? Lucy said you’d been helpful – that you know the high-up detectives. So – what’s going on here? Who’ve they got their eye on for my Ollie?’
It was worse than awkward. The physical discomfort of talking to people in a car, while holding the dog and watching for approaching traffic, made it almost impossible. ‘I honestly don’t know anything,’ she assured him. ‘I only came back today because …’ She hesitated, aware of several difficulties in finishing that sentence. Because she wanted to do a bit of ferreting on behalf of the police? Because she couldn’t abide unfinished business? ‘Well, because Lucy wanted me to,’ she concluded. ‘I went to see her in hospital yesterday.’
Kevin Sinclair shook his head, as if to say there was so much wrong that he didn’t know where to begin to set her right. ‘Get in,’ he said, to Thea’s great surprise. ‘Bring the dog and get in the back.’
In the absence of any convincing excuse, she did as she was told. No warning voices screamed inside her head; they never did. She trusted people and that was not going to change, despite her repeated first-hand experience of the awful things they could do. It was probably a character defect. But she did have a phone and a dog with her, and they were in a street in broad daylight. All the same, when Kevin put the car into gear and began to drive off, she did feel her heartbeat quicken. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked, her voice a trifle shrill.
Kevin replied wearily, ‘Only to the square. We can’t stay here – we’re impeding the traffic.’
Tessa gave a little laugh, in recognition of the flicker of panic. ‘Did you think we were kidnapping you?’
‘It happens,’ said Thea tightly.
There were a few free spaces in the car park and Kevin deftly manoeuvred his big vehicle into one of them. Ignorant about cars, Thea had been slow to observe that this was something flashy and expensive. There was a smell of leather and an impression of solidity. She glanced at Hepzie’s feet to see if she’d left mud on the seats.
‘So,’ said Kevin, turning round easily to face her. He put one arm over the back of his seat and rested his chin on it. It would have appeared relaxed and friendly if it had not been for his grey skin, red eyes and slow delivery. Everything was a visible effort. All that was keeping him going was a very obvious wish for information. ‘What do you know about the murder of my son?’ he asked heavily. ‘If I can’t find out who did it, I doubt I’ll ever sleep again.’
It was a raw, uncompromising question to which an answer was expected and needed. It left Thea in no doubt about how deep the man’s need went. Her earlier theories about the father–son relationship were being confirmed. Everything between Kevin and Ollie had been dysfunctional, and to have it cut short now, before it could be put right, was intolerable. He was resting his chin because his neck was too tired to support his head. His eyes were sunk far into their sockets, and there was stubble all over his lower face. How he ha
d managed to drive so capably was a mystery. At his side, Tessa remained quiet and still, facing forward.
‘I know he was violently attacked in the house just down there. That’s all.’
Kevin stared at her. ‘All right. So what do you know about his life? Who he was, who he lived with, why he was ever in that house?’
‘You think I’m part of the police investigation,’ she realised.
‘Aren’t you?’
‘No.’ She was going to add Not at all, but hesitated. The truth was that after speaking to Higgins and Barkley she sort of was. They had told her far more than they would tell an ordinary member of the public. And they had effectively asked her to lend a hand in ferreting out all available background information.
‘But you know things,’ Kevin persisted. ‘You and the police are hand in glove. Why else are you here again today, hanging around that house?’
‘I know that lots of people thought your son was a drug addict,’ she said. ‘And that they can’t be sure of the exact time of death.’
‘He was a drug addict,’ said Kevin heavily. ‘Who says anything different?’
‘Well – apparently there might be some doubt about that.’ Keep it vague, she told herself, belatedly recalling that Caz had asked her to keep that detail quiet. But she was so sure that Kevin had not killed his son, that discretion seemed unimportant. ‘I suppose it’s not always easy to tell,’ she added.
‘Easy enough, I’d have thought. They only have to look at those useless friends of his. So-called friends. One of them must have killed him in a drug-crazed frenzy.’
The words were in implied quotation marks, but none the less sincere for that. It did conjure a vivid picture, which was all too likely to be running in a ghastly loop inside Kevin Sinclair’s head. ‘I don’t think it was quite like that,’ said Thea, treading as carefully as she could.
‘So what was it like, then?’ The words were softly ominous. Thea’s heart rate was not slowing down.
‘I don’t know. I just happened to be walking along the high street on Wednesday when Jeremy Higgins showed up. They’d only just found the … Ollie, I mean, at that point. Higgins and I had a short conversation a bit later, when everything was still completely confused. He only really had impressions to go on – and he thought then it was some kind of squat, used by people on drugs. Later on, they got a very different idea of how it had been. Haven’t they told you all this? You’re the next of kin, after all. Didn’t you know about it already?’
‘Jeremy Higgins?’ Kevin repeated. ‘That’d be the senior investigating officer, would it? Your pal Jeremy?’
‘There’s a chief superintendent above Higgins, who’ll be the SIO. I can’t remember his name.’
The man shook his head as if to dispel irrelevancies. ‘He was a druggie,’ he repeated. ‘He lived with druggies. Everybody knew that.’
‘Which drugs exactly?’ Thea asked. ‘Did he tell you?’
‘We didn’t talk about it.’
‘There’ll be plenty of evidence in the house, I expect. And the friends will have to answer a lot of questions. Don’t worry – they’ll find who did it. They’ve got so much technology and so forth to help these days. Nobody gets away with murder any more.’ A statement she knew quite well was far from true. During this exchange, Thea had become more acutely aware of Tessa’s immobility. It began to seem unnatural, as if she was suppressing tears or words so violently that the effort paralysed her.
Kevin seemed to be thinking along the same lines. ‘Tess?’ he said. ‘You tell her.’
‘We don’t know for certain, do we?’ the woman said, without turning her head. ‘We don’t know anything for certain.’
‘We know he’s dead,’ came the gravelly reply. ‘The rest of it doesn’t much matter now, does it?’
‘Oh, Kev.’ The tone was that of a helplessly fond mother trying vainly to console a small boy. ‘Yes, he’s dead. Poor Ollie. Such a waste.’
It was exactly the right thing to say, in Thea’s view. The death of a young person was always a waste. Parents put in all that love and attention and worry, finally getting their offspring to adulthood, only for it all to wither away if the son or daughter then died. It cast a terrible pall of futility over everything. ‘Was he your only one?’ she asked, thinking of her own Jessica and how dangerous it could be to have all your eggs in a single basket.
Kevin nodded absently. ‘He did take drugs,’ he repeated, as if trying to convince himself. ‘They all did. That house was a drug den. The whole town knew it was. Isn’t that what Lucy said? For God’s sake – if that wasn’t true, then what was stopping me from fixing things between him and me?’ That felt to Thea like something close to the crux of the matter.
‘She did,’ Tessa confirmed, referring to Lucy’s words. ‘So did those two women next door to her.’
‘They wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true.’ He looked hard at Thea. ‘So the police are idiots,’ he said accusingly.
‘That’s possible,’ said Thea, her head full of images from Breaking Bad, with Barkley and Higgins following all the wrong leads, ignoring the facts. ‘But they do seem to be having trouble proving it. The drug part, I mean.’
‘Some drugs don’t leave much of a trace,’ said Tessa, finally altering her position to look at Thea. ‘It’s not always injected, is it? You can smoke most of them or snort them up your nose. There won’t have been time for the post-mortem people to test for everything.’
‘No,’ said Thea doubtfully, aware of the depths of her own ignorance on the subject. ‘Well, if that’s all … ?’ She reached for the door handle, alerting her dog in the process. ‘I hope we haven’t made mud on your car seats.’
Kevin shook his head again, as if appalled at the shallowness of this remark. ‘Go on, then,’ he said sourly. ‘Can’t say you’ve been much help.’
‘Kev!’ Tessa reproached him. ‘Don’t be nasty.’
‘That’s okay,’ said Thea. ‘I really am very sorry about your son. It’s a terrible thing to happen.’
‘Right,’ said Kevin with a heavy nod. ‘I dare say we’ll be seeing you.’
Thea and her dog left the car, and began walking away before it moved. She was displeased with herself for the way she had reacted, but unable to pinpoint any precise misstep. The confusion about Ollie and drugs was the biggest mystery, which overshadowed any other questions, such as the crucial one: who killed him? The two were obviously connected – if he had been living in a ‘drug den’ then an early death was not entirely surprising. If, on the other hand, the house had been used for thoroughly harmless and legal purposes, with Ollie an innocent victim of a savage attack, there was a much bigger mystery to be solved. But it seemed to Thea that the police were in little doubt as to which scenario was the true one. Caz had told her enough to persuade her that the latter was almost certainly the case – and yet Kevin Sinclair was not convinced.
The absence of any message from or about Lucy was beginning to seem peculiar. Whether she had had a relapse or was shortly to be discharged, Thea would expect to be informed. She had been careful to keep her phone on, and close by so she would hear a call if it came. She was also braced for a panic summons from Drew, if something went horribly wrong with his schedule for the day.
There was no sign of life back at the house in the West End street, nor next door. The Latimer family opposite were unlikely to be visible, given that they spent most of their time at the back of the house. Nor had she noticed any police activity anywhere in the town. It was as if everything had quickly returned to the usual Cotswold invisibility on every front, only two days after a murder victim had been discovered in the heart of Northleach.
The house felt cool, as before, but she made no attempt to warm it up, thinking she would not be in it long enough to warrant doing so. There were one or two envelopes in the metal cage attached to the inside of the letter box on the front door, which she left untouched. Everything seemed horribly uncertain. Should she assume that L
ucy would be home for the weekend, needing milk and bread, but quite likely to be able to get them for herself? Whatever had happened to her in the hospital had not affected her back. It would be no more of a handicap than it was before she went in for her now-cancelled operation. Thea realised that she was watching the street window in the expectation that the woman would turn up in a taxi at any moment. Or one of those hospital cars, driven by volunteers.
And then a woman did come to the door and ring the bell. Hepzie yapped uncertainly, not sure whether she was supposed to defend this house as she did the one in Broad Campden.
Chapter Eleven
‘I was told you might know something about my boyfriend and how he died,’ came the stark assertion, with no preamble. ‘I’ve just had a word with his father, and that’s what he told me.’ She bent down to pat the spaniel as if they were old friends.
‘He told you wrong,’ said Thea angrily. ‘And he knows that perfectly well.’ She made no pretence of not knowing who the boyfriend was.
‘Well, can I talk to you anyway? My name’s Vicky, by the way. I’ve got nothing else to do, and nobody wants me around.’
Thea gave her a searching look. Early twenties, thin, bad skin, straggly hair – the epitome of a drug addict, in Thea’s limited experience. ‘This isn’t my house, you know. I can’t just invite any strange person in.’ The thought had occurred to her that this Vicky was highly likely to pocket a valuable ornament, and insist on eating something from Lucy’s store cupboard. She did look hungry. And she upended all Thea’s latest notions about Ollie and drugs.
‘I’m not strange. Lucy knows me well enough. She wouldn’t mind me being here.’
‘I don’t know that I can just take your word for it, though, can I? I’m always getting into trouble through letting people into houses.’ She thought back to her days in Barnsley, near Bibury, and the awful consequences of letting a woman into a house that was not hers.
