‘He probably wouldn’t if she were a man. They have to be so careful. You know how that goes.’ Alex only wanted to do something constructive – preferably find Hugh and get him to confide in her. ‘Tony’s gone back to the clinic and taken the dogs with him. We were going to spend the day in Gloucester but with Hugh AWOL, I thought I’d better get back. Why don’t we all plan on getting together this evening?’
‘That’s fine, but I need to talk to you now. Bill wanted to know about Neve Rhys, who she is, why she’s here. I told him we don’t know, but he didn’t seem to believe me. That means he’ll be back. Miller looked through the guest book – without asking permission – and asked to see Neve’s room. Of course, I said I couldn’t let her do that and fortunately Bill agreed with me.’
‘I’m embarrassed to say I can’t stand that woman,’ Alex said. She wasn’t about to explain that since Bill Lamb’s boss, DCI Dan O’Reilly, had made it clear on a number of occasions that he’d like to be more than a friend to Alex, and gossip on the force potentially rivaled that of the average church altar society, DC Jillian Miller was fully aware of O’Reilly’s feelings for Alex. And Miller was mad about O’Reilly.
‘Listen to them in the bar,’ Lily said. ‘They’ve been here most of the day. You’d think none of them had jobs to go to.’
Voices had become a loud babble in the saloon bar. ‘They don’t know anything, do they?’ Alex asked. ‘How can they?’
Lily, a taller version of her daughter with gray sprinkled through her dark curls but almost identical, almond-shaped, green eyes, raised expressive brows in an ‘are you kidding?’ signal.
Alex sighed. ‘I see. They do know.’
‘Even if various coppers hadn’t been in and out with inane questions, someone would have got wind of something being up. That pushy reporter from Cheltenham was in, the skinny one with the black-framed glasses like diving goggles. She can’t keep the things on her nose. Now unless someone had the gall to call her, I wouldn’t have the faintest how she … well, of course someone called her. Nothing’s actually happened as far as we know. It’s potty. I don’t know what’s going on, Alex. Are you going to clue me in so I can at least fend off questions?’
Alex thought of the visit to Green Friday that morning. ‘Mum, has Doc James mentioned anything about a patient coming in with cuts from broken glass last night or this morning early?’
‘No.’ Lily frowned. She and Doc had been close for a long time. ‘James doesn’t talk about cases, anyway.’
‘Of course not. It was just a thought.’
‘So what’s going on?’
Alex plopped down on one of the tapestry-upholstered banquettes surrounding the little room and her mother pulled out a chair. ‘Sometimes it’s better not to know things,’ Alex said. ‘You can’t answer questions, then.’
‘In other words, don’t be nosey? I haven’t been called that very often.’
‘Sorry.’ Alex was annoyed with herself. ‘It’s already been a weird day and I suppose I’m not holding up perfectly. Sam Brock went to Green Friday first thing this morning to change all the locks – don’t ask me why – and came tearing down here to tell Hugh the front door was unlocked and there were smears of dried blood on the floor. The three of us went up there and it was just as he described it. But still no one walking around bleeding or covered with bandages. We called the police and got Bill and Miller. I don’t know what’s going on there. I was surprised not to see Dan O’Reilly.’
Lily gave her a shrewd glance but didn’t make any remarks about wondering if Alex carried a torch for Dan, the way she usually did.
‘Well, someone got hurt,’ Alex said finally. She frowned and tapped the edge of a beermat against the tabletop. ‘I detest saying this, but it’s too much of a coincidence that Hugh’s dropped out of sight. Unless he dashes in with a perfectly good excuse, that is. For taking off and leaving you to deal with things – without giving you a word of explanation, even a phony one, maybe?’
‘That would be a good starting place.’ Lily stood up again. ‘Is there anything else you know and don’t mind sharing?’
‘I don’t know anything. But Neve Rhys gives me the creeps.’
‘There is that. She’s an odd one and I don’t have the faintest why she’s here. She was certainly out of here early this morning.’
‘Come on,’ Alex said. ‘We can’t leave Liz on her own in there for too long.’
‘Juste Vidal was writing a sermon at St Aldwyn’s. I thought to call the rectory and he came over. He’s here, collar and all, helping out in the bar. You can’t say this is your average pub.’ Lily smiled.
‘I thought when Juste became a curate he wouldn’t feel he should be moonlighting here but he’s a very modern man of God.’ Juste had worked at the Black Dog since he was in divinity school in Cheltenham. ‘I understand service attendance blossoms when he preaches.’ The local girls whispered together about ‘our dreamy Frenchman’ and, she knew, plotted ways to capture his interest. Juste smiled his way through the attention.
Lily moved toward the door. ‘I never expected him to actually get a position here in Folly but I’m glad he has.’
When she walked into the saloon bar, Alex felt all eyes upon her. The noise level subsided briefly. ‘Afternoon, all,’ she said and hoped her smile didn’t look as if it was splitting her face – the way it felt.
‘There’s our girl,’ Kev Winslet, increasingly beefy, red-faced gamekeeper at the Derwinter estate, waved his full pint glass around, slopping beer on the floor. ‘Hugh still not shown up, then? It’s starting to feel like another Folly plot in the making. That scrawny woman from one of the papers was in here already. Quiet for her, she was. Like she was doing all the listening for a change. Would that be because this is a really big one and the coppers have managed to keep schtum?’
‘There’s nothing to keep schtum about as far as I know,’ Alex said. True, at least until she found out otherwise. She allowed herself to be pulled aside by Carrie Peale, a potter with a pottery and tiny showroom in what had been an outbuilding behind her cottage in Holly Road.
‘A word,’ Carrie said. ‘I came to see if I needed to take Harvey home.’ She indicated her artistically disheveled, rakishly attractive husband sprawled in a chair cradling a glass of what was probably whiskey on his flat stomach. A member of a biker club, regulars at the Black Dog sat with him, leaning forward and talking earnestly, with the odd poke to Harvey’s arm followed by the pair of them laughing hugely.
‘I decided I’d join him.’ Carrie raised a glass of beer and smiled. ‘Until I saw he was with his buddy, Saul. But it’s been too interesting around here for me to leave anyway.’ Her dark gray eyes shone. A stocky woman with a wide mouth and a tilted nose, her blond hair bobbed just below her ears, she wore a stained and bleached-out overall and a denim shirt spattered with paint and clay. Her feet were also paint-decorated in their inelegant brown sandals.
‘Interesting how?’ Alex asked. She liked Carrie and admired her acceptance of a carelessly self-involved husband. He was the brilliant writer yet to be recognized, kept by his ‘sturdy potter wife who was lucky to have him’.
‘These things will be all over the village very soon,’ Carrie said. She repeatedly looked at her husband and his companion. ‘Some of them already are. But there’s no reason for you to take any flack. The woman detective who was here mentioned you. She said there was a potentially serious case under investigation but although she knew you were a bit of a local celebrity as a so-called PI – her words, not mine – any information should be taken directly to her, not to you. She gave out business cards. Somehow she’s got her knickers in a twist when it comes to you.’
‘Apparently.’ Alex grinned. ‘Never mind. What sort of things were being said?’
‘Something’s happened at a house outside the village. Major Stroud said he’d heard it was on Trap Lane, up past where you live. Said that would be the Manor House or Green Friday. Most likely the latter. He was
going on about a death at Green Friday a while back and the house belonging to Hugh. Major Stroud said he thought the police came here looking for Hugh but he isn’t here. Kev Winslet talked about how Hugh was always here – which I wouldn’t know since I’m usually at the pottery. They were working up a story you might not like, Alex. I thought you’d like to know.’
‘Thanks.’ She would have heard soon enough and it was better to be prepared. ‘Let’s hope it all blows over.’
‘Absolutely.’ Carrie set her glass on a table. She turned a bit pink. ‘I did go up there, but I expect you know the police have a crew out searching the hill and woods around Trap Lane. They’ve taped that off at the bottom. There is talk they’re looking for someone who is missing. I don’t know for sure how long this person’s been gone but it sounded like more than a day or so. Someone was at Green Friday, they say. Staying there and they’ve left all their things. It doesn’t sound good and it’s a bad time for Hugh to drop out of the picture.’
The sun had gone out, holed-up between unfurling sheets of grey gauze cloud. And with the sky change came a rising chill that brought goosebumps out on Alex’s bare arms.
She had left the Dog shortly after Carrie Peale – who had given up on taking Harvey home when he’d been willingly pulled into a raucous drinking game with the Gentlemen Bikers Club, as Alex now knew these well-heeled people with money to burn called themselves.
Lily, Liz and Juste were well able to manage without her and she would be useless until she followed a strong hunch and tried to find Hugh.
Her vehicle was parked in a field behind a drystone wall. The gate to the field was missing and driving through had been easy. Climbing the hill that paralleled Trap Lane was also easy enough. Her decision not to wear shorts had been a good one. Thick blackberry brambles would have scratched her legs until they looked like used tick-tack-toe boards.
When she reached a ridge, the field swept down steeply, the rough grass scattered with clover and clumps of heather. The air was sweet and heady. If her ribs didn’t ache from holding her muscles tense – and she wasn’t sick with worry – she might have enjoyed herself.
Climbing in an arc, Alex made her way upward, looking for a vantage point on Trap Lane. She didn’t intend to be seen but she did have plans to start searching where she didn’t think the police had attempted a sweep yet. If, as she’d been led to believe, they were concentrating on someone having gone downhill to get away from Green Friday – logical enough – but they hadn’t found any sign of a person, why shouldn’t she follow her hunch and go uphill? Anyone missing for so long must be injured, unconscious, or dead, unless they had managed to get completely away.
Kicking through the clover-laden grass in her hiking boots, she constantly hunted in all directions. Around her neck she carried binoculars – they were better there than in her hands where they would slow her down. Occasionally she put them to her eyes and swept the area. Her deepest hope was that Hugh had already come up to search. There was a lot of ground to cover but with so few people ever venturing this far, she had a good hope of finding him if he was there.
From the ridge, Alex saw movement around Green Friday. It wasn’t that far away; policemen and dogs together with an assortment of other coppers, beat their way through the fields. Into the woods beyond the sycamores lining the driveway at Green Friday, along hedgerows on Trap Lane, they went. More of them were farther away on the road between Folly and Underhill.
Men were at work on Radhika’s house. They should be done in no more than a few weeks. Radhika was still spending her nights at Tony’s clinic but she did make use of rooms that were finished in the corner tower of her new home. The police must have searched the place and left already, doubting the workers would have missed a person who shouldn’t be there.
A breeze picked up, tossed the grasses and made miniature whirlwinds of dusty grit hiding beneath. Alex pressed on, wanting to keep making a mental map of any route that could have led uphill. Eventually she should find the area where Trap Lane petered out and a path led toward an alternate route downhill. Alex enjoyed feeling at home here. In childhood she had played over the hills and fields around the villages. Somewhere was that cart track that led to the Derwinter estate but anyone going that way on foot, probably in the dark, was unlikely to get far.
She mused on just how much of this land belonged to Leonard Derwinter and his overpowering wife, Heather. Likely most of it. In fact Alex had come to like Heather a lot more as she knew her better. She had decided much of the bumptious manner came from insecurity, even if it was well hidden.
Each time she made a visual search in all directions, she concentrated on looking for a man walking alone. Hugh also knew and enjoyed these hills. Why wouldn’t he choose to come here after the scene at Green Friday that morning and when he wanted to get away – and possibly when he was looking for something or someone?
In the distance, to the south of Folly-on-Weir and visible against a still-blue patch of sky, stood the folly for which the village was named. Tinsdale Tower was its real name but locals had always called it The Tooth for the jagged shape it had acquired with a serious collapse many years earlier.
Gaging that she was coming to Trap Lane, although it would be narrow at this level, Alex started to hike back up the ridge until she could see over the top, then stood very still. Her blood felt as if it had stopped flowing. Not more than yards in front of her and downhill, stood Hugh and her spine started to sweat and prickle. He rested a foot on a rock and slowly studied the hill below. Abruptly, he moved, loping easily over rough ground. And while he wove between hillocks, she stood like a salt pillar. Striding out he went down, cutting toward the direction from which Alex had come. She hoped, desperately, that he wouldn’t come upon her Land Rover. Just as quickly she wondered why that should matter, and why she didn’t call out to him.
Hugh stopped again, looked around, and turned back abruptly, headed upward again and toward his right as if he, too, were heading for the top of Trap Lane.
Carefully, she went to her knees, eased forward until she lay flat, face down and out of sight.
Why? She wasn’t sure, but it seemed important.
After timing five minutes on her watch, Alex eased up to look in the direction Hugh had taken. At first she couldn’t see him. Then she picked him out, just below her again and moving fast from the amount of ground he’d already covered.
Why did he go up, then return? He was running, leaping from hillock to hillock … running away?
She sat down, cross-legged, and let her head hang forward. The thoughts that crowded her brain sickened her. Without proof, she was convicting a man she’d come to admire of some terrible crime she wasn’t even sure had been committed.
What had he been doing up here? And why had he visited Green Friday last evening? And why, most of all, hadn’t he mentioned it when the two of them had returned there with Sam, or to the police – or during any of the opportunities he’d had since?
When Alex reached Trap Lane it resembled a path worn by animals or, if it were nearer civilization, children tramping, single-file, along familiar ground. She crossed over, making a mental note to find out exactly where the track that belonged to the Derwinters joined the lane. The track would be lower down but even if it was difficult, someone could have used that to get away. There was the back way from Green Friday that led in the opposite direction but it must be almost completely overgrown by now.
An empty, despondent feeling weighted her but she kept walking. She hadn’t really discovered a thing – other than Hugh’s whereabouts – and she ought to get back. She couldn’t forget her promise to meet with her mother that evening, and Tony was expecting to see her.
The cry of a meadow pipit soared with the bird, high overhead, and eventually slowed when the bird descended like a falling parachute and disappeared from her sight. A few more minutes and Alex would climb down. She’d better be quick about it or she would be added to the ‘missing list’.
> A small lake, more a pond, all but hid in a wide dip. Shadowed in places by thickets of gorse in full yellow bloom and by bracken and a tier of rhododendron beneath two windblown trees, the breeze sent tiny ripples scurrying across its surface.
If the lake had a name, Alex didn’t know it and barely remembered being there before, but she did recall something about it being fed by underground springs and how increased rainfall in winter made it overflow.
At the edge, she stared down. It would be quite unmoving on a still day. Was it deep? She vaguely recalled childhood mutterings about it being very deep but nothing clear. Eerie, she decided, and she didn’t like it – and she had been there before, as a little girl with a group of children. Alex disliked weakness in herself and branding a small lake creepy was weak.
Tromping along the edge, she searched for anything out of place, anything disturbed. Like signs of digging? She closed her eyes a moment. Why did she invent these disaster scenarios? She scared herself. And no one would bother digging a place to bury a body when they could push it into a lake.
She had set out hoping to locate Hugh and make sure he was all right. Then she had planned to follow her idea up into the hills beyond Green Friday. Now she’d found a deep pond she’d forgotten existed and was playing with ideas of Hugh tossing a body into the water. Imagination could be helpful, but it could also be a time-waster.
When she saw him, Hugh could have been coming from around here.
What body, Alex? What are you so afraid of? Hugh wouldn’t be standing around if he’d just got rid of a body.
Alex had made an almost complete circle around the area when she saw something roll beneath the surface on the far side. Using the binoculars, she located a tangle of thick plants growing from the bank and what looked like a matted tangle of grey wool caught on a stout root. A piece of yellow fabric flapped like a plague flag.
The thing rolled again, slowly from side-to-side, heavy and mostly under the water so she caught only glimpses of more colors. And she set off, making sure her mobile was in her pocket just in case – and feeling silly.
Trap Lane Page 5
