Slaughter in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Why does it have such a nasty name?’ Emily wanted to know.

  ‘Slaughter, you mean? Oh, I know the answer to that. It has nothing to do with killing things. It’s from “slough” which is a stretch of boggy ground. Like the Slough of Despond.’

  ‘That’s quite nasty as well,’ said Emily, obviously determined to see the grey side of things.

  Before her guest arrived, and after all the creatures were dealt with, Thea took the spaniel for an exploration of the village. As Babs had said, the farmhouse was less than half a mile outside the settlement, with the sold-off fields even closer. There was a lot more overt tourist activity in Lower Slaughter than in the other villages she had stayed in. Two stately hotels set the tone – claiming stars and crowns galore between them, to prove the luxurious quality of their beds and cuisine. There would be none of the quiet deserted mornings before the tourist coaches came through that Duntisbourne Abbots or Temple Guiting enjoyed. Hotel guests would tumble forth to savour the early sun on the little river Eye, and self-catering holidaymakers would saunter out for some local colour before breakfast. The characteristic restraint of the dozens of tucked-away villages in the area had been lost in the Slaughters. Recalling what Emily had said, Thea wondered whether it was the intriguing, slightly repellent, name that had singled them out for such relentless attention.

  A well-behaved little river ran through the very centre of the village, with the road on one side, and a wide pavement on the other. This pavement could almost qualify as a promenade, inviting strollers along the waterside. At one end was a bridge just sturdy enough to take cars, and at the other, the path turned a sharp bend to the Mill, which had been converted into a shop clearly aimed at tourists. At right angles to it was a small museum, with old rural artifacts standing outside. A row of gorgeous old houses with colourful front gardens lined the footpath, conspicuous in their Cotswoldiness, and a narrow footbridge offered walkers a car-free way across the river. It all felt like being inside a picture postcard, or a fairytale. The air was still, the water merely flickering in its lazy progress.

  Keeping Hepzie on the lead, she traversed the village from end to end, and met ten or twelve people in the course of fifteen minutes. Even in the comparatively large Blockley, there had not been so many pedestrians. It felt intimate, as if all these people should become one’s friends, or at the least exchange something beyond a nod and a smile – an impression that Hepzie seemed to share. Three times she tried to jump up at a passing stranger, forcing Thea to rein her in tightly and make shame-faced apologies.

  The tension between having definite tasks to perform on the one hand, and the irresistible sense of being on holiday on the other, had gradually become a familiar part of house-sitting. The fact that events had never unfolded as expected only added to this tension. There were many different motives for employing somebody to take care of one’s house, she had discovered. The pets and livestock often turned out to be quite incidental to the real reason for importing a guardian. Simmering at the back of her mind were the comments made by the Angells about property development and the conflicts that were bound to ensue. Quite how any of that could possibly affect her, she wasn’t sure. Probably it wouldn’t. But now that she knew about it, she felt she ought to be on the alert.

  It was impossible to know which of the people she encountered were on holiday, and which lived in Lower Slaughter permanently. She suspected the vast majority fell into the former category. Cotswold villages appeared to possess remarkably few permanent residents. Even those who did officially reside there were off down the motorway at seven in the morning, and didn’t come back for a good twelve hours. To count them as ‘residents’ hardly seemed accurate.

  But the one approaching her now was surely an exception. Not that he had straw in his hair or string tied round the knees of his trousers, but he certainly wasn’t in the clean shirt and slacks of the typical tourist. He was wearing a khaki flannel garment that looked rather warm for August, crumpled at the collar and bunchily tucked into his jeans – which had a narrow tear across one knee, exposing pale-coloured threads. He met her eyes from a distance of several yards, his head slightly cocked in a friendly question. Why, she wondered later, had he singled her out for curiosity when she was surely indistinguishable from any other self-catering visitor? But during the encounter, the only thing she wondered was how anybody could have such a vivid shade of blue to their eyes. They were gentian blue, the colour glowing in a tanned face. As she held their gaze, the blueness seemed to outshine every other hue in their surroundings. There was red on the buildings, yellow and purple in the gardens and hanging baskets, green above and below – but the man’s eyes were impossibly, inhumanly, blue.

  He was about her own age, not particularly tall or slim or muscular. He smiled lightly, and nodded a greeting. ‘Morning,’ he said, as they passed. His voice was deep and rich.

  ‘Hello,’ she answered. Hepzie tugged at the lead, wanting to contribute to the exchange. The man took no notice of the dog.

  It was over in seconds. Thea walked on slowly, blinking at the momentary dazzlement. So he had blue eyes – what of it? Phil Hollis had blue eyes as well, come to that. Phil would hold her gaze and bare his soul and invite her attention and love. There was no space in her life for sudden startling corneal intimacy with a scruffy stranger.

  She increased her pace, letting the dog have more freedom on the extendable lead. The pretty river did its rivery thing, twinkling tidily between trim stone embankments and beneath charming little bridges. The slough after which the villages had been named was firmly channelled and drained and long forgotten. The essence of the Cotswolds was thriving here, everything safe and predictable and lovely.

  She bought an ice cream at the shop, wishing it sold wine and olives as well, and turned back to Schloss Angell, alias Hawkhill Farm. The first thing she did on arriving was to go to the utility area beyond the kitchen and open the chest freezer. Two plucked and prepared pheasants caught her eye. She would cook them for her sister. Somehow they seemed just right for the occasion.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Emily arrived at three, pausing in the gateway as if unsure that she’d come to the right place. Thea was on a rickety garden bench, which had small patches of lichen growing on it to give witness to its extreme age. She sat outside because it was August, and she wanted to watch out for Emily, but it was a chilly vigil, with clouds gathering in the west and a spiteful little breeze blowing.

  Along with the Angells’ bored dogs, she watched her sister park the shiny new car and emerge in a fluid elegant movement. Emily was superficially like Thea, but four inches taller. Jocelyn, the youngest, was much fairer and heavier, plucking her genes from the Johnstone grandmother, rather than Maureen’s slighter, darker, father, Grandpa Foster, a man they barely remembered, but who was immortalised in Emily, who was said to look exactly like him.

  ‘Don’t sit here,’ Thea warned. ‘It won’t take two. Every time I move it threatens to collapse.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Emily. ‘The place seems a bit ramshackle.’

  ‘By local standards, it is – definitely,’ Thea agreed. ‘I quite like it.’

  They went in through the front door and Thea instantly saw the house through Emily’s eyes. It was dusty; the windows weren’t very clean; the rugs and stair carpet had endured spillages and damage that left indelible marks. The curtains at the front window were ragged at the edges where the parrot had climbed up them countless times.

  Ignatius was intently aware of a second intruder. ‘Lock the doors, Daddy! Lock the doors!’ it screeched, with impossible clarity. It was the first time Thea had heard him speak.

  ‘My God!’ said Emily faintly. ‘I see what you mean. It’s terrifying.’

  ‘That’s nothing,’ said Thea with relish. ‘There was a great big bat in my bedroom last night.’

  ‘No!’

  ‘I always thought I liked them until then. But it’s all true what they say – you get a real horr
or that it’ll tangle itself in your hair. I can’t think why, when they absolutely never do that, at least according to Carl. They move so irrationally, darting and swooping, and you know they can’t see you and don’t know what you are.’

  Emily shuddered. ‘I would have run right out and driven home on the spot.’

  ‘Well, I can’t do that, can I? Whatever happens, I have to stay here for a fortnight.’

  ‘Well, you’re a lot braver than me, that’s for sure. And braver than your dog, by the look of it.’

  Hepzibah was circling the parrot’s cage, eyes fixed on the bird, small squeaks emitting from her. ‘Lock the doors,’ said the parrot again, on a quieter note, sending the dog into further whining confusion. Distress was clear in every nerve.

  Thea laughed. ‘Come on, silly. It won’t hurt you.’ But Hepzie continued her patrol, thoroughly bewildered, but convinced she had some sort of protective role to play. Thea dragged her into the kitchen, where she made tea and engaged her sister in the conversation she had come to conduct. It wasn’t long before they ventured onto the main topic – the death of their father and their mother’s future. It ebbed and flowed, as they moved from kitchen to living room, and then outside to feed the dogs and ferrets. Thea spent half an hour in the kitchen, forbidding Emily from joining her as she set the pheasants simmering in a casserole, with carrots and onions and herbs. They were still slightly frozen, but she hoped that a couple of hours in a moderate oven would see them tender and toothsome. Emily called through from the main living room, every few minutes: ‘Surely I can do something to help?’ and ‘I came to talk to you, not sit here twiddling my thumbs.’ But hard experience had taught Thea that to invite Emily to share cooking was to consign yourself to a barrage of corrections and scathing comments about your technique. Nobody sliced carrots to Emily’s satisfaction, and the idea of her discovering that the birds were not fully defrosted was too terrible to contemplate.

  ‘I’ll be right with you,’ she promised. ‘We can have an hour or more of quality time before I have to get some potatoes on.’

  The conversation had already verged on the overwrought at times. Awkwardly, Emily had voiced her sense of disconnection after the funeral, only the day before. ‘I’ve been trying to carry on as normal, especially with Grant going off to sixth form college in a couple of weeks. He needs all sorts of books and clothes, and I can only do it at weekends. I should be sitting him down and making a proper list, not falling apart here.’

  ‘You’re not falling apart, don’t be silly,’ Thea argued. ‘It wouldn’t be very realistic to think you could just pretend nothing had happened. What sort of message would that give the boys? They’ll be missing Dad as well.’

  Waiting for the pheasants to cook, they doggedly forced themselves to stay with the painful subject of bereavement. Emily seemed determined to confront what she saw as an imperfect relationship with her father, dating back to her failure to adopt his values or interests. ‘He always wanted me to make better use of my brain,’ she said. ‘To go into science and do some good in the world.’ She sniffed. ‘And I could never rid myself of the notion that most of the world’s problems are rooted in science. I made him so angry.’

  ‘You didn’t do it on purpose.’

  ‘Maybe not, but he thought I did. And then you married Carl, who was the embodiment of Dad’s ideas. All that ecological stuff – it was wonderful for him. It left me even further out of the magic circle. My husband’s a financial consultant, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘Dad didn’t mind,’ Thea insisted. ‘You’re projecting too much onto him. He wasn’t at all judgmental. He liked Bruce and he adored your boys.’

  ‘Not as much as he liked Carl and Jessica. Oh, Thea – I feel so bloody guilty. I thought there’d be time to put it all straight and earn his approval. And now it’s too late. It feels so awful.’

  It made quite a lot of sense to Thea, as she meditated on the family history as she remembered it. ‘You just have to go with it, I suppose,’ she said vaguely. ‘Wait for it all to settle down again.’

  Emily twirled a strand of hair around a finger, like a fifteen-year-old. Outside, heavy rain had set in, thundering loudly on the tin roof of the barn. A glance at the clock told Thea it was high time she peeled some potatoes.

  The meal was a modest success. ‘Could have done with another hour on a slow heat,’ said Emily. ‘I’d have told you if you asked me. I did pheasant a few weeks ago for a dinner party. The flavour needs to come out with long slow cooking.’

  ‘Thanks. I’ll remember that for next time,’ said Thea lightly. ‘At least it’s edible.’

  ‘It’s really quite nice,’ said Emily graciously. ‘Much better than I expected. Though it’s a pity there’s no wine.’ She ate quickly, and in half an hour it was all over, including an apple and coffee.

  ‘I think the Angells are teetotal,’ said Thea. ‘And it didn’t occur to me to bring any booze with me.’

  ‘Just as well, I suppose, since I’ve got to drive.’

  ‘Look at that rain!’ said Thea. ‘You’d much better stay the night, instead of setting off into that. It’s getting quite dark.’

  ‘No, I’m not staying the night,’ said Emily. ‘I can’t face the idea of that bat. I don’t want to put you off, but I don’t like the atmosphere in this house. There’s something dingy about it. Cobwebs and things going rusty and inches of fluff under the beds. It’ll give me asthma if I try to sleep here.’ She put a hand to her bronchial area. ‘I can feel it already.’

  ‘OK,’ said Thea, trying to suppress the disappointment. It didn’t seem very fair of her sister to invade like this and then abruptly leave again, with no thought for the effect she was having. Thea had not wanted family business to intrude on the Lower Slaughter job, especially so soon after getting there. Emily’s feelings towards their father verged on the critical at times, which Thea found surprisingly upsetting. As far as she was concerned, he’d been perfect, and her sister had no right to jeopardise that comforting belief. After all, Emily herself had been a scratchy and even downright arrogant daughter at times. She’d always been a poor listener, disinclined to take the other person’s feelings into account, argumentative and sometimes uncharitable. Thea suspected that if the conversation had lasted much longer, she might have been tempted to say some of this, with ghastly consequences.

  So it was with more than a little relief mixed into the simmering resentment that she waved her sister out of sight, standing in the doorway only long enough to watch the car begin to move. The rain was bad enough to raise flickers of anxiety in the breast of anyone who had experienced floods over the past few years. This area, Thea remembered, had suffered severely. She wondered briefly whether the little river running through Lower Slaughter ever misbehaved badly enough to threaten the houses alongside it. It might be interesting to go for a look in the morning. As far as Hawkhill was concerned, it appeared that any run-off water had been efficiently directed into ditches and channels well clear of the house. There was no sign of rivulets or even large puddles in what she could see of the yard.

  So she closed the front door, went back into the living room, and tried to settle down on the sagging sofa. But she was soon up again, prowling around the room in search of diversion. The television’s remote control didn’t work, there was no DVD player, and the only light in the room was a rather dim energy-saving bulb, apparently bought when they first appeared and living up to its promise of lasting for fifty years. There were few books in the house, but she did find a stack of big jigsaws in one corner. Somehow Babs Angell had struck her as too busy for such fripperies, but when she examined them it was plain that they had all been used. Something about the afternoon she’d spent with Emily, the references to childhood and family life, made jigsaws seem entirely appropriate. She selected one depicting a small flock of sheep in the snow, with a lot of twisty bare tree branches, and resolved to try to finish it before it was time for her to leave Hawkhill.

  The ligh
t was better in the kitchen, and a radio sat on the windowsill. The view was over the fields and farm buildings at the back. The table could be used for the jigsaw, with plenty of space left over for one person to sit and eat at one end.

  There was a play on Radio Four, involving a Victorian governess and the younger son of the house, which kept her pleasantly diverted as she methodically sorted out all the edge pieces. Hours passed. Hepzie was curled on a muddy sheepskin in front of the Rayburn. The parrot was quiet and rain continued to thunder on the roofs outside. She made herself more coffee at one point, and wondered whether she should try phoning her daughter. It was Saturday night – Jessica ought to be out with friends, and Thea preferred not to know if the girl was alone in her flat, swotting for the next test in her police training. The absence of anything resembling a serious boyfriend was beginning to nag at Thea, however sternly she might reproach herself for it. At Jessica’s age, Thea was firmly married and six months pregnant. So was Jocelyn, come to that. Early marriage and motherhood was a pattern in the Johnstone family, and while she had no conscious desire for her daughter to follow suit, there was a subliminal expectation that would not be shaken.

  At half past ten, she went upstairs and checked that there was hot water available for a bath. The Rayburn evidently saw to it that this was never going to be a problem. So long as the thing was kept alight, all would be well. With a sigh of anticipation, she went into the bedroom to find her nightshirt and book, preparatory for a long indulgent soak.