Slaughter in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

He smiled again, and even emitted a quick laugh. ‘Nothing at all,’ he said. ‘Mine’s only seven.’

  Thea was well aware that her official boyfriend would disapprove of this conversation on a number of levels. As an assistant to the police investigating Webster’s death, she had failed completely. As a woman encountering a new man, she was behaving outrageously, at least in her secret recesses. She had moved beyond the amazing blue eyes to the personality behind them, and found it very attractive. She already liked him too much to risk upsetting him by asking any more about his brother. Besides, why in the world should she? She wasn’t a detective and her sister was under a cloud of suspicion that dictated that Thea ought to tread carefully.

  Even so, Peter Clarke’s brother had been murdered, and he must be finding it hard to think about anything else.

  Hepzie was getting restless, circling Thea’s legs and entangling her in the lead. But Thea was thinking about the brothers. ‘Why did he stay at a hotel?’ she asked. ‘And such an expensive one at that? Haven’t you got a spare room?’

  He blinked, and she realised such questions might sound intrusive. She made no attempt to retreat, however.

  ‘He insisted. He wasn’t too sure how things would go between us, and thought we might need space. He’d read some review of that particular place and decided to give it a try.’

  She nodded carelessly at this explanation. ‘Well, I’d better get back,’ she said. ‘I’m in a bit of trouble, actually, with my house-sitting. I need to keep an eye on the resident dogs. They’re under suspicion of murder, themselves.’

  The flash of alarm in his eyes made her rush to explain. Could he really have thought she meant that Freddy and Basil had killed his brother? She quickly told the story of the slaughtered sheep. The vicar grimaced and shook his head. ‘Nasty,’ he said. ‘Sounds a bit like The Silence of the Lambs.’

  ‘No,’ she told him seriously. ‘That’s different. But I suppose it’s going on as well. If I’ve got it right, this is the time when most lambs do go to the butcher. I remember a lot of noise last week, where they were separating them from their mothers.’

  ‘In Africa they just chop their heads off, in one quick swing. I came to the view that that was a lot more merciful than all this long-distance driving and waiting about in the abattoir that goes on here.’

  ‘We’re back to death again,’ she pointed out. ‘Isn’t there any other subject we could talk about?’

  ‘Not today,’ he said regretfully. ‘I’ve got work to do, policemen to talk to, letters to write.’ He sighed and the droop came back to his mouth. ‘And a mother to visit, God help me.’

  ‘I expect he will,’ said Thea, feeling entirely insincere.

  She trailed back to Hawkhill, ignoring the lavish scenery, her insides swirling with self-dislike. What was it with women, she asked herself, that they were always leaping forward to a distant future? She had been unable to prevent her imagination from settling her as a rural vicar’s wife, ministering to waifs and strays that Peter Clarke brought to her for solace. The daughter would accept her as a perfect stepmother, encouraged to remember all the details of her African childhood. All madness, she assured herself. Complete and utter fantasy, and I should be old enough to know better by now. An absolute lack of any religious faith firmly disqualified her from any such scenario, anyway. She’d never be able to attend his services or share the things that most urgently mattered to him.

  ‘Best stick with Phil, then,’ she muttered. ‘He’s not so bad, really. We’re just going through a stale patch. Once his back’s completely better, it’ll be fine.’

  The jigsaw on the kitchen table had an abandoned look, and Thea admitted inner doubts as to whether she’d ever go back to it. There were so many calls on her attention, requiring phone calls or visits, too much hanging over her that could at any moment descend with a crash. The Angells’ dogs were a source of growing guilt, as she tried to imagine how their owners would react if the worst happened and they were summarily executed. They hadn’t seemed unduly fond of the animals, but it wasn’t safe to make such an assumption. Most people were viscerally attached to their dogs, whether it showed or not. In a way, their guilt or innocence was a secondary consideration. Thea had defied her clear instructions and let them loose. It was her fault, fair and square, and she deserved to be chastised. The Angells would be within their rights to withhold payment for the house-sitting, she realised. They might even sue her for negligence.

  And there was Emily, behaving oddly and telling dubious stories to the police. Thea was steadfastly convinced that it was all a result of the death of their father and the terrible shock of coming across a violent killing only a few days later. Besides, as far as she could see, Emily’s account of her experiences had made pretty good sense. The vivid details of the victim being assaulted so savagely remained clear in her mind. The shadowy attacker was easy enough to imagine, with his sturdy boots and vicious weapon. Her imagination recoiled from the moments of contact, the skull cracking, the face driven ruthlessly into the mud. It was too horrible, and little wonder if Emily too wanted to erase it from her mind.

  But there were other things demanding her attention, too – all of them worrying. Her mother and Phil could be added to the list, that included Basil and Freddy. It all combined to make her far too restless to attempt any more of the jigsaw. It was all the worse, because she could see no obvious course of action on any issue, whether Emily, the dogs, Phil or her mother. Where exactly did she stand with the Galton man, for example? Had Phil pacified him enough for her to be able to forget him for the time being? It would have been an interesting distraction, that afternoon, to walk over to his house and have a look at his sheep, if circumstances had been different. Not the dead ones, but the flock in general. Although no expert, Thea had quite a liking for sheep, and had encountered many different aspects of them over the past year. Shearing, lambing, the use of their wool – even now the Cotswolds retained at least a faint shadow of the creatures which had originally endowed the whole area with its prosperity. She had learnt about the old Cotswold breed, now officially ‘rare’, but featuring in documents going back over a thousand years. Sheep in England were not quite as sacred as cows in India, but they had earned a place in people’s respect here in Gloucestershire. You didn’t let your dogs tear them to bits anywhere, but least of all here.

  And neither did you permit men to bash each other’s brains out. Underlying all the other concerns was the murder. It was unarguable that the killer must be caught. And like it or not, Thea once again found herself on the spot, an observant stranger with every excuse to ask pertinent questions and get to know some of the characters involved. Regardless of Detective Superintendent Phil Hollis, she would want to do her bit. And after this morning, she wanted to regain her own self-respect. She was not a silly moony adolescent with hormones out of control. She was forty-three, for heaven’s sake. Most women had finished with sex and romance and all such nonsense by that age. In many societies she’d be a grandmother by now. Even in Britain it was very far from unusual. If the hormones were misbehaving, it was because they were drying up and marking the end of her fertile years. Which meant she should be giving much more scope to her experience of life, her knowledge of people, her own sharp wits.

  ‘Right, then,’ she said.

  ‘Lock the doors, Daddy!’ cackled the parrot. ‘Lock the doors!’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Emily phoned late that afternoon. The mobile was sitting on one of the worktops in the kitchen, its charger connected. ‘How are you?’ Thea asked. ‘Did you go to work today?’

  ‘Yes I did. I’m all right I suppose.’

  ‘You don’t sound all right.’

  ‘It’s catching up with me, I think. Thea – the police came here yesterday, and told me who the dead man was. It didn’t really sink in at the time. I was concentrating on being OK for work, and getting Mark organised. But now – well—’ her voice disintegrated into gasps, which to Thea sounded wor
se than normal crying.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Thea awkwardly. ‘Take a deep breath.’

  It was half a minute before Emily found her voice again. ‘What on earth was he doing there? It never occurred to me it could be someone I knew. It makes it so much worse. I can’t bear it. I’ll have to – I mean – I can’t stop thinking about him.’

  Thea kept silent with difficulty, merely making an encouraging grunt. Words were now tumbling out at the other end of the line. ‘You remember him, don’t you? He was an Oxford don. Bruce was devoted to him. He went all silent when they came to tell us. I’ve never seen him like that. Oh, God – what am I going to do?’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Thea told her gently. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I have to get through all this.’

  ‘Yes. And you will.’ But Thea had her doubts. She was still wrestling with the coincidence of the identity of the murder victim, and the insidious effects of Phil’s suspicions.

  As if reading her thoughts, Emily said, ‘The police weren’t very nice about it. They don’t seem to believe that I didn’t recognise Sam.’

  ‘Well—’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t tell me you agree with them! Why can’t anybody understand what it was like?’

  ‘Calm down, Em. I believe you, of course I do. It was wet and dark and he was face down. Of course you couldn’t see who it was.’ She was speaking warmly, urgently wanting to console her suffering sister. In an effort to move things on, she added, ‘I met his brother this morning, as it happens. The vicar. Peter Clarke.’ She wanted to kick herself hard for the little thrill that saying his name brought about.

  ‘What? How could you possibly—?’ Emily’s voice rose. ‘Have you been talking about it to everybody you meet? I bet you have, you little blabbermouth. Oh, Christ – this is a nightmare. I still can’t believe it was Sam, and now you’ve produced a brother. Oh – it’s all getting much much worse. I never thought…’

  ‘Calm down,’ said Thea again, trying to overlook the blabbermouth remark. ‘It was a horrible shock, that’s all. It was just terribly bad luck that you were there at the time.’

  ‘It was, wasn’t it?’ Emily’s tone turned to a sudden eagerness. ‘The whole thing was just a terrible piece of bad luck. Even more unlucky that it was Sam.’ A squeak on the final word suggested that tears were imminent. ‘At least he wasn’t married,’ she added. ‘I was so worried that it was somebody who had a wife and six children.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Thea murmured agreement.

  ‘The police seemed to think I could have recognised the killer as well,’ continued Emily bitterly. ‘They went on and on about it. Trying to make me say if he was fat or thin, tall or short. And how I could be so sure he was white, if it was so dark.’

  ‘Well, you are the only witness. You’re the only person they can ask.’

  ‘Yeah,’ groaned Emily. ‘It’s all such a bloody mess. And now it’s got even worse. I’m never going to be able to sleep tonight, with all this going round in my head.’

  ‘I met Sam Webster, don’t forget,’ Thea said. ‘He seemed a really nice man.’

  ‘Yes, he was nice enough.’ Emily sounded reluctant. ‘I never liked him as much as Bruce did.’ Then the note of hysteria returned, more evident than before. ‘We’ll have to go to the funeral. I’ll have that ghastly picture of him in my mind, while everybody’s singing “Abide With Me”. Oh, shit, I never thought last week that there’d be another dead man to worry about.’

  Emily never used bad language. Her mild expletive shocked Thea more than anything else. ‘I know,’ she soothed, adding the line that women so often use to reassure each other: ‘But it wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘No,’ Emily agreed, with a hollow tone. ‘That’s right. It wasn’t my fault. That’s what I keep telling myself. It doesn’t make me feel any better.’

  ‘We all having lurking guilt, I suppose. It gets activated all too easily.’

  ‘Oh, shut up,’ said Emily wearily. ‘I can hear Bruce’s car. I’ll have to go. He’s probably had just as bad a day as I have. God knows how we’ll ever manage to do it again tomorrow.’

  ‘Good luck, then,’ said Thea.

  There were two hours or so of daylight left, and Thea felt she ought to be outside. Freddy and Basil needed further grooming, to get more of the tangles out of their coats. She had attached them to their chains in the morning, but they had spent all day slumped under the big dogwood bush at the edge of the front lawn. It still seemed unreasonable to expect them to live such constrained lives, and she found herself wondering whether she might dare to take them singly for short walks along the footpath and back, as Cedric had plainly sanctioned. Again she asked herself just how much affection the Angells had for them. Very little had been betrayed during her visit for instructions. If anything, the ferrets seemed to have a higher value, at least for Cedric.

  The cats were virtually invisible. They took the food she put down for them, and slunk through the shadows of the outhouses, low to the ground. Their role seemed to be to keep vermin levels down and nothing more than that.

  Ignatius, however, was a whole different matter. Special in a number of ways, he dominated the house. His voice was chilling, like a ventriloquist’s dummy – human and yet horribly inhuman. He had obviously learnt that anything he said would earn a gratifying reaction, from laughter to screams of alarm. His repertoire ranged from low muttering to loud shouts, and by this, her third full day, Thea was only just getting used to the suddenness of his remarks. There would be no warning, and usually her back was turned at the time. ‘Tell him he’s a fool,’ was the latest offering. It was tantalising, wondering where he had learnt the things he said. Probably not the TV, since it was in a different room, a small back sitting room containing two very ancient armchairs and a glass-fronted cabinet full of dusty china. There was no computer, no music system, no sign of handicrafts or other hobbies. It was tempting to think the couple simply slumped in the back room and watched telly for much of the time, leaving Ignatius to rule supreme in the main room.

  A glance at the papers on the bureau flap revealed letters from the Council Planning Office, leaflets about planning law and stacks of hand-written notes on lined A4 paper. Thea had forgotten the burning issue of the proposed new houses, until now. Thinking about it, she found it impossible to believe that such a preciously conserved area could ever contemplate much development. Admittedly, the outskirts of Bourton-on-the-Water, as seen from the A429, had become a densely packed estate of new houses, but if anything that must add weight to the opposition to the Hawkhill proposal. It surely made sense to confine it all to the Bourton side of the road, leaving the Slaughters and the Swells in peace?

  Funny, she reflected, how alarm bells had rung when Cedric had first told her of the controversy. New houses in lovely rural parts of England were always going to arouse furious feelings. But it certainly had nothing whatever to do with the death of Sam Webster, Oxford Don and brother to a vicar, and she opted to shelve the whole subject as needing no further consideration.

  She felt a distinct need to talk everything through with someone, only to discover that there were aspects to the story that had to be concealed from anyone she spoke to. One aspect especially was too shameful to reveal – her idiotic yearnings for the Reverend Peter Clarke. Which was, of course, precisely the thing she most wanted to talk about. The only person who she could discuss him with was the man himself, which was daft.

  As she wrestled with this jumble, she brushed at Freddy’s long coat, yanking lumps of mud away and making him yelp now and then. ‘Good dog,’ she murmured, ‘there’s a good dog.’ And he was a good dog. Some animals in his position would have snarled and snapped when a strange woman started painfully attacking his coat. All he did was stand there and make token protests. One or twice he licked her hand, as if to say, isn’t that enough?

  ‘Hiding more of the evidence, I see,’ came a loud voice behind her. As if
the intervening twenty-four hours had never happened, Henry Galton stood bulkily between her and the setting sun once again, eyeing her treatment of Cedric Angell’s dogs with a frown. The words might have been jokey, but his expression was severe.

  ‘Oh, hello,’ she said, standing up. ‘It’s you again.’

  ‘It is,’ he agreed. ‘No police boyfriend here now, then?’

  Perhaps without the low growl from the dog, she would never have detected the underlying threat in his voice. Perhaps without the growl, Galton would have relaxed and changed his manner. As it was, his frown deepened and he took a step towards her and the dog, legs slightly apart as if poised for action.

  Thea gave herself an urgent pep talk. There couldn’t be any actual danger from this man. What was the worst he could do? Something quite bad, came a nervous inner reply. ‘You’re alarming him,’ she said, as Freddy bared his teeth. ‘Don’t come any closer.’

  ‘Why should I care whether or not he’s alarmed? He should be dead by now – I’d have shot him yesterday if Phil Hollis, of all people, hadn’t been here. Him and the other dogs.’

  ‘Dogs!’ The plural raised her fear levels considerably. Nobody had mentioned shooting Hepzie – Thea has assumed the farmer knew nothing of her existence. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m reliably informed that you let three of them loose on my land, not just these two. Three dogs is officially a pack, and a lot more likely to do the damage than two.’ His gaze fell on the spaniel, who had approached him interestedly when he first arrived, but had not greeted him as she would most newcomers. ‘Spaniels are notorious for chasing sheep, let me tell you.’

  ‘Not this spaniel. The idea’s ridiculous. She’s as soft as a lamb.’

  It was an unfortunate choice of simile, as the man’s curled lip demonstrated. But Thea was gaining in courage as they stood facing each other. ‘I really am very sorry about your rams. It’s an awful thing to happen. But the evidence against these dogs isn’t really very strong. They didn’t have a drop of blood on them when they came back. They were so muddy, they can only have been in the river and along its banks. I’m assuming your sheep weren’t anywhere near there?’