Slaughter in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  The ferrets mewed at her in a friendly fashion, and she wondered whether she’d ever gather the nerve to catch one and take it out. Cedric had assured her that they were quite tame and enjoyed some human contact. But after her failure with the dogs, it seemed much too rash to attempt. Instead she simply stroked them as they ate, enjoying the sinuous bodies under her fingers and wondering idly whether they were included in Henry Galton’s gloomy prognostications for farm animals. She could only assume that the arcane practice of rabbit-hunting with the use of ferrets had a very limited future, and the animals themselves could not expect a long and prolific destiny. There was already something old-fashioned about them, a hint of barbarity and secret male cruelties out in the unobserved fields and woods.

  Ignatius appeared much as usual. When she took his night-time cover off, and produced a handful of sunflower seeds, he shifted rhythmically from one clawed foot to the other on his perch, as if dancing gently, and muttered, ‘That’s a very nice hat, Mrs Smithers,’ in a low voice, which was nonetheless perfectly clear and articulate.

  ‘Why thank you,’ said Thea. ‘It’s good of you to say so.’

  ‘We aim to please,’ added the parrot casually, and slowly winked one eye, with a dry blue-tinged eyelid. Thea found it hard to believe he was a real animate creature, as she watched his antics. It was more like a very clever toy, operated by batteries and containing a tiny digital tape of utterances.

  Outside, in the silence and stillness that was the gap where the dogs should be, Hepzie seemed restless, sniffing the air and trotting in and out of the shed that had been Freddy and Basil’s home. ‘Stop it,’ Thea ordered. ‘You’re just making it worse.’

  There was no sign of the cats when she left them some milk and biscuits, but their food kept disappearing, and Thea assumed they were around, getting on with their usual routines.

  A car engine approaching was her first inkling that there was another visitor on the way. Let it be Ariadne, and please not Mike Lister, the dog killer, she prayed in the few seconds before the vehicle came into view.

  It was Henry Galton, who up to that point had always walked the short distance from his farm to Hawkhill. Now he was in a large Toyota truck, its body high off the ground. He looked down at her through the open window, and said, ‘Found your dogs. They’re in the back.’

  She went without hesitation for a look, remembering in an uncontrollable flash the body of her father in his coffin, viewed only a week earlier. This time it was a jumble of muddy hair, snarling teeth and a lot of stiff-looking legs. Galton had laid one on top of the other, with a sack which must have been over their heads, but which had slipped off during the drive. They lay in the bed of the truck, which was almost too high for Thea to peer into. There was matted blood on both chests.

  ‘Shot them all right,’ Galton said, coming to stand beside her. ‘He’s a good enough aim not to make a mess of it, if that’s any consolation.’

  The sound of the passenger door closing sent Thea whirling round to see who else had been in the truck. Sharon, partner of Mike Lister, was stepping down from the vehicle. ‘Hello,’ she said softly.

  ‘Why are you here?’ Thea asked rudely.

  ‘She showed me where to find the dogs,’ Galton said quickly. ‘She’s come to help us bury them.’

  Thea shook her head, and let her gaze return to the tangled bodies. ‘It’s so wrong,’ she mourned. ‘So cruel. Even if he was the best shot in the world, he’d have to do first one, then the other.’ Her voice choked. ‘The second one would have known what was coming.’

  ‘They’d both know,’ said Galton grimly. ‘These dogs knew all about what a gun could do.’

  It was too much. She sagged against him, tears welling furiously. ‘How could he?’ she sniffed. ‘How could anybody do that? He’s got dogs of his own, he must understand how terrible it was.’

  ‘I was all for doing it myself,’ he reminded her, with a kind of nobility. ‘You have to be ready for a lot of killing if you live on the land.’

  Sharon approached tentatively, putting a hand lightly on Thea’s arm. ‘It was very quick,’ she said. ‘And he did it for the best, you know. He wanted to save a lot of dithering, and decided to take the law into his own hands. Sometimes that is the best way.’

  ‘Is it?’ Thea rounded on her. ‘What about the Angells? What are they going to think, when they come back?’ She put a hand to her head. ‘Damn it, I’ll have to phone them and tell them, won’t I? Now we know for sure what’s happened.’ She cast a pleading look at Galton, as if hoping he might make the phonecall for her.

  He made no such offer, but shrugged gently and said, ‘Wasn’t it you who told me that bad news can wait?’

  ‘Was it? Well, I’m not sure I was right. What time is it in Hong Kong, anyway?’

  ‘Mid-evening – something like that.’ He squared his shoulders. ‘I don’t like to rush you, but I do need to get on. First, though – have you got a camera?’

  She stared at him. ‘Pardon?’

  ‘A camera – and not just the one in your phone. We ought to record their injuries, just in case. Cedric might want see the evidence.’

  ‘In the car. I’ve got a camera in the car.’ She went to get it, and turned away while Galton took eight or ten shots, turning the bodies over, and bending in close. Sharon stood to one side, and Thea wondered exactly why she had come. Did she really mean to defend Lister? Why did it matter to her what Thea thought of him?

  ‘OK – let’s do it,’ said Galton, pulling down the rear flap of his truck. ‘Where’s best, do you think?’

  She had no idea where Cedric and Babs might choose to bury their dogs, but a small square of neglected lawn lay between some large shrubs, set back from the main garden, and Thea selected that. ‘This is very kind of you,’ she said.

  He shrugged, and the knowledge that big men were meant to be kind seemed to flow between the two of them. Big men came to the rescue of small women, perhaps less now than in earlier times, but still it could happen. She had been so overcome for a moment that she had actually rested her head on his chest and let tears fall onto it. His reaction had been one of easy acceptance, as if he knew that was the main purpose of such a broad accommodating torso. He ought to be a doctor or a fireman or an Air and Sea Rescue person, his arm encircling the half drowned or the distraught. And perhaps he was, she thought. Anybody could be a part-time fireman, after all.

  The magnitude of his helpfulness had not fully dawned on her, until she stood watching him dig. Now she didn’t have to go and search for the dogs herself. The awful task had been taken from her by a man she had first encountered in a towering rage, brandishing a threatening gun.

  For a few minutes it felt as if there were no real worries left. She would have the dreadful task of telling the Angells about their dogs, but she wasn’t going to do it until the end of the day, at the earliest. The presence of Sharon was a distraction, creating an uncomfortable triangle with Galton, forcing Thea onto the outer edge as the uncomprehending stranger. The woman seemed to want to include her, though.

  ‘It wasn’t really your fault,’ she said, as they stood over the finished grave. ‘It was bound to happen sooner or later. Mike’s obsessed with the worry that our dogs will do the same thing one of these days.’

  ‘So he keeps them cooped up in that compound,’ Thea accused.

  ‘They don’t mind. They play together and he takes them out for walks now and then. And Boris goes to the shows two or three times a year. He got Best in Breed last year.’

  ‘What – at Cruft’s?’ Thea’s eyes widened.

  Sharon laughed. ‘No, no. Only a regional thing – but it looks good on the pedigrees. Breeding dogs is quite a business these days, you know.’

  ‘I can imagine,’ said Thea. ‘But I still feel wretched about Freddy and Basil.’

  ‘They were called Ben and Jack, actually,’ said Sharon. ‘Didn’t Cedric tell you?’

  Thea felt weak and foolish. ‘No,’ she said.
‘He never did. I thought they didn’t have names.’

  Galton snorted, beside Thea. ‘All dogs have names,’ he said, as if intoning some great mystical secret. She half expected him to embark on a legend about the power of naming, with Cedric withholding the information lest Thea steal his animals’ affection. Instead he merely tossed his spade back into the truck, and stamped the soil from his boots. ‘Better get on,’ he said, cocking his head at Sharon. ‘Coming?’

  With a lingering glance at Thea, Sharon climbed into the passenger seat, and the truck departed. Only then did Thea wonder how come Lister’s partner was riding with Galton back to his farm.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Hepzie obviously knew what a grave was. She returned to the burial place of Freddy and Basil time and again, sniffing the edges of the raw earth, and whining. ‘Leave it alone,’ Thea told her, worrying that the bodies were not deep enough and foxes or badgers would come and dig them up again. She would suggest to Cedric that he pile stones on top, to make sure there was no disturbance.

  Eventually she felt forced to take the spaniel out for distraction. ‘We’ll go and see how Ariadne’s getting on,’ she said. ‘And she’ll have to put up with you this time as well.’

  By now, Peter Clarke must surely have either been released or charged, and the latter seemed highly unlikely. It would be diverting, at the very least, to hear about his experiences as a murder suspect. And she wanted a chance to compare him to Galton, to check her own reactions to the two very different men. If he was there at Ariadne’s cottage, that would be a bonus, even if they did regard her as an intruder on their romantic idyll.

  But there was nobody at the Cold Aston cottage. It had the indefinable air of an empty house, even in broad daylight when lights would not be on. Thea tried the front door, which was locked, and then went round to the back, where there was no sign of life. ‘Drat!’ she muttered. ‘Now what are we going to do?’ The day stretched ahead, blank and uninviting.

  Across the village street was a house still owned by Phil, despite his intention to sell it, nine months earlier. She suspected that he had nursed a secret plan to move into it himself when he retired, perhaps taking Thea with him. Meanwhile, he had found tenants for it, and there were toys and a battered Fiesta in the front garden. A dramatic change from its chilly darkness last November when Thea and Phil had stayed there together, sorting through Aunt Helen’s possessions and unpleasantly embroiled in the killing of a young woman not far away.

  They had never discussed the distant future, never made firm commitments to each other, but now that it all seemed to be over, Thea found herself regretting the possible scenario that had been lurking at the back of her mind. It would have been nice to live in the big old house, in the unassuming village, with a retired police detective.

  One of the hazards of house-sitting was that it left far too much time for introspection. As a strategy for surviving Carl’s death, she had trained herself to live in the present moment, not allowing fears for the future to intrude, and not giving too much rein to nostalgic visions of the past. It worked extremely well, but was hard to sustain. People would persist in asking what she intended to do, where she thought she would be in five years’ time, how long she would keep up this ridiculous house-sitting business. She wondered now whether this habit had been destructive in her relationship with Phil. Had it made him feel somehow temporary? Did he think he was a kind of stop gap while she pulled herself together and found a new career, new home, new life? Maybe he had, but it seemed unlikely now that she’d ever be able to ask him.

  And now, this morning, she very much needed to do something. She needed to take control, and not just sit around waiting for people to come and visit her – even though that had worked unexpectedly well for much of the week. Now they’d all wandered off on their own affairs and she was forgotten. It was a Friday thing, she realised. Friday was the day when nobody sent a friendly email or made a sociable visit. On Fridays they were all holding their breath and counting the minutes to the weekend.

  Except vicars, she presumed. Vicars had to work at the weekend. They had to visit their parishioners and preside over garden fêtes and jumble sales on Saturdays and hold a scrambled succession of church services on Sundays, rushing from village to village, doing the work that three or four would once have done.

  She got back in the car where Hepzie was resignedly curled on the passenger seat and opted for a circuitous drive northwards, taking the B4068 through Naunton, simply because Naunton was so spectacularly beautiful that it could cheer the glummest heart. It worked brilliantly, as she let the car crawl over the lovely old bridge by the church, and then curve around into the main street where the houses still managed to suggest a medieval style of living, with their low windows and stone mellowed from yellow into grey. Tourists seldom discovered Naunton on its unambitious little B road that led from nowhere to nowhere, simply a long loop off the much faster and straighter A436. It passed to the north of Upper Slaughter, and finally emerged at Stow, at a junction where its humble status was emphasised by a set of traffic lights which gave it such low priority that you could wait many minutes before being allowed to proceed.

  Numerous villages laid claim to being the most typically Cotswold – the stone buildings, the rolling hills, the crooked little lanes, the characterful churches – and there were certainly several to choose from. But Thea had not yet seen one that could compete with the perfection of Naunton. It had none of the self-consciousness of the Slaughters, none of the deserted preserved-in-aspic air of the Duntisbournes. Naunton had real people living in it, a shop and a Post Office, pubs and the glorious river Windrush. Naunton, in short, had everything, and just to get a five-minute fix of it, from a slow drive-through, was enough to raise anybody’s spirits.

  ‘That’s better, isn’t it,’ she said to the dog beside her. But Hepzie was unmoved by handsome buildings or living history. She wagged her tail in a brief acknowledgement, but showed no sign that her own spirits had lifted at all.

  They drove back through Upper Slaughter, passing the impossibly fairytale Manor Hotel and the layby where Sam Webster had died, and presumably the ditch where Cedric’s dogs had been dumped, as well. She found herself wondering precisely where Galton had found them, realising that it had to be somewhere alarmingly close to the scene of the murder. Another nagging coincidence, she thought. There was no possible connection between the two killings, and yet the bodies had lain within the same quarter-mile stretch of road. And of course there was a connection: Thea herself. She was the pivot at the centre of events, the one person who knew and cared about all three deaths.

  Unless bloody Mike Lister had killed Sam Webster as well, of course.

  The sky was clearer, and small patches of blue were appearing, almost for the first time all week. ‘Another few days and we might be able to do a bit of sunbathing,’ she told the dog. She had acquired a pleasing tan during June, in Temple Guiting, where the sun had blazed down all day every day, and she and Phil had been together to enjoy it. But now her skin was turning pale again, and those glorious days were a distant memory.

  Hawkhill had a creeper growing up part of its facade, untrimmed and pushing into the crevices between the faschia and the roof. Already a few of its leaves had turned red, signalling the imminence of autumn. It was a pretty house, Thea conceded, as she drove slowly down the track towards it. The air of untidiness in the objects scattered about the yard and the straggling weeds in the garden had a certain appeal. It looked real and used, unlike many Cotswold houses. Why could she not simply settle down and enjoy some quiet days with the jigsaw and TV and Ignatius, letting the hours float by without having anything to show for them? That had been her vision when she first began house-sitting. She would walk her dog and read a lot of improving fiction, and play games on her computer and feel smug that she was being paid to be so lazy. It had not worked out like that. From the very first day, the outside world had intruded, and she as a stranger in their midst had
been quick to observe the cracks and conflicts going on in a seemingly serene little village.

  She made herself a small snack lunch, barely even sitting down to eat it. The radio was on, tuned to the local station, and she listened to the bland music being played, interspersed with weather forecasts and interviews with people who had complaints against the Council. Then came a news update, which began with the latest on the Upper Slaughter murder.

  ‘Upper Slaughter slaughter,’ muttered Thea wryly.

  ‘Police have released from custody the Reverend Peter Clarke, who has been helping them with their enquiries,’ the man read, as if barely registering the sense of the words. ‘The deceased man, Doctor Samuel Webster, suffered very severe head injuries during an attack near the Manor Hotel in Upper Slaughter, where he had been staying as a guest on the evening of last Saturday. Reverend Clarke is his half-brother. The police are appealing for anybody who saw a man with blood on his clothes, on Saturday evening, to come forward with information to help with their enquiries.’

  ‘Who writes this stuff?’ thought Thea. She thought of her daughter Jessica’s impatience with the news media, and the careless way they disclosed guesses as if they were facts. In Jessica’s opinion, police work would be greatly simplified if all reporting of murders was banned completely. Thea disagreed. ‘You don’t understand how useful they can be,’ she had argued. ‘The police can’t function unless they have the active participation of the people. You’ll learn that eventually.’

  It had been a back-to-front argument, but Jessica had been new to police work at the time, and had experienced only the more obstructive and misleading side of the general population thus far in her career.

  At least Peter Clarke was free again. That came as little surprise, but was nonetheless a relief. He and Ariadne were probably celebrating somewhere, he pouring out the horrors of hisincarceration and she soothing his fretting brow.