Secrets in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  Again, she followed the footpath up towards the big beautiful mansion behind the politely forbidding gates, and tried to construct a viable scenario for what might have happened to Grace. Mostly she kept her thoughts to herself, simply escorting the police officers at a steady pace and saying very little.

  But her companions were more voluble. ‘She ran away from someone over there, then, did she?’ said Goodbody, indicating the business park. ‘Then over these fields to the woods up there?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ said Thea. ‘But there’s no way to be sure.’

  ‘Not much cover,’ observed Tompkins. ‘They’d be able to see where she went.’

  ‘They could have left her alone in the car,’ Thea suggested diffidently. ‘If there really was a car, that is. I can’t be sure that anything she said was true.’

  ‘Why? Did she come across as a liar?’

  ‘Not exactly …’ Thea tailed off, uneasy at speaking ill of a murder victim who could no longer defend herself. ‘Some of what she said sounded a bit … rehearsed.’

  ‘Hm,’ said Tompkins. ‘According to the file, she told you she’d hurt her shoulder. Is that right?’

  ‘She said it was dislocated. That was more or less the very first thing she did say, actually. But after a few minutes I came to the conclusion it wasn’t as bad as that. Just wrenched, I think.’

  They got to the immense stile in a few more minutes, and stood staring up at it. ‘Wow!’ said Goodbody.

  They slowly climbed over it, Thea first, then Tompkins. Goodbody stood back to watch, observing that anybody in a frantic hurry could trip and fall from the top. For a small person like Grace it would be quite a tumble. ‘If she landed on her shoulder, she might well hurt it enough to think it dislocated,’ he mused.

  With elaborate care, Thea demonstrated how exactly she had found the fugitive, and what happened next. ‘It was just here,’ she told the officers. ‘She said she’d been hiding under all that bracken and stuff, for a long time. Hours. You can see it would be quite easy to stay out of sight – and it doesn’t look as if people ever come along here, anyway.’

  ‘Better have a proper look,’ said Goodbody, and started to push his way into the point indicated. Almost immediately, he was forced onto hands and knees. ‘Did you do this?’ he asked Thea, over his shoulder.

  ‘Definitely not. She came out almost before I was down from the stile. Can you see anything?’

  ‘It’s a bit flattened. Er … a couple of threads caught on a thorn. Hey, T. Come and take some pics, will you?’

  DS Tompkins activated her camera and approached in a crouching posture. Thea stepped back, content to leave them to their forensic investigating. It was both like and unlike scenes from TV dramas. No white paper suits, but an impressively thorough search for all that. Small plastic bags were filled with minute threads and hairs. Pictures were taken of indentations on the ground. It took at least ten minutes.

  ‘Well, that seems to confirm what you’ve told us,’ said Goodbody, finally crawling out and standing up again. ‘Where to now?’

  Thea explained the route she and Grace had taken back to the house, and awaited a decision as to whether it was necessary to follow in their footsteps. ‘She was obviously terrified of being seen,’ she told them. ‘The walk must have seemed endless to her.’

  ‘And did anybody see her?’ asked Tompkins.

  ‘Possibly. Two cars passed us on the way.’

  ‘But neither of them stopped? Did they slow down?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so. But I suppose they could have recognised her, but just kept going, so as not to attract attention. Or something.’ She began to consider the possibilities more closely. Had someone in one of the cars phoned a co-conspirator watching from some point in the village? The driveway of the house could be seen from a variety of viewpoints, after all. If it was a matter of great importance for Grace to be recaptured without causing a commotion, the sensible strategy would be for a car – or two or three cars – to circle the area, on the assumption that eventually the fugitive would have to emerge onto a proper road, in order to get away from the area. Then the watchers might have quickly established where their quarry was spending the night, and who it was who had rescued her. But again, she kept these thoughts to herself. If she did choose to share them with the police, it would be better done during a formal interview at the police station.

  She did, however, find it oddly satisfying to have a credible explanation worked out, albeit hypothetically. It rendered the murder somehow less frightening, once it became clear that ordinary levels of common sense and persistence had been all that was needed to find and kill the woman they were chasing. Even if the whole thesis turned out to be completely wrong, it was still theoretically practicable, and therefore possible to confront without panic.

  ‘We’ll go back the way we came,’ decided Goodbody. ‘We’ve got all we need for now. They’ll be wanting to question you back at the station. We’re to take you there. Then we’ll come back to the house and give the attic room a proper going-over. We’ll probably be gone by the time you get back.’

  ‘What about the builders?’

  ‘They won’t be a problem. We might ask for their fingerprints, for purposes of elimination.’

  The return walk was soon accomplished, and Thea was being urged to waste no time in accompanying the officers to Cirencester. Quickly gathering bag, door key, phone and coat, she went round to the builders to explain that she would be out for a bit, and there would be a team of forensic people all over the house.

  ‘Whoa!’ said Sid.

  ‘They might want your fingerprints, if that’s okay.’

  Both men shrugged, not quite able to hide their excitement. Neither one seemed worried about being fingerprinted. Thea added that they should put up the barricade into the kitchen and leave through the front, pulling it firmly behind them, if she wasn’t back by knocking-off time and the police people had gone by then.

  ‘Leave it to us,’ said Sid jauntily.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Thea, with a sigh.

  Chapter Ten

  The interview took place in a small room with a bank of machines against one wall. ‘Are you going to film me?’ Thea asked facetiously, eyeing something that looked like a camera.

  ‘Not today,’ said the man, without a smile. ‘What we’d like from you is as much information as possible about the deceased. Ideally, we’d like you to recall every word she said to you.’

  For a few seconds, Thea was transported to another police interview, some years earlier, in a very similar room. She had been on her very first house-sitting job and had heard a man being killed in the garden outside. The detective superintendent who interviewed her had become rather more than a friend in the following months. He had been kind and understanding – a very nice man, as all her friends and relations observed. Just as Drew Slocombe was a very nice man, of course. She sighed and did her best to concentrate on the matter in hand. ‘I’ll try,’ she said.

  It turned out to be easier than she’d expected. The interviewer prompted her with just the right questions, and she found herself repeating many of Grace’s actual words. ‘She didn’t say very much, actually,’ she realised. ‘A lot of it was just sort of implied. But I do remember her saying, “My father’s British and my mother’s Chinese.” She spoke perfect English, so I guess she’s lived here for most of her adult life.’

  ‘Okay. The pathologist thinks she’s about fifty – would you agree with that?’

  ‘She looked younger, but I wouldn’t argue about it.’

  ‘Did she say any more about her family? Children?’

  ‘Nope. Just parents. I think they’re dead.’ She paused. ‘Actually, I’m not sure about that. Perhaps just her father’s dead. I don’t remember anything about her mother.’

  ‘But she never gave a surname? Presumably it’s something British – that’s if her parents were married, I suppose.’

  ‘Definitely no surname,’ said
Thea. ‘And I’m not totally sure I believe the “Grace”. The trouble is, even at the time, I wasn’t sure I could believe much of her story.’

  ‘Interesting,’ said the interviewer dubiously. ‘Now − you told our officers yesterday that she’d come here from Manchester.’

  ‘So I did. That’s what she said. As far as I can recall, she’d been met in Manchester – I guess the airport, but she didn’t say that, so it’s probably just me jumping to a conclusion – and driven down here. Something happened in the car to frighten her, and she made a desperate escape, leaving all her things behind. She didn’t have money or phone or passport or anything. She seemed to think she could be traced if she used a cash card or a phone. I told her that was ridiculous.’

  ‘Hm,’ said the interviewer. ‘So it didn’t seem very credible to you?’

  ‘Right. Although she was genuinely frightened. I am sure about that. I mean – something bad must have happened to send her off into the woods with absolutely no possessions.’

  ‘You’ve seen the TV reports of refugees and migrants arriving empty-handed, haven’t you? They deliberately destroy their passports. It makes it more difficult for the immigration people to decide what to do with them. They don’t know where to send them back to, if they think that’s what ought to happen.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So it makes it extremely hard to separate the sheep from the goats, the legal from the illegal. And it creates a whole subculture of migration tricks, designed to get a foot in the door of a nice peaceful country where work’s easy to find.’

  Thea shook her head. ‘That doesn’t fit. She was too self-confident, too well educated, to be one of those people.’

  ‘You’d be surprised. We’ve had people at the top of their profession turning up pleading for asylum, looking as if they’ve spent a month in a ditch. Which some of them have, probably.’

  ‘I still don’t think it applies to Grace.’

  ‘But she was frightened? She behaved like a fugitive?’

  ‘Yes. She cowered behind me with her face turned away when the cars went past. And I’m sure she had a damaged shoulder. It can’t all have been an act.’

  ‘But she didn’t say how that had happened?’

  ‘Well, yes – she said she fell off that stupidly high stile. But she also told me it was dislocated, when I first met her, and I could see it wasn’t as bad as that.’

  ‘But she refused to go to a doctor?’

  ‘Well, not exactly. I wouldn’t have been able to take her to one, even if I knew where to go on a Saturday afternoon. It didn’t occur to me to call an ambulance – it wasn’t bad enough for that. And it seemed to get a bit better on its own once she was in the house. We decided it didn’t need a sling or anything like that.’

  The man gave her a steady, considering look. ‘The pathologist couldn’t find anything wrong with her shoulder,’ he said.

  ‘Oh! Well, pulled muscles must be hard to spot. Would there be any signs, once she was dead?’

  He actually winced at the starkness of her words. ‘It would have to be a very minor injury.’

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m married to an undertaker, remember. I’m used to dead bodies.’

  ‘Ah.’ He glanced down at the page of notes in front of him, turning back to look at earlier sheets. ‘Nobody thought to mention that.’

  ‘It’s not important. Just means you don’t have to worry about being unduly delicate in what you say to me.’

  Again he looked long and hard at her. ‘You are aware, aren’t you, that on paper you look like the best – and only – proposition for having perpetrated this unlawful killing?’

  ‘Prime suspect,’ she said, with a rueful smile. ‘But only on paper, surely? I mean – nobody can possibly think I really did it. Why would I?’

  ‘“Why” questions are not always helpful,’ he told her ponderously. ‘Why would you take a total stranger into the house, to start with? Not even your own house. And then leave her there completely unattended and vulnerable, when you knew she was afraid of being found?’

  Thea experienced a moment of self-knowledge. ‘You know what? I think I was hoping she’d just quietly creep away, if I left the door unlocked. When she didn’t answer my call before I went out, I was half-thinking she might already have gone. I went off like that to give her a chance to get right away. But at the time, I wasn’t consciously thinking that. It was all instinct and gut feelings, until now.’

  The man nodded and made a note on his pad. There was a recorder running, which he had pointed out to her at the start. Then he went through the exact state of the house doors, which felt superfluous to Thea. She had explained all that the day before to the officers who came to the house. When she suggested this was repetition, her interviewer put his pencil down and adopted a severe expression. ‘It was not an official murder investigation at that point,’ he reminded her.

  ‘Point taken,’ she conceded. ‘And I admit it was very sloppy of me when I knew Grace was so frightened. I should have been more careful for her sake, but she was up in the attic and I wasn’t scared at all. I suppose I thought all danger was gone, with a new day and everything seeming perfectly normal.’

  ‘It’s still not easy to understand,’ he insisted.

  ‘But isn’t that always how it goes? Real people doing unpredictable things for no apparent reason. Not just telling lies and keeping secrets, but being thoughtless, acting on impulse, contradicting themselves. Real life is terribly messy, don’t you find?’

  ‘No, not really,’ he disagreed. ‘Most people are very predictable, and their lies are usually easy to spot. Even the secrets generally boil down to love affairs or stealing money.’

  ‘Not in my experience,’ she insisted.

  The man gave himself a little shake. ‘We’re not here to discuss human behaviour. Let’s stick to this specific case, all right? Can we go back to when you first met her? She told you her shoulder was dislocated, but what did she want from you? What did she ask you to do for her?’

  ‘Um … nothing, really. She left it all to me. I told her I hadn’t got a car, but I could offer shelter and a bit of food. I hardly had anything. I didn’t bring nearly enough with me on Saturday. I’m always hopeless with food. The whole business is so boring.’

  ‘Was she hungry?’

  ‘Very. Even though she was tired and overwrought, she managed to eat and drink everything I gave her. She said she’d been out in those woods all afternoon, and was thirsty.’

  ‘All afternoon?’

  ‘That’s what she said.’

  ‘So, according to her, she was up in Manchester for some reason – you think she must have just landed at the airport, do you?’

  ‘She must have said something that implied that, but I can’t remember what. It could be that I assumed it and she agreed. I might have put the idea in her head.’

  ‘Well, we have to check it as far as we can. So, she could have been met there and driven to the small village of Barnsley by people she decided were posing a threat to her, so she ran away from them − all during Saturday morning – right? That’s entirely feasible. She could have been telling the truth.’

  ‘Can’t you check the passenger lists? They probably have photos of everybody, don’t they? You can easily find out if she was on a plane.’

  Another severe look came her way.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t be telling you your job.’ She paused. ‘But it might all be resolved, if you find her on a list. You’d have identity, home address, next of kin, passport details.’ She grew more animated. ‘It would give you a whole lot to go on.’

  ‘Indeed,’ he said repressively, before opening a familiar map of the local area and spreading it out on his table. ‘So, is there any more you can tell me? You walked back to the Corner House via the roads, instead of using the footpath? Have I got that right?’

  ‘Yes. Grace didn’t want to go past the business park. She seemed to be saying that that was whe
re she’d escaped from.’

  The officer traced the paths and roads with the end of his pen. Thea watched, thinking again how very different the printed marks were from the reality on the ground. ‘Your detective sergeants have got all sorts of bits of fluff and photos from there that will confirm what I’ve told you. You’ll see how terribly overgrown it all is. She could easily have kept out of sight under all that vegetation.’

  ‘That’s a distance of less than half a mile, then, from the business park.’

  ‘That’s right. I’d say hardly more than a quarter of a mile, actually.’

  ‘Don’t you think a determined search would soon have found her?’

  ‘No, not really. They wouldn’t know which way she’d gone, once she was over that enormous stile. The wall’s much too high for anybody to see over it.’

  He sighed and shook his head.

  She pointed again at the map. ‘It must be a local landmark. You have to understand what it’s like there. You can’t see what’s happening on the other side of it. Grace could have gone in any of three directions. Given that there would have been at least a few people and dogs around on a Saturday, it would be risky for anybody with malicious motives to start crashing about searching the undergrowth for her. Any walkers would think it peculiar if they saw men charging through the woods beating the bushes and so forth. If they wanted to be discreet about it, she’d easily have managed to stay hidden. And she didn’t say how many there were. There might only have been one.’

  ‘Did she say “they” or “he”?’

  ‘Good question. Let me think. “They”. She definitely said “they”.’

  ‘So what else did she say?’

  ‘Well, she definitely didn’t want me to go to the police. She said she’d been deceived somehow. She said she’d made a stupid mistake, something to do with greed.’ More was coming back to her, even after she’d assumed she’d reported the whole conversation. ‘Yes, that’s what she said, more or less. She obviously didn’t want to tell me any details. Perhaps because she thought I’d disapprove. Or worse. If she was involved in trafficking rare animals, and let that slip, I’d have certainly called the police. Obviously.’