Secrets in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  He leant forward. ‘Is that what you thought she was doing?’

  ‘No, no. Not at the time. Gladwin told me about finding the pangolins in Cheltenham later on.’ She stopped to reflect. ‘No, I didn’t really think Grace was doing anything criminal. I thought she was more of a victim than a wrongdoer. Although she seemed to be feeling guilty about something, all the same. She said, “We fear those we hurt,” which I took to mean that somebody was out for revenge. And when you think about it, she did seem more the sort of person who’d victimise other people, rather than having it done to her. If you see what I mean.’

  ‘But you did eventually make a connection between her and the rare species investigation. Can you tell me why?’

  ‘Because she was Chinese,’ said Thea unhappily. ‘Does that make me a racist?’

  ‘Not for me to say,’ he replied with the faintest of smiles. ‘From what we can gather, there is some Chinese involvement, among a lot of other people from a lot of other countries.’

  ‘It could fit,’ said Thea thoughtfully. ‘I mean, she might not have realised what was going on until she got to Barnsley, and then decided to run away, rather than take part in something so horrible.’

  The man nodded, saying nothing.

  ‘It feels more likely than her being trafficked as a prostitute, anyway,’ Thea went on. ‘I mean – that was my very first thought. But she seemed too … confident. And she’s much too old, if she’s fifty – isn’t she?’

  ‘You’d be surprised. But we would need a lot more evidence before we pursued that line of enquiry.’

  ‘Isn’t there any CCTV at the business park? Surely there must be. Some of those businesses must worry about security. And people live there as well.’

  ‘There are a couple of cameras. On first glance, they don’t seem very helpful.’

  It struck Thea that she was being given much more inside information than was usual. That had to be because of her friendship with Gladwin, conferring a semi-official role on her. There had been talk, a little while before, of Thea becoming a paid employee of the police, in a civilian role, helping with local knowledge and insights. But it had come to nothing, when the precise job description proved impossible to establish. All that had happened was that Gladwin continued to treat her as a special case, sharing facts about her investigations and trusting Thea to provide whatever assistance she could.

  The interviewer looked up from his notes, meeting Thea’s eyes. ‘Did you like her?’ he asked.

  ‘What? Oh, gosh, there’s a question. I can’t give you a straight answer. I wanted to like her, but it was all so peculiar, and I was fairly sure that she didn’t much like me. There was something calculating about her, right from the start.’

  ‘You felt used? Manipulated?’

  ‘I did rather. But I admit I liked the adventure of it. It gave me something to do, something to think about. If she’d still been there when I got back from the walk, I was going to ask her a hundred questions and try to get to the bottom of the story. That’s what I mean about people being irrational, inconsistent. I sort of wanted to be rid of her, but I was also very keen to have more talk with her. It’s been extremely frustrating not understanding what was so secret.’

  ‘Secret? Did she use that word herself?’

  ‘I think she did. I think she made it obvious that behind everything there was a nasty great secret.’

  ‘One last thing,’ said the officer. ‘Where did you go? When you went out leaving the house open, on Sunday morning?’

  ‘Oh … just round the village. As far as the big hotel and back, more or less.’ She found herself oddly resistant to mentioning the romantic abandoned barn. It could not be the least bit relevant, and it would ruin the fairy-tale notions she had about it if the police were to start noticing it.

  ‘You just walked down the main street and back?’

  ‘Not quite. I took a little road that goes off just past the church, and then came back to the main street through the garden of that big hotel. It was just an aimless stroll to stretch my legs a bit.’

  ‘Did anybody see you?’

  ‘Quite a few in passing cars, I suppose, but I don’t imagine they’d remember. I didn’t speak to anybody. Not like this morning. I had quite a good chat in the churchyard then.’

  He shook his head impatiently. ‘So, no evidence that you actually did go for a walk on Sunday?’ he said with brutal directness.

  ‘What? Oh, gosh, I see now.’ She had managed to forget that she was still theoretically suspected of having committed murder. ‘You mean I should find myself an alibi. Well – a woman came out of her house and got into her car. She might remember seeing me. She’d probably know the time, as well. People usually look at the clock before they go out, don’t they?’

  ‘Do they?’ He sighed. ‘Can you remember which house it was?’

  ‘I think so. I could point it out, anyway.’

  He made a note, and then lapsed into silence.

  ‘So …?’ she prompted him.

  ‘So I think that might be enough for now. We’ll collate the findings from the house, and take it from there.’

  ‘Right.’ She hesitated. ‘Gladwin said there might be a chance of you lending me a car. Did she tell you that?’

  He blinked at her. ‘Not me, no. We’ll ask at the front desk. There’s usually a spare vehicle knocking about, but there’ll have to be a fair bit of paperwork before we can let you have anything.’

  Chapter Eleven

  There was plentiful paperwork to deal with before Thea was allowed to take the five-year-old automatic Fiat away. There had also been a crash course in how to drive an automatic, and dire warnings as to the avalanche of trouble there would be if she damaged it. ‘We’d only do this for a friend of the superintendent,’ said the sergeant who was handing the car over.

  ‘I’ll only use it when I have to,’ she promised. ‘Just for shopping, really. When do you want it back?’

  ‘End of the week?’ he offered. ‘There’s no great rush.’

  She managed the short drive back to Barnsley at a careful crawl, getting the feel of the car and terrified of stalling it at junctions. She got back to the house on the corner just after four, tucking it in beside the truck that Sid and Dave used. There were no police vehicles, which suggested a rather rapid forensic exercise. Had they scanned every surface for fingerprints and collected invisible flakes of skin to be tested for DNA? Or had they just had a good look round, concentrating on the attic and noting the way Thea was effectively camping in the living room? They weren’t specialist SOCOs, anyway – which was odd, when she thought about it. Had the hunt for pangolin smugglers taken every trained officer away from other work? More than likely, she decided, given the strictures the police were currently working under.

  The act of walking up the driveway triggered a rerun of the conversation she’d had with Sid when she’d returned from the lunch with Barkley. Clovis! There he was, tucked into a small corner of her mind, patiently awaiting his turn for her attention. What was she going to do if he came back again? Would she slam the door in his face, or at least let him explain what he wanted? She had assumed the danger was past, her turbulent hormonal responses kept hidden from her trustful husband. And now, if she readmitted him, saying nothing about it to Drew, that would compound the secret. Thinking this through made her feel trapped and cheated. Hadn’t she behaved impeccably so far, telling herself that the man had no feelings for her, and that her own reactions were therefore stupid and shameful? Clovis Biddulph was just an automatic philanderer, who gave the same Gallic treatment to every woman he met. Barkley had pointed out, on her first sight of him in Broad Campden, that he made no attempt to ameliorate his charms, wearing an expensive male fragrance and paying close attention to his clothes. His grandmother had been French, which apparently was enough to confer that special streak of sex appeal that rarely manifested in an Englishman.

  It was ten past four and the builders were obviously finish
ing up for the day. ‘You’re back, then,’ said Dave. ‘No need for us to set up the barricades, after all.’

  ‘Did you have your fingerprints taken?’

  He shook his head, almost regretfully. ‘They were no bother – hardly noticed us at all. Said they just needed to get an idea of the layout and so forth. Took some pictures and were up in the roof for thirty minutes or so. Sounds as if they’ve got a lot on at the moment, and this was just what they didn’t need. Not like on the telly,’ he concluded.

  ‘No,’ said Thea doubtfully.

  ‘We’ll be back tomorrow, then, bright and early. Have a look, why don’t you? See where we’ve got to today.’

  She obediently stepped through the doorway that was eventually to become an archway and duly admired the installed kitchen equipment, and the completed hole where the window would go. ‘Amazing!’ she enthused. ‘It’s a transformation.’

  ‘Surprising what you can do in a day,’ said Sid, with a smirk. ‘Mind you, we had everything ready and waiting, last week. Just a matter of slotting it all in.’

  ‘When will there be a back door?’

  ‘Wednesday,’ said Dave. ‘It’s being delivered tomorrow. Won’t take long, then. Thursday’s tiling and painting and making a start on the bathroom. Same thing up there – it’s all ready and waiting. We’re still hoping to get finished by the end of Friday.’

  It was all blessedly practical. A job to be done and men with the right skills to do it. No secrets or mysteries – unless they were cunningly concealing terrible mistakes in the plumbing. She gave them her most dazzling smile and went through into the rest of the house. ‘Bar the door now,’ Dave called after her. ‘And don’t touch it till we come back tomorrow.’

  She did as instructed, despite feeling no apprehension about intruders. Even if someone out there had malevolent intentions towards her, they had probably done their worst by framing her for the murder of Grace. There could be no possible reason to physically harm her; no sense in taking such a risk. Except, said a little voice, that you have a reputation for pinning down killers and helping the police. That might be enough for somebody to want you dead. She confronted this idea full on, doing her best to take it seriously. Murder was serious. That sometimes had to be repeated and emphasised, when she was immersed in a puzzle involving people she didn’t know personally. She could all too easily detach her emotions when trying to figure out a matter of logic and logistics.

  She had not warmed to Grace and was shamefully unmoved by her death. Whether the woman had been a victim or a member of some revolting gang, she did not seem a very great loss to the world. That alone was a disgraceful way to think. ‘No man is an island,’ she reminded herself. ‘Every death diminishes me.’ She had frequently struggled to accept this assertion as literally true. So many deaths occurred every day. Little deaths, of birds and fish and aborted human foetuses. She wished she hadn’t added this last, because she found the subject of abortion too big and too sad to contemplate without severe discomfort. She carried with her somewhere the conviction that the death of these countless thousands of little half-formed human beings cheapened life in its widest sense. So did the slaughter of animals for food and the wanton hunting and shooting of them for sport. Sometimes she would reach the conclusion that the murder of one more person did not weigh so very heavily in the balance, after all.

  Nonetheless, she did want to find an answer to what had taken place here in this house on Sunday morning. A person had gripped Grace by the neck, pressing hard enough to block the blood flow to her brain, and thereby killed her. Thea herself was small and not especially strong. She did not know the exact place to squeeze in order to kill someone. If she had done it, Grace would have had plenty of time to kick and scream and scratch and bite in resistance to the assault. She, Thea, would have fumbled and faltered and thoroughly failed to inflict anything in the way of damage. And why would she want to, anyway? This unanswerable question was enough in itself to reassure her that nobody would ever seriously consider her as a viable suspect.

  She made herself a mug of tea and constructed a sandwich from her purchases made at Waitrose. The house wrapped itself contentedly around her, enduring the battering its back wall had taken, and oblivious to the sudden death that had happened upstairs. There was no suggestion of a ghostly reappearance of the murdered woman. She had already seemed oddly insubstantial when Thea had met her; entirely self-contained and unwilling to share anything but the most basic facts about herself. And even they might not have been true. And if they were, then the police might already have located her on an airline passenger list, and be matching her up to some definite identity that explained who she was and why she had come to Britain.

  There might even be a CCTV recording of her getting into a car, its licence plate clearly visible and its owner quickly apprehended. The car’s journey down to the Cotswolds would be captured on a succession of motorway cameras. There would be no escape in these days of total surveillance. While Thea abhorred this development in principle, she could relish the idea that only the most cunning criminals could evade detection. Except, she remembered, they very often did, regardless of the cameras. The monsters who slaughtered and then sold rare wild animals, for a start. Would Gladwin and her colleagues really manage to catch them and bring them to justice? And what would that justice be, anyway? What difference would it make to the worldwide trade that was going on?

  Her thoughts see-sawed through optimism and dark despair at the wickedness of the human race. In the quiet of Tabitha Ibbotson’s living room, she pursued her stream of consciousness wherever it might lead her, with nothing to distract or interrupt her. She had experienced such interludes before, meditating on situations and dilemmas without flinching at the implications. It was something she shared with Drew, who was given to a very similar kind of musing. It had to do with his work, and with the fact that both he and Thea had lost partners they had expected to enjoy for many more decades. They shared an impatience with trivia and evasion. It had, she supposed, been quickly apparent to them both, from their first meeting, that they had this in common.

  All of which prompted her to phone her husband some hours earlier than usual. She had a lot to say to him, starting with the abject apology due for forgetting their anniversary.

  She tried the landline first, and was answered on the third ring by a young female voice saying, ‘Hello? How can I help you?’

  ‘Stephanie! Does Dad know you’re answering the phone? What if it’s a funeral?’

  ‘I can manage,’ said the child stiffly. ‘I know what to say.’

  ‘But where is he? Why can’t he answer it for himself?’

  There was a pause, in which Thea could hear some whispering, and then, ‘Oh, he’s upstairs. Do you want me to call him?’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Thea firmly. ‘And who are you whispering to?’

  ‘Only Timmy. I’ll ask him to go and call Dad, shall I?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thea impatiently. ‘Why’s he upstairs? What’s he doing?’

  ‘Oh – making beds or something. I don’t know exactly.’

  The tone was artificially airy and Thea began to feel suspicious. The forgotten anniversary came back to bite her, and the need to speak to her undervalued husband became more pressing. ‘Hurry him up, then,’ she said. ‘Shout for him if you have to.’

  ‘Wait a minute, then.’ The receiver was put down and an echoey silence ensued for at least a full minute. At last Drew was there. ‘Hey – sorry,’ he said breathlessly. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘Nothing, really. At least – a few things, but you don’t have to worry. The first is to offer my grovelling apologies for forgetting our anniversary. It was yesterday, wasn’t it? I just never registered the date properly. I feel so awful about it, I had to phone you as soon as I had the house to myself.’

  ‘Oh, Thea. Did you think I’d care about that? I just assumed we weren’t going to go in for any of that mush. Karen and I never bothered about
it.’

  ‘Oh.’ Outrageously, she felt distinctly slighted, until she gave herself a shake. ‘But you didn’t just forget about it, did you? You knew which day it was and just never said anything. That’s much less awful than me not giving it a thought.’ Was it, though, she silently wondered. Wasn’t there something wrong, either way?

  ‘Stop it,’ he said, sounding tired. ‘Make it up to me when you get home.’

  ‘I will. So – how’s things? Why was Stephanie answering the phone? How’s Hepzie?’

  ‘She’s fine. Being lazy. Feeling her age, I guess. Steph’s very good on the phone now. She’s heard me do it often enough. She knows what to say.’

  ‘Yes, I know she has – but a child answering a funeral call isn’t right, is it? What will people think?’

  ‘They know we don’t go in for undue formality. They’ll think it’s nice.’

  ‘Oh, well – it’s your business. So, everything’s all right, then, is it?’

  ‘Everything’s fine,’ he said emphatically. ‘Just leave us to get on with it, okay? I’m assuming you’re all right? Are you involved in any police investigation over the woman that died?’

  He sounded strangely detached, as if he only wanted to hear platitudes and blithe assurances. It felt impossible to burden him with her own alarming news that Grace’s death had been deliberately inflicted by a mysterious stranger, and that Thea herself was possibly under suspicion. The reappearance of Clovis. The powerful sense of loss at the absence of her spaniel. The cost of a modest meal at the local pub – even that seemed too much of an imposition, the way Drew sounded. ‘Yes, I’m alive and well,’ she chirped. ‘The police have questioned me a bit more today, which was all very interesting. Now I’ve got a whole evening of nothing. I’m missing you all, and still immensely remorseful about the anniversary, whatever you say.’

  ‘Then let’s just get on with it,’ he said softly. ‘You don’t have to worry. And you really don’t have to phone every day, you know. Not unless there’s something important. It’s only a few more days. Nothing to get in a stew about. Just relax and have fun − leave it till Thursday now, why don’t you? Bye, love.’