Secrets in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  It would also work as a calming process, or so she hoped. The restlessness and suppressed anxiety were starting to increase. Unsolved murders were unsettling at best. Surely everybody in the village must be feeling the same way? If they were, there was little sign of it. As usual, there was nothing to observe in the street – nobody walked along the narrow pavements, or gathered outside the pub for a sociable chat. Those who did walk, headed off along the footpaths with their dogs. Even the theoretical permanent residents probably had little flats in Chelsea they spent half their time in. Money was even more evident in this eastern side of the Cotswolds, where property values were routinely in seven figures. But there were still ordinary family homes, passed down the generations, with old-fashioned accoutrements and unpretentious occupants. When, eventually, an aged widow died and her offspring leapt like vultures to dismantle and sell the old place, another little piece of local history would disappear. And if the aged widow was in fact a spinster, with no immediate descendants, as had happened with the Corner House, then some lucky friend or distant cousin reaped the rewards instead.

  So she made herself a minimal lunch and set out in the unfamiliar car. It took barely five minutes to reach Bibury, where there were alarming numbers of people walking along the roads and paths, filling the tables at the little cafe by the fish farm shop, and patronising the handful of other shops. It was quite a shock to see so many other humans after the deserted villages of Barnsley and Broad Campden. There was nowhere to park the car. She drove over the bridge and turned right towards the famous row of ancient cottages. The whole road was densely packed with vehicles, including camper vans and minibuses. The wider area was full of coaches and the larger motorhomes. And sure enough, a good proportion of the trippers were of Asian appearance. Twice Thea saw women who could have been sisters to Grace, which sent her thoughts back yet again to the poor woman. Was nobody looking for her? Where was the husband with the initials K. A. W.? Should the police not be making far greater effort to track down more details about her than they were doing?

  She turned the car round awkwardly in a gateway and went through Bibury again. There really wasn’t a single space to park, so after a few hundred yards she randomly took a small country road to the left and miraculously found a small lay-by, where she stopped. But it was not in view of the river or the handsome old Swan Inn, and certainly not the renowned Arlington Row, which had been her intended subject for a picture. All she could see was fields, and stone walls and some well-concealed houses. But at least she could sit unobserved if she did decide to get out and do a drawing. She had the Ordnance Survey map with her, which told her she was on the junction with the old Arlington Pike road, which gave her a pleasing sense of history. Perhaps she should draw a drover with his herd of fat cattle on their way to market in Cirencester? She was rather good at drawing cows, and he could have a nice, big, rangy dog as well.

  She also had her phone with her, turned on and fully charged as Clovis had instructed. And just as she opened the car door, having decided to get out and find a quiet corner to sit, it started to warble. Jessica said the screen.

  ‘Hi, Jess. You got my text, then?’

  ‘It nearly gave me a heart attack. What are you thinking? You can’t just move me around the country like a chess piece. I’m totally involved here. There’s no way they can spare me. It’ll cause terrible ructions to even ask.’ The voice was breathless with anger.

  ‘Okay. Calm down. It just seemed worth a try. They’re really short-handed down here, and there’s been this murder—’

  ‘Isn’t there always? I did hear a bit about it, actually. Do you want to explain exactly what happened?’

  ‘Not now. It’s a long story. If you’re not coming, then you don’t need to know.’

  ‘You’re not in danger, are you? If you were, they’d provide some protection. Or you could just go home. Why not do that?’

  ‘I might leave early,’ said Thea vaguely, struggling with a strong feeling of disappointment. ‘So, you’re short of staff there as well, are you?’

  ‘You could say so. Everybody wants to be on holiday, which doesn’t help. The ones with kids, that is – which is most of them.’

  ‘I’m sorry to startle you, then. It just seemed like a good idea, that’s all. When will I see you, do you think?’

  ‘We’ve got the Bank Holiday weekend in the diary, haven’t we? If nothing kicks off here, I’ll be free then. I had to stake a claim to it nearly a year ago.’

  ‘Good. That’s not long now.’

  ‘So – what’s with all this wild animal trafficking down your way? The news is full of it. Cheltenham, for heaven’s sake! You must be just up the road from there.’

  ‘Not far,’ Thea agreed. ‘But I almost never go there. I can never find anywhere to park.’ Which was beginning to feel like a theme for the day. ‘I heard about it, and Gladwin’s immersed in the whole business, but I don’t know any details.’

  ‘It’s huge, and getting bigger by the day. Your murder isn’t linked to it, is it?’

  ‘Not that anybody can see. It could be, of course. The victim was Chinese.’

  ‘Well done, Mama. Trust you to get yourself right in the middle of something like that.’

  ‘Gladwin put me here,’ Thea snapped. ‘The whole thing was her idea from the start. I’m looking after a house belonging to one of her friends.’

  ‘She ought to know better, then. Look – I’ll have to go. Sorry I can’t join you, but it was always a daft suggestion. See if you can stop anything going through officially. It’ll only cause ructions for me otherwise.’

  ‘Probably too late. Sorry about that. See you soon, then, kiddo. You are all right, aren’t you? I forgot to ask.’

  ‘Yes, I’m all right. Bye, Ma.’

  Somehow the notion of sitting in a field with a sketchbook felt a lot less appealing after that. It was too obviously a means of killing time or worse – evading several issues that demanded her attention. There was Drew, and Clovis, Jessica, Grace, Jocelyn and sundry briefly encountered locals, all worthy of due consideration. If she ignored them, with their hidden agendas and hinted-at mysteries, she would become sidelined and no longer integral to their lives. You had to work at relationships; everybody said that. You had to anticipate their wishes and put them before yourself. Unless they were beautiful single men like Clovis, of course. And Jocelyn didn’t seem to have any problems at the moment. In fact, Jocelyn had been modelling a good sister and friend, by making the effort to share her concern for Jessica.

  Who but the most unfeeling monster could set all that aside while she sat in a field with a sketchbook?

  So she fingered her phone and asked herself where she should begin. Barkley, probably – in the hope of averting the request for Constable Osborne to be seconded to Gloucestershire. Then who? It was all too difficult, so she put the phone away again. Barkley was quite capable of dealing with it herself, and would probably tell Thea as much.

  Which left her feeling restless and ruffled and thwarted. She could do no good by phoning anybody, especially as most of them seemed to be annoyed with her. So it seemed she was going back to Barnsley, without having made any sketches or spoken to anybody in Bibury. She got up with a sigh, wondering how she was going to fill the remains of the day.

  At the car were two people, staring at it with profound disapproval. ‘Oh – sorry,’ she said, approaching them from the field. ‘Is it in your way?’

  ‘This is private property,’ said a man holding a clipboard.

  ‘Is it? It looks like an ordinary lay-by to me.’

  Wordlessly he pointed to a sign set into the hedge and barely visible for overgrown vegetation. ‘No Parking’ it said.

  ‘Ah.’

  The second person was female, about Thea’s age, holding a mobile phone and looking impatient. ‘It’s easily missed,’ she said. ‘Now – can we get on?’

  Thea made no move to get into her car. Instead she eyed the couple inquisitively, tryin
g to work out what they were doing. The woman noticed her expression and smiled. ‘He’s an estate agent and he’s showing me this house.’ She pointed over the little road to a building behind another overgrown hedge. ‘Except we haven’t started yet. I was checking whether or not this land belongs to the property.’

  ‘It definitely does,’ said the young man. ‘There’s no question about it.’

  Thea was trying to see the actual house. ‘It looks rather neglected,’ she said.

  ‘It’s been empty for eight years,’ the woman explained. ‘Some great legal wrangle over who owns it, and whether it could be sold. Apparently, it’s only just been resolved and they’ve finally put it on the market. I can’t wait to see inside it,’ she concluded, with another impatient look at the agent.

  ‘What a waste,’ said Thea. ‘When there’s such a housing shortage.’

  ‘No shortage of places like this,’ said the woman. ‘When you start looking, you find there’s one in nearly every village standing empty for one reason or another.’

  ‘It’s a scandal.’ For some reason, both women glared at the agent, as if the whole thing was his fault. In response he sprang into action, leading his client through the rickety gates and up to the front door of the house.

  Driving back, Thea mused on the complexities of families, inheritances, legalities and disagreements. It must be keeping solicitors nicely feather-bedded, she supposed. But you could hardly blame them, if families were daft enough to throw away their money and peace of mind on wrangles over a house.

  It was after three o’clock, which was good news. She had reached the point when she wanted to leave Barnsley and go home as soon as she could. The coming evening felt prickly with unfinished theories, unfulfilled obligations, unpredictable turns of events. She was severely lacking in information or understanding, unable to trust much of what people told her.

  She drove back to the Corner House and sat for a minute in the car. Sid and Dave were out of sight at the back, and there was no sign of life anywhere along the village street. How strangely silent these Cotswold villages were. She remembered Frampton Mansell and Daglingworth and how rare it was to see anyone in the lanes, or even in the front gardens. And now her attention had been drawn to the fact that some of the houses were permanently unoccupied – not just kept as country retreats for rich City bankers. When a murder took place in their midst, the ripples were almost invisible, too. The residents’ real lives were nearly all conducted somewhere else.

  Thea’s sense of history would often contrast these empty scenes with those of a century or two ago. Children would be bowling hoops, horses and dogs on all sides, the Monday washing flapping in the breeze. And here in Barnsley, there’d be the added thrill of sporadic flocks of sheep or herds of cattle being driven from place to place, along the road selected long ago for that very purpose. She sat there imagining the piles of steaming manure left behind, perhaps a few torn ears from scraps between local and drovers’ dogs. Perhaps, too, a few new litters of puppies conceived on the sly, adding useful new blood to the gene pool. If the village served as a resting place, there must have been some kind of compound close to the inn where the animals could be corralled for a few hours. At busy times, there could well be two distinct sets of drovers, needing to keep their beasts separate. Where, Thea wondered, were the first-hand accounts of this utterly forgotten way of life? There must be many people alive who had known drovers – had them for grandparents or elderly neighbours, and surely listened to their stories. Not for the first time, she resolved to see if she could discover more about the details of this specific settlement. Some googling would pass a contented hour or two, if nothing else. And the not-quite-abandoned barn continued to intrigue her, at the back of her mind. She could stroll down for another little look at it, perhaps. And she might even do a little search for Gwendoline Phoebe Wheelwright, whose mortal remains were sitting in a dark corner of a dusty old barn.

  The googling was dramatically more productive than she’d imagined. Following one link after another, she found herself in an online history for the Wheelwright family where various relatives blogged, drawing the connections between them and asking questions. The very openness of it was refreshing. No secrets here, concluded Thea. If a younger son got sent off to Australia for stealing a hogget, then that appeared to be more of a source of pride than of shame. The focus was on the nineteenth century and earlier, where recriminations and grievances could be assumed to have long ago evaporated. The family had lived in the heart of Barnsley for generations. Pages from the census were reproduced, to show the quantity of children and servants – both at their height in the 1870s. Life was good, as one present-day contributor remarked.

  But while access to the site was open, it was not permitted to add to it without due registration having taken place. There was a care for privacy that had not at first been apparent. Few surnames were used, and most people employed usernames that concealed their identity. There was nothing concerning anyone in the family still living, which Thea gradually realised was rather odd. Surely the whole venture could not be satisfactorily pursued if this was all there was? There had to be a much less accessible website, only open to certain individuals. Hazily, she wondered just how such a thing might work. But the older information was sufficiently interesting for this to be a minor concern. It was full of anecdotes and side notes from diligent researchers who had contacted cousins and lateral branches, and sometimes unearthed diaries and old pictures. One central figure had to be co-ordinating it all, gathering it together and inspiring prodigious efforts. Any archivist would surely salivate at the notion of handling the original material, wherever it was.

  It carried Thea through to six o’clock, when she realised she was hungry and thirsty, and in need of human contact. Sid and Dave had tapped on the window beside her at five, and waved goodbye for the day. They showed no sign of wanting to consult her on anything.

  She switched on the radio and tuned it to the early evening news. The pips confirmed her timing, and then the top headline seemed to be directed straight at her. ‘Police raids overnight in the area of Cheltenham and South Gloucestershire have significantly extended the investigation into the trade in rare animal products. There is thought to be a firm link with gangs in China, with a great deal of money involved. A statement is expected later this week.’

  ‘Oh!’ said Thea aloud. For a moment it felt as if the whole matter of Grace’s death was on the verge of solution. Wasn’t it self-evident that she had been somehow connected to one of these Chinese gangs? Didn’t that fit perfectly with the few remarks she had made? The fear, the need to stay hidden, the deception she’d experienced, the underlying confidence and even subtle hint of affluence. Unfair as it undoubtedly was, there was a stereotype that insisted that a rich Chinese person, like a rich Russian, was unlikely to have acquired the money by ordinary legal means.

  Grace had, it seemed, been driven to an area where pangolin scales had been discovered, by people who had first frightened and then murdered her. Somewhere along the way she must have understood that the truth behind her visit was not what she had believed. And that truth carried a serious threat, the most serious there could be. She had very probably known her life was in danger, from that moment, and gone to considerable lengths to remain safe. And her captors had been clever and persistent and within hours had tracked her down and killed her. This too fitted with the usual image of wicked Chinese gangs. They would have sophisticated electronic devices, surveillance systems, perhaps local agents disguised as ordinary Cotswolds folk. So, did Grace accidentally stumble into the clutches of a rival gang? Or did she possess skills that were needed by the criminals and was lured here under a wholly false pretext? Perhaps she understood Chinese medicine or futuristic methods of preserving body parts. She could have been brought in as a consultant, under the assumption that when she learnt the true nature of those who wanted her, the promise of money would be enough to ensure her co-operation. Or perhaps they’d s
kipped any sort of enticement, and simply threatened her with death if she didn’t do as they asked. It all made enough sense for Thea to believe her own hypothesis carried quite a healthy proportion of credibility. The quick and skilful method of killing gave it added force. If Grace had simply made her way to Barnsley to visit a penfriend or see at first-hand the famous Arlington Row, almost every detail of Thea’s encounter with her would have been different.

  The radio repeated almost the same words, later in the programme, with a barely relevant clip from a distraught animal rights spokeswoman, about the cruelty and general wickedness of those who trafficked in poor innocent pangolins. For good measure, she added a rant about rhino horn, despairing of the sheer stupidity of thinking it held any magical qualities. Dimly, Thea understood that the woman was missing the point. All magical qualities existed thanks to human belief in them, and humans could steadfastly believe a vast range of extremely stupid things. In most cases, you really weren’t supposed to judge or criticise, because that would hurt their feelings.

  It would be a real satisfaction if the murder could be neatly tied to the trafficking, with additional punishment for the perpetrators. They’d get much longer spells in prison if they could be shown to be killers as well. It gave Thea a new surge of purpose. Somehow she was going to nail these people, in the few days she still had left in Barnsley.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The Wednesday evening call to Drew began as most of the others had, with Thea using the landline yet again. Stephanie picked up the phone yet again. ‘God, Steph – what’s happening? Why is it always you that answers? Is there something wrong?’

  The child took a sharp breath. ‘No!’ she gasped. ‘Everything’s all right.’

  ‘I don’t believe you. You sound so odd, darling. What’s the matter?’