Secrets in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘It’s a secret. You mustn’t ask me. I’ll go and find Dad. He didn’t think you’d phone today. He says he asked you not to.’

  ‘But I want to talk to him. I told him that last night. Where is he?’

  ‘Oh … somewhere. Wait a minute.’

  ‘I can end this call and start again on the mobile, if you like. Would that help?’

  ‘Oh yes! That would be great. Do that, then. I’ll put this one back.’

  ‘Okay, then.’

  Thea gave it twenty seconds, and then keyed the shortcut for Drew’s mobile. Had Stephanie really said there was a secret? The idea was just as startling as it had been when it first occurred earlier in the week. Thea felt angry, then hurt at being excluded. It had not sounded like a nice secret, as she had hoped. She didn’t have a birthday coming up. Drew knew better than to plan a surprise holiday, party or unannounced visitor. But half those twenty seconds were spent coming to see that she could not ask him. Stephanie would be blamed for her failure to stay quiet. And if it was something nice, she would ruin an elaborate plan that had her gratification as its main purpose. She would do a lot to avoid that.

  Even if it was something sinister, a dark and dangerous threat that had to be kept away from her, she had no choice but to wait until her husband was ready to reveal it.

  Drew answered, in a quiet voice. ‘Sorry about that,’ he said. ‘I could have come to the phone quite easily, you know.’

  ‘So you’re not lying in bed with your leg in traction, then?’ said Thea lightly, with no knowledge of where that idea had sprung from.

  ‘What? No, of course I’m not. What’s Stephanie been telling you?’ His laugh was so forced, she could feel the effort down the line.

  ‘She didn’t tell me anything. I’m joking, you idiot. I could have said you were at the end of the garden, burying my dog.’ Her heart stopped. ‘You weren’t, were you? She’s okay, isn’t she?’

  ‘She’s absolutely fine.’ He sighed. ‘Don’t have any more fanciful ideas, okay? Once you start, I’ll never be able to stop you. Tell me about your day. Has Gladwin been to see you? Have you used the car?’

  ‘I drove to Bibury this afternoon. I was going to do a drawing, but I couldn’t get anywhere near the picturesque part. It was heaving with tourists, most of them Chinese, as everybody said it would be. Some of them look as if they’ve actually settled there permanently, but mostly they just hop off coaches to take photos and then whizz off somewhere else.’

  ‘So no picture to show me?’

  ‘Not yet. But I have done a tiny bit more of my needlepoint picture. And Barkley came this morning, quite early. She didn’t have anything new to say, really. Gladwin’s still totally embroiled in this illegal animal trade. Sounds as if they’re tightening the net, with raids and so forth. Did you see any of it on the telly? I’ve only caught bits on the radio.’

  ‘No. We haven’t had the telly on all week.’

  ‘Congratulations.’ How many weary parents could claim the same at this stage of the summer holidays? Certainly, never a one in Thea’s time. But it was different now, she remembered. ‘I suppose they’ve been on their gadgets instead,’ she accused.

  ‘They have a bit. As a reward when they’ve been good, mostly. And when they’ve got a bit noisy. There hasn’t been too much of that.’ Stephanie and Timmy were not especially noisy children anyway – something Thea felt grateful for. There was less of the mindless rampaging that she remembered from her two sisters’ children in years gone by.

  She found herself lost for something to say. Desperately she racked her brain for a joke that wouldn’t annoy him, an anecdote that wouldn’t worry him, a promise that wouldn’t be broken. She couldn’t mention Clovis, and rather hoped to stay off any detailed references to murder. ‘They’ve just about finished the kitchen here,’ she said at last. ‘Up to the bathroom tomorrow. They’re wonderfully fast workers.’

  ‘It’s all modular these days, I suppose,’ he said vaguely. ‘Just slot it all together like Lego.’

  ‘Must be,’ she agreed, thinking that would surely not be possible in the case of a new bathroom. Tabitha was having new facilities installed – bath, shower, lavatory and washbasin – but all except the shower in much the same positions as the old ones. The shower was being fitted into a space in a corner, and would obviously require considerable new pipework as a result. ‘So everything’s all right with you, then, is it?’

  ‘More or less,’ he said. ‘Only two funerals scheduled for next week. Andrew wants to go away at the end of September, and I’ve told him that’ll be all right. He hasn’t had any time off all year.’

  ‘Hasn’t he?’ Thea paid less attention to Drew’s colleague than she probably should. He worked as required, which could mean a run of three days or more during the week in which there was virtually nothing to do. Such an undemanding workload seemed to her to scarcely justify any actual holiday. But she guessed she was being unfairly Victorian about it, and his union, if he had one, would take exception to such views. ‘More than he got when he was farming, anyway,’ she couldn’t resist saying.

  ‘One reason he quit farming was to reduce the levels of stress he was under.’

  ‘I know. It’s none of my business, anyway.’

  ‘So, when are you coming home?’ He sounded like a small boy asking when his mother would come and rescue him from boarding school. ‘Do you know yet?’

  ‘I can’t see any reason to be here after Friday. I’m going to try and contact Tabitha directly and see if it’s all right with her for me to go then. It was all left a bit vague.’

  ‘That’s good. Friday, I mean. And will we have to come and fetch you? What about that borrowed car?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’ll find that out tomorrow. Why? Would it be a problem to collect me? Friday evening, or maybe Saturday morning.’

  He was quiet, then said, ‘It might be. We haven’t decided about Saturday yet.’

  That sounded extremely odd to Thea. She began to demand an explanation when she heard Timmy shouting not far from wherever Drew was. ‘Hey! Dad!’ the little boy yelled, much louder than seemed to be called for. ‘Come quick.’

  ‘Sorry, better go,’ said Drew, superfluously. ‘Sounds as if it’s important. Thanks for calling, love. Use the mobile first next time, okay? I did say that before.’

  ‘So you did. I hope Timmy’s all right. He sounds pretty desperate.’

  ‘Bye,’ said Drew and ended the call.

  The thing was, she reflected, Timmy had sounded much more like a boy overdoing a part in a school play than a child in genuine distress. He was just shouting the words, with little real feeling behind them. He had actually not sounded desperate at all. He had sounded rehearsed and insincere.

  So, something unusual was being planned for Saturday, was it? Something that might prevent Drew from driving the short distance down to Barnsley and back. At least all three of them were alive – and she hoped he hadn’t been lying about Hepzie. Never again, she vowed, would she allow herself to be separated from the devoted dog. Whatever nonsense Drew might be hatching, it was less immediately concerning than the prolonged separation from her pet. But the plot that was hatching could be something special to welcome her home, perhaps? She tested the theory against the evidence, and concluded it was untenable. Anything she could think of was untenable, in fact. All she could do was wait patiently for the revelation when it finally came. If it was something disagreeable, she ought not to be in any hurry to discover it.

  Thursday was a rerun of Wednesday, at least in the first hour or two. She woke gradually, missing the spaniel, reviewing the day past and the day ahead, and then welcoming the builders on their early arrival. ‘Gotta get upstairs today,’ said Dave. ‘You’ll need to have everything out of the bathroom.’

  ‘Already done,’ said Thea.

  ‘Did you see the kitchen?’ Sid prompted her, his face expectant.

  ‘Oh – yes. Lovely,’ she did her best to gush. ‘You’ve don
e it all so quickly. Tabitha’s going to be thrilled.’ She could not bring herself to pretend that a beautiful kitchen did anything to stir her own soul.

  ‘Bathroom should be done by the end of tomorrow,’ Dave boasted. ‘Provided the doings get delivered as promised. Should be here any time now.’

  ‘A new bath? And loo?’

  ‘And the rest,’ Dave nodded. ‘We need to get the old stuff out by dinnertime, and the new vinyl down. All organised on paper.’ He waved a clipboard at her. ‘There’s a plumber coming at two. We can get the shower in with him, first.’

  ‘You got somewhere to go?’ Sid asked her. Her response to the kitchen had clearly disappointed him, and lowered his expectations of her. She was sorry, but also irritated.

  ‘Not really. I’ve no idea what I’m going to do, to be honest. What’s the weather like?’ She peered past him to the sky outside. It looked more or less clear.

  ‘Nice day, they say. Warmer. How about a bit of shopping? Plenty to explore in Cirencester.’

  ‘It’s a thought. Pity we’re so far from the sea. It’d be nice on a beach, by the sound of it.’ Both men gave helpless shrugs at that. ‘Well, I might play on my computer for a bit. It’s still very early. Do you think I’ll be able to leave on Saturday, then? You’ll have done all the indoor stuff by then, won’t you?’

  ‘Thought you were leaving Friday,’ said Dave. ‘That’s what we were told – get everything done and dusted by end of Friday, because after that there’d be nobody to supervise.’

  ‘We’ve got another job Monday, anyway,’ said Sid.

  ‘Right. Just checking.’ The truth was, as the two men doubtless understood as well as she did, that she had not really been needed at all. Builders could get on just as well without supervision – especially ones like these, who clearly had plenty of responsibility and a decent work ethic. The whole exercise had been pointless, or worse. Without her, Grace might still be alive. But Gladwin had meant well. It wasn’t her fault the original purpose of giving Thea some space and time to herself, a little holiday from the demands of her stepchildren, had turned to ashes. Some people might even think that was a kind of divine justice.

  The computer researches of the day before had been diverting, she remembered. Right here on the doorstep was a rambling family stretching back three hundred years and more, all meticulously documented and shared amongst descendants across the world. Thea regarded herself as still rather too young for the obsessive delvings that so many people engaged in, at a time of life when they felt their own place on the tree becoming more pivotal. Once you had grandchildren, it seemed, you took the whole business more seriously. And if you were retired, with time on your hands, what better use for it than to burrow through old records and newspaper stories, in search of the fullest possible picture of the people who came before? People dead for centuries, who had the exact same ears as yours, and the same peculiar passion for apricots. It made you hopeful for your own great-great-grandchildren, and how they might even one day find you interesting.

  But she could not escape the feeling that she was simply putting off a much more serious and potentially unpleasant activity, and should give the laptop a miss. Her usual motto of Make something happen had let her down over the past few days. Wandering at random around Barnsley and Bibury did not constitute proactively searching for clues as to who murdered Grace. Even though she had gone over the same footpaths, and explored a suspicious-looking abandoned barn, she had not behaved remotely like a keen amateur detective looking for clues − for the perfectly good reason that there simply were no clues. The police must surely have crawled all over the business park by now, checked every scrap of CCTV footage, asked a thousand questions, and apparently come up with nothing. And that meant Grace must have lied in almost everything she’d told Thea. In the face of implacable lying, most people were helpless. The rules of ordinary communication were so comprehensively broken that you had nowhere to stand. Her name wasn’t Grace. She wasn’t Chinese. She hadn’t been forcibly driven to Barnsley. But she had been killed. Where the story would have made more sense if she had merely died of natural causes – heart failure for preference – the fact of a deliberate murder intensified every crucial second of Thea’s encounter with her. There absolutely had to be a clue there somewhere. And did the police not realise that? Were they just waiting for some tiny forgotten word or look to surface, which would then give them the thread they needed to follow? If so, Thea should be persistently hypnotising herself into total recollection – and with every passing day that was going to be more difficult.

  On top of all that, Clovis Biddulph could not be ignored. Here was a man who wanted to participate in the search for answers, and seemed to have the time and the brains to make a decent job of it. Seemed, however, was the operative word. Could it all be one great bluff, designed to weaken her defences and allow him to get closer to her? Surely not. Hadn’t they emerged on a calmer and more adult footing now? Respect and consideration for Drew had become the driving force, and very little harm had been done. Or so she hoped. Hoping and believing might not be enough to protect her now, if Clovis had ulterior intentions. He had delicately left the next move up to her, and three times that Thursday morning her thumb had hovered over the little numbers that would bring his voice into her ear.

  The only person left was Caz Barkley, forgetting the impossibly preoccupied Gladwin. And even Caz should not be called without some seriously good reason for doing so. Only if she, Thea, had a brilliant idea, or walked into a thrilling new piece of evidence, could such an interruption be justified. This latter notion took root, suggesting that there could well yet be something to discover at the business park, especially if she approached it from the official direction, instead of staring over hedges at the back.

  ‘I’m going for a long walk,’ she told the builders.

  ‘What do we tell anybody that comes looking for you?’ asked Dave.

  ‘You can say I’ve gone for a look at the business park,’ she said, after a brief hesitation. She couldn’t see that it mattered if she told the truth.

  ‘Private road, that,’ said Sid.

  ‘Oh well – I don’t suppose they’ll mind. I’m not going to do any damage.’

  He shrugged and raised his eyebrows, as if to say On your head be it.

  So she gathered up her map, purse and phone, shouted a cheerful goodbye to the builders and went out with a sense of high adventure. She went on foot and made for the front entrance of Barnsley Park, where small businesses were conducted in lovely old stone barns and cottages, and nothing was plainly visible. Here, if anywhere, the truth must lie.

  She had to walk an inconveniently long way along a crooked road with more traffic than was comfortable. There was no pavement, and a very variable verge. Sometimes it was quite wide and grassy, before narrowing and turning prickly with thistles and other weeds. This, she remembered, was why she’d opted for the footpath previously. But the footpath gave the businesses a wide berth, leaving them on the far side of walls and fences that gave no obvious access to them. This way, she would walk boldly into the yard, seeing the big house from the other side, and working out just how many people lived and worked there.

  She felt small but conspicuous as she entered the driveway. For a while all she could see was a wall on one side, with big beech trees beyond it, and a fenced field containing sheep on the other. Then she rounded a bend and found herself face-to-face with a stone tower she had not seen previously. She could still not see the mansion, which must lie beyond the woodland. Still there was a long stretch of driveway before reaching any buildings. Keeping well to the left, where she hoped she would be less visible against the backdrop of wall and greenery, she walked on until finally within a few yards of a collection of single-storey stone buildings. Her historian’s eye noted changes and additions to an estate that went back centuries. Originally the curtilage of the manor house, with a big kitchen garden, paddocks for livestock, humble dwellings for the staff,
it had mutated effortlessly into a twenty-first-century working collective that looked barely altered at first glance. There were no lurid signs in primary colours, no obtrusive floodlights; just a sense of quiet enterprise taking place behind the tasteful oak doors and stone facades. But a more modern wall of glass revealed recent changes, along with a sign warning that CCTV was operating on the premises.

  It was quickly apparent that casual visitors were not encouraged or expected. If you wanted a picture framed or a piece of harness repaired, you came to the appropriate unit and dealt with the person working there. Using her habitual imaginative guesswork, she ran through other likely goods and services that might be available. Private detective, goldsmith, poodle parlour, potter, garden designer, genealogist, masseur, manicurist – the list flowed readily through her active mind. All entirely likely in the affluent materialistic Cotswolds. People wanted quality handmade goods, provided by skilled individuals, and services that made them feel special. They were always short of time, too, which meant they couldn’t possibly create their own garden or trim their own poodle. Or trace their own ancestors. Probably, she concluded, the genealogist and private detective would be the same person, perhaps vaguely described as a ‘researcher’ with impressive computer skills.

  It was all her own fantasy, she reminded herself. The problem was, the reality was not easy to ascertain. There was no evidence of any artisan handicrafts. Nobody proclaimed their line of work with any clarity. There were small boards beside some of the doors, which she scanned self-consciously. The word ‘Solutions’ appeared twice, but nobody seemed to offer ‘Logistics’. She was gradually aware of faces peering out at her, from windows on all sides of the yard, one woman standing just inside the big glass windows, arms folded. At any moment, someone would emerge with a frosty, ‘Can I help you?’ and she would have to invent a reason for being there. And that would carry a degree of risk. She wanted to say, ‘I gather there’s a furrier here,’ and watch the effect. Illegal tiger skins or fox furs could so easily be tucked away in back rooms. But the police had already performed a thorough investigation into all these businesses – or so she assumed. They could hardly have failed to pursue the flimsy story told by Grace, however implausible it was proving to be.