by Rebecca Tope
‘OK. Well, we have to go – now.’
‘Is he…? Will he…?’ Ben’s cracked voice emerged in a whisper.
‘He’s dead, Ben,’ said Thea. ‘He’ll have to be taken away. He won’t get up again.’
‘He won’t ever talk, will he?’
‘No. He’s gone for ever.’
‘Has Mummy gone for ever as well?’ asked Nicky, still jiggling.
‘No, of course not. Maybe that’s who Daddy’s talking to on the phone. Let’s go and see, shall we?’
She held out a hand to each, and slowly Ben got to his feet, a deep frown marking his brow. ‘You don’t know,’ he said. ‘You don’t know where Mummy is.’
‘That’s true. But I’m sure she’ll be back any time now.’
‘Yes,’ said Nicky confidently. ‘Yes, she will.’
Ben said nothing.
It turned out that the boys’ house was literally next door to the cottage. Thea reproached herself for being so slow to work it out. Finally, she could see how the two approaches she had so far made to the village centre could in fact converge.
Out in the trampled snow, they turned left and there was the house that Thea had been in only the previous afternoon, twenty yards away. It was in no way startling that Nicky and Ben had been allowed to walk along to George’s cottage, apart from some slight danger from traffic. Cars evidently did come past, but hardly enough to present much hazard.
Simon was in the kitchen, the room full of the smell of roasting pork and apple sauce. Lunchtime, Thea realised. She’d been out all morning, and it would be dark again in less than four hours. And she might have to walk back to the barn as before, her nervousness drastically increased by the bizarre knowledge that somebody had dragged a dead body across several fields in deep snow, two days earlier.
‘Hey, boys, there you are!’ The tone was forced, in a very poor piece of acting. Even before hearing the news, Simon was suffering from some profound worry or shock. He looked at Thea with a frown, as if trying to remember where he’d seen her before. ‘Hello?’ he queried warily.
‘George is frozen dead,’ said Nicky, loud and clear. ‘In his house.’
Simon puffed a breath of amused disbelief. ‘Surely not,’ he protested. ‘His house might be draughty, but it’s not that cold.’
‘It’s true,’ said Thea urgently. She was bursting to recount the full story about following the sledge tracks, and having seen the man earlier, walking along the road. But the children inhibited her. It was one thing for them to absorb the simple fact of death, quite another to introduce a sinister figure lurking out in the fields, behaving alarmingly. ‘We’ll have to call the police,’ she added.
Simon closed his eyes and leant back against the kitchen worktop. ‘What?’ he muttered. ‘What are you saying?’
‘Where’s Janina?’ Thea demanded. She had the feeling she was going to need help in dealing with this.
‘Here. I’m here,’ came a voice from behind her. ‘Hello again.’ She was unwinding a long woollen scarf from her neck, and then pulled off a matching knitted hat. Her dark hair frizzed out untidily, and her cheeks glowed pink from the cold. ‘Am I late for lunch?’
Only then did she scan the four faces in front of her, and understand that something had happened. ‘Is it Bunny?’ she asked, with an undisguised note of contempt. ‘Is she still trapped by the snow?’
Simon made a soft bleat of protest, but Nicky drowned him out. ‘It’s George,’ he said, importantly. ‘He’s frozen dead.’
Janina blinked, and inspected all the faces again. ‘No,’ she said. Then she met Thea’s eyes and found confirmation of the story. ‘Good God,’ she gasped.
‘The man in the snow,’ said Simon slowly, also seeking Thea’s gaze. ‘Was that him, then?’
‘Almost certainly,’ she said. ‘Although I didn’t see his face properly. Look…we really do have to call the police.’
‘Yes, yes. Well…you do it. You’ve seen him. You’ll know what to say.’
Reluctantly, Thea nodded. Already she could imagine how the conversation would go: the bland failure to grasp the important background story on the part of the girl who took the initial call, the difficulty of describing the exact location, the endless bloody snow obstructing everything. ‘I’ll phone Phil,’ she decided. ‘He can find the man who came on Friday.’ Foolishly, she had made no mental or physical note of his name, and was not about to face the complicated business of identifying him to the same uncooperative female she knew would be on the end of the phone. Then a memory popped up. ‘Your brother!’ she said. ‘He’ll know who it was. It might be simplest just to get hold of him.’
‘Tony? No good. He’s gone home to nurse his cold. He’s not answering the phone.’
‘You’re joking!’
Simon shook his head ingenuously. ‘No. He gets like that when he’s ill. He wouldn’t be any use to us, believe me.’
Thea shook her head impatiently. She was acutely aware of the two small boys listening to everything that was said, with Janina still holding her hat and scarf, her face a picture of bewilderment.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ Thea grabbed at the phone and keyed the number of Phil Hollis’s mobile, which was still clear in her memory, despite not having used it for some weeks.
He answered quickly. ‘Hollis,’ he barked.
‘Phil, it’s Thea. Um…I’m phoning from a house in Hampnett. I’m afraid there’s a dead man next door.’
‘Oh yes?’ His calm was ominous. Undercurrents of irritation and worse were detectable. She could hear him thinking she only came to him when there was trouble, and that this was a kind of trespass on their former relationship.
‘Listen,’ she urged him. ‘I found the body on Friday – there’ll be a record of it. Two police officers came out, in all that snow, and when I showed them the place, the body was gone. Well, now I’ve found it again. It’s a man called George and he’s in his own house, here in Hampnett.’ Despite herself, she felt rather smug at this impeccable summary. ‘So can you find who it was who came out, and see if he’s on duty today? It would be best if the same man came again. He was a sergeant.’
‘Why? Why should it be the same man? What’s his full name?’
‘Hang on.’ She held the phone away from her head, and asked Simon. ‘Jewell,’ he supplied. ‘George Jewell.’
Thea relayed the information, aware that the police were always glad to have a name to hang everything on.
‘Why are you calling me?’ he wanted to know. ‘It’s a 999 matter, surely.’
She tried to explain to him that she’d just thought it would be so much preferable not to have to start all over again with a fresh face. That there was somehow something dreadfully embarrassing about being the person to summon the police. Something out of kilter and awkward. Phil stopped her.
‘All right, I get the idea. I’m off duty, actually,’ he said. ‘And Thea…this has to go through the proper procedure. You’ll have to call 999 to get it logged in the proper way. I can’t pretend the story makes a lot of sense, the way you’ve told it, but I’m sure it will all become clear. You’re not suggesting anybody killed him, I take it?’
‘Well, no. He seems to have died of exposure, out in the snow. But, Phil—’
‘Sorry, but my food’s getting cold. I was just sitting down when you rang.’ And he dismissed her with no further ado. She felt choked with the pain of rejection, as she put the phone down.
‘So?’ demanded Simon. ‘Are they coming?’
‘Not yet. I’ve got to make another call.’ She swallowed down the cold sensations of foolishness and abandonment and made the call, speaking briefly to the young man at the call centre, who showed admirable concern and understanding.
‘There’ll be somebody with you in twenty minutes at the most,’ he said.
Same constable, same doctor, different sergeant. Pity about the doctor, Thea thought, seeing the identical irascible expression on the man’s face as there’d b
een on Friday. She took them to the cottage, leaving Simon, Janina and the boys behind. Simon was fidgeting about his pork, turning the oven down to its lowest setting and bemoaning the spoilt and soggy sprouts.
‘Is that his wife?’ the constable asked Thea softly, as they walked.
‘Au pair,’ Thea told him. ‘From Bulgaria. The wife’s stranded by snow somewhere.’
‘Oh? Like where?’
‘I have no idea.’
‘Most of the country’s OK, you know. It’s mainly confined to Gloucestershire and Wiltshire. If it was any other month of the year, we’d probably have floods. We might anyway, when this lot decides to melt.’
There was no time to pursue the topic before reaching George’s front door. ‘This is the bloke you saw in the field on Friday, then,’ the new sergeant said, showing himself to be impressively well briefed.
‘I’m sure it is, yes. I tracked him here, you see.’
‘Pardon?’
She explained about the marks left by the large sledge. ‘At least I suppose that’s what it must have been. Something with runners.’
‘How far was it?’
‘I’m not sure. Half a mile or so, I would guess. I had no idea it would end up exactly where I was yesterday. It’s a big coincidence.’
‘Not really,’ judged the sergeant. ‘Not much of a village, is it? Nowhere else to go but this little bunch of houses.’
‘No sign of violence, then?’ The sergeant turned his attention to the doctor, who was kneeling beside the body, delicately removing instruments from his case.
‘Not for me to say,’ muttered the doctor.
‘So can we remove him?’ the police officer continued patiently.
‘No photographer this time?’ asked Thea.
‘We could call one if we thought it necessary, but that’s only for the scene of a crime, basically.’
‘So you assumed on Friday that there’d been a crime?’
‘Not as I understand it – though I’ve not seen the report. It was probably down to the snow, see. After you said how hard it’d be to reach, they brought the whole team just in case. Normally it’d just have been the two officers and a doctor.’
‘Right,’ nodded Thea. ‘But isn’t it a crime to move a dead body without reporting it?’
The man pushed out his lips thoughtfully. ‘Technically, yes. It points to something not right. There are questions to be asked, that’s for sure.’
‘Yes.’ Thea had only just begun to address some of these questions, most of them beginning with Why? ‘But meanwhile you think it’s OK to remove him now?’
‘Probably. Do we have an identity for him?’
‘George Jewell. This is his house. Simon next door knows him.’
‘When was he last seen alive?’
‘I don’t know.’ She began to feel like a fraud, taking over the way she had. ‘I’m not really the person you should be speaking to.’
‘Oh, I think you are.’ He smiled knowingly. ‘You’re involved in this, Mrs Osborne, right up to the neck.’
An hour and a half later, they drove her back to the top of the lane, regretting that it still wasn’t possible to get the car all the way down to the barn. ‘Time you got that snow cleared away,’ said the constable, who had been unnaturally quiet throughout.
‘Tell the council that,’ snapped Thea, who was tired and damp. Her feet were unpleasantly cold, and her gloves had been so soggy that she hadn’t wanted to put them on again. And she was hungry. Simon had offered her a share of the belated roast, which she had declined.
‘Not a public road, is it?’ the young man asked. ‘Nothing to do with the council.’
She had wondered whether Old Kate had found time to bring up her tractor and some sort of implement for pushing snow aside. Too much to hope that she’d have come and done the job while Thea had been out, it seemed.
Everything was quiet at the barn, the sky a heavy grey, and the white of the snow increasingly tainted by tracks and the gradual reappearance of the layers beneath. In the donkey’s paddock there were signs that he was losing patience with the altered state, and had been pawing his way through to the scanty grass he had been accustomed to nibbling. The animal itself was standing with his back to the barn and its yard, staring down the hill to the bottom of his territory. Obviously the poor thing was unsettled and probably bored.
She could phone Kate and ask whether there was any prospect of getting her car out. Another day, and she feared she might get seriously worried. Walking to Northleach was not an appealing project, if she was honest. It was bad enough to think of putting her clammy boots on again to feed the animals, let alone walking a mile or more on the slippery road surface.
And she really did not want to walk anywhere. An insistent little voice claimed that it had nothing to do with cold boots or slippery snow. It was good old-fashioned fear that made her want to stay indoors. Something very strange had been going on out there since Friday, and she could make no sense of it. Without a logical explanation, anything seemed possible. Her stomach clenched at the memory of those footprints on Friday morning and her sudden terror at the sight of them. That had been illogical at the time – until she found a dead man, twice. Now there was surely every reason to be fearful, and she allowed herself to give in to it, just as soon as she’d got back from a swift visit to the donkey’s shed, and the issue of another armful of hay.
Too late now, anyway, to call Kate and ask for some tractor-based assistance. It could all wait for the morning – a Monday, when normal service could be expected to resume as far as possible. Schools would have to open again, snow or no snow, if they didn’t want their SATs results to suffer. Shops and pubs and doctors’ surgeries would all have pent-up queues wanting their services. Four days was more than enough time to be out of action.
But it seemed the elements had other ideas. When she took Jimmy out for his last toilet break, there were fine flakes of snow swirling in a noticeable breeze. Snow and wind equalled a blizzard, and that was the very last thing she wanted. Her bowels churned involuntarily as she imagined how it might be if further heavy snow fell and was banked up by the wind, concealing fences and obstructions even more effectively than before. The sense of isolation became acute, and she returned to the house actually shaking slightly with anxiety.
The wind created sounds that were hard to explain. A sporadic screeching had Thea searching for the cat, thinking it was being tortured somewhere outside. She looked into every room before finding the animal sitting contentedly on a rug beside the warm air vent in Lucy’s study. The study door had been closed, or so she thought – presumably the cat had managed to nudge it open at some point. Don’t be so paranoid, she told herself, as she glanced around at the computer paraphernalia wondering whether some intruder had left the door open. The latch was insubstantial and everybody knew how clever cats could be when they wanted to get through a door.
She worried about the rabbits, especially the babies, with little but their own fur and a somewhat flimsy shed wall between themselves and the cold snow. Was it possible that they could freeze to death? Were they originally from some warm exotic place that gave them little natural ability to maintain their temperatures? Indigenous bunnies had deep burrows to hide in, where the soil retained the heat of summer. So far these tame things seemed to be surviving well enough – but if it got any colder, perhaps she ought to bring them into the house.
She turned on the television, but the uniform banality on all channels only made her feel more at odds with the world. What she needed was a friendly face, an engrossing conversation, with good food and wine. Not a lot to ask, she thought self-pityingly. What stupid mistakes had she made to bring herself to this lonely state? January in a snowbound barn, alone except for a load of dependent animals, and under siege by a menacing lunatic that carted dead bodies across fields for no discernible reason? It was no way to live, she decided with a long unsettled sigh.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Her dream
s were full of long chase sequences where she hid behind bales of hay and forgot all about her dog until spotting the soaked spaniel head whirling away on a great flood. She was wearing hiking boots as heavy as lead, which fixed her feet to the ground and made movement impossible. She woke to find Hepzie snuggled against her feet, licking one paw with an urgency that spread moisture around a wide area. The dog had always been a messy licker.
It was dark outside, and still noisy with the wind. Nudging Hepzie with one foot, she hissed at her to stop licking and keep still. She ought to get up and check for snowdrifts, but no way was she going to do that. What would be the point? Time enough in the morning for any really bad news. Everything would seem better in daylight. She drifted off to sleep again, thinking about those hardy human beings who made it through the ice age, without any of the comforts of electricity or oil or underfloor heating. But they did have wolf skins and log fires and each other, she argued to herself. Like the rabbits in their deep burrows, they probably chose the most sheltered caves to colonise, and managed to cope perfectly well.
When morning came, Thea felt no urgency to leave the bed, despite the comfortable background temperature maintained by Lucy’s clever system. She could think of no reason to hurry, apart from Jimmy’s need to go outside, and he seemed to have an infinitely capacious bladder. The light seemed much as before, but small comfort could be derived from that. All it suggested was that there had not been a dramatic thaw during the night.
Her small travelling clock informed her that it was past eight – not yet late, but close to a dereliction of duty for a house-sitter. She was thirsty, but not desperately so. While she continued to think about it, she drifted back to sleep. When a loud knocking came on the front door, it shocked her awake with a painfully thumping heart. Hepzie gave a protesting yap and jumped off the bed.
* * *
She hurried down the stairs in her dressing gown, feeling bleary and confused. What time was it now? Had she slept the morning away? Was it some terrible news waiting for her on the doorstep? Fumbling with the lock, she called, ‘I’m coming,’ before finally getting the door open.
