by Rebecca Tope
The woman with the freckles and the loud laugh who had replaced her in Phil Hollis’s life. Everything sprang from that overlooked detail, so carefully imparted by her daughter. Phil and Thea had agreed to part, in a mature and unemotional exchange, and left it at that. They had spoken on the phone a few times since, in polite tones, about nothing much. When Jessica gave her the news, she had swallowed down the jagged feelings of rejection and jealousy, sternly labelling them as unjustified. But feelings seldom did as they were told. They simmered persistently, emerging in disguise, sometimes so powerfully that you were undone by them. You thought you were going mad with the irrationality of it all. Why feel so afraid of a fall of snow, when it couldn’t possibly hurt you? Because it wasn’t the snow at all that was the problem – it was the terror of remaining single and unloved for the rest of your life, and a neat symbol for that state might easily be a featureless expanse of snow stretching as far as you could see.
When a very sweet and trusting little boy lost his mother to a violent and senseless death, that too represented abandonment and rejection. Plus the pathetic dog, similarly abandoned on the roadside, with whom it had been all too easy to identify – it all added up to a cold, lonely universe in which there was very little comfort.
Not to mention poor George, she added to herself, wryly. As the pieces all slotted into place, she found herself feeling much better. There was sense in her alarmingly dark musings after all. Anyone would have reacted the same way. And it was all quite readily soluble. She would meet new men, make new friends. She only had to settle herself into the right frame of mind, and they’d be flocking to her door.
But it would never come right for George, or Nicky or even the wretched Jimmy. They were the truly tragic victims in this particular story, and she owed it to them to do all she could to offer at least some consolation.
She passed the rest of the day playing games on her computer, watching a long film on a DVD, cooking herself a generous quantity of spaghetti bolognese, with real ingredients, including two carrots that were strictly intended for the rabbits, and which had gone somewhat rubbery. She took Jimmy out, and then led him back to his new corner, trying to convince him that it was exactly the same as the old one. She added a small quantity of cooked mince to his dinner – as well as to Hepzie’s – hoping they would regard it as a treat. When the two dogs curled up together on Jimmy’s beanbag, she felt she had accomplished something important.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
She awoke to Wednesday with a sense of trepidation. Had the snow deepened again? Would Jimmy be all right? Had it got even colder than the day before?
She pulled aside the curtains. Light bands of white cloud gave the sky a festive appearance. Water dripped past her window, and as she focused on the buildings and trees around the barn, they all appeared to be wet. Streaks marked the vertical surfaces, and the ground was patched with dark colours between the areas of snow.
Thawing! It was all thawing. Like a miracle, the snow was turning to water, even at this hour of the morning. The normal world was returning, shaking off the unnatural white covering and getting itself back to business. As she listened, she could hear drips and gurgles as it all turned to liquid.
She turned on the radio just in time for the weather forecast at five to eight. The wind had veered to the south-west, raising the temperature by seven or eight degrees overnight. The fast-melting snow might cause flooding in some areas, as it rushed down the hillsides and into rivers that might not cope with the sudden influx.
Only in England, thought Thea, could one weather-related drama switch so abruptly into another. Should she now be worrying that Lucy’s Barn could be inundated with floodwater? She went outside and tried to assess the lie of the land, and where the snow melt might go. It seemed that the barn had been built on a slight rise, which was only to be expected from those sensible farmers of a century or two ago. To the left, the slope was obvious, leading down to Old Kate’s. Ahead, where the donkey had his paddock, the ground also fell gently away at first, and then more abruptly. Behind the barn was a level stretch, but a ditch had been dug twenty yards away, which would surely divert any runoff water. Only to the right, where Gladwin had helped her to get her car out, was there a little uphill slope. And anything running down there would surely maintain the course of the track, and head off down towards the next farm.
So she could allow herself an inward whoop of relief. She could collect her car and bring it back to the yard. She could open one or two windows and let some milder air into the house. She might go for a walk across the fields behind the barn, where she had not yet ventured. There should be snowdrops growing, and catkins on the hazel. Regardless of it still being the middle of January, she felt stirrings of spring already. Six days of snow had been winter enough, surely?
She fed the animals quickly, her toes still unfrozen inside the boots, and gloves quite unnecessary. The baby rabbits remained invisibly in their luxurious nest, and the donkey had already come outside for a look at his changing world. Jimmy was at least alive, and there was no sign of further incontinence. After his visit to the garden, Thea put him back in the conservatory, making up his bed as close as possible to how it was.
Then she got the dog lead and wallet and took Hepzie out to collect the car. There was still a lot of slushy snow on the ground, but it seemed to disappear on contact with her feet. Water lay in pools all along the track, and trickled musically on all sides. After the silence of the snow, this evidence of movement and life was a delight to the ears.
The car was where she’d left it, which seemed like another cause for relief. ‘We’ll go to the shops in Stow,’ she told the dog. ‘And get something nice for supper.’
The car was facing north, and rather than turn it round in the still-slushy and possibly slippery road, she drove off in the direction it faced, towards the centre of Hampnett. The road was very wet and splashy, the trees on her left looking drenched in an oddly different way from usual. A rainstorm left its own patterns of drips and rivulets. Melting snow was quieter, more gradual and more penetrating. The world looked as if it had been dipped in a large pool and brought up again, streaming with water. The water came from below, not above, and it looked nothing like rain. Thea drove slowly, savouring the oddness of it all.
At the village centre, she paused, wondering whether she might see someone familiar. Then it occurred to her that the only people she knew were directly involved in a murder, and were unlikely to be in any mood for chatting to an ephemeral house-sitter. All the same, she drew the car to a halt, thinking it was high time she investigated the famous church. It was there to her right, with its own parking area. A slightly sloping path led through a small gate and along to the porch and big old door.
Glad of her sturdy boots as she trod through the puddles, she approached the building. Hepzie stayed unprotestingly in the car, which Thea had not bothered to lock.
Inside, the church was light but chilly. At first glance it seemed unremarkable, until she turned east and was abruptly dazzled by the stencilled decorations on all the walls of the further end, where the altar stood. Slowly, she approached, noting the arch between the two sections, carved and painted with such exuberance it felt nothing like a place of Christian worship. The patterned walls were more like those of a papered sitting room than a chancel, or whatever it was. There was a joyful decadence to it that struck her as defiantly nutty. She had read of the arguments many years ago, in the parish, and the near victory of those who wanted it painted over and decorum restored. That it had survived for something like one hundred and fifty years was amazing, and glorious. Now, of course, it attracted tourists and anything that did that acquired a sanctity all of its own.
The archway was as flamboyant as the stencilling, with crinkly stonework and stylised little carvings of men who were probably saints. There was also an intriguing pair of birds at the top of a column, drinking from a bowl, their wings half open. She stared at it for a full minute, wondering about its age, and t
he motivation behind the choice of subject.
But it was the stencilling that gave the place its character. There was something foreign and pagan about it that Thea found mildly unsettling, here in the heart of rural England. But then she remembered that William Morris had once lived close by, and that the very architecture of the area stood witness to the spirited imagination of people who had lived here. They might have been shepherds for the most part, and stolid merchants, but they had not been immune to beauty, both natural and man-made.
A sound amongst the scanty rows of pews attracted her attention. She had walked past them with her eyes fixed on the painted walls, seeing nothing else. Now she looked back, and saw a small head close to the floor. ‘Hello?’ she said quietly, half convinced that it was something insubstantial that would vanish on closer inspection.
It didn’t vanish, but neither did it move. She went closer, bending down to look between the pews. ‘Who’s that?’ she asked. There was a little body crouching on the floor, parallel with the seats, its bottom towards her. ‘Hey…come on out of there,’ she persisted. ‘It must be cold on that stone floor.’
Awkwardly, the child shuffled backwards, before standing up and turning to look at her.
‘Nicky!’ Thea cried, in recognition. ‘What on earth are you doing here? Where’s Janina? Or Daddy? What’s been happening to you?’
The little boy said nothing, simply staring at her with eyes full of unshed tears. Thea sat down beside him and pulled him to her, fighting back her own urge to weep. ‘Oh, Nicky,’ she moaned. ‘It’ll be all right.’ But it wouldn’t. How could it be? Nicky shivered and stood stiffly in her encircling arm. He was wearing a thin shirt, with no coat or jumper. Only then did Thea wonder just how he had got there, and why nobody had missed him. Why was there no frantic search party out there calling his name?
‘I want George,’ whispered the child. ‘I’m finding George.’
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
She carried him back to his house, which was after all only two or three hundred yards away. But he had crossed a road, albeit a very little-used one, and got inside the church through the heavy oak door. He gave her no enlightenment as to where he was meant to be and how he had evaded the adults who should have been looking after him.
The house was deserted, and Thea assumed that Janina and perhaps Simon were, after all, combing the area in search of the missing child. The front door was closed but not locked, and she took him inside, anxious to get him warmed up. He was still shivering, and when she settled him into a corner of a big red sofa, he looked horribly pale and drawn. The room was warm and tidy as if waiting for visitors to arrive.
‘I need to wee,’ said Nicky suddenly, and rolled off the sofa. He headed for a door next to the kitchen, and Thea let him go, trying to remember the usual level of competency of a four-year-old in that department. Her sister’s youngest was eight, and it didn’t seem too long ago that he had regularly wet his pants in times of excitement. She considered herself lucky that this one had waited until she put him down, rather than let go while still in her arms.
She heard the flushing of the loo, and then the pale child returned slowly, a frown on his face. ‘What’s your name?’ he asked.
‘Thea,’ she told him. ‘I came to your party, remember?’
‘Oh yes,’ he nodded, with no sign of recognition. It was impossible to guess what was going on inside the little head, but it was easy to believe that events since Saturday had completely obliterated all memory of his birthday. ‘You came when George was dead.’
Even harder to grasp just what a four-year-old understood of death. They played games about killing on the computer, watched it in TV cartoons, heard references to dead animals and perhaps people. But to see an actual dead person at that age was beyond the realms of comprehension, in this society at this time. Fears about the damage it would do must run riot amongst his family and teachers. Why, then, had he apparently been abandoned to lose himself in a church? How in the world could such a thing have happened?
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘And you’ve been looking for him today, have you?’
‘Janina said he would go to the church,’ he nodded.
She must have meant his funeral, Thea supposed. The au pair had presumably been trying to explain the process, in an effort to reassure and inform. People these days believed it was important to keep children abreast of events, not to exclude them and lie to them. Thea approved of this, herself, but in this instance she suspected that Janina had gone too far. Or had failed to anticipate the effect of her explanations. And what, if anything, had Nicky been told about his mother?
She began to feel awkward in her role as rescuer, making free with someone else’s house, and in sole charge of a traumatised little boy. She should summon somebody – especially if there was in fact a desperate search party out there looking for Nicky. But the only call she could think to make was to the police, and that seemed ill-advised, until she knew more. If Nicky had not been reported lost, then there might be repercussions for those who had allowed him to wander away unnoticed. It would be doing Simon no favours to add this charge of neglect to his other worries.
But as she sat beside the child, having found him a sweatshirt and made him a drink of warm milk in the microwave, she began to wonder about Simon. What father would be so careless, whatever the circumstances? She thought about her own father, always so mindful of his children’s welfare, and Carl, who had devoted himself to Jessica when she was Nicky’s age, taking her for long country walks and carrying her home when she was too exhausted to move another step. She might have heard stories of men who forgot to collect their kids from school, or left them for hours in a car – but she had never experienced one of them at first hand.
After half an hour, she knew she had to make a move. Her dog would be restless, she herself was getting hungry, and Nicky was in obvious need of a familiar pair of arms around him. She had switched on the TV and they were watching something mindless as a distraction, when the doorbell rang.
Carefully, with her heart thumping nervously, Thea went to answer it. A woman she recognised stood there, with a small girl at her side. ‘Dorothy!’ Thea remembered. ‘Aren’t you Dorothy?’ The argumentative child from the party – one of Nicky’s little friends. It explained nothing, but she was very glad indeed to see them.
‘Have you got Nicky?’ the woman burst out, before Thea had finished addressing the little girl. ‘He hasn’t been at nursery all morning. Bernard was supposed to collect him.’ She grimaced with that familiar look of wives who found themselves saddled with unreliable men.
‘Yes,’ said Thea shortly. ‘But there’s nobody else here.’
‘Thank God for that.’
‘I told you, Babs,’ said Dorothy. She looked at Thea, woman to woman. ‘Daddy forgot all about it. He doesn’t listen, you see.’
Dorothy was at least six – old enough to be in school. But a closer inspection revealed a crusty nose and red eyes indicative of a nasty cold.
‘Can I have a quick look at him, do you think?’ asked Barbara. ‘I was aghast when I realised what must have happened. I would have sent Bernard to abase himself, but what’s the point. He’s had Philippa on the phone to him half the morning, God help us, so he’s in no state to deal with nursery matters.’
‘Come in, then,’ said Thea, with an exaggerated version of the odd pang she always had when making free with other people’s homes.
Nicky was still on the sofa, his eyelids flickering as he dozed off to sleep. Barbara took one look at him and retreated back to the hall, Dorothy following her.
‘I really am terribly sorry. Where’s the au pair? Have you been here with him all morning?’
‘I found him in the church,’ said Thea brutally. She gave a brief account of events, experiencing afresh the shocked alarm at finding the small child all alone in the cold. ‘Heaven knows what would have happened if I hadn’t gone in there. I’m not sure he could have opened the door
again by himself. He might have been in there for days.’
Barbara shuddered. ‘Let’s hope someone would have thought to look for him there, once they realised he was missing. And where is that girl?’
‘I have no idea. I suppose I’ll have to stay here until somebody comes back. I assume Ben’s at school as normal?’ She still had no clear idea of what the original plan had been that day, or how Bernard had so comprehensively failed to play his part in it.
Barbara shrugged. ‘I suppose so. I’ve been concentrating on Nicky. Bernard took Wilf to nursery this morning, and apparently should have taken Nicky as well. But he got distracted somehow, so I only heard about it later. Then he had to go and see someone, so I was left with madam here.’ She shook her head impatiently. ‘It never occurred to me that kids could be so complicated,’ she complained. ‘I thought I’d escaped all that business. All my own fault, I know, for falling for the silly old sod. Terrible what a moment of weakness can lead to.’
Thea laughed, liking Barbara more by the minute. ‘I expect there are compensations,’ she said, eyeing the self-possessed Dorothy.
‘Oh, Dottie and I get along marvellously. She makes everything worthwhile.’ And she calls you Babs, Thea thought. Somehow that did suggest a good relationship.
‘You do seem rather alike,’ she observed, wondering about the absent Philippa.
‘So Bernard says. Well, we’ll go, if that’s all right. Dottie’s not supposed to be out, by rights. She’s got a stinking cold.’
At the door, Barbara turned back, and said in a low voice, ‘You have heard what happened to his mother, I assume?’
‘Mmm,’ Thea nodded briefly, reluctant to speak about Bunny in front of the little girl. ‘I assume that’s what all this is about. Simon and Janina must be – I don’t know, helping with investigations, or something.’
Barbara widened her eyes. ‘Appalling thing to happen. That’s what Philippa was on about to Bernard, apparently. Ranting about nowhere being safe, and were we looking after her children properly. Bloody nerve! If she cared all that much, she’d look after them herself.’
