Fear in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  Then she thought of Bunny Newby, who would never know the love of a grown-up son, and a complicated grief seized her.

  ‘Did you hear about Bunny, the mother of those two little boys?’ she said. ‘I suppose you must have known her.’

  Kate grabbed her arm and shook it violently. ‘Be quiet!’ she hissed. ‘Mind what you say.’

  But it was too late. The old man had heard and was visibly crumpling. ‘Is it true?’ he croaked. ‘Kate, you told me it wouldn’t be her. You promised me.’

  Kate rolled her eyes skywards, and shook Thea again. ‘See what you’ve done,’ she snarled. ‘Bloody hell.’

  ‘But… But he would have found out eventually,’ she defended. Then she turned towards the old man, reaching out a hand to him. ‘But I’m terribly sorry if I said the wrong thing – I mean, who was she to you?’

  ‘My wife’s daughter,’ said the old man softly. ‘Beatrice was my stepdaughter.’

  Thea struggled to grasp the chronology – Bunny surely had to be ten or fifteen years junior to Kate. So Kate’s mother must have taken chronological precedence over Bunny’s in the old man’s life. Confused alternative scenarios flickered through her mind, whereby Bunny was born to another man whilst her mother was married to the one standing here in the yard – but the primary thought was that her image of Bunny failed utterly to cohere with life on this farm, in any shape or form.

  ‘I knew, anyway,’ continued the old man. ‘I knew when you said the telly was playing up, and when you made such noise in the news on the wireless. Dropping that pan,’ he stared accusingly at Kate. ‘Think I’m daft, don’t you?’

  ‘Did they give her name out, then?’ Thea asked. ‘When did they do that?’

  Kate shook her head irritably. ‘No, they didn’t. But I didn’t want him worrying.’

  ‘So how did you know who it was?’

  ‘And just who might you be, to ask so many questions? What business is it of yours?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Thea could hardly deny the justice of the question. She must seem outrageously nosy and intrusive. ‘But I have met the family, and I’m dreadfully upset about those poor little boys.’

  ‘Hm. Me too,’ muttered Kate, still eyeing her father with concern. ‘Dad? Come indoors and we’ll talk about it.’

  ‘She was killed. Isn’t that what they said? A woman killed at the weekend, in the snow. Poor little fool. She might have been stupid, but nobody deserves that.’

  Thea’s eyebrows rose and she threw Kate a look of wordless enquiry. Kate shook her head impatiently. ‘It’s not like it sounds. He’s no blood relative of hers. Hadn’t even seen the woman for a year or more.’ She gave her father a fierce look. ‘Don’t you go all soft on me, you hear? She was nothing to you – not really.’

  ‘But the boys,’ Thea persisted. ‘Wouldn’t they have loved to come here, and get to know their… stepgrandad? I mean, they live barely a mile away, for heaven’s sake.’

  ‘They came,’ muttered the old man. ‘George brought them.’

  George? Thea’s insides began to churn. This was beginning to sound alarming. If George had secretly brought Nicky and Ben to the farm, without the knowledge of their parents, then something wasn’t right. Besides…how did you ensure that a four-year-old kept it quiet? Nicky was too young to understand about secrets and things you shouldn’t say. Unless the au pair was part of the conspiracy, and somehow an alternative story had been created, to make Bunny think the child was describing something else.

  Her mind raced through all this, as she looked from father to daughter and back again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said feebly. ‘I shouldn’t interfere.’

  ‘Bit late for that,’ said Kate.

  Thea knew when she’d outstayed her welcome, and calling her dog from where it was nosing after rodents in the heap of beets, she turned back towards Lucy’s Barn.

  As had happened before, Thea found herself wondering whether she was ahead of the police investigation, or behind it, or simply running along a parallel track. The clear fact was that there had been no police visit to Kate and her father, which suggested that their relationship to the murder victim had not yet emerged. And until it did, there was little likelihood of the police discovering that the connection was closer than might first appear.

  Carefully, she rehearsed a possible conversation with DS Gladwin in which she passed on the information she had just gleaned. Who, if anyone, would she be betraying? Janina emerged as the most probable name, and that depended on a lot of unfounded supposition on Thea’s part. It was perfectly likely that Simon had known about the visits to the farm, but kept it from Bunny, due to some long-founded animosity between her and her stepfather. So…would it make any difference what she did? If ancient feuds between the old farmer’s two wives emerged into the light, so what?

  So perhaps Kate herself would be put under the spotlight. If the stepsisters had not been speaking, and yet the children had been visiting the farm, did that not suggest a possible motive for killing Bunny? Kate herself showed no sign of having any offspring of her own – perhaps these were the only grandchildren and therefore in line to inherit the farm. Plainly there had been some kind of conspiracy going on behind Bunny’s back, if only a very small and innocent one.

  And what about Simon? He was becoming increasingly enigmatic. His brother had been called on for support in the initial shock of losing Bunny; Janina was his stalwart deputy where the children were concerned, while he worked all kinds of unsocial hours at his smart hotel. Did Bunny work because she thought it preferable to being at home with young children, or because she earned irresistibly good money? What did she and Simon actually want out of life? Thea had found it helpful at times to ask this question, when tracing out the past histories of the people she encountered in these villages. Sometimes it was easier to answer about somebody she had only just met – their goals and obsessions were often nakedly apparent. But with Simon Newby, she was stumped.

  The afternoon tasks were upon her, and she sloshed across the donkey’s paddock, melted snow creating squelchy indentations with every step. There was water everywhere, on surfaces both horizontal and vertical. It dripped from the trees and trickled down fence posts. The donkey came out to greet her, his ears pricked forward, his eyes bright. ‘Good afternoon, Donk,’ Thea trilled at him, reaching out to stroke the soft nose. ‘This weather more to your liking, then?’

  She examined the abrasion on his chest, which seemed to be healing nicely. She resigned herself to never knowing exactly what had caused it. It was possible that he had slipped over in the snow and caught himself on barbed wire or a sharp stick, although such an accident was difficult to envisage. It was more of a denial of the real probability than a genuine hypothesis, since George had crossed this paddock during Friday night, and had died just over the fence. Had the donkey witnessed this final trek through the snow? Had the man’s last act been to pause and fondle this velvet nose, just as she was doing now? If the donkey had brayed, would Thea have heard him, and got up and discovered the man in time to avert his suicide?

  If…if…never a useful word, and one she consciously fought to avoid as much as possible. ‘If’ could lead to defensive living on a grand scale. If I let my daughter go out with that boy and he has a drink, he could smash up the car and kill her. If I don’t put away a hundred pounds a month in high-performance shares, I won’t have anything to live on when I’m old. In Thea’s experience, the effort of trying to predict and thus avoid the worst-case scenario led nowhere. Things happened that you could never have foreseen. Your precious savings evaporated under severe mismanagement by the banks. Your daughter ran away from home because you were impossibly repressive. Better by far to expect the best, and let the ifs look after themselves.

  It was an outlook you devised in early infancy, she had concluded. Her brother Damien regarded her as almost criminally feckless in her refusal to worry about the future. He had, it seemed, listened to his mother’s worries and resistance to risk from
his earliest days and accepted her world view as right for him. Thea, on the other hand, had adopted her father’s trusting approach. The other two siblings, Emily and Jocelyn, had constructed their own variations on the theme. And once established, it was never going to change. That, Thea sometimes thought, was the true tragedy of the human condition.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Gladwin was turning out to be something of a mind-reader. Her car splashed down the track at half past three that afternoon, just as Thea was kicking off her boots and thinking about a large mug of strong tea.

  ‘Brilliant timing!’ she applauded. ‘On your own?’

  The detective nodded. ‘Not too early for tea, I hope?’

  Thea laughed, finding herself unreservedly glad of the visit. ‘Follow me,’ she said.

  The two women settled down in the kitchen, the spaniel under the table at their feet. ‘George,’ said DS Gladwin firmly. ‘I want to talk about George.’

  ‘Me too,’ Thea nodded. ‘Very much so.’

  The post-mortem had failed to find any suspicious cause of death, apart from the confirmation that the body had been moved some hours after he’d died. Calculations had been made on the basis of low temperatures, the effects of alcohol, and George’s low proportion of body fat. ‘Skinny as a rake,’ said Gladwin, with a pitying sigh. But there had been no wild guesses as to the exact time of death. ‘If you hadn’t found him, we’d never even have managed to pin it down to a given day,’ said Gladwin.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  The other woman shrugged. ‘Everything matters,’ she said. ‘And it would be extremely useful to know whether he died before or after Mrs Newby.’

  ‘Oh?’ Thea frowned. ‘But surely she was ages later?’ She tried to remember the sequence of events. ‘She wasn’t found until Sunday, was she?’

  ‘Right. The operative word being found. We think she was there for two days or more. She was well covered with snow.’

  ‘When was she last seen alive?’

  ‘Thursday morning.’

  ‘My God! Hadn’t she phoned her family since then? Weren’t they worried about her?’ Then she remembered. ‘But she did send a text. That was Saturday morning, I think. Benjamin said something about it. She sent a text to say she couldn’t be there, and Ben was sarcastic because Nicky couldn’t read it.’

  ‘Anybody can send a text,’ said Gladwin, with an air of having uttered something significant.

  ‘Would they know if it was from her phone?’

  ‘Probably. Most people have caller ID come up automatically.’

  ‘Then someone took her phone, after she was dead?’

  Gladwin exhaled with exaggerated patience. ‘If she was dead by the time the text was sent, and if it was sent from her phone, then yes.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Thea. ‘I’m being obvious, aren’t I?’

  ‘Not really. It helps to talk it through.’

  ‘But could Bunny still have been alive on Saturday? Could she have sent the text herself?’

  ‘It seems not.’

  ‘Can you tell me exactly how she died?’ She knew she was pushing the limits of Gladwin’s easy goodwill and comradeship. She had already heard a lot more than she expected.

  ‘Blows to the head with something heavy. It’s not entirely clear-cut, which is nothing new.’ She sighed. ‘Unless someone’s shot point-blank through the back of the head, there’s generally scope for alternative explanations.’

  Thea sighed in sympathy. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said feelingly, thinking of a recent experience of her own. ‘But can you tell whether she died in the place where she was found?’

  ‘Near enough. The pooling of the blood shows she didn’t lie anywhere else for any length of time. All the snow under her had melted, so she would have been warm when put there.’

  ‘Have you been interviewing loads of people?’

  ‘We only got a definite ID for her yesterday. Give us a chance. But yes, a few. They’re ongoing as we speak. I’ve seen a handful of the interview reports.’

  ‘And…?’

  ‘She was a law unto herself, off around the country on her campaigns, meeting clients, selling ideas. Whatever it is that advertising people do. She worked her socks off – everyone agrees about that. Made good money, which is amazing in itself, these days.’

  ‘Did people like her?’ Thea wondered.

  ‘Admired. Envied. Were intimidated by. One or two disapproved.’

  ‘Like Janina,’ said Thea without thinking.

  ‘Oh? You think she disapproved of her employer?’

  ‘Well, yes. I don’t know how deep it went, but she didn’t seem to have much regard for her. I met her two Sundays ago, outside the church, and she was full of how stupid Bunny had been to pursue such a useless career when she could be looking after her own kids. Something like that, anyway.’

  ‘She told us that she had great respect for both her employers. That it was a model family, fully functional and happy in every way.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said Thea. ‘And she had a best friend – Philippa something. Have you spoken to her?’

  ‘Lives in Stow with a bloke twelve years younger. Children taken on by a stepmother.’

  ‘I’m impressed,’ said Thea.

  ‘Don’t be,’ said Gladwin. ‘She approached us. She has theories. Which brings us back to George Jewell,’ said Gladwin.

  ‘Does it?’

  ‘A lot of quite unsavoury unfounded ideas about him, in fact.’

  ‘Surely not.’ Thea was shocked. ‘Those little boys were very fond of him – they went looking for him. People saw him with them. He took them for walks.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Thea chose that moment to tell her about the visits to Kate and the step-grandfather of the boys, without Bunny’s knowledge or consent. Then, for good measure, she described her encounter with Nicky in the church. ‘So what?’ she added when she’d finished. ‘I think it sounds rather nice that George took such an interest in them.’

  ‘You would,’ said Gladwin with a shrewd look. ‘You’re living out of your time, Thea Osborne – you do realise that, I hope?’

  ‘No I’m not.’ She felt surprisingly annoyed at the accusation. ‘It isn’t old-fashioned to trust people and believe the best of them. It’s you police people who’ve put everybody against each other and sown suspicion on all sides. All this talk of crime and security and the need for everybody to be surveilled – or whatever the word is – every minute of the day. It’s all rubbish. People are the same as they’ve always been, and you need to just let them get on with their lives in their own ways.’

  ‘Phew!’ Gladwin rocked back in her chair, exaggeratedly. ‘Where did that come from?’

  Thea took a deep breath. ‘It’s something I feel strongly about,’ she muttered. ‘The only thing wrong with this country is the spineless way we’ve let it turn into a police state.’

  ‘Steady on.’ Gladwin’s eyes were wider, her thin nose sharper. ‘No way is this a police state. That really is rubbish.’

  ‘It isn’t far off. Anyway, what were you going to say about George?’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything. We have no reason to think he was doing anything wrong. As you say, the kids loved him. They’d never have felt like that if there’d been any funny business.’

  ‘Right,’ said Thea, feeling as if she’d somehow tilted at the wrong windmill. ‘Good.’

  ‘But it’s not that simple. He has a police record – vagrancy, disturbing the peace, getting on the wrong side of neighbours. Treated with suspicion everywhere he goes.’

  Thea frowned. ‘A scapegoat,’ she summarised.

  Gladwin met her eyes. ‘In the old-fashioned sense of the word, yes. The outsider, shouldering all the guilt and shame of the community. Unfortunately, there are members of my team who see this sort of thing differently. No smoke without fire, they say. A lone man like that, maybe not quite right in the head, stands to reason he’s got something to hide.’ She put on a
growly voice to quote her colleagues’ remarks.

  ‘So you think he killed himself because people were being horrid to him?’

  ‘It’s a thought. If you’d heard that Philippa woman, you’d understand.’

  There was a short silence, during which Thea wondered about the cruelty of village life, and the undercurrents she was having difficulty in ignoring.

  Gladwin spoke first. ‘How much contact have you had with Janina? How frank do you feel she’s been with you?’

  Thea had to think about it. ‘I’ve seen her four or five times in total. First time was outside the church. Then I met her in the road and went to Nicky’s party. Then she came here at the same time as Kate, and they talked to each other, mostly, while I was outside. She was there when I found George in his house. Then yesterday, when I found Nicky and took him home. She always seems quite open and friendly. I didn’t get any impression that she was hiding anything or worried. She was cross, the first time, and there’s a kind of cynicism about her – an air of knowing better than other people. She is very highly educated, isn’t she? She must feel a bit demeaned, doing what she does. I don’t expect she gets the recognition she deserves.’

  ‘Except by you,’ said Gladwin, still in shrewd mode.

  Thea brushed this aside. ‘And I think she liked George,’ she added, remembering the fresh news of that morning. ‘She must have done, to go along with him taking the boys to the farm.’

  ‘Yes, I want to come back to that. Who are these people?’

  ‘She’s called Kate. I don’t know the surname. Her father is Bunny’s stepfather. Second wife must have already got her when she married him. Doesn’t sound as if she and Kate had any time for each other.’

  ‘And they live just down the track from here?’

  ‘Right. This used to be their barn.’

  ‘Bloody hell,’ Gladwin groaned. ‘How are we meant to keep track of these convoluted families? There isn’t even a proper computer program for it. We’ve got names for both her parents, of course, but not how they connect to everybody in the area.’