by Rebecca Tope
‘That’s right,’ she said. ‘I’ve walked here for a change, now there’s no snow left.’
‘Didn’t bring that lurcher as well, then?’
‘Jimmy? No, he wouldn’t be able to cope.’ How did the woman know about him, anyway? When did anybody ever see the reclusive animal?
‘The van man knows him,’ came the freely supplied explanation. ‘Lucy has a delivery from us, see. The dog comes out for a bun. We keep a bag of them for people’s pets. Good for customer relations.’ She laughed complacently. Thea found it hard to envisage Jimmy accepting such an offering, but then Jimmy was capable of quite a few surprises.
‘How nice,’ she said.
‘Pity about all the trouble over there,’ the woman continued. ‘Those poor little boys. My grandson’s in Ben’s class. You have to explain it to all of them, you know. It’s not easy at that age. They get in a panic about losing their own mums – shakes their confidence, especially the boys. These people, they don’t realise the consequences of what they do. They don’t think about how it affects the whole community, something like that. Twenty, thirty years from now, it’ll still be talked about – the winter when poor Mrs Newby was killed. That and the snow, of course. Never seen snow like that in my life.’
Was this somebody who had liked Bunny, then? And surely she must have experienced similar snow before. She looked to be at least fifty – couldn’t she remember 1963? Doing the sums, Thea concluded that maybe not. Thea herself had been born after that great adventure, which her parents described with almost euphoric merriment.
‘I bumped into their father and uncle, last time I came here,’ she said, hoping to keep the conversation going. ‘They looked totally shell-shocked.’
‘And so they might,’ the woman nodded. ‘Though I can’t say I know the uncle. Can’t honestly say I know the family at all, other than a few glimpses.’
‘They don’t get their bread from your van, then?’
A rueful expression answered that. ‘Everything’s from Waitrose for people like them,’ she said. ‘Must have been a real shock for that Polish girl, or whatever she is. Don’t expect they have the like where she comes from.’
‘Bulgaria, and I’m sure you’re right,’ said Thea, wondering briefly how it was that Janina’s existence had filtered down to the shopkeeper. ‘Have you seen her outside school?’
She shook her head. ‘My daughter has, though. Said she was too pretty to be left so much alone with the boys’ dad. Asking for trouble, as anyone can see.’
‘Right,’ said Thea heavily. It was all too obviously true, with all its painful implications. She went back to her tethered dog, who greeted her passionately, before being abandoned again while Thea went into the shop on the corner to buy further provisions.
The walk back, with a canvas bag slung over her shoulder, was a prospect she found even less appealing than before, thanks to an increasingly bitter east wind. The road out of Northleach was lined with small stone houses on both sides. Nobody was using the pavement, and little traffic passed by. The town was not on the way to anywhere, large new roads having been constructed to the north and east to obviate the need to drive through Northleach. The resulting quiet was a major factor in producing the out-of-time feeling. The little place was left in peace to potter along invisibly, not competing or displaying itself, but merely getting on with life on its own terms.
When a car drew up beside her, her instant reaction was wariness, an assumption of trouble. Somebody would want to know the way, or make a lewd suggestion. She braced herself, as the passenger door was pushed open clumsily by a driver leaning across the front seat. ‘Dorothy said it was you,’ came a woman’s voice, and she leant down to see who it was. The small girl in the back was altogether familiar.
‘Oh, hello,’ she said, tentatively. ‘Hi Dorothy. Are you still poorly?’
The woman nodded on behalf of the child, and Thea wondered whether she herself had ever looked so terrible, even in those first days after Carl was killed. This was a figure of desperate misery, a young woman, barely thirty, with greenish skin and sunken eyes. Not fit to be in charge of a child, or a car. When she spoke, her voice was strained: ‘She said I should stop for you, because you were at Nicky’s party. I’m Philippa – her mother.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Thea, thinking she’d now got the full set, although little Wilf seldom seemed to put in an appearance, but also wondering how it was that she had taken back childcare from the capable Barbara. Dorothy looked anxious, and it occurred to Thea that the child had wanted help in dealing with this distraught mother.
‘Can we take you somewhere? It’s cold out there.’ The politeness suggested good upbringing, Thea noted, despite the undercurrent of something like hostility.
‘Well…thanks. If you’re passing the turn to Hampnett, that would be helpful. Is the dog all right? She can sit on my lap.’
The answering grimace ensured that Hepzie remained firmly off the upholstery, which was certainly spotlessly clean.
Thea had been a nervous passenger ever since Carl’s fatal accident. She greatly preferred to be the driver, despite several minor collisions of her own. But it was not always possible to avoid riding with other people, and she made a point of concealing her feelings. Admitting to weakness only made everything worse, as far as she could see. Besides, her bag was uncomfortably heavy.
But Philippa was in no condition to drive competently. The car lurched in spasmodic surges, as she tormented the accelerator like a woman three times her age. ‘Mother!’ squealed Dorothy from her booster seat in the back. ‘You’re kangarooing.’
‘Shut up, Dorothy,’ snarled Philippa. ‘You’re making me worse.’
The drive should have taken three minutes at most, but there were traffic lights where the small road crossed the A429, and they had a long wait. Opposite them was a large building, and for something to say, Thea read out the lettering above one of its portals. ‘The Old Police Station,’ she murmured. ‘Sounds interesting.’ The building did seem incongruous, with no houses or other structures nearby. Thea tried to imagine how it would have been to be an inmate in one of the police cells. Without the busy road – which appeared to be a recent construction – it must have been quite isolated. ‘I ought to go and have a look,’ she said. ‘I’m quite keen on local history.’
‘You can’t – it’s closed in the winter, except for coffee.’
It was nowhere near enough time to gain a reliable impression of this ex-wife, friend of Bunny and young but neglectful mother. She must only have been in her early twenties when Dorothy had been born; Bernard past fifty. ‘So…you’re taking a turn with the invalid, then?’ she ventured.
‘What? Oh, you mean Barbara generally has them. Yeah. Well, it’s complicated.’
She doesn’t want to discuss it in front of Dorothy, thought Thea, understandingly, while at the same time intensely curious about her. This was a woman whose best friend had just been murdered, and who had taken it extremely badly, to judge by her appearance. The few reports Thea had gleaned about her suggested somebody selfish and of illiberal views. Bunny must have been at least ten years her senior, and therefore likely to have been a mentor. Had they enjoyed trenchant conversations over coffee, putting the world right while signing up for membership of the BNP? Or if not quite that, then UKIP?
She could not refrain from broaching the subject that could not fail to be on both their minds. ‘You must be very shocked by what happened.’ It seemed a safe enough thing to say, even in front of the child.
The response came readily enough. ‘I’m devastated. Absolutely flattened. I can’t even think straight. I’m scared stiff.’
‘Oh?’
‘Well, who wouldn’t be?’ Impatience with Thea’s obtuseness made her operation of the foot pedals even more erratic, as they were released by the traffic light turning green.
‘This is very kind,’ said Thea. ‘It’s out of your way, I expect.’
‘Only slightly, and there’s no
hurry. Besides, I didn’t think you should be out on your own. Who knows what might happen?’
This ludicrously extreme version of Thea’s own anxieties almost made her laugh.
They had both forgotten the child in the back. Now she spoke up. ‘What happened to Ben’s mummy?’ she demanded. ‘Babs says she’s dead. How is she dead? Where did she go?’
Thea found herself approving greatly of the how? question. It made a pleasing change from the everlasting why? that she remembered from her sister’s children. Her own daughter had not been given to asking questions much at all.
‘Shut up, Dorothy,’ pleaded the child’s mother, abruptly stemming any feelings of approval that might have come her way. ‘Bunny was my best friend. And I just wish I could get my hands on the bastard that killed her.’
From being scared stiff to seeking physical vengeance in twenty seconds was not unusual, Thea told herself. Shock led to erratic emotions, after all. ‘I’m sure the police will do a good job,’ she said carefully.
‘Are you? Seems to me it’s a bit late for that, letting psychos go free to do whatever they like. This is what happens, don’t you see? Not one of us is safe in our beds.’
A whimper from the back activated Thea’s own anger. ‘That’s rubbish,’ she snapped, turning to smile tightly at Dorothy. ‘Absolute rubbish. A bed is the safest place in the world. So is a house, and a school. The world has never been as safe as it is now. You’re not scared, are you, pet?’
Dorothy looked doubtful. ‘I want Babs,’ she said, undiplomatically.
‘Well, bloody Babs can have you,’ snarled Philippa, making Thea’s blood run cold. The woman might be well brought up, with a nice car and good clothes, but she was every bit as monstrous as the rumours had implied.
‘Drop me here,’ said Thea, gripping the dog on her lap. ‘I can walk the rest of the way.’
The car jerked to a halt, and Thea scrambled out. It was only a hundred yards or so from the track down to the barn.
‘Thanks very much,’ she said, throwing a last supportive smile at Dorothy. The little girl returned an oddly complacent grin, and the car made a sudden leap forward almost before Thea had closed the door.
Rather to her disappointment, there was no visitor waiting for her at the barn. No Gladwin or Janina or sniffing Tony Newby. No lost children or stiffening corpses, either. The very absence unnerved her. Increasingly, she felt a tremor when she walked into an empty house, aware of potential attack on a burgeoning number of fronts. In the months after Carl had died, she had often entered her own house with a secret hope that he would somehow have come back, and be there waiting for her with his reliable smile and a mug of coffee. When that finally faded, she had progressed to a numb stoicism, which held no fear, only a dogged need to fill the rooms with light and music as substitutes for company. The house-sitting had seen her in charge of a number of empty rooms and strange dark corners, along with a few frightening incidents that she had coped with quite valiantly at the time. Fear had never been a problem – so why now? Why had she become this timid stereotype of a woman alone, scared of every sound, flinching at shadows, unable to escape the clutches of cold implacable fear?
Because, she answered herself, there was nobody on her side this time. Because it was wintry and frosty and everything was so unpredictable. And because the shock of seeing those footprints on a snowy morning a week ago had never really worn off.
She was quite aware that there was every chance that she had not encountered the person who had murdered Bunny. There were plenty of residents of Hampnett she had never even seen, not to mention people from further afield. And yet, the situation suggested that the murderer had not travelled far, the way the weather had been when Bunny died. Cars could hardly leave their driveways, buses and trains had been cancelled. All that was left was a person’s own legs, or possibly horseback. And on the principle that most murders were committed by close relatives, she very probably had met the killer – however much she wanted to think otherwise.
She had nothing to congratulate herself for –Gladwin must have given her up as useless days ago. As a helpful amateur detective she had totally failed, unlike on previous occasions. Or had it perhaps been that she had never really made a difference? That it had been DS Phil Hollis all along, quietly pursuing his professional work and letting her think she was serving some purpose, when in fact she had just been a bit of decorative distraction? Looking back, it seemed all too persuasive a summary of all that had happened. Even when she had found herself in the thick of an investigation, in at the final revelations, she could hardly claim to have played a central role. And now, without Phil to guide and provoke, she was irrelevant.
Jimmy’s next toilet outing was due. Although he was obviously able to wait for indefinite lengths of time, it seemed mean to expect it of him. Outside there was a glimmer of weak sunshine, and if she could keep him out of the east wind, he might actually enjoy the fresh air. That, after all, was what she was being paid to do: to make the impaired dog as happy and comfortable as possible. He seemed to take a faint sort of pleasure from the trips outside, especially if Hepzie was beside him. He walked delicately on his long, thin legs, head down, but ears erect. His unself-conscious emptying of bladder and bowel seemed to leave him satisfied.
‘Come on, old boy,’ Thea crooned at him, going into the conservatory. ‘Come for a little walk, OK?’
She was used to having to lift him to his feet and wait as he got his bearings and his balance. Then she would hold his collar and direct him out into the garden. He never resisted, but stepped willingly after her. It was a melancholy task, in many ways, but from the dog’s point of view, it wasn’t so sad. He didn’t know what he was missing, what his life might have been, running free over the paddock, chasing a ball or sniffing after wildlife. Hepzie apparently accepted his limitations without surprise or disappointment.
She could not explain afterwards why she did what she did. Something about giving Jimmy some extra time outside, or simply a whim of her own, born of nothing she could identify. Whatever the reason, she left the dogs in the wintry garden and went around the side of the house to the rabbit shed. Leaving the door half open, she went to the big cage, and unlatched it, and then bent down to extract two or three carrots from the bag on the floor. Sensing the treat to come, one of the rabbits began to nudge at the cage door, and finding it loose, lost her balance and fell out onto the floor of the shed.
Before Thea could grab her and put her back, the door of the shed was pushed further open and an unrecognisably energetic Jimmy came in like a bullet. The rabbit stood no chance, and with a muffled scream it died in the dog’s jaws, after one swift neck-breaking shake.
‘Jimmy!’ Thea shrieked, and aimed a kick at him. Even as her foot connected with his shoulder, she regretted her action. He dropped the limp body and backed away, eyes staring. Thea picked up the victim and stupidly let it lie across her hands, willing it to revive. ‘Don’t let it be the mother of the babies,’ she prayed aloud, all the time knowing that it was. Obviously she would be the most hungry, the one to come impatiently forward for the carrots. She knew from the colouration, the prominent nipples amidst the belly fur, and the cussed behaviour of Fate.
The disaster was as deep and terrible as that of the dead man in the field, in that moment. Was it remotely possible that she could rear the babies by hand, and if so, how? Would it mean being up all night with tiny bottles of special milk? Would she have to make a nest for them in the house, and ensure exactly the right temperature? Were they that important?
First, she dragged Jimmy back to the conservatory, clenching her teeth against an urge to thrash him for what he’d done. It was not for her to judge, she reminded herself – he was Lucy’s first priority, and when it came to the point, a rabbit was almost certainly dispensable. Next, she switched on her laptop and searched the Internet for instructions on hand rearing baby rabbits.
There was plenty of it, and she began to hope she might save at
least some of them. It appeared that the two primary requirements were infinite patience and warmth. They could manage baby formula, dropped extremely carefully into their mouths, and at their age it appeared that they might last through the night without a feed. They might even nibble at some solid food. Weaning could be achieved by seven weeks – which meant Lucy would be saddled with them for some time after her return.
The sense of loneliness increased, as she collected the babies in a cardboard box and took them into the house. With a teammate, the task would be fun, as well as much quicker. Carl would have revelled in the challenge, insisting on the immense care necessary if the milk was not to go down the wrong way and drown the poor little things. As it was, she would have to keep the dogs and cat firmly away from the improvised nest, sitting for hours in isolation. And for what? Was it possible that it was worth the trouble? Lucy hadn’t even known the babies were expected. If only Thea hadn’t said anything, she might have quietly let them die, and buried them out of sight, no harm done – apart from the slaughter of the poor, pretty doe.
But they were so very much alive that such a course would never have been an option.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
She would have to go out and buy milk powder and a small feeding bottle, at the very least. Bourton-on-the-Water was the nearest place likely to sell such items, but she was not familiar with the shops there, and would hardly know where to start. Stow was better, but even then, she was unsure whether to try a normal chemist or a farm supplies place. Only after much dithering did she think she might walk down the track to the farm, and ask Old Kate. She would surely have everything necessary, readily to hand. But she would scoff at the idea of hand rearing rabbits. She would regard them as worthless rodents, something to be shot, not nurtured as beloved pets. And Kate’s scorn was something Thea preferred to avoid if at all possible.
The websites had stressed the difficulties of the procedure; the need for experience and infinite care. Thea had never bottle-fed any creature, not even her own daughter. Kate would know how to do it – would give her instruction and perhaps active assistance, even while disapproving. It would be dark in an hour or two, the short day closing down far too early for comfort, making normal activity much more of a performance, with the need for a torch amid unseen hazards. Besides, people would not take kindly to unheralded knockings on their doors after nightfall. Where you might readily stroll down for a chat at nine on a summer evening, such a visit even at five in the winter would be seen as an intrusion.
