Cotswold Mystery, A

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Perhaps he likes it gloomy. He sounded a bit like that from what Giles said.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Jessica sounded interested and alert, suddenly.

  ‘What?’

  ‘A lamp’s been knocked over.’

  Thea almost laughed. It was a cliché, surely? A classic Agatha Christie moment. ‘Is there?’ she said. ‘How clumsy.’

  ‘I’m going to knock,’ Jessica announced. ‘We can introduce ourselves to him. It’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do.’

  So she did, and just as before, there was no response at all. A chilly silence seemed to seep from the house which even Thea had to admit was unsettling.

  ‘Can we get round the back, do you think?’ Jessica asked.

  Thea sighed. ‘Quite easily, as it happens – but why? What possible justification do you have for doing such a thing?’

  ‘There are definite signs of something not being right.’

  ‘But darling, you’re not on duty now, and besides, I’m starving hungry.’

  ‘Well I’m going back into our house, and out into the garden. Something feels fishy here. You don’t have to come.’ But Thea knew she didn’t have a choice. Briskly she led the way through to the back door, across the lawn and over the wall into the next garden. They had to push through the bamboo curtain, which rustled loudly. Jessica strode to the back door, knocked on it and called ‘Hello? Sir? Are you there?’ Then she turned the handle and pushed the door, which readily opened.

  Thea waited outside, sifting a clutch of emotions ranging from admiration to trepidation, all imbued with pangs of hunger. Jessica came back white-faced, fishing in her pocket for her mobile phone, and having got hold of it, quickly thumbing the buttons.

  ‘Hello? Yes, this is Probationer PC Jessica Osborne, Manchester Division. I’ve just discovered a fatality. Suspicious circs. Blockley, Gloucestershire. High Street. Elderly male. Name unknown. No persons on the premises. Right. That’s right. Thank you.’ She pressed another button and faced her mother. ‘There’s a man in there. He’s dead.’

  Thea felt a wild desire to laugh. ‘It’ll be Julian,’ she said. ‘Bags I not be the one to tell Granny.’

  CHAPTER SIX

  Jessica prevented her mother from going into the house and seeing the body. She pulled the back door shut and bundled Thea through the Montgomery house and into the front room to watch for the police response. It took twelve minutes for a familiarly marked car to pull up in the street.

  ‘You deal with them,’ said Thea. ‘I can’t cope with this.’

  With an impatient little toss of her head, Jessica went outside. But she threw back the comment that she would be bringing the officers through the house in the next minute or two.

  She met them as equals, rather to her own surprise. ‘You’re the rookie who called this in, are you?’ asked one. He was a uniformed sergeant, thirtyish, with kind eyes. Jessica nodded.

  ‘Not on duty, then?’ said the other one: a constable with ginger hair and a nervy manner.

  ‘I’m here on holiday. I’m stationed in Manchester. I only got here this afternoon.’

  ‘And the first thing you do is find a stiff. Clever!’ smiled the sergeant. ‘So where is he? Who is he?’ He had a clipboard in his hand. ‘You know about the G5, I suppose?’

  ‘Vaguely,’ Jessica admitted. ‘The house looked odd to me. My mother’s looking after this one, temporarily. The deceased lives next door. There’s access at the back.’

  ‘OK, lead on,’ invited the sergeant. ‘I’m Tom, by the way and this is Eddie.’

  ‘Jessica Osborne,’ she responded.

  ‘Yes, we’ve got that,’ said Tom, smiling again.

  Briefly introducing the policemen to Thea, who was hovering in the hallway, Jessica led them along the same route as before. Elbowing their way through the bamboo gave rise to some remarks about jungles, but the atmosphere was essentially serious. Eddie grew more tense as they stepped into Julian’s house.

  The body was lying spread-eagled on the kitchen floor, wearing ordinary day clothes. The wide-open eyes staring blindly at the ceiling were all the confirmation required that this was a dead person. Carefully, Tom leant down and lifted the body’s right arm. ‘Rigor,’ he noted. ‘Been dead all day, then.’ He glanced at the two younger officers. ‘Don’t touch a thing,’ he cautioned them. ‘Jess – what have you touched in here already?’

  ‘Door handle, that’s all,’ she said. ‘I didn’t go close to him. It was obvious he was dead.’ She was hypnotised by the staring eyes, filmed with the bombardment of tiny airborne particles that would normally be blinked away every few seconds. ‘What killed him?’ she wondered. ‘Might it have been natural causes, after all?’

  ‘Not for us to say,’ Tom told her. ‘But I can smell foul play here. You don’t lie like that if you’re having a heart attack or a stroke, or if you’ve just stuffed yourself with Paracetamol.’

  Eddie was only half inside the room. His skin looked green. ‘Go outside if you’re thinking of chundering,’ Tom warned him.

  ‘It isn’t at all disgusting, is it?’ Jessica said softly. ‘Poor old man. It’s just terribly sad.’

  ‘Good girl,’ Tom approved. ‘Is this your first?’

  She nodded. ‘You never know how you’ll react, do you?’

  Tom huffed a brief laugh. ‘Eddie does. This is his third, and he’s still going to pieces. Do you know his name? The old man, I mean?’

  ‘Julian something, that’s all. Assuming he’s the occupant of this house, of course. He doesn’t look like a burglar caught in the act.’

  ‘Does your mother know him? Can she identify him?’

  Jessica shook her head. ‘She only got here yesterday. She’s never seen him.’

  ‘Neighbours?’

  Jessica sighed. ‘You’ll need to check with my mother, but there’s an old lady in the cottage attached to the house we’re in. She’s senile, though, as far as I can gather. Not likely to be a reliable witness.’

  The aspect of the procedure that Jessica found most surprising was the lack of urgency. It made sense, she supposed, with the man past rescue, but if it was a murder, surely they should be pursuing the killer more quickly? Tom seemed to read her mind. ‘We have to get every detail right at this stage,’ he explained. ‘Otherwise we contaminate evidence, or make mistakes that wreck the whole investigation all down the line. Think about it.’

  She nodded. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘It’s just…’ she tailed off.

  ‘OK, well we can’t do any more until we’ve had the doctor and the photographer do their bit. Then Forensics get their turn. Then we remove the body and it gets its PM. That’ll be first thing tomorrow.’ He cocked his head at her. ‘You could watch, I would guess – if you wanted to. You have to do it sooner or later. This might be a good one to start with.’

  ‘Wouldn’t I need clearance from Manchester?’

  He shrugged. ‘They’d be glad to get the box ticked, like as not.’

  The ticking of boxes and generous inclusion of Jessica into the next hour and a half of police activity swept all thought of anything else from her mind. The forensic team arrived and offered her a protective suit and a grandstand view of their operation as they crawled all over the house, tagging and bagging, whipping fingerprints from every surface and generally turning an ordinary place of residence into the scene of a crime. The computer in a small office was taken away for analysis and several boxes of files quickly scanned and summarised.

  The identification of the body was performed, at Thea’s suggestion, by a tall sleepy-looking man called Giles. He had been quickly located and discreetly escorted through Julian’s front door. Jessica took little notice of him, being more interested in the filling in of the vital G5 form.

  ‘Any sudden death, you fill in one of these,’ Tom explained. ‘It goes to the coroner eventually.’

  The form invited a detailed description of the scene of death, name and address of the person identifying the body, last known sig
hting of the person alive.

  Giles couldn’t answer that point. ‘I had a quick glimpse of him this morning, as it happens,’ he said, with a glance at Jessica. ‘The house-sitter lady was looking for him yesterday evening and I guessed he might have gone down to Dorset. But that is a pure guess.’ He scratched his large nose and looked anguished.

  ‘Where did you see him this morning?’ Tom asked.

  ‘Walking along to the postbox, at the end of the street.’ Giles pointed towards the woods.

  ‘And what time would that be, sir?’

  ‘Early. Before seven. I was finishing an article in my office, up there.’ He pointed again, to an upstairs room in a house on the south side of the High Street. ‘I can see a lot from up there.’ His stricken look intensified. ‘How long would you say he’s been dead?’

  ‘Can’t say yet, sir.’

  ‘But he’s stiff, isn’t he? That means several hours. So unless Gladys…no, that can’t be right…’

  ‘Don’t worry, sir. We have an idea of the difficulties with Mrs Gardner,’ said Tom.

  He didn’t, though, thought Jessica, having seen Thea’s reaction to these words. She didn’t herself, yet. The desire to meet this bewildered and bewildering old lady was getting increasingly strong.

  The police doctor had at least settled the question of how Julian died. With the help of the invaluable Tom, the body had been rolled over, to reveal a wound just below the left shoulder blade. ‘Right into the heart, I’d say,’ nodded the doctor. ‘Sharp little weapon, too. See how it’s sliced through the cloth of his shirt? Clean as a whistle.’

  ‘Why so little blood?’ asked Jessica breathlessly. She could feel the wicked metal blade entering her own back, in a ghastly piece of empathy. ‘And how did he get onto his back?’

  ‘Good questions,’ nodded the doctor. ‘My guess would be that the knife was left in place for a few minutes, until the heart stopped beating. It would act as a kind of bung, then. As for how he got turned over, we’ll probably never know.’

  ‘Would the killer have blood on him?’ she went on, keen to maintain a professional manner.

  ‘Unlikely. The weapon would, though.’

  Everything moved on. The body was taken away, the people of Blockley became aware, rather slowly, that some crisis was taking place in their midst. And Thea had to deal with a suddenly animated Granny.

  The buzzer betrayed the old woman’s exit onto the pavement, and before Thea could intercept her, she was at Julian’s front door, pushing between two white-costumed forensics officers to gain entry. ‘Where is he?’ she asked, in a normal-sounding voice.

  At that point Thea caught up, and put her hands on Granny’s shoulders. ‘He isn’t here,’ she said.

  ‘Why?’ The tone was that of a curious six-year-old. ‘Where is he?’

  The officers looked worriedly at Thea, clearly conveying that this was not their area of responsibility and could she please deal with the situation quickly.

  ‘They had to take him away,’ Thea said, painfully torn between a desire to tell the truth and fear of an unpredictable reaction. ‘Come back to the cottage and I’ll try to explain.’

  ‘Who are these men? They look like astronauts. Why are you pulling me like that?’

  Thea felt a surge of resentment against the old woman and everyone else in sight. She was being asked to do the impossible, and it damn well wasn’t fair.

  Then help appeared in the shape of Giles Stevenson. He had been hovering at the edges of the activity for the past hour, not speaking, taking a few steps up and down the street, but obviously unable to tear himself away. Now the old woman had materialised, Jessica wondered if this was what he had been waiting for all along.

  ‘Gladys, Gladys,’ he crooned, coming towards her with his hands outstretched. ‘It’s all right my old dear. Come back home and we’ll try to explain it to you.’ He threw Thea a look that said she was expected to come as well.

  Bystanders had slowly assembled along the High Street, watching and muttering between themselves. ‘What in the world is happening?’ called a smartly dressed woman standing on the opposite pavement.

  Nobody gave her an answer. There was only one vehicle left outside Julian’s house, belonging to the forensic team, demonstrating that the main action was past and there would be little left to see from outside. Inside the house, however, a lot was still happening. Fingerprints taken, photographs capturing the precise location of mundane objects, drawers opened, paperwork examined. But this was invisible to the gathering onlookers. They had to rely on rumour and speculation to figure out the basic story, and if that didn’t work, someone would eventually ask Giles to enlighten them, when he had finished soothing the bewildered Gladys.

  Jessica was left behind by the departing Tom and Eddie, the undertakers and the police doctor. She had an invitation to attend the post-mortem at eight-thirty next morning, and a warm ember of satisfaction lodged in her breast at the way she had performed in a time of crisis.

  Now her mother beckoned to her, saying, ‘Help us see to Granny, will you? We’ll have to get her back into her house and settled down. I don’t think it’s going to be easy.’

  In the event, Thea and Jessica stayed only a few minutes, shooed away by Giles’s insistence that he would manage better on his own. But not before they had both noticed a giant display of flowers in a tall ceramic vase on the living room table. ‘My word!’ gasped Thea. ‘They weren’t here yesterday.’

  ‘Frances sent them,’ said Mrs Gardner proudly. ‘They’re for Mother’s Day. Isn’t she a good girl!’

  Thea gazed at the display. ‘But when?’ she wondered. ‘When did they come?’

  Giles cleared his throat. ‘I was in on the secret,’ he confessed. ‘They were sent to me yesterday and I brought them over this afternoon. Nobody’s going to deliver on a Sunday, you see. Not even such a special Sunday as this.’

  ‘Well, they’re gorgeous,’ said Thea, and followed Jessica along the pavement to their own front door. ‘Food,’ she whimpered, standing in the hallway. ‘I must have food.’

  It was half past nine. They hurried to The Crown in the faint hope that something would still be on offer. ‘It is a hotel,’ said Thea optimistically. ‘Surely the kitchen stays open round the clock?’

  The bar was not busy. The staff seemed exhausted from the lunchtime family rush, and seemed half-inclined to refuse to serve any more meals that day. Thea talked them into something from the snack menu, pushing Jessica into a seat in a corner of the small bar and getting two glasses of white wine.

  ‘I don’t like white wine,’ said Jessica. ‘I wanted lager.’

  ‘Drink it,’ Thea ordered. ‘It’s medicinal.’

  ‘Funny sort of medicine.’ But she drank half of it in a few large gulps. ‘God! What a day! What a week! There’s obviously a curse on me.’

  ‘You were wonderful out there,’ Thea said with total sincerity. ‘So professional! I was really impressed.’

  Jessica nodded acceptance of the tribute, but gave a rueful grin. ‘You were rather sidelined, I’m afraid. It must have been frustrating, just waiting for everything to get done. Why didn’t you have something to eat while you were hanging about?’

  ‘I didn’t like to, in case I was needed. I could hardly just sit there eating scrambled eggs with the place full of police. I did have a couple of biscuits, though.’

  There were three people in the small corridor-like bar next to the main one, easily able to overhear what Thea and Jessica were saying. A young man put his head around the doorpost and caught Thea’s eye. ‘You know about the murder then?’ he asked. ‘What’s happened?’

  Jessica put up a hand to ensure her mother’s silence. ‘We can’t tell you anything, I’m afraid,’ she said. ‘It’s all being taken care of. If you live in Blockley, there’ll probably be house-to-house questioning tomorrow. Anything you want to know will have to wait until then.’

  The youth pulled a face expressing reluctant acceptance of
her words. ‘I live in Moreton, actually,’ he said.

  ‘Well, it’ll be in the papers, I expect,’ Jessica said with finality.

  Mindful of his mates listening in, he had to make one last try. ‘You a policewoman then?’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jessica, meeting his eye until he dropped his gaze and returned to his drink.

  ‘We can’t talk here,’ Thea realised, looking round the small room, with only seven tables, packed closely together. Three of them had people at them, all within a few feet. It was as if they were assembled in a normal living room. It would feel almost rude to fail to include them in any conversation. The fact of a sudden violent death in their midst was plainly occupying all thoughts. The word Julian with its soft consonants floated from ear to ear, along with muttered interrogations about what could have happened and when he had last been seen and how hard it was to believe such an event could happen.

  ‘No,’ said Jessica. ‘And it doesn’t really matter now, anyway.’

  ‘Oh, yes it does,’ Thea insisted. ‘That’s your real life, back there. This is all just a distraction. Whatever mistakes you might have made in Manchester are going to have to be faced. And I want to know the whole story.’ She was muttering, her face turned down towards the table, but still she knew how audible she was to the other drinkers.

  The food arrived and they ate it rapidly, with little interest in the quality. When she had finished, Jessica played with her wine glass, sliding it backwards and forwards over a damp patch on the table. Finally she began to speak, her tone flat, her eyes on the drink. ‘I know I should tell you about it. Get it off my chest, or something. But it seems very remote, all of a sudden. Nobody died, at least. I just made a total idiot of myself, that’s all.’

  ‘Well, let’s go for a walk, up to the church and back, and you can tell me the basics as we go.’

  They were gathering themselves to leave when two people came down a flight of stairs running from the corner of the bar close to where they were sitting. Thea turned and saw the odd-looking man from the day before. The one who had called himself ‘Ick’. With him was a girl. She was tall and thin and very pale-skinned. Her hair was black and long, her limbs loose. Her face was striking, with fleshy lips and wide-spaced eyes.