Cotswold Mystery, A

by Rebecca Tope

  Thea defended herself. ‘Yes, I know. And suicide is violent and selfish and shocking and all that. But murder’s an enormous crime against the rightful order of things. It shakes everything up. It never really goes away – the trace persists for decades – sometime centuries.’

  ‘You don’t have to tell me that,’ the girl complained. And then the doorbell rang. ‘It’ll be the police again,’ said Jessica with certainty.

  Even though the man on the doorstep was not in uniform, she remained convinced that he was from the CID. ‘Are you Miss Osborne?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right,’ she confirmed, throwing back her shoulders. ‘How can I help you?’

  The man’s manner quickly alerted her to her mistake. He dropped his gaze, chewed his lower lip and shifted his weight from one foot to the other. ‘Well…um…I don’t expect you can, really. My name’s Nick Jolly. I’ve just driven up from Dorset.’

  ‘Oh! You must be a relative of Mr – I mean, the name’s the same. Jolly.’ Jessica found herself almost as tongue tied and upset as the visitor.

  He nodded. ‘My grandad. The police phoned me. I came—’ he forced a watery smile, ‘I suppose I came to make sure it was true.’

  ‘Come in,’ she ordered him. ‘You look awfully shocked. And you’ve driven all the way from Dorset?’

  ‘I must have done, but I can’t remember much about it. I just kept getting this picture of Gramps as I last saw him. He was really fit, you know. And they wouldn’t tell me what happened,’ he burst out. ‘I’ve been visualising the most terrible things.’

  Thea appeared and helped Jessica to usher him into the sitting room and onto the sofa.

  Nick shook himself. ‘I still can’t believe it. I only saw him last Saturday. I came up for the day, and we went out to – for a little walk. He was on good form, considering.’

  ‘Considering what?’ asked Thea.

  Nick wiped a large hand down the side of his face. ‘Oh – well, he was never particularly cheerful. You know Gramps. I think the word is curmudgeonly. In a nice way, of course. Nobody really minded him. What on earth happened?’ he finished loudly.

  ‘We never met him,’ Thea said gently. ‘I only got here on Saturday and Jessica arrived yesterday. Almost the first thing she did was to find his body.’

  ‘Mum!’ Jessica warned in a low voice. She gave Nick an apologetic look. ‘Sorry, but I don’t think we can tell you very much, until after you’ve seen the police. It’s up to them, you see.’

  ‘But it must have been violent?’ he hazarded. ‘There wouldn’t be all this beating about the bush otherwise. The man who phoned said they were pursuing enquiries, or something…’ Again he swiped a hand slowly down his cheek. ‘It sounded as if they were hinting that he was…well, murdered.’ He turned mournful eyes onto Jessica. ‘Can’t you tell me that much, at least?’

  Nick Jolly was in his mid-thirties, with very thick dark hair growing long at the back and sides. To Jessica’s eyes he was a man genuinely in shock, trying to keep pace with events, and maintain his frail composure. She shook her head regretfully. ‘To be honest with you, I’m not sure you should have come here,’ she said. ‘I understand why you did, but it’s important that you speak to the officers involved with the case before I tell you anything.’

  He frowned at her in confusion. ‘You sound very formal,’ he said, with a hint of a boyish whine.

  ‘Jessica’s in the police as well,’ Thea explained. ‘That’s why she has to be careful to stick to the rules.’

  ‘Oh! How—? I mean, that’s a surprise.’ His face grew even paler and his fingers started a little dance where they rested on his leg. ‘What about Gladys? I suppose that’s why you’re here,’ he realised slowly. ‘If Ron and Yvette are away. She must be in a real state, poor old girl.’

  ‘She doesn’t seem to understand, actually,’ Thea said. She bit back the questions she wanted to ask, after another repressive glance from Jessica.

  Nick got up from the sofa. ‘I’d better go. It was out of order to come so soon. You must be pretty shaken up yourselves. Anyway, I got what I came for, I suppose.’ His shoulders slumped as he turned towards the door. ‘There’s no doubt about it, I see that now. Gramps is dead, and it’s a case for the police.’ He sighed. ‘In a way, he’d probably have enjoyed the drama. He wasn’t the sort to look forward to a slow lingering death from some disease finishing him off by inches.’

  Mother and daughter merely smiled, and stood out of his way.

  ‘Well… This is…’ He stumbled into the hall. ‘I shouldn’t really have come, I know. But I was bothered about Gladys. I needed to know if she was all right.’ He glanced towards the cottage, as if hoping to see through the wall into Granny’s quarters.

  Jessica had followed and was standing protectively close to Nick. ‘It’s nice of you to be concerned about her,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, well. I’ve known her all my life. She’s always been a bit like another Granny to me. And Frances – I always adored Aunt Frances.’ He sighed again.

  Halfway into the street he looked back, and said, ‘I’ve booked into The Crown for a couple of nights. Perhaps I’ll see you again.’

  ‘I’m sure you will,’ Jessica agreed. ‘And…we’re really sorry, you know. It’s a rotten thing to happen.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he choked, before stumbling down to his car.

  ‘Poor chap,’ said Thea, as they closed the door. ‘He seems very genuine. Sorry if I almost put my foot in it. I didn’t understand the rules.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. By rights he ought never to have come here. They’ll have told him to go straight to the Incident Room for interview. At least, that’s what I assume. I was so scared of messing up by saying too much to him. I expect he thought I was rude.’

  ‘He was in too much of a state to notice,’ Thea assured her. ‘Fancy driving so far in that condition.’

  ‘People do it all the time,’ said Jessica absently. ‘Do you think he really was genuine? I got the feeling he was hoping to see Granny for some reason.’

  ‘What – more than a normal concern for her?’

  ‘Possibly. It felt odd the way he mentioned her again right on the doorstep.’

  ‘I don’t think that meant anything,’ said Thea. ‘You’re reading too much into it.’

  Jessica shrugged. ‘I expect you’re right. But I would love to sit in on his interview with the police. I get the feeling he could be extremely interesting.’

  ‘Oh?’ Thea’s tone was abrupt. ‘Can you say why?’

  Jessica blinked. ‘No special reason, except he’s bound to tell them a whole lot more about Julian than they know so far. They’ll get all kinds of stuff out of him.’

  ‘But he’s only just heard that his beloved grandfather has died.’ Thea stared at her daughter. ‘You make it sound so cold and callous.’

  ‘Don’t start that again, Mum. They’ll be careful with him, of course. But they do need to know the facts of Julian’s background. Surely you can see that?’

  But Thea had become entrenched. ‘No, I can’t. That poor man can barely form a complete sentence, the way he is now. And when he comes here for some reassurance, you clam up and quote police procedure at him.’

  Jessica gritted her teeth. ‘It wasn’t at all like that. I think you’re talking absolute rubbish. I’m going upstairs now, before I say something I’ll regret.’

  Watching the girl disappear, Thea was left with a residue of uncomfortable feelings. While Jessica had been at the post-mortem, she had done little more than rerun events of the past two days and worry that her daughter was having a ghastly time. Now they seemed to have stumbled into a pointless argument that left them both sulky and silent. She went outside, thinking a change of scene would help.

  A quick walk to the end of the garden with the dog brought her unpleasantly close to the scene of Julian’s demise. The bamboo screen had been mangled by the comings and goings of several officials, even though most of them had used the front door.
The damage to the plants seemed symbolic of the sadness hanging over the house. Gradually Thea’s attention became entirely absorbed in the appearance of the two gardens, and its implications for what had happened to Julian Jolly the previous day.

  She began to force her mind to construct possible explanations for how the man had met his fate. As far as she was aware, the front door had been bolted from the inside, so even if the killer had been admitted by Julian willingly, surely the escape after his death could only have been through the back, with the door left unlocked. Slowly, she examined the possibilities. On the further side of Julian’s garden there appeared to be a small wooden door in a high wall, where, she had noticed earlier, there was at least a theoretical egress onto the street beyond. But when she examined it closely, it was obvious it had not been opened for years. Ivy twined robustly around the hinges and across the small space between door and wall. The act of opening it would have torn away several tendrils and been impossible to conceal. This left her concluding that nothing short of an athletic climb over the back wall could have taken place. The wall was close to eight feet high, with another house immediately beyond it, which made this theory highly improbable. She would have to ask Jessica to find out from the police whether they had evidence to show how the killer got away. Without that, she could not avoid the notion that he had fled through the unlocked back door of the Montgomery house, and out of the front onto the street while Thea was asleep upstairs. Except – she had locked the front door and bolted it. Nobody could have fastened it again from the outside.

  Jessica had returned to the kitchen and was reading her lecture notes. Hostilities forgotten, Thea joined her, intent on talking through her latest findings. She began with an account of her garden explorations.

  ‘Do the police know how he got away?’ she asked. ‘Because as far as I can see, it’s a real mystery.’

  Jessica teetered between irritable dismissal of the question, and something more cooperative. Her mother, like most mothers, had an uncanny knack of asking the wrong thing at the wrong moment. But there was already too much unpleasantness floating around, and the balance came down on the side of good sense.

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I hadn’t even thought to wonder about that until now.’

  Thea laid out her alternative hypotheses on what could have happened. ‘It’s a dreadful thought,’ she said, ‘but the most likely one is that he ran through this house, in at the back and out at the front.’

  ‘You’d have heard,’ said Jessica earnestly. ‘That can’t possibly have happened. Besides, surely you locked both the doors?’

  Thea had been braced for this. ‘Front yes, back no,’ she said concisely. ‘And don’t lecture me. Ron himself said he doesn’t usually bother with the back. He said nobody could get in that way,’ she added miserably. ‘But it still doesn’t work, unless I was so distracted by the buzzer going off that I never even noticed the front door was unlocked.’

  ‘Can’t you remember?’

  Thea’s face tightened in an effort at recollection. ‘I think I had to turn the key, and unbolt it, to get out. But you do that stuff so automatically, I can’t be totally sure.’

  Jessica scratched her nose thoughtfully. ‘There aren’t many alternatives,’ she concluded. ‘From Julian’s back door, the only ways to go are into this house, or over the wall at the far end of his garden, or into the next house along the High Street.’

  Thea nodded. ‘That’s right. I just hope it’s the last option – although from what I can see, there isn’t any escape from the next house along. It’s got solid walls on all sides.’

  ‘Solid? And high, I suppose.’

  ‘Looks like it. I suppose the police have explored it by now. They’ll tell us what they’ve found eventually, will they?’

  Jessica grimaced. ‘They will if they decide the killer came through here. Now take me to see this door you’ve found.’

  Jessica had no need to say anything, having inspected the door just as Thea had done. Her eyebrows did the talking, as she stared up at the wall.

  ‘You see what I mean,’ said Thea and her daughter merely nodded.

  In the house again, reluctant to talk through the alarming likelihood of what had happened, the two remembered the wider world at the end of their respective mobile phones. ‘We’d better try and catch up with James and Phil,’ said Thea. ‘Or they’ll be banging on the door by tea time.’

  ‘At the latest,’ Jessica sighed. ‘But we’d miss them if they didn’t exist.’

  They went into separate corners of the house with their mobiles and tried to rectify their omissions. Jessica had more luck than her mother. Detective Superintendent James Osborne had been waiting anxiously for the call, so much so that the woman on the switchboard put her through in a second. ‘Jess? What’s happening? You are in Blockley, aren’t you? Your name’s here on the screen as having found a body. Homicide victim. For God’s sake, sweetheart – what’s going on?’

  Calmly, she told the story. ‘Although I expect it’s all on your screen anyway,’ she concluded.

  ‘Most of it,’ he agreed. ‘So you’re all right are you?’

  ‘I’m fine. Don’t fuss,’ she said, trying to sound convincingly firm and evidently failing.

  ‘Jess – I’m here to help you. You ought to come to me when there’s any trouble, not try to deal with everything on your own.’

  ‘Stop it,’ she sniffed. ‘You’ll make me cry.’

  ‘Listen. What happened in Manchester – you have to believe me when I say it’s not important. It’s practically forgotten already. You’ll get a bit of a reprimand, admittedly, but there won’t be any follow-up.’

  ‘Thanks. But that isn’t really – it isn’t really that side of it that’s bothering me. It’s me. I lost it. I lost control.’

  ‘And scared yourself. I know. It’s normal, love. We all do it. We’re not robots. And people can be so bloody infuriating at times.’

  Despite herself, she felt better, and giggled. ‘That’s true.’

  ‘So take a few days out, let your mother spoil you. There’s sure to be some fascinating bit of history she’ll latch onto. Go for long walks. Try some of the local eateries. There’s a great place at Paxford I’ve heard about.’

  ‘That’s all fine,’ she interrupted him. ‘Except that the man next door’s been murdered, and there’s a senile old Granny here, as part of Mum’s package for the house-sitting. Granny-sitting is more like it. And we’ve just had a visit from the victim’s grandson, which set us at each other’s throats for some reason.’

  She heard James tapping a keyboard. ‘Nicholas Jolly. Fontmell Magna, Dorset. That grandson?’

  ‘The very one. He’s probably quite nice when he isn’t in a state.’

  ‘Bit old for you, pet.’

  She gritted her teeth at that. Even her devoted uncle suffered from the general obsession with sexual cliché that seemed to run right through the police force. If she ever thought about it at all, she supposed he might be somewhat starved of sex, because his wife, Rosie, was a semi-invalid with a chronic back problem. James Osborne was not happy – that was the basic essence of it. Childless, required to be eternally patient and caring towards Rosie, the survivor of two brothers who had always been devoted to each other, he seemed battered by fate and unable to find any haven from his troubles.

  ‘Mum forgot all about Mother’s Day,’ she said, snatching at random for a change of subject. ‘Don’t you think that’s funny?’

  ‘Silly business,’ said James inattentively. ‘Just a racket created by florists and greetings card people.’

  ‘Like Valentine’s Day,’ she agreed.

  ‘Right. Not to mention Christmas.’

  ‘Don’t mention Christmas,’ she pleaded. ‘Now I’ll let you get on with your work. Thanks for being so nice. Don’t worry about me any more, OK?’

  ‘I’ll worry until they’ve caught that killer. And be sure to lock all the doors.’

  ‘You think it
’s a burglar who’ll come back for more loot?’ She thought she’d managed to inject enough bravado into her tone to convince him, successfully hiding the lurking nervousness that wouldn’t go away.

  ‘I’d like to think it was a very frightened burglar who’s now two hundred miles away.’

  ‘But you can’t believe that.’

  ‘No,’ he said gently.

  ‘So who was it?’

  ‘Somebody who had a grudge against old Mr Jolly, perhaps. Or wanted him quiet about something – for ever. Or got into the wrong house by mistake. You know this isn’t the first time your Mum’s been caught up in something nasty.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So think about it. People away – strange woman, not knowing anything about the place or the locals. Golden opportunity to nip in and do the dirty deed.’

  ‘You sound like a – I don’t know. A cheap paperback thriller from the Fifties.’

  James snorted. ‘And what would you know about the great Rex Stout? Or John Dickson Carr? Or—’

  ‘OK, OK. I’m going. See you soon.’ And she disconnected him. With a deep breath she tried to push away the apprehension that had been growing ever since the post-mortem had forced the reality of the situation upon her. Somebody was out there with a murderous weapon, and she and her mother were staying in the very next house. And however much Thea might joke about the dog defending them, they were essentially defenceless. Daytime was all right – their eyes and ears would alert them to any danger. But the night would be very different, and Jessica was already inwardly shuddering at the prospect.

  * * *

  ‘Mine’s having a bit of a panic. How about yours?’ said Thea, coming into the room a few moments later.

  ‘The same. He means well, I suppose.’

  ‘I know.’ Thea sighed.

  ‘You’re missing him,’ Jessica accused. ‘If I wasn’t here, you’d have asked him to come and stay, I bet.’

  Thea was emphatic. ‘No I wouldn’t. I wanted this time with you. I haven’t seen nearly enough of you since last summer. Phil can wait. He’s not going to go anywhere.’