Cotswold Mystery, A

by Rebecca Tope

  Thea flapped a hand at the Sergeant, trying to make him stop while she explained, aware that she had asked precisely the same questions of Yvette, some weeks earlier.

  ‘She’d have to shout. They’d hear her in the night. It’s all one house originally, after all.’

  ‘And don’t forget the buzzer,’ said Jessica.

  ‘What buzzer?’ asked Tom.

  Thea showed him. ‘It’s very loud. Rather a good idea, in some ways.’

  ‘Hmm,’ said the policeman. ‘So she isn’t allowed to go out of her own front door.’

  ‘I took her out for a walk on Saturday afternoon,’ Thea said, as if in self-justification. ‘It wasn’t altogether successful.’ She laughed ruefully. ‘She fell over, which was very scary at the time. That’s when that Ick person showed up. He offered to help, which was nice of him.’

  ‘Icarus Binns,’ Jessica translated importantly. ‘We saw him in The Crown. And Cleodie Mason was with him.’

  The sergeant was perhaps thirty-four, the constable six or seven years younger. There was no doubt whatsoever that they would know the two celebrities.

  Both men struggled to appear nonchalant. ‘Yeah, I heard something about that. We like to keep an eye on these high-profile figures. They can be vulnerable.’

  ‘You mean somebody might kidnap them?’ laughed Thea. ‘And hold them to ransom?’

  ’It isn’t unknown,’ said Tom stiffly.

  Beside them came a sudden banging on the locked door. ‘What’s all that noise?’ came a shrill voice. ‘Who’s doing all that talking?’

  Thea called back, ‘It’s all right Granny. I’m going to open the door, and you can see for yourself.’

  ‘Who do you think you’re calling Granny?’ came an angry reply. Thea remembered that she had been careful to stick to the more formal ‘Mrs Gardner’ until then.

  ‘Sorry,’ she said, pointing to the key hanging just too high for her to reach. Tom lifted it down, and put it in the lock. It turned easily, but when he tried to open the door, it wouldn’t move. ‘Hang on,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t locked after all.’

  ‘Yes it was,’ said Thea. ‘I checked it on Saturday and I haven’t touched it since then.’

  ‘Well, you saw what I just did. I turned the key, and now it’s locked.’ He reversed the process, and the door opened. ‘I turned it back, and it’s open. I don’t think you can argue with that.’ He looked to Jessica and Eddie for support, which they both gave with unreserved nods of their heads.

  When the door was pulled fully open, Granny Gardner was revealed, standing very upright, dressed in clean cord trousers and a bright pink jumper. She looked alert, fit and about seventy-three.

  ‘Police!’ she said, eyes wide. ‘Has there been a robbery? Did Yvette lose the Minton plates? I told her not to leave them on full view.’

  ‘No, no,’ Thea said. ‘Nothing’s been stolen.’

  ‘You’ve been driving too fast then,’ she stated as clear fact. ‘That must be it.’ She gave Thea a penetrating scrutiny. ‘You’re the person with the long-tailed spaniel,’ she said.

  Thea almost clapped. ‘That’s right!’ she said. ‘We went for a walk together.’

  ‘No, I went for a walk with Giles. Silly man,’ she added. ‘Told me Julian was away with that grandson of his. I knew that wasn’t right.’ Her face clouded. ‘I remember his notes,’ she quavered. ‘They say Julian is dead. Can that be right?’ She looked from face to face, stepping back to give admittance to the policemen.

  Sergeant Tom gently ushered Mrs Gardner into her front room, and leant himself casually against the back of a chair. ‘Yes, that’s right,’ he said. ‘And we came to talk to you about him.’

  She frowned at him, a wilful child with pouting lips.

  ‘Julian was your good friend, is that right?’

  She nodded. ‘He helped me with my lists. He was like you – bossy,’ she quipped, with a little smile.

  ‘And was he going to help you when your daughter went on holiday?’

  ‘Is Frances on holiday? I haven’t seen her for ever so long. But she sent me flowers, see.’

  ‘No, it’s Yvette who’s on holiday,’ Thea insisted. ‘And I’m here to keep an eye on you. The policeman wants to know whether Julian would have done the same.’

  The blankness that met this question seemed to Thea tragically genuine. The old woman didn’t even shake her head, but simply lost herself in thick clouds of bewilderment.

  ‘Did he have a key to your house?’ Tom repeated.

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed. ‘Key? What key? Did who have a key?’

  ‘Mr Julian Jolly.’ Tom pushed a hand into a side pocket of his jacket. ‘Because I think he did. I think this is it.’ With a magician’s flourish, he produced a shiny door key, which Thea recognised immediately. She took a breath to speak, but he quelled her with a look.

  Mrs Gardner failed even to focus on the object. ‘Never mind,’ said Tom. ‘We won’t bother you any more. Thank you for letting us talk to you. And, if I may say so, you’re looking extremely smart today.’

  ‘I always put this jumper on for Julian,’ she said, looking down at herself. ‘This one’s his favourite.’

  Leading the way, the sergeant conducted his little party back through the connecting door into the main part of the house. Closing the door behind Jessica, he removed the key that Thea had used, and inserted the one from his pocket. But his expectations were dashed. The key refused to turn.

  ‘What are you doing?’ asked Thea.

  Tom tapped the key against his teeth for a moment, and then looked towards the back of the house. ‘There’s a lock on the kitchen door, I assume?’

  ‘Of course,’ Thea nodded.

  Without waiting to explain, he marched through and repeated his experiment with the key. This time it fitted perfectly, turning in the lock and doing everything a good key should.

  Tom flashed a triumphant smile at his audience. ‘This was in Mr Jolly’s pocket,’ he said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  Before leaving, the police officers’ attention was caught by the cage outside the back door of the cottage. For Tom, it seemed to be more evidence of strange behaviour on the part of the Montgomerys towards their aged mother. Thea made no attempt to defend them, still struggling to connect the fact of the key with the theories she and Jessica had developed earlier in the day concerning the escape route of the killer.

  The two women talked about doors and keys for quite a long time after the policemen had gone, but with no constructive conclusion. Their theories tended to the circular, with so many distracting convolutions that there was plainly no sense in sharing them with the police – who in any case could work it out just as easily for themselves. Or so Thea insisted, when Jessica worried that they should at least check that Julian’s garden had been thoroughly explored.

  ‘That would be telling them how to do their job,’ Thea objected. ‘Not a good idea, in my experience.’

  After they’d made and eaten a hearty lunch, Hepzie was showing signs of cabin fever, so Thea suggested a walk through the woods to the higher ground, where they could look across to what had once been the village of Upton. ‘It’s stopped raining,’ she pointed out. ‘And there’s a whole lot of day still to go. Hepzie can have a good run up there, as well.’

  Jessica agreed with scant enthusiasm, and they set out towards the end of the High Street with a final glance at Granny’s door. ‘We’d better not be long,’ said Thea.

  It was obvious that the girl was preoccupied, as they passed several attractive houses and gardens without her seeming to notice them at all. Thea deliberately pointed out interesting features, as if to a young child in a sulk. She began with the Russell Spring, from which clear water constantly trickled. ‘I bet it’s lovely to drink,’ she said.

  Jessica didn’t reply, and was barely even turning to look at the landmarks. Thea persevered, on the assumption that the silence was due to the girl not wanting to go out at all. The weathe
r was far from perfect, reminding them that it was still only March, with all the mood swings that implied.

  ‘Oh, look at this,’ she went on, coming to a sudden stop beside a wide entrance to a steeply climbing driveway. ‘Joanna Southcott lived here. 1804–1814. Where have we heard that name just lately?’

  Jessica blinked. ‘Never heard of her,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, you have. I’m sure you were there. Something about a box. Yes – I know! When Granny was talking about Julian this morning. She said he wrote a book about it, or something. With Thomas. Didn’t she?’

  ‘A box?’ Jessica frowned. ‘Joanna Southcott’s Box. Yes, I remember. There was a file in Julian’s house when it was searched. That was the title on the front. What do you know about it?’

  ‘Hardly anything,’ Thea admitted. ‘So when we get back, you can look it all up on the Internet. It sounds intriguing. I have heard of her, somewhere, but I have no idea who she was.’ She scratched her cheek, groping for a mental link. ‘I thought she was some sort of witch, or a wise woman. Something like that.’

  ‘Nice house,’ observed Jessica, standing back for a better look. The big rectangular property was some distance above them, backed by trees, with terrace gardens between it and the road. ‘Some climb to get up to it.’

  Inside the gateway, to the right, was an arrangement of low stone walls which had no obvious purpose. ‘What’s that for?’ asked Jessica.

  ‘It’s like a little area for people to sit in,’ said Thea. ‘Maybe she held her consultations there – for people too feeble to struggle up to the house.’

  ‘Right. In 1814,’ said Jessica. ‘And her ghost keeps it tended even now.’

  ‘Either that or Julian Jolly’s been doing it,’ said Thea lightly. ‘It looks important, though – don’t you think. Something we could find out about.’

  Jessica sighed. ‘Mum – that key. You do realise how bizarre it makes everything, don’t you? Bizarre and scary. The dead man had a key to your back door in his pocket when he died.’

  So that was the cause of her preoccupation, Thea realised. Not a continuing annoyance about one of her mother’s gaffes, nor a worry about what awaited her back in Manchester. The girl was frightened.

  She aimed for a gentle reassuring tone. ‘You don’t know that. The killer could have popped it in after he was dead.’

  ‘Oh, yes – and why in the world would anybody do that? That’s a daft suggestion.’

  ‘I don’t know!’ Thea almost shouted in her frustration. ‘Now leave it for a bit and let’s get on with the walk.’

  Meekly, Jessica followed, as Thea led the way confidently to the right and up a wide pathway to the end of the woods and out into a wide open field. The dog ran cheerfully ahead of them, and the breeze tossed their hair more in play than chilly malice. They strode out, passing a pretty farmhouse with a massive barn facing onto the pathway and a picturesquely ruined outhouse the other side of a low stone wall. ‘Isn’t that gorgeous!’ trilled Thea. ‘If it’s true that Granny was a painter, she must surely have painted this.’

  ‘Did she really say she was a painter? When?’

  ‘On Saturday, when I took her out for a walk. She said a celebrity woman paid hundreds of pounds for some of her work.’

  ‘Not Cleodie Mason, I guess. She doesn’t look as if she’d know what to do with a painting. So where’s this Upton place?’ Jessica switched subjects as if one was no more interesting than another.

  Thea dug the map out of the bag on her shoulder, and carefully located the right section. ‘Two more fields and down to the right.’

  Jessica looked over her mother’s shoulder. ‘That’s not a right of way,’ she pointed out. ‘We can’t go down there.’

  ‘We’ll say we’re lost if anybody sees us. It probably happens all the time.’

  ‘How would you like it, if it was your land?’

  ‘We’re not doing any harm. Just let’s see if we can recognise anything, OK?’

  They walked for ten more minutes, passing a small Dutch barn on the track leading to Upton. A few yards further on, Jessica baulked. ‘We’d be able to see by now if there were ruins or anything,’ she objected. ‘And all there is is a field, the same as any other field. I’m tired. Let’s go back. It’s going to rain again, as well, look.’

  Forced to admit that there was truth in every word, Thea allowed herself to be turned around and marched back the way they’d come. ‘Imagine it, though,’ she attempted. ‘Living up here in neolithic times. Like being on top of the world.’

  The way back felt longer than before, despite it being downhill. Thea talked about abandoned villages, and the various theories concerning them. Inevitably they reverted to the topic of Julian Jolly, archaeologist. ‘Maybe he made a stunning new finding, and was murdered because of that,’ she suggested, in a gothic sort of tone. ‘They didn’t just abandon their homes because there was no more work – but some terrifying disease struck them down.’

  ‘Or they were abducted by aliens,’ said Jessica, reviving somewhat.

  ‘Or they were removed forcibly by some agency of the government who wanted to conduct some kind of secret activity here.’

  ‘Did they have agents of the government in medieval times?’

  ‘Definitely,’ said Thea, with much more conviction than she really felt. All she could recall was Aphra Behn, spying in the seventeenth century, which was completely irrelevant.

  ‘More likely they couldn’t stand the weather,’ said Jessica, facing into a sudden squall, shoulders hunched. ‘Look at that cloud. It’s going to pour.’

  ‘We’ll be home in ten minutes if we bustle,’ said Thea.

  A minute later, the cloud had passed by, to the south, and flickers of sunlight were forcing their way through the thinner covering overhead. ‘We can slow down now,’ panted Thea. ‘I want to savour the view for a minute.’

  Jessica stopped her headlong march, and sighed. Wind tossed her light brown hair. Her moods appeared to be every bit as changeable as the weather, and for the first time in over an hour, she smiled. ‘It is rather impressive,’ she conceded. ‘All this open countryside – miles and miles of it. You never think about it, do you? It’s just a kind of background blur that you see very vaguely from the motorway or the train.’

  Thea said nothing, trying to adjust to the change of temper.

  Jessica turned in a slow circle, scanning the woods between themselves and Blockley, the wide rising fields to the north and west, the vanishing path over the brow of a hill to the south. ‘I can see precisely two buildings,’ she announced. ‘No roads. A few telegraph poles. It’s a whole different world from where I live now.’

  Thea and Carl had regularly taken their daughter on country walks from her earliest years. Carl had been a naturalist, eagerly showing her birds and flowers and fishing newts out of ditches. ‘Yes,’ said Thea. ‘You knew that already.’

  ‘I forgot,’ said Jessica simply. ‘You forget.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Thea. ‘Maybe you do.’

  ‘The point is,’ said Jessica patiently, ‘that there’s stuff happening out here.’

  Thea still hadn’t quite caught the drift. ‘What – nature red in tooth and claw, you mean? Things eating each other in the hedges?’

  ‘Not really. I was thinking of people, tucked away in those houses, completely private. They could be doing absolutely anything, and nobody would know about it.’

  Thea felt a cold shiver run through her. This was the voice of a police officer, imbued with the necessity of surveillance around the clock. Every moment documented, recorded, monitored. People forbidden from covering their heads, for fear the CCTV couldn’t register their faces. People scanned with electronic devices to see what was in their pockets. People stored on databases by their iris patterns and their DNA. People filmed as they drove in the illusory sanctity of their private cars, not even able to pick their noses in peace.

  ‘And good luck to them,’ she said with feeling. ‘Little do they
know that Big Brother is working as we speak to discover a way to watch over them.’

  ‘There’s the satellites,’ said Jessica, thoughtfully. ‘They can read the headlines on a newspaper from up in space. DEFRA pays them to report people digging holes where they shouldn’t, or growing the wrong crops.’

  ‘God help us,’ said Thea, feeling suddenly painfully middle-aged. ‘Where will it all end?’

  ‘If they’ve nothing to hide, then they’ve nothing to worry about,’ said Jessica.

  ‘That’s all very well, but show me the person with nothing to hide.’

  ‘Nothing illegal, I mean.’

  ‘And who’s to say where the line comes? Today’s little bit of eccentricity might be tomorrow’s criminal act.’

  ‘Not my problem,’ said Jessica. ‘I’m just meant to be enforcing the law as it stands today.’

  ‘But that makes you no better than an automaton. You’d willingly go on one of these terrible dawn raids, would you? Hundreds of armed police battering down doors of totally innocent people?’

  ‘Of course I would.’ Jessica turned to give her mother a fierce look. ‘That’s my job. And they’re not totally innocent.’

  ‘Often they are,’ Thea insisted. ‘What about neighbours of the suspects? They get “evacuated” at gunpoint, smacked on the head if they’re slow or argumentative. Jess, it’s happening every week, here in this country. Stories that ten years ago would only be told about the KGB or Saddam Hussein.’

  ‘I didn’t think you’d gone so political,’ said Jessica stiffly. ‘When did this happen?’

  ‘I haven’t gone political. I just don’t like the way things are going. And it upsets me to think you’ve joined the enemy.’ Even as she said it, she knew she’d gone too far. ‘Sorry, sorry,’ she said urgently. ‘I didn’t mean that exactly. Although…’ she paused wretchedly. ‘I do wish you’d give it some objective thought.’

  ‘We do, Mum. We have whole mornings in the classroom thinking about it. We know what people like you think of us, as it happens.’