Blood in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know you knew about trees. Shallow roots, eh?’

  He refused to be baited. ‘I only know about beeches,’ he said with all due modesty.

  He took another painkiller before they set out on their walk, already wondering whether he was being entirely too ambitious. Thea had refused to drive the short length of the lane, on the grounds that it would be a waste of the effort necessary to fold Phil into the passenger seat and out again. He agreed, with growing trepidation, that the walk presented no real difficulty. ‘We can always turn back if you feel it’s too much,’ she breezed.

  When they reached the fallen tree, it looked considerably more dramatic than Phil remembered from his dawn visit that already seemed a long time ago. It had fallen towards Hector’s Nook from the opposite side of the road, plainly causing a total blockage for traffic until the chainsaw man had turned up. Several spreading branches had been sawn away and left strewn across the tussocky field in which the beech had been growing. The road hedge had been wrecked, both by the impact of the tree and the subsequent attentions of the man with the saw. Miss Deacon’s land faced it on the opposite side of the road and a few twigs lay scattered on the verge that side.

  ‘It must have been very tall,’ Thea remarked, impressed in spite of herself. ‘Poor thing. And there aren’t many leaves. It must have been sick, don’t you think?’

  Phil was examining the area of the roots, trying to explain to himself just why it had fallen when it did. ‘I’d guess it must have been a good forty feet high. It was growing on a slope, look,’ he pointed out. ‘It can only have been the sheer force of gravity that brought it down. Pity we can’t remember what it looked like before. I never even noticed it.’

  ‘Nor me. You don’t notice individual trees, do you? Not unless they’re really spectacular. How old do you think it was?’

  ‘Probably less than a century. Seventy or eighty years, maybe. They grow quite quickly, I think.’

  They had gone into the field through the crumpled fence, led by Hepzie. ‘Lucky there were no animals in here,’ said Phil. ‘They’d all have escaped.’ He was carefully negotiating the uneven surface, which sloped upwards in one of the classic Cotswold undulations that gave the region its charm. His back was making more of a protest than he chose to admit even to himself. Distraction, he muttered. Think about something else.

  The tree’s roots formed a perfect circle, ripped violently from the earth and seeming to silently shriek at this unnatural exposure to air, as a fish might do. He reached the rim of the shallow crater left behind, a tilted bowl on the side of the slope.

  ‘Hello,’ he muttered. ‘What’s that then?’

  Thea didn’t hear him, until he made a louder wordless cry, and went stiffly down onto his knees into the rumpled orange-yellow earth where the tree had been standing for so long. She looked towards him, from where she was resting against the smooth horizontal tree trunk, and started up in alarm. ‘Phil, what on earth are you doing?’ she shouted. ‘Come out of there.’

  He ignored her until she got closer, and then held up his find.

  It was a human skull.

  Chapter Five

  ‘I don’t suppose it could be a sheep, or something?’ she said with a crooked smile. He gave her a withering look and said nothing. ‘No, I thought not,’ she admitted sadly. ‘Trust you to find it. I don’t suppose it’s been there for a thousand years, either?’

  Phil shook his head, and held the bone at arm’s length. ‘Still got tissue and hair attached,’ he said.

  She wrinkled her nose. ‘Oughtn’t you have left it where it was?’

  ‘Thea,’ he said warningly. ‘This is serious.’

  ‘I know it is. I understand that. But I still think it’s a valid question. You’ve disturbed the evidence.’

  ‘No more than having a dirty great tree uproot itself and scatter bones everywhere.’ He waved a hand, and she began to see white objects spread across an area of some size.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said faintly. ‘I hope Hepzie doesn’t take a fancy to them.’

  He put a hand to his back and groaned. ‘I might react better to black humour if I wasn’t hurting so much,’ he puffed. ‘Have you got a phone with you?’

  She shook her head and grimaced. ‘Silly of me,’ she admitted in all sincerity. ‘We might have needed help to get you home again. What’ll we do? I could run back and get the phone and the car, while you stay here. I don’t suppose it’s terribly urgent, is it?’ She looked more closely at the skull, which Phil had replaced gently on the ground. ‘Weird to think that was somebody’s head,’ she added, putting an unconscious hand to her own occiput.

  ‘Can you bring one of my painkillers as well?’ he pleaded. ‘This is really starting to hurt. I should never have done so much walking.’

  ‘Phone, pills, car – anything else?’

  ‘Just get on with it,’ he gasped.

  She seemed to be gone for ages, as he crouched on the dry grass edging the new crater, feeling like a sentry guarding his grim discovery. The fragmented skeleton would give rise to a concerted police enquiry, however old it might be. As he contemplated the skull, he noticed a break in the temple, close to the left eye socket. A ragged hole had been torn in the bone. ‘I hope that wasn’t the cause of death,’ he muttered to himself. But already he knew that it probably was, and that somebody had killed this anonymous sexless victim, and then buried the body at the foot of a beech tree in a small field on the edge of a village. And he knew that once again he and Thea would become embroiled in a murder enquiry.

  It was still barely eleven when the full entourage had established themselves in the little tilting enclosure beside the small quiet country road, erecting canvas shelters and bands of police tape to deter non-existent sightseers. A forensics team brushed delicately at the soil covering most of the bones, like archaeologists excavating a barrow. A police doctor hovered, peering at the skull and the newly revealed pelvis. ‘Male,’ he said. ‘No sign of any clothes. You’d expect some fragments of cloth at the very least. Not wrapped in anything at all, as far as I can see.’

  Phil felt his face contract in disgust as his mind painted an image of soil being piled over the exposed skin, finding its way into all the private crevices, vulnerable to the worms and insects that would rejoice in the bounty suddenly presented to them. ‘Barbaric,’ he said. ‘Everybody deserves a shroud of some sort.’

  The doctor looked at him and blinked. He was a short bald man, with dark eyes set deep in his head. His presence was required whenever a human body, or even a small part of one, was discovered, so that he could pronounce life extinct. This could sometimes give rise to some sighs at the silliness. Phil knew him of old, but they seldom exchanged more than the briefest professional remarks. ‘What are you doing here anyway?’ he asked Phil, with a meaningful examination of the stiff back and casual clothes. ‘If I might ask.’

  ‘I was here for the weekend, and slipped a disc on Sunday night. It seemed sensible to stay. I’m in an old cottage down there.’ He indicated the track down to Hector’s Nook.

  ‘Nasty. Were you here when the tree came down, then?’

  Phil nodded. ‘Must have been in the small hours. I heard the chainsaw clearing the roadway at about six. I came up to have a look.’

  The doctor raised his eyebrows. ‘At six? With a prolapsed disc?’

  Phil nodded ruefully. ‘I was awake, and I just thought it warranted investigation. I’d already been woken up at first light, anyway.’

  It clearly sounded strange to the medic, but Phil was past caring. Despite the painkillers he was still suffering, and starting to worry that he had caused further strain to the prolapsed disc with his incautious behaviour. Thea had tried to take him back to the house in her car, but he had felt obliged to stay at his post and oversee the police activity. ‘They’ll expect it of me,’ he said. ‘Since I’m on the scene already.’

  ‘Well, I’m going to check the horses and feed th
e snake,’ she had said, turning her back on the bones and everything Phil had chosen to protect. ‘I can’t pretend I’m happy about all this.’

  He gave her a patient smile. ‘I wouldn’t expect you to be,’ he said. ‘I’m not entirely jubilant myself. But it is my job and I can’t simply ignore it, now can I?’

  ‘You’re sick,’ she reminded him. ‘Off duty. Not obliged to get involved.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ he snapped. ‘That’s nonsense and you know it.’ He had watched her go striding off to the car and then speeding down the bumpy track and he sighed unhappily to himself.

  But the pain and stiffness in his back ensured that he was of very limited use to the investigating team, and it was with profound relief that he realised that another senior officer had been sent to take control of the proceedings. News of his incapacity must have reached the roster clerk, and his name removed from duties until further notice.

  A thin brown-haired woman he had never met before arrived in an unmarked car and stepped briskly over the fallen tree to where he was leaning awkwardly against a fence post. She held out a hand, and shook his whole body jarringly as she greeted him. ‘DS Sonia Gladwin,’ she announced. ‘Just shipped in from Cumbria. We’ll probably be seeing plenty of each other.’ Her accent was strong – Phil suspected deliberately so. He had heard its like a few times, the words formed deep in the throat, with echoes of Geordie in it. An old-sounding timbre, calling to mind sparsely populated uplands and mysterious practices.

  ‘Sorry I can’t be more use,’ he panted. ‘But I damaged my back on Sunday night and it’s still bloody painful.’

  ‘And yet you managed to get up and find all this,’ she said, almost accusingly. ‘Some people can never give it a rest, can they?’

  ‘Right,’ he agreed weakly. If he could avoid an argument with her, then he would. It would be madness to begin their professional relationship as adversaries. How much easier, he found himself thinking, if it had been a man. Thin women could be so intense and restless. He felt a flash of annoyance with Thea for abandoning him as she had and wondered when she might condescend to come back for him. And would she use the car or force him to walk down the steep bumpy track? Self-pity welled up before he could stop it and he sighed.

  ‘Do you need to be taken somewhere?’ the new DS asked him with a close look. ‘You don’t seem too bright to me.’

  ‘I’m in agony,’ he admitted without hesitation. ‘The house is just down there,’ he pointed. ‘I ought to be able to walk it, but…’

  ‘Get in the wagon, for Christ’s sake,’ she ordered.

  The wagon proved to be a generously sized Volvo, and Phil somehow rolled himself into the passenger seat with only minimal howls of pain. Already he felt more favourably disposed towards Gladwin. ‘Thanks,’ he gasped. ‘It’ll only take a minute.’

  The two women inspected each other in time-honoured fashion, each slightly amused at how different they were. ‘Will you be SIO on this, then?’ Thea asked.

  Gladwin paused only fractionally to acknowledge Thea’s grasp of police acronyms before nodding. ‘Just got here from Cumbria,’ she said again. Then she kinked one side of her mouth. ‘First week, to be honest – but don’t tell anyone.’

  Phil watched Thea’s seduction with mixed emotions. The conspiratorial wink, the rapid relaxation of defences, the offer of coffee all contributed to the dawn of an unlikely friendship. He had to bite back a plaintive What about me? as they left him shuddering on the edge of Miss Deacon’s sofa, his back feeling like jelly after the exertion of getting out of the car.

  ‘I can’t stop,’ Gladwin said. ‘I ought not to have deserted my post at all, but…’ she looked at Hollis. ‘I couldn’t just leave him to struggle back by himself.’

  ‘I would have come for him,’ Thea said. ‘I thought he’d be happy to stay in the thick of it for a while. And I – well, I didn’t really see the appeal. It wasn’t me who found the bones.’ She gave Phil a glance that was close to accusation.

  ‘Right. The bones. What a business! And what a place! I thought I was leaving tiny rural villages behind when I came down here.’

  ‘It isn’t like Cumbria,’ Thea told her. ‘Except for the sheep, I suppose. There are still a fair few sheep around here.’

  Phil sat rigidly, afraid to move. He took a shaky breath and said, ‘Not been dead for very many years, the doc thinks.’

  ‘Not one of the Knights Templar, then?’ said Gladwin easily, with a smile at Thea.

  ‘Hey! You know about them, do you?’

  ‘Not a whisper until about an hour ago. There’s a young detective constable at the station who reacted when she heard the name of this place. Her aunt lives here, or something.’

  ‘Don’t tell me her aunt’s Miss Deacon,’ pleaded Thea. ‘That’s the lady I’m house-sitting for. I’m looking after her brother’s snake, as well.’

  Gladwin flinched and glanced around the room. Phobia was written all over her. Phil found himself wishing quite strongly that Thea hadn’t mentioned the snake – which he still had not encountered.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ said Thea. ‘It’s not in the house.’

  ‘If I had my way all exotic pets would be banned,’ said Gladwin. ‘I did my stint in Customs and Excise and saw some appalling cruelty in the trade that goes on. I could tell you some stories…’

  ‘Well, don’t,’ said Thea flatly. ‘And I hate to remind you of your job, but…’

  Phil held his breath at this impertinence. His girlfriend was effectively throwing a detective superintendent out of the house.

  But Gladwin didn’t see it like that at all. ‘Gosh, yes,’ she laughed. ‘I always did talk too much. See you again.’ And she was gone, the Volvo speeding up the track in a trice.

  ‘I liked her,’ said Thea, as if surprised at herself. ‘She’s too thin and probably dreadfully neurotic, but she has a good heart. How old would you say she is?’

  ‘Early forties,’ guessed Phil carelessly.

  ‘Wedding ring, I notice. Probably some kids. That would explain the thinness. Never has time to eat.’

  Phil knew better than to comment. They had had a few tiffs where he defended every woman’s right to pursue a career, whether she had children or not, whereas Thea claimed that it was a child’s right to have its mother by its side for at least the first four years of life, and preferably rather longer than that. He took another painkiller and wondered why he felt so exhausted until he remembered the insanely early start to the day. ‘Can I have a little nap, do you think?’ he said. ‘Just here on the sofa. If that doesn’t sound too feeble to you?’

  She gave him one of her softer looks. ‘You can be feeble for a bit, if you like. But it is your own fault for walking up there in the first place. I still can’t believe you did that.’

  ‘Neither can I,’ he said, aware for the first time that if he had stayed in bed someone else would have found the skeleton and he would never have needed to get involved. ‘I wish I hadn’t, if that’s any consolation.’

  ‘Not much,’ she said, with another almost-as-soft look.

  * * *

  When he woke up, she was clattering quietly in the kitchen and he wondered whether it could be lunchtime. Outside the crystal-clear light suggested the sun was beating down from directly overhead. He cleared his throat unnecessarily, hoping to alert her to his return to consciousness. When nothing happened, he began an inspection of the state of his back. So far, the pain was no more than a dragging ache, like a large bruise. He dug his elbows into the sofa cushions and levered himself gradually upright. It hurt, but not desperately.

  But the floor looked a long way away, and the various reconfigurations needed to achieve a standing position were daunting. He settled himself down again and waited for Thea’s attention.

  It was some minutes in coming, but she finally appeared carrying a metal bowl in front of her like a church acolyte serving the priest. ‘What’s in there?’ Phil demanded. ‘Not dead mice, I hope?’


  She shook her head ‘It’s for the horses. Miss Deacon said they like cut-up apples and carrots every now and then. I found some just now, and thought I should give them a treat. I’ve done the mice already.’

  He looked at her closely. ‘Was it gruesome?’

  ‘Not a bit. Mind you, it doesn’t seem much nourishment for such a big creature. She’d have been happier with a small dog, I think.’ Thea glanced at Hepzie protectively. ‘That sort of size, in fact.’

  Phil swallowed convulsively, imagining the jaws parting to envelop the spaniel. ‘Surely not,’ he croaked. ‘It can’t be as big as that.’

  Thea made a circle with the forefinger and thumb of each hand. ‘Must be about that big around,’ she said. ‘Three or four inches.’

  Phil made a mirroring circle. ‘Nowhere near big enough to hold Hepzibah,’ he concluded. ‘But we’d best not let her wander into that shed, just in case.’

  He felt proud of himself for conducting such a normal conversation without once mentioning his back, or reproaching Thea for not asking after it. He knew he was earning her approbation with the slightly dark banter that they frequently slipped into. She rewarded him with another sweet smile. ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m more than ready for some lunch,’ she said. ‘There’s French bread and paté, and some olives and red wine.’

  ‘Very Continental,’ he approved. ‘And look at that weather to go with it!’

  ‘We’re having it outside, of course. I’ll leave you to struggle up while I go and lavish affection on the horses for ten minutes.’