Blood in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘I still don’t—’

  The man’s face reddened. ‘Look, Hollis – I can’t say much more. All I wanted was for you to find out whether that body was – is – Giles. If it is,’ he swallowed painfully, ‘then I’ll have to come clean. But if it isn’t, then I’d have said too much. Do you see? And, to be honest with you, I think it’s unlikely. I only came to set Trudy’s mind at rest. He takes after her, you know. What they used to call “highly strung”, both of them.’

  Phil shifted position, with agonising consequences. The radiating streaks of red hot fire occupied all his attention for half a minute. ‘Not really,’ he panted. ‘I don’t really see at all. But I’m not on duty, and I would much prefer not to be having this conversation.’

  ‘Sorry. I can see you’re suffering. I take it there’s no likelihood of a visual identification?’ He swallowed again.

  ‘No,’ Phil agreed. ‘It’ll have to be teeth. You might let us have the name of his dentist?’

  ‘Not DNA?’

  ‘Only as a last resort, I would think, although it won’t be my decision. DNA tests cost money. Besides, we’d have to have a sample of someone we think it could be, for comparison.’ Phil was still panting, holding himself rigid. It felt exactly the same as it had on Sunday night, and he was gripped by despair at the prospect of inactivity for several more days. Maybe that hospital medic had been wrong. Maybe he’d be like this for the rest of his life. And Thea would dump him – that was obvious. She didn’t love him enough to saddle herself with an invalid for the next thirty years. And who could blame her?

  Pritchett brought him back from his gloomy thoughts. ‘His dentist was in Stow. A private chap. I’ll write it down for you.’ He took out a small notebook, wrote in it and tore out the page. Phil had time to wonder at a man who carried such a thing in his inside pocket before Thea came back with a tray.

  ‘I made iced tea,’ she said. ‘Sorry I took so long.’ She looked probingly from face to face. ‘Back still bad?’ she asked Phil.

  He nodded and tried to smile.

  ‘I won’t stay, if you’ll excuse me,’ said Pritchett. ‘I think we’ve finished.’ He stood up, looming over the others. The top of Thea’s head came to his sternum. ‘Oh – one more thing,’ he said. ‘It might help to know that Giles is very tall. Six foot five, poor lad. And just in case you do need DNA, I could give you this.’ He held out a small white envelope. ‘Some strands of his hair. We’ve still got a brush he used when he lived with us.’ He chewed his lower lip fiercely for a moment, as Phil took the hair. ‘So I’ll be off then.’

  Phil nodded, and lifted a hand in a complicated signal of comradeship and acknowledgement and farewell.

  When he had gone, Thea said, ‘Did you notice he said is?

  ‘Hmmm?’

  ‘Giles is six foot five. He doesn’t believe his son is dead at all.’

  Chapter Seven

  After two more painkillers, Phil was able to creep back into the house at the end of the afternoon. The radio, which Thea switched on in the kitchen, told them it had been the hottest June day for fifty years, and Phil felt some burning on his nose to prove it. And it was expected to be at least as hot the following day.

  ‘Imagine living somewhere that had these temperatures all the time,’ said Thea. ‘Would you ever get used to it?’

  ‘I had a few weeks in Australia just before I got married,’ he said. ‘Queensland. Everybody wears shirts and ties. The women wear tights even when it’s eighty or ninety degrees. At least they did then. I bet they still do.’

  ‘What a waste. And now they’re all terrified of skin cancer, so they keep the kids indoors all the time. We won’t go and live there then.’

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘I think we can safely say we won’t.’

  ‘But a nice relaxed island, where you don’t have to wear anything, would be all right. Where you wake up to bright blue skies, and the evenings have just a hint of a sea breeze.’

  ‘Shut up,’ he said affectionately. ‘We’ve got it all right here. Be content with what you have.’

  ‘I am,’ she said. ‘Although I’m getting very bored with your bad back.’

  ‘So am I,’ he said emphatically.

  The little fold-up bed looked somehow forlorn as it waited for him in the living room. Narrow and fragile, it seemed to emphasise his disabled status as nothing else could. ‘Can’t I use Miss Deacon’s room?’ he wondered. ‘There’s a single bed in there.’

  ‘I can think of at least two reasons why not. First, you can’t go upstairs for at least another day or two. Second, it would be an outrageous impertinence to sleep in her bed without permission. How would you like it?’

  ‘We’d change the sheets. She would never know. She might think it was her brother, if she did notice anything.’

  ‘Well, there’s only…’ she counted on her fingers, ‘…five more nights to go, before Archie takes over. You can manage down here until then.’

  ‘Five more nights!’ It felt like an eternity.

  ‘Well, maybe you’ll be miraculously restored before then. Stop anticipating the worst. And shouldn’t you have contacted that SIO woman, whatever her name is, and told her about Stephen Pritchett? I didn’t hear what he said to you after I left, but I’m sure it was something she should know about.’

  ‘Don’t tell me my job,’ he flashed. Then quickly, he amended, ‘Sorry, but I know what I’m doing. I’m going to call tomorrow and ask to see the pathology report from the post-mortem. I doubt they’ll have done it yet.’

  ‘Post-mortem? On a heap of bones?’

  ‘Right, right.’ He smiled. ‘Probably not the right word for it. But the pathologist will have found out all he can. In the light of that, I can feed in what Pritchett told me – or not. If the deceased was a man in his fifties, of short stature, I don’t have to say anything at all.’

  She frowned. ‘That sounds a bit iffy. As if you’re protecting him from something.’

  ‘No, no,’ he sighed. ‘Nothing like that. I’m sorry, love, but I’m too wrecked to talk about it any more.’

  She helped him into the bed, and within seconds he’d fallen asleep. It was a quarter to nine. The last thing he was aware of was the sound of curtains being closed across the window.

  He woke shortly after midnight, the red figures of the digital clock on the DVD player keeping him informed of the time. His back had roused him, protesting sharply at an unconscious movement. He lay as still as he could, thinking of Thea overhead, curled up with her dog, sleeping blissfully. He couldn’t blame her for feeling frustrated at his sudden disablement. It was not the week she had planned, after all. Except, he reminded himself, the plan had been for him to be back at work, and Thea left alone in the house. Surely, he thought, it was a bonus for her to have his company, even if he was so useless physically. Was her disgruntlement purely because they couldn’t have sex?

  The three large fish tanks in the room gurgled relentlessly, and a dim red light had been left on behind one of them. In the midnight hours, every sound was magnified, and the room felt far too noisy for proper sleep. He thought about the discovery of the dead man under the fallen tree, and wondered exactly how it could have got there. It seemed a peculiar place to bury a body, with the roots obstructing any digging. Probably there had been some sort of natural cavity between two roots, which had looked like a ready-made grave. He remembered just such a tree near his boyhood home, in a park. He and his friends had used it as a secret hiding place for their treasures, tucking packets and messages under the thickest roots. But a body was a far larger proposition, and would have to be much more effectively concealed, not least because foxes and badgers and even dogs would quickly have located it and dug it up again unless it was thoroughly covered over.

  He tried to visualise the wider terrain: the angle of the slope where the tree had grown, and the distance from the road. The body must have been uphill from the tree, on the side furthest from the road. When the roots had torn themselve
s away, the resulting crater had been at least three feet deep in places, and the bones were mostly buried lower than that. It had, after all, been a pretty efficient burial, then. A burial, he recalled, of a naked man – which suggested forethought and planning beyond a hasty panic-stricken disposal of a man killed in error. Possibly some of the roots had been chopped through to create a good-sized hole. It was even possible that this had weakened the beech, bringing about its collapse as the forces of gravity worked their inexorable way with it.

  He reran the disjointed, patchy tale that Stephen Pritchett had told. The man had only revealed the fragments he thought would suffice to persuade Phil that he feared the body might be that of his son. Because, he realised, if the body was not that of Giles, then he, Pritchett, did not want any further enquiries to be made by the police. The resulting delicate tightrope must have required enormous care, and Phil searched in vain for any mistakes. The reference to drugs had been clumsy, and probably solely for Thea’s benefit. The corrected version, once she had gone into the house, focused on family disagreements and vague worries about mental illness. Pritchett would know how slow the police could be in searching for adult individuals who went missing of their own volition. ‘After all, sir,’ Phil himself had said many a time, ‘it isn’t illegal to run away from home.’

  His next conscious thought was many hours later. Sunshine was filling the room, despite the closed curtains, and there was a smell of toast and coffee. He squinted at the DVD player, blinking in disbelief that it read 8.55.

  ‘It can’t be!’ he said.

  At the sound of his voice, Hepzie appeared, jumping half onto his pillow, thrusting her soft nose into his face. The air turbulence caused by her furiously wagging tail was dramatic. ‘Oy!’ he protested. ‘Put me down!’

  Thea appeared from the kitchen, holding two large mugs of coffee. ‘Awake at last,’ she observed. ‘I thought you were dead.’

  ‘Alive and kicking,’ he said calmly. ‘I can’t believe it’s so late.’

  ‘Best of the morning’s behind us already.’ She moved to open the curtains, pausing to gaze out at the hills and trees visible from the window. ‘I wonder how Janey got on with St Yvo yesterday. I should phone her and ask. I really would have liked to go along.’

  ‘Well, why didn’t you? I wasn’t stopping you.’

  ‘Yes you were,’ she said, without reproach.

  ‘You have her number? Just how matey did you two get before I turned up?’

  She shrugged. ‘Not especially. She told me a bit about Miss Deacon and the village. She was born between here and Guiting Power and knows just about everybody. It was nice of her to come and see me.’

  ‘Just being nosy, probably. Wondering what a house-sitter looked like. What does she do for a job?’

  ‘She’s a farm secretary. Works for most of the farmers in the area, filling in all those forms they get, and working out their tax returns for them.’

  Phil tried to imagine the great body wedged into the tiny cobwebby corners that most farmers called the farm office. In his various investigations over the years he had encountered quite a few of them. Even in the affluent Cotswolds where farms had mostly mutated into huge industrial complexes producing grain to the exclusion of nearly everything else, there were scattered family operations still surviving. Besides, even the big ones tended to skimp on office accommodation.

  ‘So where does St Yvo fit in?’

  ‘Just a hobby, I think. Miss Deacon’s one of their circle as well – did I tell you that? She was very sorry to miss this month’s ceremony, but she’s going to lead the whole thing next month. That’s going to be St Kenelm on the seventeenth.’

  Phil looked at her. ‘I’m amazed.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you remember the name and the date. But I have heard of St Kenelm, you’ll be surprised to know. He’s got a well and a footpath near here, if I remember rightly.’

  ‘Well, you’re one up on me, then,’ she admitted. ‘But Janey says he was quite a character—’ She paused as if afraid of boring him. ‘A young prince, foully murdered, apparently.’

  ‘Well, I am genuinely interested in hearing more,’ he said, ‘but first I’ve got to get myself out of this bed. Let’s see how the back’s shaping up today.’

  ‘I didn’t like to ask,’ she smiled. ‘I thought you might have forgotten about it.’

  ‘Very funny.’ He swung his legs onto the floor and shifted his weight. ‘So far, so good,’ he reported.

  Thea watched until he was on his feet and taking reasonably normal steps across the room. ‘It’s going to be even hotter today,’ she said. ‘We’ll have to go out somewhere with some shade.’

  ‘Right,’ he agreed, intent on monitoring his pain levels. ‘This really isn’t too bad,’ he said. ‘Surprising what a good long sleep will do.’

  ‘Well, we’d better make sure you don’t overtax it this morning, then.’

  Something in her tone alerted him. Suddenly he understood that it wasn’t primarily the slipped disc that she was cross about – it was his dawn walk of the day before. Somehow that made him feel better – she was blaming him for something he had wilfully done, and not for the unavoidable accident on Sunday night. He might have known, of course. Thea was seldom unreasonable in her apportioning of blame.

  He paused and met her eyes. ‘No,’ he said. ‘And I’m really sorry about yesterday. I was very stupid.’

  ‘Yes, you were,’ she said, with an expression that warmed his heart.

  * * *

  Breakfast was taken outside, Miss Deacon’s horses invisible on a shaded patch behind their barn. Thea described her morning tasks, performed while Phil was still asleep: checking water, patting noses, watering plants, peeping in at the snake.

  ‘Those fish tanks are noisy in the night,’ Phil said mildly.

  ‘I imagine they are. But they can’t be turned off. I’ve got strict orders about that.’

  He knew when to drop a subject, and concentrated on his toast for a minute or so.

  ‘Um – that hole in the skull…’ Thea began. To Phil’s own surprise he found himself washed through with relief. He met her eyes and waited. ‘It might have been what killed him, don’t you think?’

  ‘Quite likely, I’d say.’

  ‘Something heavy and sharp? I keep visualising a pickaxe, for some reason.’

  He had not expected her to be thinking about their find, other than as an annoying interruption to their week together. He smiled drily. ‘It could have been the exit wound from a bullet. I can’t say I examined it very closely. But I think I’d have noticed a corresponding entry wound. So yes, something like a pickaxe might have done it.’

  She frowned in distaste, but pursued the thread she’d started. ‘Like Jael with the tent peg. Except that went right through and pinned him to the ground. There’d have been two wounds then, as well.’

  He screwed up his face in exaggerated apprehension. ‘Sorry, but you’ll have to explain who it is you’re talking about.’ Admitting ignorance was not usually difficult; they both accepted that she knew more about literature and the arts than he did, in the very nature of things. His knowledge of human nature came from direct experience, he sometimes reminded her, and not from books, and she was mostly gracious enough to avoid any hint of competition.

  Now she simply smiled and explained. ‘It’s a story in the Bible. A woman called Jael betrayed a soldier – he might even have been the general of the whole army, I can’t remember that bit – from the enemy camp, by inviting him into her tent, and then driving a spike through his head when he was asleep.’

  ‘And is she considered a traitor or a heroine?’ he asked, looking at the fresh slice of toast he’d just started buttering.

  ‘Opinion’s divided, I think. Although she was celebrated at the time, because the war was won thanks to her.’

  ‘Nasty story, anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Sorry. I’m being ghoulish. I wonder whether it really was Giles
Pritchett. When will we know?’

  He liked the we. ‘I’ll phone Gladwin later today and see if the report’s through by then.’

  ‘Won’t she be cross when she hears you’ve spoken to Mr Pritchett and not told her?’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ he said again. ‘I know what I’m doing.’

  She pursed her lips at the implied reproach. ‘We need some shopping doing,’ she said. ‘I thought it would be interesting to try the local shop. They run it as a cooperative, you know. Very unusual. And I gather there’s some controversy about it. It’s all on the Internet.’

  ‘Isn’t everything?’

  ‘Surprisingly not, actually. You’d never know anything about the history of Guiting Power if you relied on Google, for example. There are still great glaring gaps, which have to be filled by books or word of mouth.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me about the history of Guiting Power? Assuming it’s different from Temple Guiting.’

  ‘Briefly, yes. There was a woman called Moya Davidson in the 1930s who bought up a lot of the properties and set up a trust so there would always be affordable houses for young people. It’s made a huge difference ever since. Janey told me all about it.’

  ‘And this Moya person’s not on Google?’

  ‘Not as far as I can see, no.’

  ‘But the shop in Temple Guiting is?’ He was humouring her, parodying an interest which in reality was lukewarm. It didn’t matter that she understood this. The point was that they were sitting together in the morning sun, relaxed in spite of his back and the discovery of a mouldering skeleton less than a quarter of a mile away. At their age, given his line of work and the general state of the world, they could scarcely hope for more, and they both knew it.