by Rebecca Tope
‘Maybe he did,’ she nodded. ‘That’s if he existed at all, of course.’
‘Oh? Is there some doubt?’
‘Very much so. Janey showed me his entry in that set of Baring-Gould books at her house. He’s another one who’s really just a legend. She prefers them to authenticated ones, I think. Easier to draw symbolic meaning from them, I suppose.’
‘But he was killed by his sister? Did I get that right?’
‘Yes. In fact she had several goes at it, but got there in the end. But he had magical powers and she was soon found out.’
‘I still think it’s uncomfortably close to things we’ve been hearing about the locals in Temple Guiting. And this St Melor, whoever he was. We should be researching him a bit more. Except I get the feeling Gladwin’s got one of the girls onto that by now.’
Thea laughed. ‘Gladwin’s looking quite efficient, wouldn’t you say? Considering this is only her first week, she’s obviously got things under control.’
‘Oh, yes,’ Phil agreed as heartily as he could. ‘She’s very impressive, given how little there is to go on.’
‘Did she say anything else about St Melor this afternoon?’
He shook his head. ‘I suppose she’s wondering how it could possibly fit the facts.’
Thea tapped a finger on the steering wheel. ‘It must implicate Janey and her Saints and Martyrs.’
‘Indeed,’ he assented. ‘Which neither of us can pretend would come as such a major surprise, now can we?’
Thea sighed and said nothing. He knew she was thinking that Janey Holmes would make a tragic murderer. Better, almost, to bury the whole idea and let the anonymous victim drift peacefully into forgetfulness.
As they approached Guiting Power, Thea threw Phil a quick look, and asked whether he felt equal to a bit of a detour. ‘We could go and have a look at Hailes Abbey,’ she suggested. ‘Just from the car – see what it has to offer. Have you ever been there?’
He shook his head and valiantly agreed to her idea. She turned left and slowed to fish behind her seat for the map. ‘You’ll have to navigate,’ she told him. ‘I can’t remember exactly where it is.’
The tortuous route lay through Guiting Wood, and then across a sweep of open farmland that felt like a private road. ‘Must have been the farm’s approach drive once,’ he observed. ‘It’s called Salt Way.’ There was something alien about the landscape, and the way the few vehicles they met seemed to slow for a good stare at them. Thea drove sedately, giving herself time to look around. ‘St Kenelm’s Well is just over there,’ Phil told her. ‘Feel free to park me and hike up for a look.’ But they had already passed the steep hill with the well at the top.
‘Another time,’ she said.
Hailes Abbey turned out to be unimpressive, involving a walk that Phil felt unequal to and a fee to go in. ‘I get the picture,’ he said, peering at the row of stone arches which was all that was visible from the car. It was close to five o’clock, but the sun was still high, throwing dark shadows from the stonework and surrounding trees. ‘But I’ll wait if you want a better look,’ he said again, feeling increasingly noble. All he wanted was to get back to his comfortably angled lounger. It was hot in the car, and his head was aching. The dog on the back seat was panting, too, obviously wanting to go home to some shade and a drink of water.
‘Oh!’ said Thea suddenly. ‘Look!’
He followed her gaze and focused on a couple walking towards them, having just emerged from the abbey ruins. ‘Um…’ he said blearily. ‘That’s that girl from the other night – Soraya. Isn’t it?’
‘And she’s with Rupert Temple-Pritchett,’ Thea hissed dramatically. ‘Holding hands, look. Good Lord, what an unlikely couple. He’s twice her age.’
‘Probably her uncle or cousin or something,’ said Phil, trying to concentrate. ‘And he’s more than twice her age. We know he’s early forties and she’s twenty.’
‘Don’t let them see us,’ Thea whispered, sinking down in her seat.
‘Difficult to avoid. She’ll recognise the car. Why does it matter, anyway?’ He wanted to point out that kneeling on the floor of a small Fiesta was well beyond his capabilities even without a prolapsed disc, but he held his tongue. Instead, he watched the couple closely, trying to assess the nature of their relationship. The girl looked fit and well, for a start, which was a relief. Being knocked into a hedge by this very car could have led to quite severe injuries. As it was, Soraya was swinging the arm that was joined to Temple-Pritchett like a young child. She kept looking up into his face with the unmistakable glow of young love.
‘They’re in love,’ said Thea, her voice full of astonishment.
Phil turned his attention to the man. His face was open and soft and somehow more genuine than during previous encounters. He smiled happily at the girl, and let her swing his arm as unresistingly as a doll. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I think they are.’
The pair walked right past Thea’s car without even seeing it. ‘They’re not interested in us, or anybody else,’ said Phil. ‘I haven’t seen anything like that since – since – I don’t know when.’
‘It’s rarer than you think,’ murmured Thea. ‘He looks so different, doesn’t he? Do you think all that foppish stuff was just a stupid act?’
Phil flapped a hand to indicate his ignorance. ‘Possibly,’ he said.
‘Like Lord Peter Wimsey,’ Thea mused. ‘Hiding his scheming mind behind a dim-witted manner, to put people off the scent.’
Phil recalled other references to this Wimsey person, where his abysmal failure to respond had given rise to disappointment. He still knew nothing whatever about the chap, but made a careful sound of accord.
‘But – what about her father?’ Thea continued. ‘He can’t be very happy about it. Rupert’s probably older than him. How long has it been going on? Do people know about it?’ She watched the retreating backs of the girl and her escort with a stare intense enough to bore holes. ‘They’re not trying very hard to avoid observation, are they?’
‘I doubt if the locals ever come here. It’ll all be tourists from other places, won’t it?’
‘Oh, well,’ Thea sighed. ‘I don’t suppose it’s important. And they do look terribly happy, don’t they? That girl deserves some pleasure.’
Phil did a double take. ‘How do you work that out?’
‘Oh – she just seems the sort of person who always gets a raw deal. Ordered about by her father, getting knocked down right outside her own fields. I just see her as a victim, somehow.’
‘But she’s in love, and everything’s all right.’ He had a thought. ‘She was probably mooning along in the lane the other night, never even hearing us coming, and not getting out of the way. All her own fault, you see.’
Thea laughed. ‘That’s right,’ she agreed, and started the car engine.
As Phil navigated them back to Hector’s Nook from the unfamiliar direction, his mobile went off. Fumblingly, he answered it, to find Gladwin full of eager information. ‘We’ve matched the DNA,’ she said, with scant preamble. ‘But it’s thrown up rather a contradiction.’
‘Go on,’ said Phil.
‘Well, according to the lab analysis, the dead man is Rupert Temple-Pritchett. The sample matches the one we requisitioned from his mother’s legal people.’
Phil grunted. ‘Well, that can’t be right. We saw him ten minutes ago, large as life.’
‘Exactly. So we’re wondering whether it might be his father, a man called Graham Bligh, according to our investigations. I’m not exactly clear on the science, but it seems a fair guess that they’d be very similar.’
‘Hmm,’ said Phil. ‘Or maybe the labelling got mixed up – that’s more likely, don’t you think? Happens all the time. Though on second thoughts, it can’t be the father, can it? The age doesn’t match. Rupert’s father—’ he registered the jerk of surprise from Thea beside him, ‘must be well into his sixties. I thought these bones came from somebody much younger than that.’
‘OK,’ said Phil slowly. ‘Well, I promise you, he’s very much alive, which can only mean there’s been some kind of mix-up at the lab.’
Gladwin made a tapping noise for a few moments. ‘If so, that’s going to make a mess of the legal proceedings. Although nobody seems to be in any great hurry to get it settled. Nothing’s progressed for the past two years or more.’
‘Well, the important point is that the dead man is part of that family,’ Phil insisted. ‘As we thought. That in itself gives you the green light to bring them all in for formal questioning.’
‘Yes,’ agreed Gladwin glumly. ‘Plus we’d better look for Graham Bligh, I suppose.’
‘Cheer up,’ he adjured her. ‘This is what you’ve been waiting for. And thanks for telling me – it’s nice to be in the loop again.’
Despite these words, Phil felt irrelevant and superfluous, contributing nothing to the enquiry, a helpless onlooker, fit for nothing. All he’d accomplished during the past week was to thwart Thea in her planned explorations of the area and annoy various local people.
* * *
At the house, he almost rolled out of the car, stumbling painfully to the front door, the spaniel threatening to trip him up in her own dash for sanctuary. ‘Honestly, you two,’ mocked Thea. ‘That’s gratitude for the lovely drive I’ve just given you.’
Hector’s Nook stood cool and inviting, the wood-panelled rooms suggestive of earlier times when the sun was so much less intrusive and the outdoors something to be avoided. Thea gave first priority to checking that the snake was still in its rightful place, and the horses well provided with water. ‘Only one more day,’ she announced, coming back from her chores. ‘And all’s well. I might as well keep quiet about the escapes, when Archie comes, don’t you think? He doesn’t need to know. I can write to Miss Deacon later on, and tell her a bit more. Of course, by then DS Gladwin might have solved the murder as well, and everything will have settled down again.’
Thea had been eager to hear the latest news as soon as Gladwin’s phone call had ended. ‘What was that about Rupert?’ she demanded, and Phil had conscientiously repeated every detail.
‘Well, that’s that, then,’ Thea had said blithely. ‘Case closed. It was obviously Janey’s father who did it – killing his wife’s young lover in a fit of jealous rage.’
‘Thirty-five years after the event?’ Phil queried.
‘Well he didn’t know about it before, did he? According to Rupert, it was just vague suspicions until they had the DNA test done.’
‘And cutting off a hand and foot for good measure?’
‘That will have been to please Janey somehow,’ she said confidently. ‘Something to do with one of her saints. Once they’d got a dead body, it could come in handy for one of the Saint ceremonies.’
‘Thea, you’re being ridiculous. None of that makes the slightest sense. Apart from anything else, it would implicate Janey.’
‘Well, Fiona, then. We both thought she was too normal to be true.’
‘Did we? I just thought we found her refreshingly ordinary after all the other weirdos we’ve come across.’ He heard himself revising his previous reservations about Fiona, presuming that by comparison with most of the other people they’d met, she was indeed a beacon of sanity.
‘But Rupert and Soraya,’ Thea said wonderingly. ‘Was it really how it looked? Could he be an uncle, or even her real father, do you think? Would that explain her adoration? It just seems so unlikely otherwise.’
‘You know the answer to that as well as I do. Nobody looks at uncles or fathers like that. And it isn’t so unlikely. It happens all the time.’
‘Maybe you’re right. I remember my sister Emily had a thing with a man twice her age, when she was twenty. He was a secondhand furniture dealer and had a glass eye. My father went ballistic about it when he found out.’
‘Not because of the glass eye?’
‘More because of the terrible old van he drove, I think,’ she giggled. ‘The point is – it does happen.’
‘Of course it happens,’ said Phil impatiently. ‘But for me the point is that fathers almost always go ballistic about older men seducing their daughters. It offends their sense of what’s right, somehow.’
‘That’s interesting, isn’t it,’ she agreed, clearly quite ready to discuss the socio-psycho-sexual implications if that’s what he wanted.
But Phil had had enough. ‘What’s for supper?’ he asked shamelessly.
The pieces of evidence, the stories and connections swirling around the village and the people he had met all combined to make Phil mentally restless but physically exhausted, even before factoring in his traumatic experience of that morning. ‘I feel as if I’ve been sandbagged,’ he said, as he sat in Miss Deacon’s small courtyard, catching the westerly rays of the sun full on his face.
‘It has been quite a day,’ Thea said, with a sigh. ‘I haven’t really got to grips with the fact that you might easily have been shot and killed. I can’t really bear to think about it.’
He felt a foolish flutter of pleasure at these words. She did love him, then, if she couldn’t abide the thought of his death.
‘Your initial concern was all for Giles,’ he reminded her, knowing it was a daft thing to say, even as he said it.
‘So it was,’ she admitted. ‘What a cow I am.’
‘Not at all. Just true to your principles to the bitter end.’ He threw her a smile, to show he was teasing.
‘I keep thinking about Janey as well. She seems such a tragic figure, even though she’s always quite cheerful when you talk to her. Everybody seems to like her, and she’s got plenty of interests. But losing a baby – what a terrible thing!’
‘People lost babies routinely, only a century ago. When did it get to be such a devastating catastrophe, I wonder? One child dies and the whole nation goes into mourning, now.’ He assumed she would pick up the reference to a major news story during the past winter, when a small girl went missing in East Anglia and was eventually found trussed up and decomposing in a tiny cobwebby shed. The place had quickly become a shrine, with the usual mountains of cellophane-wrapped flowers. Phil and Thea had agreed that it was gruesome on every level.
‘I think it was always desperately painful, but people had different outlets and distractions. Religion, lots of surviving children to focus on, other people in the same boat. If you read contemporary letters and so forth, the same lines keep recurring, about relief from suffering and God’s will. Plus the stiff upper lip, which has a lot to commend it, if you ask me.’ She paused. ‘None of which does anything to reduce Janey’s misery.’
‘It must have been the First World War,’ he mused, answering his own question. ‘When just about everybody lost a son.’
Thea flipped a hand, as if to divert the conversation to a new topic. ‘Stephen Pritchett’s going to blame you,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think? No sooner does his son show up, than you cause him to be half-killed. How must they be feeling – him and his wife?’
‘Who knows?’ It was asking too much of him, that he should empathise with the Pritchetts. ‘I suppose I’ll catch up with him over the next few days. For all I know, he’s shaking in his shoes because he thinks Giles is the killer the police are looking for.’ He remembered with a new jolt that Gladwin had discovered who the victim was. The anonymous bones in their tree-disturbed jumble, now had a family, even if some doubt hung over his precise identity. It made a huge difference, he realised. ‘Why would Giles be so angry about my discovering the remains of somebody he probably hardly knew?’
‘Who says he hardly knew him?’
Tiredly, Phil forced himself to think. ‘The dead man must be twenty-five years older than Giles. No, wait a minu
te. This gets impossibly complicated.’ He shook his head. ‘I can’t remember how Gladwin worked it out, now. Rupert and Janey are forty-one – we’d pegged them as older than that, hadn’t we? Anyway, that means they were around thirty-six when the murder happened. Rupert’s dad was sixteen, so early fifties when he died…’
‘Stop!’ Thea begged. ‘I’m not following any of this. We’ll have to write it down.’
Phil entertained a vision of the white board at the police station, where Gladwin and the team would have jotted dates, with arrows and lists and any relevant pictures. There’d be a timeline, with everybody’s name and age slotted in as appropriate. He was trying to hold all that in his weary head.
‘Or we could just leave it to Gladwin,’ he said.
A few minutes after they moved into the house for a bedtime drink and a quick bit of tidying, Hepzie began to bark. She barked urgently and incessantly, which was unusual. ‘That bloody snake isn’t loose again, is it?’ said Phil.
Thea had gone pale. ‘If that’s all you’re worried about, then you’ve got thicker skin than I thought,’ she said. ‘I’m scared it’s another man with a gun.’ She had gone to each window in turn, peering out into the twilight. Neither of them was inclined to open the door.
‘It’s probably a fox or squirrel or something,’ said Phil. ‘You can’t see anybody, can you?’
‘You’re not looking in the right place,’ came a voice from the kitchen doorway. ‘I just walked right in through the back.’
Chapter Seventeen
It was Robin, father of Soraya, and he was not holding a gun. Nor a knife, crossbow or any lethal weapon. He was actually looking rather sheepish.
Phil’s instant assumption turned out to be correct. The man had come to make a complaint about the accident of the previous evening. He began haltingly to express his concern and displeasure.
