by Rebecca Tope
‘But she’s perfectly all right,’ Thea blurted, interrupting him. ‘We saw her this afternoon.’
‘What? Where?’
The silence that followed was an abyss of regret at having given away what was quite probably a secret. ‘Oh, well, she was at Hailes Abbey,’ Thea pressed on unhappily. ‘She looked quite fit and well.’
Robin blinked and then frowned. ‘Well, yes, she works there sometimes,’ he said. ‘On the kiosk. Is today one of her days?’ He addressed this question to a far corner of the room, and showed no surprise when no answer was forthcoming. ‘Maybe it is.’ He appeared to do a mental calculation. ‘Friday,’ he concluded. ‘Yes.’
Phil gave the man a careful scrutiny. His clothes were clean but crumpled. The cuffs of the shirt were frayed. His hair was too long and there was a scab on his chin. He was very thin. Hadn’t the Fiona woman said something about him being ill? ‘Sit down,’ he suggested. ‘Have a drink.’
It was ten o’clock in the evening. All three of them suddenly became aware of the oddness of a visit at such an hour. ‘Sorry it’s so late,’ Robin said. ‘I had a cow calving, or I’d have come sooner.’ He rubbed a hand across his brow. ‘And I’m to be up again at five, for the tanker.’
‘Can I get you coffee or something?’ Thea asked. ‘I don’t think we’ve got any booze.’
‘I don’t drink,’ said Robin absently. ‘Soraya, it is. She could’ve been killed. It’s not right, is it?’ His look was much more of a supplicant than an accuser.
‘I know,’ said Thea gently. ‘And I really am terribly sorry. I was dazzled by the sun, and never even saw her. I was going very slowly, luckily. And she landed in the hedge, amongst a lot of cow parsley and stuff. It wasn’t at all serious. We made sure before we let Fiona take her home.’
‘You people,’ the man went on. ‘Stirring things up, doing what you like, not understanding anything. Getting away with it.’ He looked at Phil. ‘And you in the police, they say. Something high up, is it? Not answerable. It’s not fair, whatever anybody says.’
It was delivered in a flat, hopeless tone, as if he expected the words to go ignored. Thea went to him, and laid a hand on his arm. ‘Please don’t think of us like that,’ she pleaded. ‘We never meant to stir anything up. Honestly, it’s been as upsetting for us as for everybody else. And Phil’s hurt his back. When I hit Soraya, the jerk hurt him more than her. You really shouldn’t judge, you know.’ She injected a thread of severity into her final words, but the atmosphere remained tentative and strangely considerate. It was like the hushed mutterings around a hospital bed, Phil thought. Everyone afraid of the pain lying just below the surface. Thea moved away, followed closely by her dog.
Phil felt himself to be in a no man’s land, between the professional activity of the murder enquiry and the sick bed he was forced to lie on because of his back. He knew little more than disconnected scraps about the investigation, and had no authority to formally question any of the Temple Guiting people. All he could do was pay very close attention to whatever came his way.
‘Mr…?’ Had he ever known the man’s surname?
‘Wheeler,’ came the answer.
‘OK, Mr Wheeler. Do you remember on Wednesday when Miss Deacon’s horses got out, you told me some story about a vagrant you thought must be the dead man?’
‘Aye.’
‘Well, were you trying to divert police investigations away from the reality when you told me that? Did you say the same things to DS Gladwin?’
Robin Wheeler nodded. ‘True, it was. Why’d I say anything different?’.
‘I see. And I suppose you’ve heard what Giles Pritchett did this morning?’
The man leant forward, his small hands clasped between his knees. ‘D’you think it was him, then, who killed and buried that bloke under the tree?’
Phil tilted his head consideringly. ‘What do you think?’
Robin sat up straighter. ‘Not for me to say, is it? My girl and Giles Pritchett went to school together, on the same bus. She always had a bit of a liking for him. Then he went off somewhere and his Dad was forever badgering me and Sory about where he might have gone to. As if we’d know.’
Giles Pritchett went to the local comprehensive? Or did Soraya by some miracle get a place in a public school? ‘Which school was that?’ he asked.
‘Not the same school,’ Robin scoffed. ‘Same bus, that’s all.’
‘Ah,’ said Phil, obscurely satisfied that his assessment of the social standing of the young people had been right all along.
Thea was sitting in an armchair close to the fireplace, the spaniel on her lap. She played idly with its long ears, while the animal wriggled with ecstasy. Hepzie seldom kept still during the daytime, but she slept like a stone at night.
Robin Wheeler got up abruptly. ‘Best go now,’ he said. He seemed to be resisting an urge to say something humble and apologetic. ‘I’ve had my say.’
‘Yes, and we really do regret what happened last night. It could have been very much worse, and you’re well within your rights to be annoyed about it.’
The farmer drew back his lips in a forced smile. ‘Yeah, well annoyed doesn’t really cover it. Panicked is closer, if you want the honest truth. If I lost that girl, it’d be the end of me.’
He doesn’t know about Temple-Pritchett, then, Phil concluded, suddenly remembering how Robin had dismissed Rupert as a ‘waste of space’ the first time they’d met. All the same, he felt a profound pity for the man, as well as a dawning respect. He had made the effort to come here, when he would normally be in bed, and confront people who might well make him feel inferior. ‘How did you get here?’ he asked curiously. ‘We didn’t hear a car.’
‘Oh, I came on the cob. He needed a turn, and these light evenings are good for a ride.’ He spoke as if the use of a horse as a means of transport was still quite normal.
Phil looked through the uncurtained window. It was no longer light. ‘It’s dark now,’ he said.
‘He can see his way, don’t you worry.’
‘I’m more worried about car drivers seeing him,’ said Phil.
‘Don’t you worry,’ said the man again. And then he left, through the back door as he had entered. The horse, apparently, was tethered to a hitching post that had been there since the house was built three centuries ago. Thea followed Robin out and reported it when she returned.
‘No wonder Hepzie barked so much,’ she said. ‘We’ve never had a visitor on horseback before.’
Saturday morning brought the first clouds for what seemed like months. Phil thought at first that it was still pre-dawn when he woke at seven and looked out of the window. Then, having checked the clock on the wall and looked again, he realised there’d been a change in the weather. It made him sad to think that could be the end of the un-British heatwave; that from then on there’d be the usual drizzle and cool breezes, with only the occasional bright afternoon to remind itself that this was summer. Without the blazing sunshine, there would be no excuses for lounging in the garden. Work would once more be the norm. Except, he remembered with a stab of pain, there was still his back.
And there was still an unsolved murder to think about. Less than twenty-four hours earlier he had been staring at the muzzle of a pistol and wondering what it would feel like to be shot. He still had not spoken to Stephen Pritchett about his son’s behaviour and subsequent severe injury. There was no pressing reason why he should, apart from normal human decency, based on their acquaintance. A kaleidoscope of local faces swirled through his head. They could all have known the man who’d been murdered – assuming it was Rupert’s father, Graham Bligh. Certainly Janey’s errant mother had known him intimately. The discovery of his probable identity must have created a major digression in police thinking, Phil supposed. The bizarre story of the genetic complexities resulting from Mrs Temple-Pritchett’s behaviour had come across like a fairytale – something that was barely credible and yet was merely one of countless strange-but-true anecdotes.
Life was full of them – coincidences, unexplained flurries of telepathy, chance encounters. The woman had conceived two babies on the same day, by two different men. Medically speaking, it was perfectly possible. For the family involved, the implications must have been beyond imagining. Hardly surprising, then, that the rogue inseminator should find himself slaughtered under a beech tree – except that his killing took place thirty-five years after his sin had been committed.
Meticulously, he went over everything he knew about the people concerned. Rupert had been the chief source of information, but he had disclosed no precise dates. Surely it was the case that the DNA test which had finally confirmed the decades of suspicion, had only taken place a few years ago? The technology had not existed before then. Perfectly likely, surely, that the murder had been committed at that same time. Which put all the suspicion onto Janey’s father, Mr Temple-Pritchett, the cuckold wildly intent on revenge, on discovering that his son was not his son at all.
Gladwin would be following that line as a priority. She’d be tracking the man down in Tuscany or wherever it was he spent most of his time. She’d pore over the contradictory DNA test results that were in the hands of some solicitor or other, since there was an ongoing ‘case’ about it. What exactly, Phil wondered for the first time, did the case consist of? Who was suing who, for what? Was it to do with Janey’s fabulous house and the trust who owned it? Was Janey’s father charging Janey’s mother with some sort of crime against their marriage? From what he’d understood, they still lived together as a couple in their Mediterranean hideaway.
Pared down to the basics, the murder had suddenly begun to look very simple. There was ample motive, means and opportunity for Janey’s father to have killed Rupert’s – but the task of putting together a convincing prosecution case with evidence and witnesses looked impossible five years on. Plus there were the very untidy extraneous factors such as the behaviour of Giles Pritchett, the murky involvement of Robin and Soraya Wheeler, and the activities of the Saints and Martyrs Club, linking to the mutilation of the corpse. St Melor, he remembered. There had been a saint, killed by his uncle and deprived of a hand and a foot into the bargain. It would not be safe to ignore any of these elements. If Temple-Pritchett were to be brought to court, his defence would bring it all in, if only to muddy waters that were already far from clear.
And wasn’t there something else? Something he and Thea had talked about, right at the beginning? Templars – that was it! The glaring detail of the family name, tied so directly to the village and its sense of ancient history still somehow surviving in the very air of the place. The mother of the twins had been a Temple. She had allied her name to that of Pritchett when she married. That meant, of course, that both Janey and Rupert were of the Blood Royal, so to speak. Their paternity hardly mattered, in that case. And, he thought helplessly, neither did the murder of one of their fathers. Graham Bligh was irrelevant to the Temple heritage. Which presumably removed it from the list of motives for killing him.
Thea came down at eight, followed by the dog. ‘Good night?’ she asked him.
‘Not bad, thanks. I’ve been lying here going over everything again. More as a sort of mental exercise than anything else.’
‘So you haven’t had a dazzling insight into who, why and how, then?’
‘Not exactly, no.’
‘Well, I have!’ she announced with a broad smile.
‘It fits perfectly,’ she insisted for the third time, as Phil struggled to pick holes in her theory right through breakfast and beyond.
He found himself pushed into defending his own theory that Bernard Temple-Pritchett was their killer – a theory that Thea dismissed with provoking certainty. Her own solution was the only one she would now contemplate. ‘But you’d never be able to prove it,’ he argued. ‘And without proof, it’s useless.’
‘So I’m going to find proof,’ she said confidently. ‘Smoke them out. I’ve done it before.’
It was true, he thought ruefully. Either by luck or design, she had more than once flushed out a murderer and thereby done a lot of the police’s work for them. She wasn’t afraid to get close to people who would frighten off most women of her size and background. Thea waded in where others feared to tread.
‘I don’t see how,’ he objected. ‘Especially as we’ll be packing up to leave this time tomorrow.’
‘Don’t worry about that,’ she said. ‘A day’s a long time when it comes to solving a murder.’
He knew he should stop her – tie her to a radiator if he had to; anything to keep her from rushing off into the dragon’s lair and probably breaking the law while she was at it. He had briefly tried anger. ‘Don’t be a bloody fool,’ he had shouted. ‘This isn’t a game.’ She had shaken her head wordlessly at him, leaving him at a loss.
Then he tried pleading with her. ‘Think of my position,’ he begged. ‘Think of Jessica. If this goes wrong, you’ll be such an embarrassment we’ll both have to leave our jobs and change our names.’
‘It won’t go wrong,’ she breezed. ‘I promise.’
‘It will if you’ve got the whole thing back to front. If you’ve made a fundamental mistake in your reasoning.’
‘You don’t think I have, though, do you?’ she challenged. ‘And you’ll be grateful to me when I serve you up some watertight evidence with a red ribbon around it.’
‘No,’ he said stubbornly. ‘I’ll still be embarrassed. You’re taking far too much into your own hands. I can’t decide whether you think you’re Superman or Batman or the Jolly Green Giant.’
‘Don’t be silly,’ she said. ‘I’m going in a minute. Look after Hepzie for me, and if I’m not back by one, raise the alarm.’
He could say it was his back, of course. That he had been powerless to prevent her from doing as she chose. He could even say she hadn’t told him anything of what she intended. If it came to it, he could probably retain his position and his dignity by a few careful omissions and deviations. But it infuriated him that he would have to. It bothered him dreadfully that he was allied with a woman who could so blithely ignore his status in society, his obligations and assumptions. It was as if a bishop had married a Spice Girl, he thought sourly. It made him even more sour to realise he couldn’t think of a more up-to-date airhead to use as an example. Unless it was Paris Hilton. But Thea was worse than an airhead – she had plenty of brains. The fact that she chose to use them so irresponsibly made everything even more aggravating.
She had given him no real details of what she was going to do or where she intended to go. ‘If you want to help, you can phone Stephen Pritchett,’ she had suggested. ‘Ask him how Giles is, and say you’ve got no hard feelings.’
‘And what use is that going to be?’
‘It’ll tie up a loose end,’ she said.
So he did it. Pritchett sounded groggy, as if still in bed. It turned out that he was. ‘I sat in the hospital till gone midnight,’ he said.
‘Oh, did you? Then I’m really sorry to wake you. How is he?’
‘Conscious. In tremendous pain. You’d think they’d be able to deal with it in this day and age, wouldn’t you? Frankly, Hollis, I think the staff are working at dangerous levels of undermanning. You never see the same person twice, and they’ve got hopeless channels of communication. I don’t mind admitting to you that it’s frightening.’
‘He’s not in a private place, then?’ Phil still clung to the idea that all the Pritchetts were rolling in disposable income.
‘Of course he isn’t. Private places don’t handle emergencies, and don’t take kindly to police officers standing guard over their patients day and night. Nor, I might add, could I afford it, even if they did.’
‘But he’s out of danger?’
Pritchett gave a rumbling sort of sigh. ‘So it seems. Apart from facing prosecution for threatening to kill a police officer. That’s you,’ he added unnecessarily.
‘And your wife? How’s she taking it? She must be glad to know Giles is st
ill…well, alive.’ It sounded stark in his own ears.
‘Trudy doesn’t know what to think. She’s out of it, to be honest with you. Probably the best thing.’ He sounded deeply mournful.
‘You mean she’s taking tranquillisers or something?’
‘Doped up to the eyeballs. It’s her usual recourse when life gets hard. I thought you knew that.’
‘No,’ said Phil. ‘Although there have been a few rumours.’
‘She’s hooked on the damned things,’ said Stephen. ‘Has been for years.’
Phil made sympathetic noises, then, ‘How well do you know Rupert Temple-Pritchett?’ he asked, on a sudden impulse.
The man answered readily enough, though with a note of impatience in his voice. ‘His father’s my cousin. Until a few years ago, he and his wife lived in Guiting Power. Then they sold up and moved away.’
‘So you were close until they moved?’
‘Not at all.’ The voice was less groggy now, Phil noted.
‘But you are friendly with Janey, and she’s their daughter. And Rupert’s sister.’
‘What’s all this got to do with anything?’
Phil took a major risk, then, with a sense of having little more to lose. ‘You probably didn’t know that the murdered man has been identified now. His name was Graham Bligh, and he was—’
‘I know who he was,’ interrupted Pritchett. ‘But I had no idea he was dead. Somebody told me they’d seen him, come to think of it, not so long ago.’
Phil’s heart lurched. ‘Did they? Who? When?’
‘Can’t remember. A bit ago now. Somewhere like Birmingham or Coventry. We never knew him well, he was just one of the youngsters that hung round Jackie.’
Phil calmed down. For a man of Pritchett’s age, a bit ago could easily be five years. And yet – there was still a nagging doubt as to the true identity of the body. The DNA said it was Rupert. Knowing it could not be him led to assumptions that actually had no firm evidence to substantiate them.
