Revenge in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  The three women had disappeared, along with the vehicle. The village was deserted, as all Cotswolds villages habitually were. People remained indoors or in their back gardens, if they weren’t away in London, where their real daily lives were conducted.

  Mrs Foster’s sister’s house was a large traditional stone building, with the usual tidy garden and well-kept paintwork. It was more recent than the Daglingworth one, but still a good century old, she guessed. She extracted the key and long list of instructions from her backpack and took a deep breath. The door opened smoothly, and she went into a shadowy hallway, feeling unusually apprehensive. After all, she had never met the owner, and had not even been told her name. The arrangement struck her as uncomfortably ad hoc, on reflection. If the woman was only away for a week, couldn’t the plants manage on their own? Was there some sinister ulterior motive for bringing her here? Was she being foolishly naïve, or foolishly nervous? The burglar alarm had to be deactivated, and she carefully keyed in the numbers she’d been given, wondering what her chances were of successfully setting it again when she left.

  Her worries were allayed as she tiptoed into the living room. Hepzie had been left on the doorstep, her muddy feet rendering her ineligible to walk around a strange person’s house. It turned out to have been a wise decision. The sofa and chairs were upholstered in spotless fabric of a creamy colour, surrounded by spindly antique objects all too easily knocked over. A deep window seat was full of exotic indoor plants. Beyond that room lay another, containing a massive oak dining table and a lot more plants. It smelt of polish and frangipani and air freshener; clean, fresh, hygienic smells that betrayed nothing organic or agricultural. Modern oil paintings hung on the walls and a shelf of books bridged an alcove next to a fireplace. Underfoot, there were short-pile rugs in colours that echoed those of the curtains. The walls were neutrally painted in almost-white shades.

  Who were these people, Thea wondered? How much time and attention did they devote each day to maintaining this perfection? What else did they do with their lives? Except, there had been no reference to a husband. Just a sister. Had she cleaned up after a divorce, perhaps? A guilty man handing over his house and cash at his injured wife’s insistence? There was no trace of children, no family photographs. The niece in Australia presumably stood to gain quite a substantial inheritance from these two country aunts, if there were no others in her generation to share the spoils.

  She gave the plants some water, picked up the meagre scattering of letters and flyers from the doormat, and prepared to leave. At the last minute, she realised she needed a pee, and found a downstairs lavatory with immaculate modern accoutrements. So modern, in fact, that when Thea tried to remove the plug from the bathroom basin after washing her hands, she could not see how to do it. There was no chain, no little lever, nothing to grip hold of. There had to be a trick to it, but she could not for the life of her work out what it was.

  Why on earth had she pushed the plug down in the first place? she asked herself. The answer was that her hands had been rather grubby from the various things she had touched during the walk, and she had very much liked the smell of the soap provided. So she had made a thorough production, half filling the basin in the process. The only thing she could think of was to bail out as much as possible of the water with a small glass she found in the kitchen, and pour it down the loo. It left a puddle of rather grey water that she could not scoop up. Shrugging helplessly, she left it, promising herself to see to it on the next visit.

  When she emerged from the house, having used extreme care in resetting the alarm, she found that rain had set in to an uncomfortable degree. A mile’s country walk with a reproachful dog and only a flimsy jacket was not a happy prospect, and she hovered on the front doorstep, unsure what to do. Already the return walk was acquiring a daunting new prospect. The first part would be uphill, the gap into the woods probably difficult to find. She had taken no precautionary notice of landmarks on the way down. The bare trees would drip on her and provide very little shelter from the rain. And her shoes were hardly more resilient than her coat.

  She extracted the map from her bag and peered at it. Walking back via roads was hardly any longer, and probably much more sensible. Negotiating the big roundabout where several small roads joined the new A417 would be the biggest hazard. On the map a tangle of green and yellow lines made it look worse than she remembered it from that morning. So long as she had Hepzie firmly on the lead, it should be all right.

  She went back down to the church and turned right towards something called Perrotts Brook on the map. Her shoulders were already wet and Hepzie was turning frizzy. Her mood, which had lifted somewhat during the past few hours, dropped back to worry and frustration. She should have prepared better for such weather. She should have got a move on, and simply checked the house and turned back. If she’d done that, she’d have dodged the rain completely.

  When a noisy engine came up behind her, she was in a narrow part of the lane, so dragged Hepzie closer and turned to face the vehicle. It was a muddy Land Rover, of an age and condition seldom seen in the affluent Cotswolds. When it stopped beside her, a man in his fifties with greyish-ginger hair and a lean face leant over the passenger seat and pushed the door open. ‘Want a lift?’ he asked.

  A black-and-white sheepdog was in the back, pushing its face eagerly towards her with a wide grin.

  ‘Yes, please,’ said Thea without hesitation. ‘I’m getting soaked.’ She didn’t have to apologise for her dog or her wet feet, as she might in a proper car. She lifted Hepzie in ahead of her, and climbed up onto the grubby seat. When she slammed the door behind her, she was aware of a rich smell that could only be labelled as ‘farmyard’. It was lovely, and she sighed.

  ‘Where to?’ he asked.

  ‘Daglingworth. Lower End, if that’s all right. Is it terribly out of your way?’

  ‘Terribly,’ he said cheerfully. ‘I was going to North Cerney. Totally different direction. You’ll owe me.’ His accent was that of any educated middle-aged Englishman, with no rolled rs or archaic grammar. ‘This is Rags,’ he added. ‘She’s an old girl now.’

  Thea reached back and gave the collie her hand to sniff. ‘Hello, Rags,’ she said.

  ‘Did you break down or something?’

  ‘Oh, no. I decided to walk across the fields. I had no idea it was going to rain. It was fine when I set out.’

  ‘Not local, are you?’

  ‘No. I’m house-sitting for a couple of weeks. I like to explore when I’m on a job. It gets a bit boring otherwise.’

  ‘House-sitting?’ He repeated it as if the words and the concept were both entirely new to him. ‘Who for?’

  ‘They’re called Foster. Do you know them?’

  He frowned. ‘He’s not the auctioneer, is he? The Cheltenham one. Does antiques and stuff.’

  ‘Might be. I don’t know what they do, actually. If it is him, there aren’t any antiques in the house.’

  ‘Don’t worry – I’m not planning to burgle them.’

  ‘Oh no – sorry. I didn’t mean that.’ She was hot with embarrassment and he laughed. She babbled on. ‘They’ve gone to Australia for a wedding. Makes a change from cruises, at least. They seem to be a real growth industry.’

  He snorted. ‘Chance’d be a fine thing.’

  She managed a faint laugh of her own, thinking this man was just about the last person ever to find himself on a cruise liner. ‘Anyway. I’m Thea Osborne. It’s very nice of you to give me a ride, I must say.’

  ‘Doesn’t happen so much any more. You were brave to take me up on it.’

  ‘Desperate, more like. I was talking to some women an hour ago. I should have asked them to take me back, if I’d known it’d rain.’

  ‘You mean those idiot protesters, I suppose? I saw them in that Freelander, outside the church.’ He shook his head. ‘You don’t want to get mixed up with them. They’re all crazy.’

  ‘I did wonder,’ said Thea, feeling briefly disloy
al. Tiffany, for one, had been perfectly nice and not at all crazy.

  ‘You can’t imagine. There’s a dozen or more of them, men as well. Never sure who’s going to join them next. All they do is find things to complain about. They make a lot of people very angry, I can tell you.’

  ‘Including you?’

  ‘Yes, including me. They’ve got no idea what it’s like trying to run a decent farm with a bloody great debt around your neck and prices going nowhere. Do they think I want to sell land? Nobody wants to do that. My dad’ll come back and haunt me for it, any time now. But it’s a scrappy bit, off in a corner, and they asked me if I’d part with it. It was never my idea. Some bloke knocks on the door one day and says it’s worth a hundred grand as a building plot. Good access, nice outlook – all the boxes ticked. So what am I going to do? That sort of money doesn’t come along more than once. It’s one acre, for God’s sake. I’ve got another hundred and four that’s still going to be part of the “natural landscape”, as they keep calling it. You know the latest thing – they told the council they’d found a rare orchid growing there, which couldn’t hope to survive being moved or built around. All I had to do was put some bullocks in there and that’d be curtains for the orchid. Madness. What else can you call it?’

  They had turned right onto a similar lane, and then right again. The road had trees on one side, reminding Thea of many others across the region. She looked out at the wet scene and said nothing. The driver was ranting every bit as excessively as Sophie had done. Had she blundered into a wholesale war, in which nobody could think of anything other than their grievances?

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, as her silence finally registered. ‘You probably don’t have any idea what I’m talking about.’

  ‘I got the gist,’ she said.

  ‘It’s a nightmare,’ he went on. ‘Though there’s other farmers who get it even worse. The ones who support the badger cull are lucky if they ever get a decent night’s sleep. They harass them in the small hours. But the police say nobody’s breaking any laws. We just have to stick it out and wait for the gang to move on to some other obsession somewhere else. What do they expect to gain, anyway?’ he burst out loudly. ‘Do they want to stop all new building altogether?’

  Silently, Thea tried to justify the protesters, having always instinctively sided with any efforts to preserve the landscape, and having found most newly built Cotswolds houses to be too big and far too yellow. They were ostentatious demonstrations of wealth, in most cases, she judged. Probably owned by wealthy Russians or Saudis, and no use at all in providing homes for ordinary local families.

  They were at the big intersection, with late-afternoon traffic quite heavy along the main road. The Land Rover driver seized a small gap and got hooted at as a result. ‘Careful!’ squeaked Thea.

  ‘Don’t worry. I know what I’m doing.’ He sounded offended.

  ‘Sorry. I’m a nervous passenger. Ignore me.’

  ‘Just take my advice and don’t get involved with those loonies. They’re parasites, you know. They’ll drag you in if they think you can be of any use to them, and then just drop you again. They do nothing but harm. Most of them come from the other end of the country – what brings them here, I can’t imagine.’

  ‘I’m only here for two weeks,’ she said. ‘I doubt if they think I’m worth bothering with. They didn’t seem very keen to talk to me, anyway, when I met them. They were too busy talking about somebody’s boyfriend.’

  He gave a huff of impatience, and turned left at the crossroads that was Daglingworth. ‘Up here somewhere, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘That’s right. But you can drop me here, where it’s easy to turn. I can walk the last bit.’

  ‘I’m Jack Handy, by the way.’ He pulled up at the side of the road. ‘Thanks for listening to me. I s’pose I sounded pretty much of a nutcase myself, going on like that.’

  ‘No problem,’ she said. ‘And thanks for the lift. You’re very kind.’

  He grinned at that. ‘Not many people think so,’ he said.

  Chapter Four

  The nameplate on the Fosters’ front wall, announcing ‘Galanthus House’ was not as welcoming as ‘Bide A While’ or ‘Journey’s End’ might have been, but she was glad to get back into its sheltering portals. She had forgotten to enquire as to the significance of the name – some sort of plant, she suspected.

  It was half past four. Nearly time to feed the dogs and think of something for herself. It would be eight or so before she could phone Drew, as she was itching to do. The intervening hours would pass slowly, as she knew from past experience. Supervising dogs, taking Gwennie outside, unpacking, working out how to operate the various controls for the television – all these diversions and more only took her to six o’clock. Accustomed to similar spells of inactivity in the first days of a house-sit, she pottered in the kitchen, frying herself two eggs and a fishcake, that came from her own grocery supplies. The Fosters had made it clear they expected her to see to her own catering requirements, only using condiments and sauces from their cupboards.

  She elected to listen to the radio, rather than sit in front of the TV, with the news full of the usual extreme weather events and alarming economic figures. Nothing she need bother about, she decided.

  Her mobile was fully charged and very much more central to her existence than it had been before things had started to happen between her and Drew. She sent him a steady stream of texts and even photos from time to time. But nothing came close to the pleasure she derived from a real conversation and hearing his voice, as far as satisfaction went. And that was a poor second to being in the same room with him, meeting his gaze and touching his skin.

  There were other people she could contact, of course – first amongst them being Jessica, her police officer daughter. She had neglected Jess rather seriously in recent months, feeling guilty mainly because she didn’t feel guilty about it – which made Drew laugh. The girl was twenty-three, qualified, busy, sociable. She didn’t need her mother very much. But other women still hovered over their daughters well past that age, expecting to know every detail of their lives and to have their advice heeded. There was definitely a rule of some sort somewhere that Thea suspected she was breaking. The breaking of rules was part of her nature, it seemed, especially in recent times of surveillance and interference and intolerance of differences. Every time she heard anybody talking about it as an age of individualism, she scoffed. As far as she could see, it was the exact opposite. To run counter to the prevailing tide of opinion was to attract the most extreme opprobrium and even the attention of the police, if they suspected you of hating someone.

  When the mobile trilled at her, she leapt to grab it, thinking Drew had found a moment to call her earlier than usual. But it was a different number showing on the screen. ‘Hello?’ she said.

  ‘Thea. It’s Damien. Where are you?’

  ‘Damien? For heaven’s sake – what’s happened? Is it Mum?’

  ‘No, no. Don’t panic. It’s nothing like that. Where are you?’ he asked again.

  ‘A little place called Daglingworth. You won’t have heard of it. Why do you want to know?’

  ‘Just curious. I can never keep track of you these days, with that boyfriend and everything.’

  Were older brothers meant to supervise their sisters, then, like a mother with a grown-up daughter, she wondered irritably. Damien had always been someone to avoid as much as possible, with his prissy judgements and tendency to over-control everyone. As older brother to three sisters, he had assumed responsibilities that nobody had ever actually accorded him.

  ‘So …?’ she prompted. She didn’t like to have the phone tied up for long, when all she wanted was to speak to Drew.

  ‘Listen. I’ve got some news.’ His voice was oddly unsure, even shy – which was highly unusual.

  ‘What?’ Already she had guessed that he was going to take holy orders, or sell all his goods and become a hermit. Damien had embraced religion some fifteen years a
go and had become difficult to talk to ever since. Occasional attempts to convert one or other of his sisters never came to anything.

  ‘Judy’s pregnant.’

  ‘Good God!’ Despite repeated requests that everyone in the family refrain from such expletives, the habit was far too deep to change. And perhaps this time, he would deem it appropriate anyway. ‘That’s amazing.’

  ‘I know. We can hardly believe it. It’s due in August, which doesn’t seem very far off. We had no idea until last week.’

  Thea tried to do the calculations. ‘She’s four months on, then?’

  ‘Sixteen weeks,’ he agreed.

  ‘And she’s forty-four – is that right?’

  ‘Not quite, but she will be when it’s born. A baby, Thea! At our age!’

  ‘Yes,’ she said faintly. ‘It’s hard to imagine.’ And it was. Judy had a PhD in numerology, which had apparently fitted quite readily into Damien’s religious faith and practice. She worked as some sort of consultant to a perfectly mainstream financial institution, which supposedly did at least involve an understanding of numbers.

  ‘We never even dreamt …’ He was obviously trying to say something about how the creature had been conceived, but was too embarrassed. ‘We thought it was … you know, the menopause.’

  At least he didn’t call it The Change, Thea thought. ‘I gather that happens a lot,’ she said, wondering with a distinct horror whether it could ever happen to her. ‘People seem to cope pretty well. You’re both in good health, at least.’

  ‘You are meant to offer congratulations,’ he said, sounding stiff and awfully old.

  ‘Take it as read. What does Mum think? Have you told Jocelyn? What about Emily?’

  ‘Mum’s delighted. She likes babies. And I’m calling Jocelyn next, after you.’ The question about their other sister was ignored.

  ‘You’re right about Mum. Well, thanks for telling me. I appreciate it. I’ll come and see you sometime. Maybe over Easter. I need to go now – sorry. You’ll be fine. Tell Judy from me, she’ll be a great mother.’