Revenge in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  At least I’m not spending any money, she thought to herself, as she turned back to Galanthus House. Mooching around the country lanes with the dog was a gratifyingly cheap way to pass the time and, weather permitting, would amply fill the coming days, without any need to engage with activists, dead or alive.

  She automatically checked her phone when she got back. It had been a sporadic progression from never even thinking about the thing to a pitiful reliance on it to maintain contact with Drew. Other people used it to call or text her, but not on the same regular basis. It had some abilities that she had come to value, such as access to websites and use as a camera, but she had not yet dived into the world of apps or games. She suspected she was just too old to feel comfortable letting her whole life be controlled by a small electronic gadget. As for Facebook, she still utterly failed to see the slightest appeal to it.

  There was a text message.

  HI, MA. WHERE ARE YOU? I’VE GOT A DAY OFF THIS WEEK. CAN I VISIT, TUES? JESS. XX

  It had happened before, of course. Not just Jessica, but both her sisters and her mother had joined her on various house-sitting commissions, to a mixed reception. The company was welcome, but the complications that came with it much less so. Her relatives tended to show up with the aim of pouring out their latest troubles. They saw her duties regarding the houses as minimal and unimportant. As far as they were concerned, she was having yet another little holiday, all expenses paid, and they may as well share in the bounty.

  Without further deliberation, she called her daughter back. ‘I’m in the Cotswolds again,’ she said, after brief preambles. ‘It’s all beautifully springlike and peaceful.’

  ‘So can I come?’

  ‘Of course you can. It’ll be lovely to see you. We can investigate one of the pubs.’

  ‘No murders, then?’ Jessica teased. Murders did happen a lot when Thea was around.

  ‘No. Some chap fell into a quarry, apparently. That’s all.’

  ‘Fell? Are you sure he wasn’t pushed?’

  ‘I know nothing about it. I’ve met a few people who knew him, that’s all.’

  ‘Right. So Tuesday, then? Tell me where you are. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘You’re talking to me now.’ It was a shameful evasion, which she knew even as the words left her lips, but she was in no mood to provide counselling for a young policewoman, even if she was her daughter.

  ‘Come on, Ma. Don’t be like that.’

  ‘Don’t call me Ma,’ said Thea automatically. It was a recent development that she very much disliked.

  ‘I’ve got a dilemma and I want your advice. That’s what you’re for, remember? Most mothers never stop giving advice. Why do you have to be different?’

  Most mothers jogged Thea’s memory. ‘Did you hear about your Aunt Judy?’

  ‘What? What about her?’

  ‘She’s pregnant. You’ll have a new cousin.’ Every time she thought of it, it seemed more ludicrous.

  ‘Wow! How did that happen?’

  ‘I’m sure they’ll be happy to explain it to you, if you ask them. I had to stop him before he talked me through it.’

  ‘He? Uncle Damien told you? When?’

  ‘Yesterday evening. I think he was working through the family. I imagine Jocelyn will say all the right things. She likes babies.’

  ‘Everybody likes babies when they’re your own relations. I think it’s lovely. Don’t be such a curmudgeon about it.’

  ‘I’ll try. It’s just such a surprise. I can’t really imagine it enough to be happy or excited about it.’

  ‘It’s good to have plenty of people in that generation. They’ll have to keep you in your old age, remember.’

  ‘So they will. I’d better buy it a lot of educational toys and books, then, to make sure it gets a good job.’

  ‘You’ll have to pretend to be pleased. They must be terrified. How old are they?’

  ‘He’s forty-nine and she’s forty-four. Nearly. You must admit that’s awfully old to be first-time parents. I was twenty when I had you.’

  ‘And now you’re old enough to be a grandmother. Yes, I know. So what?’

  ‘I don’t want to be a grandmother. And your gran’s got plenty of grandchildren, so she doesn’t need another one.’

  ‘Well, I think it’s lovely,’ insisted Jessica. ‘Now tell me where you are, and I’ll be there before lunch on Tuesday.’

  ‘Great.’

  The idea that her brother and his wife might be frightened had not occurred to her. Damien had never shown fear in his life. He had embraced religion in his early thirties and sustained an unshakeable faith ever since. This had given him a patina of complacency that caused irritation, bewilderment and occasional envy in his sisters. The message he put out was – I have everything sorted, and if you are so blind and stupid as to reject what I have to offer, then that’s your problem.

  ‘It’s not proper religion,’ Jocelyn had complained once. ‘Really religious people have doubts and dark nights of the soul, and endless moral dilemmas. He doesn’t do any of that. He’s so bloody certain all the time.’

  Thea had agreed. So perhaps this baby was God’s way of showing her brother that the way was not always smooth, and that he’d had it much too easy up to then.

  What would they do if the baby was found to be defective on the scan? She had no idea what Damien thought about abortion, but the assumption had to be that he was against it. Thea herself, with her low levels of maternal passion, would have found it a gruesome decision to have to make. In the end, she thought she’d have ducked it and kept whatever child fate landed her with. While not actively seeking to have a second baby after Jessica, she believed she would have accepted an accidental one with good grace. She wasn’t sure people should have quite that much control over something so fundamental – which she supposed was very much out of line with orthodox thinking. Going against nature, as Carl very often remarked, could rebound on you rather painfully at times.

  And then a small voice whispered to her – Just be careful the same thing doesn’t happen to you and Drew, then. That would be a very neat revenge on her, she realised. It would ally her with Damien, and probably separate her from Drew. The idea gave her the shivers. She was only a year older than Judy. It could happen. But of course it wasn’t going to, even if – as everybody knew – births and deaths always came in threes.

  She made herself a modest and rather late lunch, and began a list of shopping for the following day. Cirencester was close by, and well worth an hour or so pottering up and down the streets. Except she’d be lucky to find anything so mundane as bread and milk in any of the town-centre shops. There would be a Waitrose somewhere – she knew she’d visited it on previous occasions, but had forgotten exactly where it was.

  The afternoon loomed ahead of her, as Sunday afternoons so often did. The risk of loneliness and self-pity made her feel cross and determined to ensure they didn’t take hold. She wanted Drew. She could see his face before her, feel his warm hugs and hear his hearty laugh. But Sundays were his sacred time with the children, and she seldom found herself included as part of the family. She was not part of the family, with Karen dead so short a time. There had been a few wintry walks since Christmas, and a dozen or more evenings together, which extended into the night, but not to the following morning. She had driven all the way back to Witney in the small hours, feeling both lucky and unlucky, blessed by Drew but thwarted by his children, with whom things were still liable to be awkward and difficult. Stephanie had a way of looking at her that made her itch with embarrassment.

  So, not for the first time, she found herself with no choice but to speculate on local happenings. The people she’d met were interesting, to say the least. Sheila Whiteacre was a delight, while Sophie and Nella were intriguing. There were loose ends in abundance, now the identity of the dead man was established. Jessica’s immediate suggestion that foul play might be involved was an added ingredient to the story, raising a host of possibl
e motives even amongst the handful of people Thea had met so far. There would be others, if she cared to go out and find them: Ricky Whiteacre, for one, and people she still knew nothing about.

  The obvious scenario was that Danny had been prominent in a group intent on forcing a number of issues that locals might prefer left just as they were. Most people grumbled gently about change, but adapted to it well enough when it came. A large proportion of the residents of Cotswold villages were rich and powerful enough to organise life as they wanted it to be and ensure that they kept well clear of any nuisance. A wind farm on the top of Cleeve Hill was never going to happen. Fracking was unlikely. The landscape itself was relatively safe from predation, other than the erection of new houses in large numbers. Nobody liked new houses, however loudly the need for them might be asserted. It was always a need more acute somewhere else. All those neglected, weedy sites in the scruffy end of town – towns such as Reading, Croydon, even perhaps Guildford, but definitely not Cirencester or Winchcombe. They weren’t towns at all in that sense. They were oases of history, impervious to the vagaries of population and politics.

  Danny would inevitably have fallen foul of Farmer Handy and his intention of selling his field for building, along with the rest of the activists. But it was a big stretch from that to suspecting Handy of deliberately killing the man. Why Danny, when there were so many other protesters who would rise up to take his place? Besides, the house would or wouldn’t get built, regardless of who died amongst those who opposed it.

  Maybe it was the badgers, then. Dairy farmers wanted the animals dead and gone. The government was cautiously on their side, but very conscious of the opposite view. The whole question of what to do with annoying wildlife – foxes, badgers, squirrels, rabbits – never really went away, and was never properly understood by politicians. It wasn’t altogether understood by Thea, either. She just knew that it was very far from simple, with whole new layers involved when it came to badgers and foxes.

  The speculating occupied about half an hour, as she sat in the living room with both dogs on the sofa beside her. Gwennie leant a tentative snout on her thigh, and sighed. Hepzie rolled her eyes and fidgeted. Outside it was dry and reasonably bright, with almost no passing traffic. Lower End was apparently in the universal shutdown mode that was the norm for the Cotswolds. Whatever activity there might be at the quarry was quite out of sight and earshot. In any case, it would surely all be over by this time.

  Restlessly, she extracted herself from the dogs and went to the door into the hallway. It was a more characterful house than the one in Bagendon, but much less so than the one inhabited by the Whiteacres. Mr and Mrs Foster were not obsessively tidy; not ashamed to let the stair carpet get frayed or the occasional spider to set up home over a window. Curious for more information about them, she went into the dining room and in a heap of papers on one corner of the table she found an opened letter from an estate agent, enclosing details of a house in Frome, Somerset, priced at something very much lower than Galanthus House must have been worth. So they were downsizing, or at least moving to a cheaper area – which happened to be not far from Drew and his green cemetery. It was none of her business, not relevant to her commission, but it aroused her interest. Mr Foster must be retiring, she supposed. Perhaps they knew people in Somerset. Perhaps Drew knew somebody they knew.

  Poor Gwennie, she thought. Such an old dog would be dreadfully traumatised by a change of environment. She’d never find her way around. Were the Fosters planning to have her put down before they moved? Or was it all just a tentative plan for the future, scheduled for two or three years’ hence, and simply getting a feel for prices and facilities in other parts of the country?

  And wasn’t it a bit peculiar to have the details sent on paper in a letter? Didn’t people do it all online these days? She remembered that her dealings with the Fosters had all been by phone from their first approach about house-sitting. A friend of a friend had passed them her name. She had not come across a computer in the house – but then people used iPads and even smaller gadgets to send their emails these days. And they took them along on holiday, leaving nothing in the house. Even so, Thea began to suspect that here was a highly unusual couple, not so very old, who did not engage in any online activity. It made her smile to think such people still existed.

  And so the afternoon drifted by, with no sense of urgency or obligation. At five she turned on the TV, and caught some local news, which made much of the discovery of a body in the Daglingworth quarry, but did not name the victim or the manner of his death. A little while later, a national news summary headlined a police raid on a nursing home in Somerset, which was suspected of either neglecting or actively killing a number of inmates. A whistleblower had drawn attention to the fact of a spate of deaths in a short time, with associated elements that might suggest all was not well.

  Thea knew instantly that the whistleblower was Drew. He had been taken seriously, to the extent that within hours the police had descended on the establishment. How did you ‘raid’ a nursing home? Did they batter down the door and dash down corridors shouting ‘Police!’? Almost certainly not. There’d be a quiet approach to the matron, or whatever the top person was called, and a request to see every scrap of documentation, with names of doctors and relatives and medications. But the media had got hold of it from the start. Probably listening in to police radio, she thought wryly.

  She broke the rule and phoned him.

  Drew was still agonising about his reckless reporting of the suspicious nursing home. The police had reacted quickly, and the place was already being investigated. ‘If they don’t find anything wrong, my career will be over,’ he wailed, plainly suffering from panic and regret. ‘They’ll know it was me – who else could it be? I’ll be blacklisted and scorned. I don’t know what made me do it.’

  ‘Conscience,’ she said.

  ‘I suppose so. It sounds horribly pretentious when you put it like that.’

  ‘Come on. You wouldn’t want your poor old mother starved to death in such a place – or whatever it is they did to them.’

  ‘No,’ he said doubtfully. ‘But it’s not so simple, is it? I mean – a lot of them probably want to get it all over with. They might be refusing food. You’re not allowed to force feed anybody, after all.’

  ‘That makes it worse,’ she said decisively. ‘You can’t let the idea catch on that these homes are really places to go to be finished off. They’re supposed to provide warmth and comfort and distraction and company in your final years. It’s supposed to be happy and interesting for the inmates.’

  ‘Right.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

  ‘Did they have dementia – your customers?’

  ‘Not that I know of. Let me think – one did, maybe. It was a niece who made the funeral arrangements in advance, but the old lady signed the forms herself. Why?’

  ‘I just thought that might make them more annoying for the staff, and more likely to refuse to eat, maybe.’

  They talked around the subject for a few more minutes, before Drew asked how things were going in the Cotswolds.

  ‘A man died in a quarry,’ she said. ‘They found him this morning.’ For the first time, the thought hit her that perhaps the body had been there when she’d walked past the previous day. He might have been just below her feet, perhaps not quite dead. She had actually looked down and thought it a dangerous spot. Had he been inaudibly crying for help? Had she mysteriously heard him telepathically? Until that moment, she had felt entirely removed from the death, only interested in an intellectual, theoretical fashion. ‘I passed that way on my walk yesterday,’ she added, slightly breathlessly.

  ‘An accident, then?’ said Drew, sounding as if he needed that to be the case.

  ‘Probably. He had a fiancée. I met her briefly, and her friends. He was one of the people protesting about local environmental threats. Specifically, a proposal to build a big new house somewhere near here.’

  ‘I see,’ he said abs
ently.

  ‘You should go. Where are the kids?’

  ‘Upstairs. I’m meant to be doing supper.’

  ‘I’ll phone again tomorrow. Eight o’clock.’

  ‘It’ll put the whole place out of business,’ he burst out. ‘The home, I mean. What have I done? Why the hell did I do it? I must have been mad.’

  ‘It’ll turn out right, you’ll see. Stop stressing about it. What does Maggs say?’

  ‘Nothing. She’s too busy being sick.’

  Only then did Thea remember that particular added layer of complication in Drew’s life. And if it was in his life, then it was in hers as well.

  ‘I’ll ring again tomorrow,’ she repeated and left him to his family.

  She fed the dogs and took them round the garden. Then she settled with the bland Sunday offerings provided by the television and did her best not to think very much. She wanted life to remain quiet and uneventful while she was in Daglingworth. It didn’t seem a lot to ask. But then, she had wanted it many times before and been denied her wish. Trouble followed her on so many of her house-sitting jobs. Trouble and malice and deception and fear had all dogged her footsteps from one village to another. People behaved badly much of the time. And Thea, with her sharp nose for connections and dissembling, was very often the linchpin in teasing out the truth of what had happened.

  Not this time, she resolved. If indeed it was a this time. If it did turn out that somebody had deliberately hurled the protester into the quarry, she wanted nothing to do with it. She had no reason at all to concern herself with it. She was still mentally insisting on this sort of approach when a police detective came to the door.

  Chapter Seven

  It was Jeremy Higgins, a familiar face from only a few months before, as well as occasions prior to that. He smiled ruefully and said, ‘Me again, I’m afraid.’