Revenge in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘In the garage. They wouldn’t have seen it.’

  He made a little shrug and smiled. ‘I’ll leave the questions to the police. You don’t want to have to say it all twice. Congratulations, by the way, on handling it all so capably. Fire blanket and coat – exactly what we’d have recommended. If it’s any consolation, I don’t think you were in much danger. There isn’t a lot to encourage a good blaze just here. Can’t have been too much smoke, either. The walls aren’t black.’

  They were, however, smudged with grey blotches in places. ‘The carpet will have to be replaced, though. And one of the coats hanging up was burning when I came down.’

  He looked at the coats. ‘Lucky that didn’t spread, then.’

  ‘It’s not a very Cotswoldy thing to do, is it?’ she burst out. ‘I mean – you associate it more with inner cities and family feuds. And gangs. Or insurance scams.’ She remembered a dreadful story of a man who set fire to a house and killed a large number of his own children. ‘And it’s pretty stupid, as well,’ she added with feeling. The sweet tea was evidently working, as she stood in the kitchen doorway filling up with anger.

  ‘That’s better,’ approved Fireman George Kemp. ‘Look, I’ll stay till the crime chaps show up, if you like. I can sit in there and write my report.’

  ‘You don’t have to. I’ll be all right. It’s lucky I managed to get myself dressed before you got here. I came down in bare feet, when I realised what was happening. As it is, these are yesterday’s things. I need to go and change.’

  He smiled distantly. ‘I’ve known people die because they stopped to get dressed. Amazing, when you think about it.’

  ‘The power of cultural taboos,’ she agreed. ‘I can see that a lot of people would rather die than stand in the street stark naked.’

  ‘We give them blankets. One of the first things we do. I’ll just hang on for a bit, while you sort yourself out,’ he finished kindly.

  She went upstairs and pulled on the warmest clothes she’d brought with her, hoping to stop the shivering that still beset her. Hepzie went with her, leaving Gwennie to guard the fireman. Gwennie seemed to be rather enjoying the whole business. Thea’s thoughts remained scrambled, fixated on the mentality of a person who could deliberately fill a bottle with petrol and push it into a house, quite unable to predict the exact consequences. Not least, she realised, a very long prison sentence if they were caught. Throughout history, the setting of fire to things had been considered a heinous crime. Children with arsonistic tendencies must always be firmly quelled – she remembered her own brother, in a rare moment of disobedience, getting into extreme trouble at school for throwing a lighted match into a roller towel in the boys’ lavatories, and causing a minor conflagration. She had been impressed and rather amused at his mortification. But the abiding lesson was that fire had a mind of its own, and quickly got out of control. You treated it with respect and kept matches in a safe place.

  Downstairs, she encouraged George Kemp to get back to his duties and leave her to gather herself together. ‘I’m perfectly all right now,’ she said.

  ‘If I were you, I’d bale out, and let the house fend for itself. You’ve earned your fee already, and you’re going to be shaky for a day or two yet.’

  ‘I can’t do that,’ she said, automatically. ‘They won’t do it again, will they?’

  ‘I don’t suppose they will,’ he agreed. ‘But the cops’ll tell you the same thing.’

  ‘I can manage them, don’t worry.’

  Two unfamiliar police officers arrived at eleven-fifteen, and elicited the whole story from her. Their eyes widened with admiration at her capable behaviour, but they said little. They gathered fibres and carefully bagged the melted plastic bottle. The fire officer had left them an official report, which they read attentively. They measured and re-enacted, one of them going outside and operating the letter-box flap. ‘Pretty amateurish,’ one of them muttered. ‘Lucky – or unlucky, I should say – the thing caught light at all. It’s not as easy as people think to burn a house down.’

  ‘Was it petrol, then?’ Thea asked. She had hovered and watched them, despite being well aware that they would rather she didn’t.

  ‘Probably,’ said one. ‘Put it in a bottle and fit a bung of cotton wool or something. Set light to it and throw. It generally explodes and spreads the flammable fluid over a wide area. Plastic doesn’t work as well as glass.’

  Rather belatedly, she thought, they asked for contact details for Mr and Mrs Foster. ‘Do you have to tell them? It’ll spoil their holiday,’ she pleaded.

  The men gave her a look, almost identical on the two faces. ‘This is a serious crime, madam. We have no choice in the matter. We need to know whether they have any ideas as to who did this.’

  Thea gave them the Australian phone number the Fosters had given her and left the rest to them. ‘They’ve gone to a wedding,’ she said. ‘It’s in the middle of this week. I think tomorrow, actually. You won’t want them to come home early, will you? All that way!’

  They were interrupted by a woman approaching from the road. The white coveralls worn by the officers were as big a giveaway as there could ever be, Thea realised. ‘What in the world happened?’ asked Sheila Whiteacre, her blonde head jutting forward in her eagerness for information.

  ‘Just a little—’ Thea began, before one of the men laid a hand on her arm.

  ‘Can’t tell you just yet, madam,’ he said. ‘Nothing to be concerned about. Might you be a neighbour?’

  ‘Not really. Baunton.’

  ‘Right. But you know Mrs Osborne, do you?’

  ‘We met yesterday.’ Wide-eyed, she gazed through the open door at the blackened hall carpet. ‘Was there a fire?’

  Thea nodded briefly, feeling like a traitor.

  Sheila evidently had little fear of contravening police orders. ‘Somebody tried to burn this house down? With you in it? Good God, that’s appalling!’

  Thea nodded again.

  ‘They must have assumed it was empty, surely? They’d never have done it if they thought you’d be trapped. And the dogs.’

  ‘Gwennie raised the alarm. She was a hero.’

  ‘Your people must have done something to annoy somebody, then. Something rather awful, I’d guess.’

  ‘Madam,’ thundered the policeman. ‘Speculation at this stage is very unhelpful. If you have any information that you think would help, please come to the police station and make a statement.’

  ‘No, I haven’t. I don’t know the people who live here. But I think I might be allowed to express some normal human sympathy.’ She addressed Thea again. ‘You know you’re always welcome to come to us. If you lose your nerve, I mean. I’m sure I would.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Thea. ‘That’s very kind of you.’ She resisted a strong urge to just pack up and accept the offer. ‘My daughter’s coming tomorrow. I’ll see what she thinks. But I’m not scared to stay here. I don’t think the fire-raiser knew I was here. And I’m quite sure he won’t be coming back. Nobody would be that stupid.’

  ‘True.’ Sheila nodded decisively. ‘Well – the offer remains.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Thea again.

  It was one o’clock when she finally had the house to herself again. She was hungry, thirsty and unsettled. There was a real risk that the Fosters would feel so agitated and bewildered that they’d decide to fly home after the wedding and abort her fortnight in Daglingworth. But hadn’t they made it clear that nothing whatever would be allowed to do that? Wasn’t it more likely that they would content themselves with police assurances that nothing further could be done, and their house-sitter was willing to carry out the original commission?

  She found herself hoping they wouldn’t be in any rush to come back. Why did she hope that, she wondered? What possible reason did she have to want to stay in a place where people were committing vicious acts of violence? She concluded it was more that she did not want to go home to Witney. Doing that would make it impossible to avoid
a host of implications, financial, romantic and professional. Everything hinged on everything else, the consequences of one decision spreading across all areas of her life. And she felt unequal to deciding anything without a contribution from Drew.

  It was much easier to concentrate on events in the Cotswolds that centred on other people’s lives. Even thinking about Damien and his baby, or Maggs and hers, was preferable to estimating how much money her house might be worth and which items of furniture she ought to dispose of. It made her feel like a retired person downsizing, instead of a woman in her prime, with many decades ahead of her.

  The dogs ought to be given some attention, she decided. Gwennie was still glowing from her small act of accidental heroism, turning her cloudy eyes up to Thea’s face every few minutes in a show of affection. Hepzie was plainly bored and unimpressed, making a big show of her feelings by jumping on and off the sofa and sighing.

  ‘Come on, then,’ said Thea. ‘We’ll go and look at the church again.’

  It was a short, easy walk, either by road or footpath, already proving perfect for Gwennie’s limited capacity. It was possible to turn it into a circular stroll, which would take well under half an hour to complete. As always, there were public paths in all directions, and for a moment she was tempted to lengthen the walk southwards, where the map showed a dotted line running directly into the famous Cirencester Park. ‘We’ll do that another day,’ she decided. At the back of her mind was the idea that she ought to stay close to Galanthus House for the rest of the day, either as guard, or simply to be available in the event of further police visits.

  There were no people about. Nobody jumped out at her to ask why a fireman and two policemen had called at the house early on a Monday. The few scattered neighbours who might have noticed something had probably been off down the motorway to work, or glued to their computers in a back room. The sudden appearance of Sheila Whiteacre began to seem rather odd, the more she thought about it. Had she perhaps been planning to call in for a chat and been deterred by the police officers? Did she have news about the dead Danny, or even questions for Thea about her encounters on Saturday?

  Which set Thea thinking all over again about the body in the quarry.

  Chapter Nine

  To distract herself from futile speculation she went into the church, which she came to from the east along a track which suddenly opened out into a wide area with car park and large houses. She tied the dogs to the porch gate, and pushed open the big wooden door which she faintly recalled as being five hundred years old or thereabouts. Inside there were three Saxon stone carvings which she knew were renowned for their powerful simplicity. She gazed at them for a while, thinking how impossible it was to recapture the passions and motives of the people who made them, a thousand years before. The figures were out of proportion, as if drawn by a child, and it was hard to imagine that they had inspired reverence at any stage of their existence. The main source of awe, she found, was that they had survived for so long. Similar amazing survivals had been preserved in numerous small Cotswold churches, their origins essentially mysterious. The scenes depicted were amusing, more than anything else, in this sophisticated age. Spiritual inspiration or encouragement was very far removed after so long.

  Outside again, she felt a sudden chill from an easterly breeze and thought how typically March it was. It would be nice to light a log fire and spend a cosy evening with a book and warm dogs. Although any thought of setting a fire going gave her pause. Don’t be silly, she scolded herself. It would be very inconvenient to go through the rest of her life afraid to strike a match.

  She caught herself counting the hours before she could phone Drew again. Despite breaking the rule the previous evening, she knew she mustn’t do it again. Nobody could blame Stephanie and Timmy for objecting to their father spending an hour on the phone instead of reading them their bedtime stories or supervising their bath time.

  She took the dogs down the little road to the junction where the appealing herb garden beckoned. No traffic passed, and she let the dog leads droop loosely from her hand. But she was careful not to let them go altogether. A painful lesson had been learnt in Lower Slaughter about the hazards of escaping dogs. Gwennie might well have hidden energies, capable of making a dash for it if the whim seized her. Old dogs could take you by surprise, as she knew from experience.

  As Galanthus House came into view, she felt a strong disinclination to go back into there. ‘Where do I want to be then?’ she muttered to herself. The answer was so obvious that she smiled. Drew’s little house, with its burial ground full of saplings and bulbs and pieces of stone and wood, was her favourite place in the world now. Time spent away from it was simply a waste, a sort of treading water that left her feeling detached and unemotional. The shock of the fire was an exception; the discovery of a dead man in a quarry was not. She found herself really not caring very much about Nella and Sophie and their fellow protesters. They didn’t seem particularly pleasant people, anyway. Only Tiffany and her parents had got through to her, charming as they had been. As for Jack Handy, she rather wished she had not accepted his offer of a lift and thereby got herself peripherally involved in the whole business. Whatever possessed the dratted man to give her as some kind of alibi, when it was obviously not enough to clear him of suspicion?

  Jeremy Higgins probably hadn’t even heard about the fire at Galanthus House. He would be spending every minute on interviewing witnesses, reading background information on the victim, and searching for evidence to incriminate a murderer. Thea had been close to many such investigations over the past three years, but still had a shaky grasp of precisely how the police arrived at their final conclusions. So often it turned out that somebody unexpected gave the game away, or the truth emerged sideways, associated with something else entirely. This line of thought took her to a very unappetising idea: what if the fire she had been faced with that morning was connected to the death of Danny Compton two days before? However hard she tried, she could not see how this might be, unless some idiot thought she had killed him and was wreaking revenge. That was laughably unlikely. Danny had definitely been murdered – as Higgins had confirmed – and probably it was because of his activities as a protester. He had driven somebody beyond the point of reason. It ought not, she thought, be too difficult to pin down the individual concerned.

  She found herself looking forward intensely to seeing Jessica again and running everything past her. There were so many questions hanging in the air and the wait for answers was paralysing. What would the Fosters do about the fire? Were the police going to question her again? How much should she tell Drew about it? However hard she looked, she could find no certainty in any direction.

  She made herself a mug of tea and a small stack of cheese sandwiches when she got back indoors, thinking that her eating habits were becoming rather odd. There was a randomness to the timing that some people might think eccentric. The prospect of a substantial pub lunch the next day with Jessica began to gain appeal and she consulted her map to find a likely venue. The Bathurst Arms in North Cerney looked the most accessible. They might even walk to it if the day was fair.

  And then DI Higgins himself was at the door again, with a female person slightly behind him. Thea assumed it was a new young detective she had not yet met. ‘This is DC Gordon,’ he introduced. ‘She’s only just started in CID, so she’s observing, that’s all.’ He looked as if the presence of the observer was something of a trial to him.

  ‘Come in, then,’ Thea invited. ‘You’ll have come about the fire, I suppose.’

  ‘Not really. That’s all in hand, as far as I know. It’s more of a long shot about the victim in the quarry.’

  ‘Danny Compton,’ she agreed. ‘What about him?’

  ‘Just wondering whether you’ve heard any more about his background. Seeing the way you get people to talk, I thought you might know more than we do about it.’

  ‘Not a murmur,’ she admitted, with a pang of regret. ‘Sorry.’
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  ‘Doesn’t matter. We’ve got all we need from the girlfriend, when it comes to it. There’s not really a problem – just that it seems a bit odd the way the parents don’t seem too bothered about him.’

  ‘Don’t they?’

  He rubbed his brow. ‘Actually, I’m not sure they’ve been told the full facts. There’s been some trouble getting to see them face-to-face. We get the feeling there’s some sort of rift.’

  ‘Awkward,’ Thea sympathised. ‘I suppose lots of people don’t speak to their parents.’

  Higgins nodded and chewed his lip. ‘Right,’ he said reluctantly. ‘But when there’s a murder, we need to find out as much as we can about the victim. Friends, relatives, employers. All the obvious stuff. Miss Davidson told us almost every detail of the past year of his life, took us to his flat, and explained all about his freelance job. Not entirely useful.’

  ‘What was the job?’

  Higgins grinned. ‘He’s a locksmith, specialising in cars. Makes new keys when people lose theirs. Goes all over the country, apparently. Not been doing it long. Set up for himself, with all the gear.’

  ‘So what’s the issue? Assuming there is one, or why would you be here?’

  ‘Just a feeling there’s something missing. Something we’re not being told about him.’

  ‘He’s a protester, remember. It comes with the territory, keeping a low profile.’ She found the whole idea of avoiding leaving much of a trail rather exciting, already impatient to tell it all to Drew. ‘What else would you expect to find?’

  Higgins looked uncomfortable. ‘Phone, car – for a start. The car’s registered in the girlfriend’s name. She said it was an insurance thing, because he already had the van full of locksmithing stuff. And the phone’s a pay-as-you-go thing. Anonymous.’

  Thea shrugged. ‘Doesn’t sound very unusual to me, especially the phone. I’ve seen the way they use them – they’d be daft to advertise where they were, and who was using them. They do break the law, I imagine, quite a lot of the time. They harass people in the night.’