Folly

by Stella Cameron

Alex had only traveled a couple of miles between dry stone walls and frostbitten hedgerows when a farmer ventured from a gate, signaled with his crook, and a herd of sheep like puffed up marshmallows on dark sticks came pouring across the road. A sheepdog raced, belly to the ground, from one side of the group to the other, disappearing back into the exit field for stragglers before shooting out to funnel his charges to their destination and a good feed.

  When her breath started making clouds of vapor, Alex remembered to turn on the heater. With her thick coat she hadn’t felt the cold before. Alex Duggins had been watching sheep herded across roads, paths and tracks since her earliest memories.

  Duggins. Yes, she liked being Alex Duggins again. It felt right and it was who she was. Her marriage, or most parts of it, seemed far away. She was starting to heal in some ways.

  At last, the gates were closed and the roadway clear. She drove fairly slowly, on the lookout for more obstacles, until she made the final turn toward Bourton.

  As she got around the bend she saw a familiar red vehicle up on the left verge. Will Cummings’ panel van with the bonnet up.

  Will’s head and upper body emerged from the innards of the Volkswagen and he immediately jumped up and down and waved his arms.

  Smiling, she ran the Land Rover on to the verge and stopped in front of him. He arrived at her window as she got it rolled down. ‘Didn’t you think I’d see you?’ she chuckled. ‘Jumping jacks on a day like this will give you a heart attack. Or they’d give me one.’

  ‘That thing was just serviced,’ he sputtered. ‘I called the mechanic and his wife said he’s out and there’s no one else to come. Ah, that’s the way it is these days. Used to be a man’s work was his pride and he’d want to get here any way he could. Not now. They all feel too sodding important – beggin’ your pardon, but truth be told he’s probably in front of the telly watching Coronation Street.’

  ‘Let me help, Will.’ Alex was anxious. She wanted to get into London as quickly as possible.

  ‘Well—’ He looked her in the eye, then settled his attention on the distance where only snow-covered fields with a white pall hanging above them could be of interest. ‘Hmm. P’raps I should try myself a bit longer.’

  ‘That’s silly, Will. Lock it up and I’ll drive you until we can find someone to come and get it going – or give you a tow.’

  His gray woolen hat sat atop his head as if it would pop off at any second. Despite the cold he was perspiring and his face shone. His agitation was catching.

  ‘Not all of them work on diesel,’ he said. Finally he added: ‘Thank you, I’ll take you up on your offer,’ slammed down his bonnet and ran around to the passenger side of the Land Rover.

  As soon as he was buckled in, she took off again. ‘Shall I go into Bourton?’

  His sigh was huge. ‘To tell the truth, I’m in a pickle. I’ve got to get to London. Fast.’

  She glanced at him. ‘Where in London?’

  He drummed his fists on his thighs. ‘Any Tube station will do. I can get where I want easy enough.’

  Could he be going to Reverend Restrick, too? She dare not ask.

  ‘I’m going into London. I can take you where you need to go.’ She smiled. ‘As long as it isn’t Wapping or somewhere. I’d only get lost there.’

  He took a while to respond, then said, ‘Whereabouts are you going?’

  This wasn’t her strong suit, making things up on the fly. ‘I’m meeting some old friends from art school. They’re in Notting Hill.’ That wasn’t so far from Praed Street and St Mary’s but it wouldn’t give her real destination away.

  ‘I’ll be glad of that then, lass,’ he said, sounding as he had when she was a girl. ‘You’re an old hand at the drive but I bet I can show you a shorter way to the A429.’

  THIRTY-FIVE

  Beer wasn’t Tony’s drink of choice. He nursed a pint of local Ambler – which he could probably learn to love – afraid that if he drank the whiskey he preferred he’d go through too much, too fast. He could be sitting in the Black Dog a long time, repeatedly checking his watch and meeting Lily’s anxious glances.

  Each time he looked in her direction, she stared back while she rubbed at the same area of the bar.

  He needed his wits about him.

  Alex had only been gone … thirty minutes. With the roads the way they were she wouldn’t be moving fast. But she’d promised to call and that could be at any moment.

  It was too soon yet.

  He took out his mobile and put it on the table.

  Cathy Cummings arrived. She didn’t greet him, or seem to notice him, didn’t even greet Lily behind the bar, just got to work serving the straggle of customers making it in for lunch.

  The noise level was rising and Lily remembered to put some music on. One of the customers whooped, ‘Dirty Hat Band, yeah.’

  Lily was good at assessing a crowd.

  The inn door opened and Bill Lamb came in with Constable Smith. The younger man sniffed appreciatively at the lunch smells and was obviously pleased to be out of the cold.

  Lamb made straight for Tony but searched the whole room while he came. He nodded at Tony’s dad, who arrived and sat at the table.

  ‘Where’s Ms Bailey-Jones?’ Lamb asked, standing beside them. Smith got a little closer to the fire and Bogie got up to give him a sniff and a tail wag.

  ‘Not here at the moment,’ Tony said, chewing the side of a thumb, a nervous habit he’d forgotten years ago.

  ‘Where is she?’

  For once, Lamb’s pushy approach raised more pit-of-the-stomach foreboding than irritation. The man expected him to know where Alex was?

  ‘You aren’t usually here if she’s not, or so I’m told. Why did you come now?’

  ‘To have a drink.’

  ‘Don’t be smart with me. Is Will Cummings here?’

  Tony ran a hand around the back of his neck. Lily had brought his dad a coffee. ‘No, he isn’t. Alex said he was in a bit of a down mood and took off for the rest of the day. Cathy’s here.’ Although he couldn’t see her at the moment.

  ‘Damn.’

  Tony raised his eyebrows but his heart started to do odd things. ‘Where are you going with this, Lamb?’

  ‘You haven’t seen Alex today? She isn’t at the lodge, or her mother’s cottage. And you don’t have a clue where she is? You expect me to believe that?’

  Pushing his half-empty glass away, Tony struggled to keep his voice even. ‘I already said I saw her earlier. She isn’t here now, and I don’t know anything else.’

  Lamb stared him down.

  ‘What’s going on?’ He’d promised not to tell anyone where Alex had gone but he wasn’t feeling secure about any of his decisions right now.

  ‘Come to the parish hall, please. Now.’ He gestured to Smith and said something to him that Tony couldn’t hear. The constable went to the bar.

  Tony was instantly on his feet. ‘Something’s badly wrong, isn’t it?’ he said in a quiet voice, staring from his dad to Lamb. ‘You’re looking for Alex … and it sounds as if you’re looking for Will Cummings, too.’

  ‘I’ll come with you.’ The unmistakable loss of color in his father’s face did nothing for Tony’s confidence.

  ‘We’ll be back,’ Tony called to Lily, deliberately cheerful. ‘We aren’t done with those.’ He pointed to their glasses on his way to the door.

  The tea towel she’d been polishing with was wadded between Lily’s clenched hands. ‘I’ll be waiting, Tony,’ she told him and, for the first time he remembered, there were tears in her eyes.

  Getting to the parish hall on foot only took minutes.

  Uncomfortable minutes.

  Tony’s father strode along with his chin thrust forward, his hair a white halo in the sharp reflected light, and a silent attitude that didn’t invite conversation. Not that they were likely to say much with Lamb there.

  Too many vehicles for comfort crammed the sides of the road outside the hall. Tony didn’t like the van
with an aerial, or two others with locking compartments on the sides.

  Lamb sprinted ahead. James Harrison kept pace with Tony running up the front steps and inside.

  More trestle tables had been put into service and two officers worked over a map on the hanging boards. Each time an instruction was called out by one of a group gathered around a computer screen, several wearing headsets and mouthpieces, one of the two drew another line on the map.

  The place was freezing and all the officers wore their greatcoats. The smell of old coffee permeated the air and sandwich wrappers overflowed two bins.

  Lamb went to take up a place beside O’Reilly, and a man Tony recognized as Madden from an earlier encounter. Several constables concentrated on another screen. Lamb talked close beside his boss’s ear.

  ‘Has something else happened?’ Tony said. He made straight for O’Reilly and Lamb’s group.

  The group fell silent, but continued to watch the screen.

  ‘Was Alex still at the Black Dog when Will Cummings left?’ O’Reilly asked.

  Tony swallowed. ‘Yes. He’d already left when I got there. Is this significant?’

  ‘We wouldn’t be talking about it if it wasn’t,’ Lamb snapped, and got a quelling glance from his boss.

  ‘Come and look at this,’ O’Reilly said.

  Tony’s father went with him to stand behind the computer. The men and women moved to make room for them. ‘What are we looking at?’ his dad wanted to know.

  On the screen, a grainy video moved in a loop, repeating over and over again. A man walked from a building, paused to look in every direction and opened a folder file to check the contents, which looked to be scant.

  ‘Watch him walk,’ Lamb said. ‘Look at his face, or what you can see of it. Is he familiar?’

  Crouching, Tony gripped the edge of the table and stared closely at the screen. ‘Any hints? What am I looking at?’

  ‘That’s the library on Brunswick Road. In Gloucester,’ O’Reilly said. ‘We’ve been tracing the obituary that was pinned – or darted – to Alex’s kitchen table.’

  Tony turned to look at O’Reilly, ‘And?’

  ‘We think that man is leaving with the photocopy of that obituary. It’s from a magazine called Our Kind.’

  Incredulous, Tony turned back to the screen. ‘You mean that could be the man who was in Lime Tree Lodge?’

  Grunts were the only answers he got. His dad leaned over his shoulder. The hand he rested beside Tony’s turned white-knuckled. ‘Can you freeze the picture on the man and make him closer?’

  ‘Already done,’ O’Reilly said, hitting a key. ‘We had it isolated and they got rid of as much pixilation as they could.’

  The close up was still blurred. A man in a woolen hat. Stocky. Angry.

  ‘Doctor Harrison?’ O’Reilly said, touching that white-knuckled hand. ‘Tony, is it him?’

  ‘Oh, yeah. It’s Will Cummings,’ James Harrison said before Tony could answer.

  ‘Getting Cummings, and fast, is a priority, but we need to make sure Alex is in a safe place,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Are you sure you don’t know where she might be, Tony?’

  Protesting incoherently, Cathy Cummings was led in by Constable Smith, who looked more than gloomy at his task. He held Cathy’s upper arm as she tried to twist away.

  ‘Not back here,’ O’Reilly said and pointed to a chair in front of the table. ‘Hello, Mrs Cummings. Take a seat.’

  ‘I want to go home,’ she said quietly. ‘Please can I go home. I can’t help you with anything.’

  ‘She hasn’t so far, boss,’ Smith said unhappily. ‘Doesn’t know anything about anything.’

  O’Reilly smiled kindly at the woman. ‘We meet again, Cathy. Twice in one day. You were upset at the Derwinters.’

  Her expression changed, turned hard and angry. ‘Leonard said my boy meant nothing to him. Nothing to them. If it had been his boy who died in that river it would have meant something. Graham was a lovely little boy. Cornelius Derwinter tried to make it as right as he could but then …’ She looked startled and closed her mouth.

  ‘It’s all right,’ O’Reilly said. ‘Terrible thing, to lose your child.’

  ‘You can’t blame Will for feeling the way he does. The Black Dog has been his reason to get up in the morning. Cornelius couldn’t have meant the money to stop coming for us. He wanted us there. It was Leonard and Heather who interfered – but it was all going to be all right in the end if Alex would—’ Again the frightened, bewildered look.

  ‘Constable Smith is going to take you into the station, Cathy,’ O’Reilly said. ‘He’ll make sure you get to say your piece with a solicitor there. Always good to have a solicitor to guide you.’

  ‘I didn’t want anything to happen to Alex,’ Cathy muttered. ‘She’s kind, always was. If only she’d given up and gone away again.’ She let Smith guide her away.

  Tony met his father’s eyes. ‘Alex got a call from St Mary’s Hospital in London. Supposedly Reverend Restrick is asking for her and Mrs Restrick had a nurse make a call to Alex. She’s on her way there now.’

  By the time O’Reilly was on his feet he had car keys in one hand. ‘Do you know exactly what route she’d take?’ he asked Tony.

  ‘Yes.’ The shortest was obvious.

  ‘Do we have solid coordinates for her mobile yet?’ Lamb roared. ‘They’ve had long enough.’

  ‘Should do anytime now, Sarg,’ one of the line-drawers at the boards said.

  Tony looked at the man over his shoulder. They were in crisis mode here and seriously searching for Alex.

  ‘Reverend Restrick is still in a coma,’ O’Reilly said, jogging for the door with Lamb behind him. ‘Absolutely no visitors. He’s had two surgeries to relieve the pressure on his brain. His wife can stand by his bed for five minutes at a time. If there had been any change in his condition, I’d know. There’s round-the-clock security on him. No one would call Alex and tell her to visit – no one who didn’t have another reason for wanting her on her own and away from here.’

  They dashed down the steps outside.

  ‘You should have told us about the call Alex got right off,’ Lamb said through his teeth. ‘We’ve wasted time.’

  ‘I’m coming,’ Tony’s father said. ‘There are things you’ve got to know but we can’t hang around talking. I’ve been a fool. I didn’t think … Will … I just didn’t think it of him.’

  ‘We’re both coming,’ Tony said. He opened the back door of O’Reilly’s Volvo and got in. ‘Why not have me call her when you think the time’s right? If there’s someone with her who shouldn’t be, a call from the police could be dangerous.’

  ‘Why do you think we’re working on her location?’ Lamb said. ‘You don’t have to ring a mobile to find out where it is – if you’re lucky.’

  They were triangulating or whatever they did. Using phone towers to try to find Alex. ‘You really think Will could be with her, don’t you?’

  ‘He might be,’ O’Reilly said, starting the car and swinging it in a tight circle before spitting snow and gravel from beneath racing wheels. ‘Now he’s our number one suspect for planting that obituary at Alex’s, it’s likely.’

  ‘Would he kill Edward because he blamed him for the accident that killed little Graham Cummings?’ Tony said. ‘If Edward went to the pub the night he died, Will might have recognized him and flipped out. Then, when Brother Percy showed up, he could have been afraid he’d let the cat out of the bag about Edward’s identity and the game would be over. I’m very sure he didn’t want that – I just can’t work out why. Not definitely.’

  ‘Cathy probably called Will after she was at the Derwinters’ this morning,’ Lamb said. ‘He’s already on the edge – make that over the edge. Hearing his boy’s death had been dismissed like that would be enough to finish it. I think he’s been trying to frighten Alex into leaving the village. Cathy backed that one up, sure.’

  ‘Leaving the pub he thinks should still be his, you mean,’
James Harrison said.

  THIRTY-SIX

  ‘There’s an extra mug in the cubby,’ Alex told Will. ‘Flask is by your feet. It’s pretty good coffee. My mother made it.’ She took a now tepid sip from her own cup. It was strong and wet and that was all. She didn’t care much.

  ‘Not for me,’ Will said. He’d unhitched the shoulder harness from his seatbelt and leaned forward, staring through the window as if he could make the journey go faster. ‘Bloody road works don’t help anything,’ he muttered. ‘These sods’ll still be leaning on the same shovels in the same spots come next Christmas. Lazy bastards.’ His demeanor had flipped.

  ‘You’re in a nice mood,’ she said, hoping to calm him down. She didn’t fancy the drive to London in the company of an angry man. ‘We’re all tired of the bad weather and inconvenience. Winter gets to be too long, doesn’t it?’

  ‘A lot of things get to be too long.’ He turned sideways in his seat, facing away from her. ‘You must have had enough of everything in Folly by now. I’m surprised you haven’t already gone back to your art permanently. I thought you’d be gone long ago. You moved on to get away from the village when you went off to school.’

  ‘And I came back because it’s home and there was nothing tying me anywhere else – not any more.’

  His foul temper bothered her. She felt trapped but there was nothing she could do to change his mood until he was ready to relax.

  ‘Underhill was your home, not Folly,’ he said. ‘You and Lil. That’s where you’re from.’

  She thought about what he’d said. ‘Could you top up my coffee, please, Will?’ she said, buying time while she tried to work out what was bothering him.

  ‘Your wish is my command,’ Will said, and at least he was careful not to slop hot coffee from the flask. ‘You like giving the orders. Fell right into being the boss lady like a pig sliding in shit.’

  ‘If you don’t want to pour it, I’ll pull off and do it myself. I’m used to being on my own.’

  He’d already dealt with the coffee and was tightening down the lid on the flask. ‘Ah, you’re no different from anyone else. You like being a big fish in a little pond.’

  She accepted the cup and took a slow, considering sip, screwing up her eyes against the steam. ‘Are you trying to make a point, Will? It’s not like you to say nasty things. Are you trying to goad me, or what?’