by Rebecca Tope
Now she wished she had somebody she might phone for a long lazy Sunday chat, mentally reviewing possible candidates. Still mildly haunted by her dream of the night before, she paused at the thought of her sister Jocelyn, revising her earlier careless dismissal of the idea of calling her. Two years earlier Joss had spent a few days with her in Frampton Mansell, and since then they had seen little of each other. There were five children in the family, which meant there were very few opportunities for long lazy chats, besides which, it was not their habit to call each other. But it was worth a try, perhaps, especially in the light of the dream.
Jocelyn’s husband answered the phone, sounding impatient. ‘Oh, Thea … hello. What’s the trouble?’
‘No trouble at all. I just wondered if I could have a little chat with Joss.’
‘She’s upstairs. Hang on.’
Already Thea was regretting the impulse. Casual conversations about nothing were a waste of time. Her family had never gone in for such stuff, which meant that Jocelyn would leap to the same conclusion as her husband had, and assume there was a problem.
‘Thea? What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing. I’m bored, that’s all. Are you busy?’
‘No more than usual. Where are you?’
‘Snowshill, if you know where that is.’
‘Not the foggiest. Is it snowing?’
‘Not today. Apparently it does, quite a lot, in the due season.’
‘Is it nice?’
‘It’s fantastically lovely. Same gorgeous old houses as there are all over the region. Plus a famous manor for good measure.’
‘Sounds okay.’
‘How about you? What’re you doing for the summer? Mum said you might go to the Shetlands – can that be right? With the whole family?’
‘Yes, it’s all fixed. We leave on Wednesday and get the ferry. Everybody’s wildly excited.’
‘What an adventure. Lucky I caught you, then.’
‘Thea – are you really okay? You sound odd. Sort of drained. What’s the house like? Have you got loads to do?’
‘It’s stuffed full of knick-knacks. Hepzie and I daren’t move in case we break something. But no, there’s hardly any work. That’s why I’m bored.’
‘Have you met any people?’
‘One or two. Nobody interesting. Oh – Jessica’s boyfriend has dumped her. She’s dreadfully upset, poor girl.’
‘The swine! You never did like him, did you?’
‘Not much. But I didn’t think he’d be as rotten as this. He did it by text, apparently.’
‘They’ve all forgotten how to speak face-to-face. Mine are getting to be the same.’
‘I’ve got very fond of my BlackBerry, I must admit.’
‘Pooh! A BlackBerry is very yesterday, dear. It’s moved on since then.’
‘Don’t tell me that. I don’t think I could face starting again with something else. Anyway – it does so many things, how can a new version be any better?’
‘Don’t ask me. Anyway, I can hear ructions in the garden. I’ll have to go. I’m sure you’ll have a lovely time there. The weather’s good, and you can go and explore that manor.’
‘Yes, I can. Go on then and quell the riot. And have a lovely holiday.’
‘Thanks, we will. Bye, then.’
Thea disconnected the call with a rare feeling of warm sisterhood. She should value Jocelyn more highly, spend more time with her, keep up the bond between them. Their older brother, Damien, was difficult and distant, since becoming a committed Christian and trying to make them see how fulfilled and inspired he was. When they politely wished him well, but failed to adopt the same all-consuming faith, he had withdrawn from them. Their sister Emily was distant for other reasons, which nobody in the family could bring themselves to discuss.
Her arm was almost better, the terrible pain of the hornet sting almost as forgotten as the much more distant throes of childbirth – which had been far from excruciating anyway. Nonetheless, she harboured a persistent nervousness about the front garden, as well as an irritation with the overstuffed interior of the house. Sitting in the kitchen, she sipped coffee and wondered where she might spend the afternoon.
Yvonne’s cats were slowly coming to accept her presence, slinking sinuously across the floor to crouch under the table, side by side. Hepzibah ignored them, having found a chair to her liking in the living room. It was positioned beneath the window, where sunshine fell for most of the afternoon. Thea had removed a hand-embroidered cushion from the seat and permitted the dog to curl up on the upholstery, promising to herself that she would give it a thorough brushing on her final day.
As on the previous day, traffic flow past the house was sporadic as people headed for Snowshill Manor. Where did they all come from, she wondered? How far afield would people travel to see a motley accumulation of Japanese armoury, old clocks, Victorian toys, boxes, machines and a thousand other things? You looked, but couldn’t touch. As far as she could understand it, there was no narrative, little chronology and a strong sense of pointless eccentricity. Yes, she would have to go and see it for herself, but the real interest lay in what had been hidden away in the secret attic room, which the National Trust had very sensibly banished to more esoteric realms where such objects were better understood. Nobody could accuse the National Trust of having any truck with witchcraft, with their wholesome teas and carefully labelled gardens.
Somehow she had entangled the sinister-sounding Charles Paget Wade with the delinquent lad, Stevie. There was a hint of malevolence surrounding them both – Wade with his sudden startling leaps from hidden passages, Stevie with his sticks and stones designed to damage. Wade had spent his younger years in the West Indies, amongst practitioners of voodoo and wild tales of zombies and black magic. Stevie had presumably spent his entire life being spoilt and indulged by his mother in a remote English village. Even the neighbours who regarded him as a menace appeared to accept him as a necessary element in their lives. Yvonne had given no advance warning of his predations. Perhaps he had just been having a bad day, and should be given a chance to redeem himself – especially after Clara’s disclosures, minimal though they had been.
There was a limited range of choices as to how to pass the afternoon. She could drive to a local beauty spot and walk the dog again. She could wander back down the track past Gudrun’s house and follow the official footpath leading to Dulverton Wood. Or, she remembered, she could go to Broad Campden and check out Drew’s incipient burial ground. He had put the whole enterprise on hold when his wife fell ill, but the local council had already given outline permission for him to establish a modestly sized woodland cemetery, and he had effortlessly gained ownership of a house in the middle of the village. Funny he hadn’t asked her to go and look at that as well, she thought. As far as she knew it was standing empty, with no firm plans for its future.
Outside, the sky was clouding over, some thickening grey areas hinting at rain. That would be very bad news, confining her to the house and all its oppressive contents.
‘Come on, then,’ she called the dog. ‘We’ll just go for a little drive, shall we? I need to get milk and fruit, anyway.’
Her car was parked just beyond the front hedge, there being no allotted space for vehicles within the official curtilage of the house. Hyacinth House did not possess so much as a garden shed. The lawnmower and a few tools lived under a flimsy overhanging device at the back of the house, supported by two wooden posts, without walls or doors.
As she reached the small gate which opened onto the road, she unlocked the car from a yard or so distant with the button on her keyring. The driver’s side was closest to the wall, so she went to the passenger door to admit the dog, who had been sniffing at something just beyond the vehicle. Then she walked around the front, heading for the driver’s door. But she never reached it. Lying crumpled on the grass, face down, legs sprawling, was a small body with very fair hair.
Chapter Six
Her mind froze, her on
ly sensation a violent urge to find the child’s mother and bring her to him. He belonged to her with a primitive irrational sense of rightness that could not be resisted. Having paused only to turn him over and ascertain from the inert white face and tightly constricted neck that he was dead, she went flying down the track to Gudrun’s cottage. Not, she noted later, across the road to Janice and Ruby. Nor into the village where she could stand by the church and scream for help. Only one thought filled her head – the mother must be summoned.
Breathlessly, she ran round to the back, following a brick path becoming slippery in the first minutes of a heavy rain shower. ‘Gudrun!’ she shouted, throwing as much breath and energy into the word as she could muster. ‘Are you there?’
There was a sound from within the house of a chair being scraped over a stone floor, and then a low ‘Yeah? Who’s that?’
‘It’s me,’ called Thea unhelpfully, and threw open the door, unable to wait for Gudrun to gather herself.
‘What d’you want? I was just having a bit of a rest. I was cutting up logs all morning.’ She looked out at the sky. ‘Raining, is it? Thought it would. Where’s Stevie got to? Has he been up to his mischief again?’
‘He’s at my house – I mean, Yvonne’s house. You’ve got to come. He’s—’ For the first time, she wondered what in the world she was thinking of, fetching the woman to witness the cruel killing of her only child. She almost backed away, hands aloft, saying she was sorry, it was nothing, just a silly mistake. Instead she looked away, focusing on the tidy pile of logs in a lean-to shed a few yards away.
‘What? He’s what? Hurt himself, you mean? Wait a minute – let me get my boots on.’ Gudrun thrust her feet into a pair of black wellingtons standing just inside the door. ‘Did you call an ambulance? How bad is he? Can’t he walk?’
Thea led the way back up to the road, saying nothing. She could barely hear the questions being fired at her, her mind full of the image of the boy’s small lifeless face, and the tight cord around his neck.
He lay where she’d left him, the rain starting to form a faint frosting on his clothes. As Gudrun rushed past her, her head twisting from side to side as she searched for her child, not seeing him at first, Thea found herself swaying in the closest she had ever come to a faint. How had she ever managed to fetch the woman? Her legs couldn’t possibly have found such strength. How could such a gigantic catastrophe be happening, here before her eyes?
Everything had gone silent. Gudrun gathered up the limp body and clutched it to her breast, her eyes staring unfocused, straight ahead. Now and then she shook the boy, as if to force life into him. Her fingers toyed with the ligature round his neck, but made no serious attempt to remove it. It was as if she made no connection between it and the cause of the child’s death. Thea choked slightly, as she slowly realised what had been done to young Stevie, how terrifying it must have been for him to feel it digging into his tender skin.
The BlackBerry was in her pocket, as always. She tremblingly took it out and tried to remember what to do to summon the police. Gudrun should have been shrieking at her, galvanising her into action, instead of just sitting there in the rain rocking her boy. Two or three cars passed a few yards away, one every half-minute or so. How could they fail to know what was happening, how badly they were needed? Too much time was passing; something was supposed to happen. When it did, it was far from useful.
Tears began to course down Thea’s face of their own accord. Something had welled up like a great wave from deep inside her and erupted out of her eyes. Her chest pumped the fluid out, as if it were her lifeblood. It was much too terrible to deal with. Nothing so bad as this had ever happened before, not in the whole history of the world. Gudrun’s face bore witness to that. Gudrun had turned to stone, as dead and useless as the child in her arms.
It was the spaniel, yapping impatiently from inside Thea’s car, that set things in motion at last.
Thea had been involved in sudden and violent deaths before, not least that of her own husband, Carl, over three years earlier. This was nothing like any of them. The police officers, when they arrived, evidently had the same reaction. A deliberately garotted child was way beyond the experience of almost anybody in the country. Children might accidentally hang themselves from carelessly placed ropes or lines, which was ghastly and terrible enough – but this had been done with malice. The weapon appeared to be a sort of plastic-coated string, which must have been held tightly in place for several minutes, before the attacker tied it in a knot at the side of the child’s head. It was bright green – the sort of innocent item everybody had neatly coiled in their box of oddments. It was not an obvious means of killing someone, being rather springy and disinclined to stay where one put it. These details emerged in short fragments from the low conversation that went on around Thea’s car throughout the remainder of the afternoon.
Thea and a policewoman led Gudrun into Hyacinth House, but she stayed only moments before running outside again to see what was happening to her boy. She was like a bulldozer, with wide powerful shoulders and short strong legs. Nobody felt up to tackling her physically, and in no other way did she pay the slightest attention to the people around her. There was no place for consolation or sweet tea or sedatives. Her distress was far beyond anything on offer, impossible to assuage or divert.
And yet Thea was already catching odd glances between the milling officers, which suggested ideas that were at first quite horrifying. They eyed Gudrun’s muscular frame, and muttered about Stevie being a known troublemaker, a real handful for a single mum. They cocked sceptical brows at her display of maternal grief, which had, over the course of an hour or so, mutated from silent horror to loud moans. Anger was not far away, Thea guessed – and then things would become far more difficult.
But the child himself remained the central focus. A doctor knelt gently over him, listening to his heart and palpating the violated neck. A photographer grimly captured the scene, swallowing hard as he bent close to the area of trauma. The little knot of curious villagers assembled at the gate was held back by a uniformed officer. Unable to see anything, thanks to Thea’s sheltering car, they drifted away quite soon.
And then Gladwin arrived.
Detective Superintendent Sonia Gladwin was well known to Thea, and very much liked. She had transferred from Cumbria, where the climate and people had shaped her into a person of adaptability and great good sense. She was approaching forty, a thin energetic mother of twin sons and generally content with her life. She had never seen a garotted child before, either.
‘My God, Thea! What’s going on here?’
She ought not to have addressed the house-sitter before the police officers at the scene, but nobody appeared to take exception. Gladwin’s gender was a central part of her approach to the job, something she made no attempt to deny or conceal. She behaved as a woman generally behaved: going soft over baby animals, looking for the emotional angle in a case, making outrageous intuitive leaps and cajoling colleagues instead of yelling at them. As far as Thea could tell, it worked extremely well.
‘I found him. He lives just over there, down that track. I’d already met his mother, and seen him around, since I got here yesterday.’
‘And somebody killed him?’ Like the photographer, she swallowed hard before moving to view the body. Thea knew better than to follow, even if she had wanted to. It was a crime scene, potentially rich with invisible clues, and everyone was required to keep a good distance away, the police hoping the earlier invasions of both Thea and Gudrun would not have already obliterated anything of significance. It was raining harder now, and the chance of finding helpfully relevant threads and hairs and flakes of skin had to be close to zero. Nonetheless, rules were rules and the area was now forbidden territory. It had to be meticulously examined for signs of a violent struggle.
‘Unless he did it to himself,’ said a uniformed male officer. ‘The doc thinks that’s unlikely.’
Gladwin’s expression silenced him v
ery effectively.
‘You’re right in the middle of this one, then,’ she said to Thea. ‘Again.’
‘Don’t,’ begged Thea. ‘I tempted fate by thinking things were really going to be rather dull here. Except when the homeowner went missing, of course,’ she added carelessly.
‘What?’
‘It’s not important. She was soon found again. And from what I’ve seen and heard of Stevie, he was … well …’ She tailed off, unable to voice anything condemnatory of the pathetic little figure, who had certainly never done anything to deserve such a dreadful end. He should have lived, and grown up to become a responsible citizen, using his talents to good effect. She put a hand to her own throat, as she had seen a number of the assembled officers do unconsciously. ‘Poor little boy,’ she murmured. ‘How could anybody be so cruel?’
‘I have to talk to the doctor and the others. I’ll see you in the house in a little while. We’ll have to deal with the mother first. She’s looking rather explosive.’
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ said Thea, thinking it would be good to sit down and let go of some of the emotions she was fighting to control. She felt choked and clogged with misery. ‘Can I let the dog out now?’
Gladwin frowned, until Thea indicated the frantic animal still shut inside the car, which had been shunted three or four yards away, to leave space for the numerous police officials. ‘I thought she’d better stay there for the time being, but she’ll go mad if I don’t rescue her soon.’
For answer, Gladwin herself went and opened the passenger door of the car. The spaniel flew out, ears flapping, and jumped up at Thea’s legs in an ecstasy of relief. Thea pushed her down, and took hold of her collar. ‘Come on, you. I’ll have to shut you in the house now. You’ll only be a nuisance out here.’
She took herself to a corner of the living room, amongst the clutter of shelved units and crowded cabinets, and closed her eyes. The feeling of overwhelming cruelty surged all around, with a sense of something demonic and loathsome lurking close by. She had already been foolish enough to entertain fantasies about witches and vampires, letting the supernatural add spice to the blandness of the day. Now the real world had turned far more threatening and malevolent than any demon or bloodsucker ever could. She almost found herself hoping that Gudrun had indeed murdered her own son. That would at least contain the dreadful wrongness, and make some slight sense of what had happened. Mothers lost their wits in the strain and pressure of dealing with an impossible child; it was terrible and tragic, but not evil. People could crack, their weakness emerging as a fit of appalling violence, and they finished up by harming themselves more terribly than anybody else. Except for the slaughtered child, of course, who had lost absolutely everything.
