A Grave in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  Higher authority always meant God to my ears. If Mr Maynard proposed to consult the Almighty, I didn’t think I had much to worry about. Quite obviously, God was on my side, even if it had been a secular funeral.

  I snorted sarcastically, which wasn’t very wise of me. The man from the council had no tolerance at all for being mocked. The wind continued to blow, buffeting us quite violently at times, before pausing to recoup its strength. We were partly sheltered by the hedge, but such was the force of the gale that it got into every corner of the little field, a separate entity that seemed to involve itself in our argument. The entire conversation had taken place with raised voices, which had the effect of making everything more aggressive than it might otherwise have been. A few minutes later, it occurred to me that we could have been heard by anybody standing on the road, or on the other side of the hedge in the scrappy woodland adjacent to the field. If not our actual words, then the fact of raised voices and confrontational stances would have plainly revealed a serious disagreement was under way. At the time, that didn’t worry me at all, and it certainly didn’t worry Mr Maynard.

  ‘Oh!’ His minimal chin reared itself to its full extent. ‘Oh, so you think this is funny, do you? I can assure you, Mr Slocombe, it is very far from amusing.’ I waited for him to say travesty again, but he disappointed me. ‘You are so patently in the wrong that words fail me,’ he sneered. ‘I can see we’re getting nowhere here. There will be a letter from our solicitors in the post first thing on Monday.’

  ‘It won’t do you any good,’ I retorted hotly. ‘Do what you like, you won’t get any money out of me. You might try Mrs Simmonds’ family, although I very much doubt that you’d have much luck. Give it up, Mr Maynard. It isn’t worth the taxpayers’ hard-earned cash, for a tiny patch of land you’d forgotten all about until now.’ A new thought occurred to me. ‘Besides, you’ll probably find that she had squatters’ rights over it, anyway, if she’d been using it for more than seven years.’ I was on doubtful ground here, but knew vaguely there was some such rule.

  ‘Twelve,’ he snapped. ‘It’s twelve. And she would have to be able to prove constant usage throughout that time. In any case, she was paying rent, which means she knew for a certainty that she was not the outright owner of the field.’

  ‘Difficult,’ I agreed, with another reckless smile. Somewhere in the past thirty seconds I had opted to fight openly for Mrs Simmonds and her chosen burial spot. Something inside me had clicked into battle mode, and I was feeling good about it. ‘Let the best man win, then, as they say.’

  ‘You’ll regret this,’ he warned loudly. ‘I’m going to make you very sorry you ever got involved.’

  ‘And let me tell you,’ I said, even louder, finally losing my temper, ‘that I don’t intend to let you win. People like you don’t deserve to have any authority; you understand nothing about what really matters. You should all be swept away, if you want my honest opinion.’

  We had begun to move back to the road by this time. At my parting shot, Mr Maynard had already turned his back and begun to march stiffly off, in a northerly direction, towards the village of Broad Campden. A car came towards us and slowed to a halt beside my vehicle.

  ‘What’s all this, then?’ came a voice I recognised.

  I turned to meet the enquiring gaze of Police Officer Jessica Osborne who, if anything, appeared to like me even less than she had done the day before.

  Chapter Four

  I made it worse for myself by sighing, ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ It seemed a reasonable question at the time.

  ‘I don’t have to explain myself to you,’ she snapped. ‘Besides, I should be asking you that question. I thought you’d gone back to Somerset.’ Really, I said to myself, this was one very unfriendly girl. What had I done to deserve such disapprobation? Then I remembered my illegal car, and felt a small but real panic. However decent and competent a person you might be, there was no redress against police harassment. They could do exactly what they liked to you, so long as it didn’t leave too nasty a mark.

  ‘There’s a problem about this field and who owns it,’ I explained, tilting my chin to indicate the receding figure of Mr Maynard. ‘That’s a man from the council, who summoned me back here to be informed that the whole business has been a travesty. But I really don’t think there’s any need for you to get involved.’ As before, she was not in uniform, but dressed in a red sweatshirt. When she got out of the car I saw she also sported a pair of black jeans. She really was nothing at all like her mother.

  And why was she there, anyway? There was no sign of the detective boyfriend.

  ‘Hmm,’ she said, unhelpfully. ‘I did wonder.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I wondered how legal this burial was. Mum assured me you should know your own business, and there couldn’t possibly be anything dodgy about it.’ She looked at me with a false innocence that I found extremely irritating, but at least she wasn’t quite so hostile as she’d been at the start.

  ‘There’s nothing illegal about it,’ I said. ‘At worst it’s a trespass. That stupid idiot is overreacting, as they generally do. It’s a pity, though,’ I admitted, running a hand through my hair. ‘If only for Mrs Simmonds’ sake. Anyway, I have to go. This was a very inconvenient interruption, driving a hundred and twenty miles for a ten-minute argument. The whole thing could have been done by phone.’ The enormity of it hit me for the first time, causing a wave of rage against the infuriating council official. ‘It’s outrageous,’ I spluttered.

  ‘You can’t just turn round and go straight home again,’ she said, with a much softer tone. ‘You’d better come back to the house with me, and have some lunch or something.’

  I blinked. Was this the same bossy young police officer I thought I knew? ‘Well…’ I prevaricated. ‘I shouldn’t, really. If I get cracking, I can be home again soon after one.’

  ‘Up to you,’ she shrugged. ‘We’re probably leaving this afternoon, as well. But you ought to have a look at the village, first. It’s really interesting. Paul and I walked around it after breakfast, and now I’m off for a look at Blockley.’

  ‘On your own?’

  She shrugged. ‘Paul isn’t very interested. I know Blockley, you see,’ she added. ‘I stayed there with my mum, just about a year ago.’

  She was confiding in me against her better nature, the way people often did. I was good at simply absorbing revelations and vague musings like this. I watched her face, which had relaxed and softened as she spoke. ‘A man was murdered,’ she went on. ‘I hadn’t realised until today how close the two places are. You could walk from here to Blockley and back in barely an hour.’

  I reminded myself of why I was there. Mr Maynard had marched off, his head bent against the wind, and I wondered why he had no visible car to drive away in. Did he perhaps live in Broad Campden? I felt quite glad that he had not stayed to include Jessica in our confrontation.

  ‘No,’ I decided. ‘I really think I ought to head for home.’

  ‘Up to you,’ she conceded. ‘But I think I’ll leave Blockley for another time. I might go and have a proper look at your grave instead, now it’s been filled in.’

  As I opened the driver’s door of my car I remembered again that there was history between Officer Jessica and my humble motor. Keeping my back to her, I waited for the heavy hand, the stern words. They never came. When I glanced back, she had gone into the field, and was disappearing towards the grave, which we had very considerately tucked into a corner out of sight of the road. I got in quickly, and started the engine.

  But something held me back, and I switched it off again. Was I simply going to drive all that tedious way home, with nothing resolved? Mr Maynard would be true to his word, despatching legal threats to me at Peaceful Repose, and disturbing my serenity for the following weeks and months. Wouldn’t it be better to face up to the situation now, and try to get it settled? And where better to start than with an officer of the law, who might yet lend a hel
pful word, if I managed not to alienate her any further?

  I got out of the car and waited, watching the wind tossing the tops of the leafless trees, thinking how typically March it was and finding some small consolation in the cycle of the seasons and the bigger picture. It seemed a long time before Jessica came back, but was probably less than five minutes. ‘Still here?’ she asked me, unnecessarily.

  ‘I don’t suppose you know Mr Maynard from Parks and Recreation, do you?’

  She stared at me blankly. ‘Of course not. How would I?’

  ‘No…silly question. I just thought, as you were in Blockley recently…well, you might have come across him somehow. He was phoned by one of the mourners at yesterday’s funeral,’ I went on. ‘And he wasted no time in causing trouble. He’s one of those people you feel should never have been born. It’s impossible to imagine him doing any good in the world.’ I was speaking as much to myself as to her, venting my spleen with no sense of caution. Jessica fixed me with a clear greeny-brown gaze. ‘You can’t say that about anybody,’ she told me seriously. ‘That’s a fascist remark.’

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘It indicates the strength of my antipathy towards him. You should have heard the things he said.’

  ‘I can imagine how it might have been. Council officers do tend to miss the point at times.’ She smiled at me, and for the first time I caught a flash of her mother in her. ‘It’s a nice grave,’ she added, and I felt she’d awarded me some kind of major Brownie point.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said.

  ‘It’ll be a shame if they have to disinter her. Although…’ she looked thoughtful, ‘it might be interesting to observe, I suppose. If they did it soon, it wouldn’t be particularly gruesome.’

  ‘It wouldn’t be soon, though,’ I said. ‘Even if I didn’t put up a fight – and I will – the paperwork would take ages.’

  ‘You’re just like my mum,’ she sighed. ‘Always looking for a fight. It’s people like you…’ She didn’t finish, but just threw me a dark look that conjured street protests and fathers for justice climbing up public buildings and causing embarrassment. I had heard the police viewpoint before, and was seldom tempted to sympathise.

  ‘Speaking of your mum,’ I said, ‘is she still at Mrs Simmonds’ house?’

  ‘Yeah. She doesn’t like to leave until she knows who’s responsible for it, although I told her she ought to go home today. They’ve already turned the phone off, and the electric’s likely to go at any moment. She says she was booked until this time next week, so she doesn’t have anywhere else she needs to be, and she might as well stay on for a few more days. The fact is, she’ll do anything to avoid going home.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Mm. My father died three years ago, and she lives in the same cottage – the one I grew up in. She won’t admit it, but I think the memories are still bothering her a bit too much for comfort. She’s been doing this house-sitting lark for a couple of years, and never seems to get sick of it. She’s got the dog, of course.’ It was a disjointed bit of explication, but I thought I’d got the basic picture.

  ‘Dog?’ I said.

  ‘Hepzibah. It’s a cocker spaniel.’

  ‘And people let her take it with her when she’s looking after their houses?’

  ‘Evidently. She specialises in looking after pets, and Hepzie’s very easy-going. She gets along with most things. The worst was a parrot in Lower Slaughter, apparently. And there was a nasty moment with a snake at one point. Usually it’s dogs and cats, and she’s fine. Mum can sweet-talk people into agreeing to anything, if she sets her mind to it. You wouldn’t expect anyone to ever hire her again, the things that keep happening, but they seem to think it’ll just make her all the more capable. That’s if they get to hear her history, of course. I don’t think this Simmonds woman knew about any of it.’

  ‘Sounds intriguing,’ I said, my head full of exotic animals and mysterious goings-on. I also noted that once again Jessica was confiding in me.

  ‘Please come and have lunch with us,’ she invited, again. ‘I was probably a bit out of order about the car yesterday.’

  I suspected her mother had been giving her a telling-off about it, and she was hoping to earn forgiveness by being nice to me, now she had a second chance. I had little sense that she approved of me any more than before, but the persistence of her invitation impressed me.

  ‘Oh, all right then,’ I said, pushing aside all thought of Karen and the kids missing out on my company.

  She turned her car around first, waiting while I did the same, and then leading me a surprisingly short distance to a picture-book thatched cottage facing onto a quiet lane, a few yards off the main street of the village. Through the bare trees behind the house, I could glimpse the land sweeping downhill in a grand slope, with a classic farmstead at the bottom. As I got out of the car, Thea Osborne opened the front door and stood there, the sun on her face, looking young and pretty and cheerful. She was obviously astonished to see me, as I squeezed my car into a space behind Jessica’s, tilting her head in wordless enquiry. A dog came past her, trotting towards us, a long plumy tail held out horizontally behind, and sniffed my legs as I emerged from the car. I bent to pat its soft head. ‘Shouldn’t cockers have docked tails?’ I asked, stupidly, trying to work out what looked wrong about the animal.

  Neither woman answered me, but Thea rolled her eyes as if I’d said something annoying.

  ‘I found him arguing with a man from the council about the new grave,’ Jessica explained briefly. ‘He’d been summoned back here to answer some questions. I asked him to join us for lunch.’

  Thea grimaced in an exaggerated wince of sympathy, but said nothing. I remembered the detective boyfriend, who was probably around somewhere. What was I doing here, I suddenly asked myself? I’d walked into something I wasn’t prepared for, on a number of levels. I had not been adequately prepared for Mrs Simmonds’ funeral, to begin with. Nor the attentions of the police when it came to my delinquent car. Nor the fury of Maynard-from-the-council. Nor the sweet smiles of Thea Osborne. I felt myself floundering. ‘I ought to phone Karen,’ I said, to nobody in particular, having consulted my watch and found it was already five to twelve. ‘She’ll be wondering when to expect me.’

  ‘Your wife,’ said Thea, with a little nod. ‘The phone’s been turned off, and my mobile’s with the wrong outfit, apparently. I can’t get a signal without going up a hill.’

  Jessica threw her mother an exasperated look. ‘Why don’t you use the Blackberry I gave you?’ she demanded. ‘That would work here. You should throw that old thing away.’

  ‘I will,’ Thea promised with a disarming smile. ‘I did mean to, but I forgot to bring it. It’ll take a while for me to get used to it.’

  We tried my phone, and found that Thea was right about the signal. I looked round at the scenery, wondering where I could go for better reception, since it was clear that the police officer had no intention of lending me her mobile. ‘Have I got time to walk up there?’ I asked, pointing across the road. ‘There seems to be a footpath going that way.’ The path led alongside a very substantial brand-new house built of yellow Cotswold stone that I thought warranted a closer inspection.

  ‘No problem,’ said Thea. ‘And when you come back, we can all go to the pub.’

  And that meant spending money, I realised with a silent groan. Perhaps, after all, I should simply go home and do my best never to revisit Broad Campden.

  I walked down the little lane and emerged quite soon onto rising ground. Looking back, I got a fine view of the new house, as well as another one of similar age, further along. I tried to imagine life in this tiny settlement, where people could afford to live in mansions with electrically operated wrought-iron gates, and pay a gardener to keep the topiary under control. The views were of tilted fields, bare hedges and leafless trees. Overhead, the clouds were being shredded by the wind. There was no sound of traffic, or voices or dogs. Even without the wind, I suspected the place would lack al
l the usual noise of normal life.

  I had to walk to the very top of the field before my phone would work. I called Karen, who sounded distracted, even though she assured me the children were fine, and her headache had gone. ‘Oh, but Maggs wants you,’ she remembered. ‘There’s been a call from somebody in a nursing home.’

  Aha! Here was my excuse to skip the pub lunch. I could easily plead sudden urgent work, with Maggs unable to remove a body by herself. But first I ought to phone her, to check that Karen had the right story. It wasn’t certain that anyone had died at all.

  Maggs did not answer her mobile, so I left a message and then waited on the hillside to see if she would call back. It was no hardship, on that sunny March day, to do nothing for a few minutes. The wind was quite violent, apparently having shifted to the south or west, since there was no longer the easterly chill in it, and I enjoyed a sense of exhilaration as it tossed my hair about and swished the treetops. The hedge that ran alongside me sported patches of celandines and violets and the grass had begun to grow at the base. I meandered aimlessly as I used the phone, straying along the edge of a narrow piece of woodland. Strange little towns with names like Chipping Campden and Blockley and Paxford were scattered about within a mile or two – places I had never seen and which conjured another world where prosperous medieval Englishmen strolled down the main streets haggling over the price of wool. Just to my right somewhere was Mrs Simmonds’ grave, although I had lost my bearings so completely that I was far from sure of the direction or distance.

  Maggs took just over five minutes to get back to me. ‘Where are you?’ she asked, before I could put the same question.

  ‘In a sloping field, on the edge of some very nice woods, in a tiny Cotswolds village,’ I said. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘In a lay-by, on the way to Ottery St Mary. Remember Mr Everscott?’