A Grave in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  He steepled his fingers and pushed out his lips. ‘Not so, according to her medical history.’

  My own fingers had begun quivering again. ‘Really?’ I bleated.

  ‘She was diabetic, and had been a lifelong smoker. The occlusion she died from was technically unforeseen, but she was far from in robust health. Her blood pressure was in the top five percentile and she had high cholesterol.’

  ‘But she wouldn’t have known that, would she?’ I almost begged.

  ‘Oh, she knew. She went for regular health checks, and was given the full story, no holds barred.’

  My head began to clear, as if the sun had burnt off some of the fog. ‘But this isn’t evidence, is it?’ I said. ‘It doesn’t prove anything.’ Even I, with my slender grasp of the convolutions of the law, could see that much. For almost the first time, I caught the eye of the junior, whose sole role, I presumed, was to witness the proceedings. He held my gaze without a flicker of emotion.

  ‘It puts you under further suspicion – and I have to say we were already treating you with special interest.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ I said.

  ‘Mr Slocombe, I put it to you that you deliberately killed Mr Gavin Maynard on Saturday, March 17th.’

  ‘I ought to have a solicitor, then,’ I realised worriedly. ‘Aren’t you supposed to provide me with one?’

  ‘Only if you request it. I did inform you of your rights, on Sunday, if you recall.’

  ‘Did you? I must have thought it wouldn’t be necessary.’ I rubbed my face with both hands. ‘How long have you known about this will?’

  ‘Let’s see now – what’s today? Thursday, I think. Well, then, it must have been Tuesday, latish. You were right about one thing – the Simmonds lady kept an awful lot of paper. We took a little while to track down her last will and testament.’

  For the first time I thought of Thea. Had she been present for the search? Had she known all along what they had found, and refrained from telling me? ‘Was Thea there?’ I asked, before hearing how foolish a question it sounded.

  ‘Excuse me?’ This phrase had always irritated me, used in this context. It sat oddly on the lips of a bluff Midlands detective, when I mainly associated it with American teenagers.

  ‘Mrs Osborne, the house-sitter. Was she there when you searched Mrs Simmonds’ papers?’

  ‘What difference does that make? As it happens, no she wasn’t. She’d gone back home by then.’

  ‘Why did you want her here again, then?’

  He pushed out his lips again, disapprovingly. ‘No comment,’ he said. ‘I’m the one asking the questions, remember?’

  He had evidently forgotten it himself for a moment. I glimpsed some light ahead. He wasn’t behaving as if he had a murderer in front of him, despite his plain warning that he was actively seeking evidence against me.

  ‘I don’t want a solicitor,’ I decided. ‘Why should I? I did not kill Mr Maynard. That’s the key fact here. I met him a few hours before he died. I shook hands with him. We walked close together. It was very windy. You might find one of my hairs on him – but I didn’t kill him. I was at the pub with Thea and her daughter. And Detective Paul. I mean Paul something…Middleman. You know who I mean,’ I finished irritably.

  He doggedly went back over the same old ground we had covered days earlier. ‘You were gone, all on your own, for nearly half an hour at very much the exact time the killing took place. You knew the deceased was working against you over the matter of the grave. And now we discover that you have inherited a very nice cottage in a very desirable village, making it very much in your interest to eradicate the potential unpleasantness and bad feeling over your unorthodox burial of the former owner of that cottage.’ It was a long speech, clumsily constructed, but clear enough.

  ‘But how exactly do you connect his death with my inheriting the house?’ The phrase inheriting the house echoed in my head and generated the first small spark of excitement. I had a house! It must be worth half a million, easily, even in a stagnant market.

  ‘Think about it,’ he advised me.

  I thought, in vain. At the edge of my thoughts were the mysterious remarks made by Mrs Maynard concerning rightful ownership of the property, cautioning me not to raise any hopes. This recollection only served to muddle the DI’s suggested logic even further. ‘I still can’t see it,’ I said. ‘Plus, you won’t find my fingerprints on that stone, either.’

  He emitted a small sigh of disappointment, as if he had hoped I wouldn’t say that. ‘We think there is more to Mrs Simmonds’ choice of burial place than meets the eye,’ he revealed. ‘We think you and she both knew she had no legal claim to the land, and that you deliberately conspired to use it, for reasons we have yet to discover. This was so important to her that she rewarded you for your assistance, rewarded you very handsomely, in fact, with a valuable house. Unfortunately for you, Mr Maynard from the council got wind of it only hours after the burial had taken place, and threatened to have the body exhumed and buried elsewhere. This threat jeopardised your inheritance, so you killed him to protect it.’

  ‘How? How on earth could he jeopardise my inheritance?’

  Again, a flicker of disappointment. ‘Because, Mr Slocombe, the bequest is conditional. You only inherit the house if you agree to live in it as your main residence, and ensure perpetual protection of the grave by turning the field into an alternative burial ground.’ He was quoting from notes on a sheet of paper in front of him. It took me a few seconds to translate it into an idea I could understand.

  ‘But that’s impossible,’ I concluded. ‘We’d never get permission, for a start. And surely that kind of proviso isn’t legal?’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Not for me to say. Sounds feasible to me, on the face of it.’

  I started to think seriously about it. The field was a quarter of a mile from the nearest dwelling, at least. It was the right sort of size – two or three acres. It was well screened by trees. It could just possibly work, given the goodwill of the locals and my own expertise. But the Talbots would not like it, not one little bit. I shuddered to think of how much the Talbots would dislike the proposal.

  ‘In any case, I don’t want to live in the Cotswolds,’ I concluded. ‘I’d have to move my family here, and they can’t be disrupted like that.’ Goodbye inheritance, I realised wistfully. I’d known it was too good to be true, all along.

  ‘Think about it,’ he said again, but more nastily. ‘That’s if you haven’t done so already. I am far from convinced that this is all news to you.’

  ‘You credit me with more acting skill than I possess,’ I objected.

  He gave me a long look. ‘I wonder,’ he said.

  I struggled to straighten my tangled thoughts. As police interviews went, this one seemed quite unusual. The revelations had obliterated most of my original expectations, leaving me less afraid, but much more stunned than I’d anticipated. ‘We need to understand why she did it,’ I concluded. ‘There must have been a reason.’

  ‘We?’ he repeated, eyebrows raised at my instinctive assumption that he and I were essentially on the same side. It had been an unintentional slip, but I had the feeling it hadn’t done me any harm at all.

  I pressed my point. ‘Yes – we both need to work out what’s been going on. We both want to know who killed Mr Maynard and why. I can understand why you thought it could have been me, but you’ve got no evidence against me, and I assure you, there isn’t any to find, other than the accidental fact of my walking along the same path as Mr Maynard presumably did, a little while later. Better to make use of me in your efforts to find the real murderer, don’t you think?’

  It was a boyish attempt to convert him, which was obviously doomed to fail. His eyebrows rose higher, and a cynical little smile played on his lips. ‘Sir, we do not employ amateur detectives in this police force. I’m afraid you’re going rather too fast for me. Nothing you’ve said has persuaded me to remove you from our list of suspects. In fact, I believe the next
step will be to formally charge you with suspicion of having committed the unlawful killing of Mr Gavin Maynard.’

  The abrupt switch of tone and mood was disorienting. ‘What?’ I croaked again.

  He cleared his throat and intoned the formal charge again. Then he stood up and said something about bail conditions. My head was ringing so loudly that I missed the exact words. I felt a very long way from home, caught in a trap that had somehow been laid for me, perhaps by Greta Simmonds herself. But alongside all that there was an echo, a repeating word from something I had just said myself. Accidental, it was. I had said it was an accident, a coincidence, that my path had crossed with that of the dead man. I frowned at DI Basildon.

  ‘Hold on…’ I began. ‘I just thought of something.’

  ‘Sorry.’ He shook his head. ‘This interview is now concluded, at…’ he glanced at his watch, ‘eleven-twenty-seven a.m.’ He stood up, and the young man next to him did likewise.

  ‘Are you going to keep me here?’ I asked, looking round half expecting to see a cage waiting for me.

  ‘No, sir,’ he said loudly. ‘You will be released on bail, but at least for the next day or two, we would like you to remain here in Gloucestershire.’

  This last comment, rerunning the events of the weekend, had probably been intended to upset me, but in fact it fitted well with what I wanted. After almost a week, I understood that the village of Broad Campden was part of my destiny. I had done my best to ignore it, but it had finally forced itself onto my attention. If nothing else, I was at least momentarily the putative owner of property there.

  ‘Right,’ I nodded. ‘Bail.’ Then I remembered that bail meant money. In effect it was like putting yourself in hock – you paid for your freedom, but if you absconded they kept the cash. ‘How much?’

  He smiled jadedly. ‘You don’t have to pay anything these days,’ he told me. ‘Just give us an assurance that you won’t run off anywhere.’

  ‘Goodness me,’ I said, with genuine surprise. ‘Do people really stick to promises like that?’

  ‘Sometimes.’ The smile became more sincere. ‘I have a feeling that you’ll be one of the obedient ones.’

  The compliment did nothing to improve my mood. It probably wasn’t even a compliment anyway.

  ‘So where do I sign?’ I asked, confident that there would be plenty of paperwork associated with this bizarre system.

  He laughed unfeelingly, and ushered me out of the makeshift room and across the hall to another partitioned corner. There he indicated with a little dance of hand and head movements that the silent constable should take custody of me, and see to the mundane business of letting me go. I was escorted to a woman at a desk with a computer on it, and made to listen to a lot of jargon about bail conditions. She managed to inject considerable gravitas into it, and I nodded submissively at the injunctions she laid on me.

  Behind me a shadow fell across the doorway, but I did not turn around. I finished giving my assurances to the woman, and stood wondering what I ought to do next.

  ‘How much did you have to pay?’ came a familiar voice.

  She had been waiting quietly, a small figure in clean respectable clothes, looking as if she might have come to offer some sort of professional service to the police.

  ‘They don’t accept money any more, apparently,’ I said. ‘All you have to do is promise not to abscond.’

  ‘Amazing,’ she said, her eyes widening. ‘They must lose half their suspects that way.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ I said.

  We left the building together as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

  Chapter Fourteen

  It turned out that we were both thirsty and also quite hungry. Breakfast had been hours ago, and the sun had come out.

  ‘We could leave the car at the cottage and walk to the Baker’s Arms,’ she suggested. ‘Clear our heads.’

  ‘Where’s the dog?’

  ‘She’s been in the car all this time, poor thing. She’ll come with us to the pub, of course.’

  Which, of course, she did, even though we had to sit outside again. We had left the car locked up and sitting outside the house I still thought of as belonging to Greta Simmonds. Then we walked slowly along the village street with me resisting the temptation to recount the salient points of my interview with DI Basildon until we were somewhere more settled. Instead we talked about Jessica and Paul, and the same walk we had done on Saturday, unaware of poor dead Gavin Maynard awaiting discovery in a gateway. It did not occur to me to ask Thea about her own interview, which I assumed had been brief and insignificant. I was much too full of my own gruelling experience.

  We arrived just as the pub door was opening. Thea marched straight through the bar, uttering a subdued rant about the way pubs had become so restrictive, when they all used to admit dogs without raising an eyebrow in the past. ‘We should just plonk ourselves down by the fire, without asking permission,’ she stormed. ‘They probably wouldn’t have the nerve to say anything if we didn’t make the mistake of asking permission.’

  I laughed. ‘Never ask permission – that’s my motto, as well,’ I said. ‘Especially where councils are concerned.’

  She cocked her head, and I explained about the rules about alternative burials – or rather, the lack of them. ‘It’s only a matter of time before they pass a new law,’ I sighed. ‘But at the moment, it’s remarkably unregulated.’

  ‘Unlike the rest of life in this country,’ she scowled. ‘Whatever happened to personal privacy?’

  It wasn’t a subject I had given much thought to. Where I lived, there were very few CCTV cameras, and I couldn’t say I felt especially under surveillance. ‘Mmm,’ I said carefully.

  ‘You wait,’ she warned me. ‘Now you’ve come to the attention of the police, they’ll be able to trawl through every phone call you’ve made in the past year, every time you drove along a motorway, every transaction you’ve made with plastic, every email you’ve sent – and a whole lot more. Doesn’t it make your flesh crawl?’

  She was almost shouting. I leant back in my chair. ‘Whoa!’ I begged. ‘I agree that’s terrible – but they won’t find anything incriminating. They’ll just be wasting a lot of expensive time.’

  ‘You agree it’s terrible?’ she pressed me. ‘Do you really?’

  The fog was back, my brain fumbling about for a few clear thoughts. ‘You make it sound totally unacceptable,’ I began. ‘And in theory it is, of course. But I don’t personally feel that it matters very much. I suppose I still trust the authorities to use it for the right reasons,’ I concluded, feeling pathetic.

  ‘Aha!’ she pounced, holding up a finger. ‘There you have it. We might be able to trust them now, but governments change, often very suddenly, and we have all that mechanism in place for a full-blown fascist state. They know everything about us. It’s all stored on databases – how we vote, who we speak to, what we read, what we buy.’

  I took a deep breath, her passion like a small storm in front of me. Why had I never even thought about this stuff? All I could dredge up from my torpid mind was a few thrillers I’d read, where fugitives had to outwit the state authorities in various clever ways. And I had watched Spooks with no great involvement in the way cameras and computers could track every move a person made. It just made for a good story.

  ‘I suppose that’s right,’ I said, even more pathetically than before.

  She relaxed slightly. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I don’t know when I got so het up about it, but it’s been a gradual process over the past year or two. The more you’re sensitised to it, the more ghastly it all starts to look. I feel like a real Cassandra at times – but I know I’m right. It’s all crept up on us, with so many reassurances and promises, we’ve just let it take over. When something like today happens, I just have to explode.’

  ‘So what did the police ask you?’ It wasn’t such a change of subject as it sounded. I was worried that she’d exploded all over one of
the police officers, as well.

  She winced exaggeratedly. ‘Oh, they wanted to know how well acquainted with you I was, basically. I think they’re intrigued by my part in all this, being Jessica’s mother and so forth. Plus, I imagine they’ve got a whole database just for me, after what’s happened over the past couple of years. I do tend to turn up in all the wrong places.’

  ‘Weren’t they embarrassed at the way they fobbed you off on Sunday?’

  ‘Not so’s you’d notice. Of course, now they have woken up to my part in it all, I’d really rather they left me alone.’

  It was a confusing answer, delivered in a wry, almost bitter, tone. ‘You said to me, at Mrs Simmonds’ funeral, “At least she wasn’t murdered”. It struck me as funny at the time. Now I find it a bit scary.’

  She smiled. ‘I know. It was idiotic of me to say that – but I have been involved in a few murders, one way and another. And so have you, I gather?’

  I conceded that it was something we shared. ‘Not for a while now, though,’ I added. ‘I thought I was going to have a nice quiet life for the next fifty years.’

  ‘How old are you?’ she asked, with startling directness.

  ‘Thirty-seven and three-quarters.’

  ‘I’m forty-four,’ she said, solemnly.

  This echo of the playground seemed to mark some kind of stage in our friendship. It made no difference to anything – how could our ages matter, after all? But it was a deliberate mutual disclosure of a personal detail, freely and honestly made, and it brought a little bubble of fresh air with it.

  ‘So what happens now?’ I wondered. ‘I’m stuck here with no car, required to stay within earshot of DI Basildon, probably followed at a discreet distance, in case I incriminate myself.’

  ‘There’s only one option,’ she said robustly.

  ‘Oh?’