by Rebecca Tope
‘No, I haven’t. I’ve been here before, Drew – that’s the point. I know how people behave under pressure. You have to push them into a corner, make them desperate.’
‘Isn’t that the police’s job?’
‘Yes, it is. That’s what interrogation is all about. Make them think there’s nowhere to hide, catch them out in lies and contradictions. Confront them with their own guilt – force them to recognise it.’
‘Nasty,’ I shivered. ‘Cruel.’
‘Definitely. It’s a cruel world.’
After all, I told myself, she did have relatives in the police, not least her assertive young daughter. She had been the girlfriend of a senior detective, and joined in a few of his investigations. She had glimpsed the cruel world that I could barely accept as real, despite my own brushes with violent crime. I had made excuses for people, even when they were shown to be killers. I had even tried to understand the man who had shot my innocent wife. ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘maybe it is.’
‘You don’t sound convinced.’
‘I’m not. I suppose I think cruelty is what gets forced to the surface under this pressure you’re talking about. It’s not a natural human trait.’
‘It is, though. Of course it is. It’s about power and hierarchies and maintaining your position. Just watch any playground.’
‘I thought we were short of time,’ I said, ducking the issue.
‘Don’t worry. We’ve got to wait here until half past eight.’
I had begun to understand that she really did have a plan in mind, that she was orchestrating a series of events designed to avert the exhumation at midnight. And that in her own thoroughgoing way, she was bringing me up to speed with what was going to happen.
‘So you went to the Talbots?’ I prompted.
‘Charles and Judith were there. I had a long talk with them, going over what they told us last weekend, and a lot more. I can’t tell you all of it now, but it was very interesting.’
‘Why did they agree to talk to you? What business was it of yours?’
‘I began with a grovelling apology for staying the night in the house with you, and telling the Watchetts that you’d been left the property. I guessed they had reasons for not wanting that particular fact to get out, and it turned out I was right. Anyway, that easily led into what I wanted to know.’
‘Which was?’
‘Oliver and Judith are very much in disagreement over the house, and whether or not to contest your inheriting it. Charles is on his mother’s side. Oliver…well, Oliver is an extremely important player in this game. We should have paid him more attention from the start.’
‘Do you think he killed Mr Maynard?’ I asked eagerly. ‘Something to do with old rivalries – her carrying on with the Ingram chap?’ I thought back to the argument in the pub. ‘Or something about that girl, Carrie, who’s such a mystery.’
‘Wait,’ she insisted. ‘I have to tell it to you in the right order.’
‘But what about Charles Talbot?’ I could not resist asking. ‘He didn’t look too happy just now.’ I thought again of the grooves in his face, suggesting inner torment as well as anger.
‘No. There’s some business between him and Helena Maynard, which I haven’t entirely fathomed.’
‘Business? Not an affair, surely? She’s his mother’s age, isn’t she? And I thought we’d decided it was Ingram, not Charles.’
‘We don’t know that for sure – it was only Oliver making a wild accusation. And she’s not so much older than Charles.’
‘Yes, she is. She must be. She went to school with Judith, remember.’
‘We haven’t time for this,’ Thea shook her head impatiently. ‘Let me tell it in my own way.’
She went on to describe her visit to the Watchetts, again ostensibly to apologise for offending them by sleeping in the cottage. ‘They weren’t so easy to mollify,’ she confessed. ‘She ranted about betrayal and loose morals.’
‘I hope you convinced her we didn’t do anything immoral.’
She laughed. ‘I didn’t have that much time to waste. It was easier just to let them believe what they liked, and get onto the important stuff.’
I groaned, thinking my reputation and marriage were actually fairly important to me.
‘Anyway, once I got Susan on her own, it all became very interesting. When she stopped to think, she wasn’t surprised that you’d been left the house – typical of Greta, she said, always trying to have the last word. She still rather likes you, apparently, in spite of everything.’
‘That was my first impression, when she came to the burial, but I thought she’d gone off me since then.’
‘And Greta’s choice of funeral was typical as well. Everybody says that. She’d have done it as much to upset the maximum number of people, as from any real concern for the environment or whatever.’
‘That can’t be true,’ I objected. ‘She really believed in ecological funerals and simple living. Look at that co-housing business. She must have joined them for strong personal reasons. She’s made the best provision she could to ensure that a natural burial ground be established here. Although,’ I added sadly, ‘if she didn’t own the field, it’s never going to happen, is it?’
‘She seemed to be vaguely aware of what I was talking about, but made no direct response.
‘She was a nice woman,’ she mumbled unhappily. ‘I wish I’d known her better.’
I nodded. ‘Have you seen young Jeremy again?’ I asked, from an automatic association.
She shook her head. ‘But I gather he’s back here now. Somehow or other, his mother persuaded him.’
‘Does she know he’s been at the co-housing place?’
‘No idea. Not relevant,’ she said, with a quick flip of her hand.
The clock on the dashboard was approaching eight, and I wondered how much more she had to disclose. I concentrated hard on the information she was imparting, trying not to interrupt or divert her from the thread she was following. I was still very far from grasping the final import, the logical conclusion of what she had discovered. Gradually, I found myself believing and, yes – trusting her. She seemed so clear and sure about it all. I began to feel hope and excitement instead of dread and despair.
‘But how did they rush through the demand for the exhumation so fast?’ I wondered at one point. ‘I’d have expected it to take weeks.’
She smiled, her face a strange shade of orange from the street lights. ‘Well, that’s where my influence with certain people came in handy. It helped that DI Basildon had come round to taking me seriously. That was mainly due to my friend Sonia Gladwin, actually. I called in one or two favours, as they say.’
I had an impression that she could have told me more – that her acquaintance with the police was even deeper and wider than I realised.
‘What a very tangled tale,’ I summarised, when she’d finished. ‘People lying about their ages, fighting over a house, neglecting their own children. And yet they all seem perfectly pleasant when you meet them.’
‘Right. I’ve learnt, from recent experience, that things that happened ages ago still rankle enough to make them do terrible things years later. People get stuck in certain positions, and never seem to be able to forgive or forget. And events from schooldays loom larger than most. It’s all so passionate and overwhelming when you’re sixteen.’
‘How on earth have you found all this out? It’s mind-boggling.’
‘Friends Reunited, for a start. And Facebook – that’s fantastic for linking people together. Everybody blithely reveals their entire past history for all the world to see. It makes me despair, usually, but for once it came in very handy. I think they’ve all been keeping in pretty close touch for years.’
‘But there are no huge secrets. For example, I assume Oliver really is the father of both Charles and Jeremy?’
‘Oh yes. Plus a daughter who has a degenerative disease and is in a care home.’
I had forgotten the invisible sis
ter. ‘Ah, so that’s it,’ I said. ‘It sounds like a very sad story.’
I wondered how much of this was directly pertinent to our campaign. Surely Thea would know better than to waste precious minutes on idle gossip, and yet I couldn’t see where it was leading. ‘So?’ I asked.
‘So now I think I’ve built up the complete picture.’
‘And what happens next?’
‘We recruit an assistant,’ she laughed gaily. ‘And I think this must be him, right on time. Look – it’s half past eight.’
As if on cue, there was a rap on the driver’s side of the car, bringing Hepzie to her feet, with a few startled yaps. ‘OK, Heps, settle down,’ said Thea, opening the window. ‘Hello, Harry. What fantastic timekeeping!’
Chapter Twenty-Three
Harry was the elderly bearded bloke from the co-housing place, who had sat next to Thea at lunch. It took me some time to recognise him, and even longer to grasp that they had already started to hatch their devious plot over the soup on Saturday. I felt sidelined and even more betrayed. ‘Couldn’t I have helped?’ I whined. ‘If you’d explained it to me?’
‘Yes, I’m sure you could. But I wanted to keep it to myself for a bit. I’m sorry if that sounds bad, but there it is. I mean, I hardly know you really, do I?’
I swallowed. It felt to me as if we knew each other rather well – that we had meshed almost from the outset, easy together and on the same side. But it was true – we had not spent many hours in each other’s company. We had no real knowledge of how each other reacted under pressure – although I guessed that Thea had an idea that I might not be entirely reliable.
Harry was in the back seat with Hepzie and we were driving back to Broad Campden. Thea began to give instructions, like the top man in a bank robbery. The plan was bold and simple and terrifying. ‘They’re all in the same house, which is extremely handy,’ she said.
I found myself running through the story again, increasingly aware of the many gaps Thea had left in her reasoning. One major omission was Helena Maynard. I was still ignorant of how or whether she fitted into the picture, apart from speculation as to whether and with whom she had been unfaithful to her husband. But it was too late to ask any further questions, so I tried to concentrate on the tasks allotted to me by our leader, far from fully understanding precisely how everything was going to work.
The house was ablaze with light, upstairs and down. The Watchetts lived in a row of houses on the Chipping Campden side of the village, that looked as if they had once been owned by the council: solid, unimaginative, built to last, with good-sized gardens at the front, and no doubt also at the back.
Harry went first, while we waited in the car. He was to introduce himself as a close friend of Mrs Simmonds, from the co-housing group, come to express his regrets for not being at the funeral. He was to manifest total ignorance of the proposed exhumation, shock, horror and then a display of dawning understanding as he absorbed the idea that Greta might have been murdered. ‘Well,’ he would say, ‘I suppose I’m not entirely surprised, when I come to think about it – but from what I know of Greta’s life, it wouldn’t have been the undertaker who killed her. She had enemies far closer to home than that.’ This was designed to cause flurries of mutual suspicion amongst those present, and a heightened atmosphere.
‘Won’t the atmosphere be quite high already?’ I asked. ‘Under the circumstances.’
‘The higher the better,’ said Thea.
Harry had a scant fifteen minutes to achieve his objective, at which point Thea and I would enter the fray, claiming that we could not settle, knowing they all believed that I had killed their sister, aunt and friend. I would proclaim my innocence in a near hysterical mode – further heightening the atmosphere, hoped Thea. She would disclose her intimacy with senior members of the police force, and hint that she was aware of many aspects of Mr Maynard’s murder that had not been publicly revealed.
‘That gives us an hour or so in which to get what we want. Should be plenty,’ she said.
‘Thea – I ought to tell you,’ I began hurriedly, ‘you ought to know that I have been involved in something rather like this before. People behave with serious violence when they’re under pressure. I’ve seen it happen. You need to know what you’re doing.’ She seemed like a barely credible character at that moment – something from a comic strip: Nancy Drew or Lara Croft. Not a small English widow in her forties.
‘I like to make things happen,’ she said, with a ridiculously sweet smile. ‘It usually works.’
‘But what if it goes wrong? What if Charles or Mr Watchett has a gun? Or a knife? I mean – everyone can get a knife easily enough, can’t they? There’ll be a drawerful of them in the kitchen.’
‘Why would they want to knife anybody?’ She gave me a wide-eyed look that didn’t fool me for a moment. ‘All we’re going to do is talk to them.’
I gave up. Beneath all the plans and instructions thrummed the constant question – who killed Mr Maynard? He had certainly been deliberately coshed by somebody, even if they hadn’t meant to kill him. I thought I understood where the guilt must lie, but to my slow-moving brain, the proof was flimsy and the whole exercise fraught with hazard.
‘It’s simple,’ she said impatiently, when I stammered out my confusion, without explaining precisely what it was that was so plain and obvious.
I did my best to concentrate on the present moment, trying to trust that Thea knew what she was doing. At least there was no sign that Harry had blundered too badly, so far. No screaming or slamming doors or gunshots issued from the house. No wailing police sirens attending an alarm call. At exactly nine o’clock, Thea opened her door, told the dog to stay where it was, and said, ‘Come on, then,’ to me. Feeling rather like a second spaniel, I did as I was bid.
We were admitted to a living room that seemed uncomfortably crowded. The bright overhead light left nowhere to hide, and all the faces, as I looked from one to another, displayed varying emotions, from irritation through impatience to boredom. There wasn’t much of a heightened atmosphere, as far as I could discern.
Thea made her opening speech and then waited for me to deliver mine. ‘I know you all think badly of me,’ I began, ‘but I came to try to convince you that I truly did not harm anybody. Not Mrs Simmonds or Mr Maynard.’ I stood up straight and met any eye that fell in my direction. ‘It has all been a complete mix-up, and it’s time we straightened it out before any more damage is done.’
Seven people stared at me. Charles Talbot was standing by the fireplace, in a pose that seemed deliberately calculated to suggest the final act in a play from the Thirties. He ought to have been smoking a pipe for maximum effect, I thought crazily. His young brother was slumped in a corner of a big green sofa, his mobile phone in his hand, as if just about to compose a text message to someone, taking no notice of me and my announcement. Did he have a girlfriend, I wondered? Someone he was relaying all this family turmoil to?
Judith Talbot was beside her friend Susan Watchett, slightly squashed on the remaining sofa space. Mr Watchett was in an armchair, his head and shoulders pressed back as if trying to withdraw from the proceedings. His stare came and went – more a snatching of quick glances than a sustained attention to what I was saying. Oliver Talbot squatted incongruously on a leather pouffe close to his elder son, his expression sulky.
Harry and Thea had gravitated to a point behind the sofa, leaning over it like latecomers to the drama. A big grey cat was curled on a rug in front of the unlit fire, ignoring the whole performance.
‘Poor Greta,’ sighed Harry, apparently not quite done with his own presentation. ‘She was her own worst enemy, of course. Would never give an inch in a disagreement. I never expected her to be murdered, but I sometimes wondered how she escaped a good smack.’
Thea gripped his arm. ‘What do you mean? How well did you know her? Who are you, anyway?’
It struck me as deeply unconvincing, but nobody else seemed to spot a piece of bad acting
when they saw it.
‘Oh, I do beg your pardon,’ he gave a quaint little bow. ‘The name’s Harry Richmond. I knew your Mrs Simmonds for six months before she left the cooperative. I actually took her side once or twice in an argument, just for the sake of fair do’s, but it never seemed to help. She was such a very abrasive woman.’
A protesting snort came from the boy on the sofa, but nothing more articulate emerged.
‘So you agree with us that she was murdered?’ said Judith Talbot, in far less belligerent mode than earlier in the evening. ‘But you don’t think it was Mr Slocombe who did it?’
‘Of course I didn’t do it,’ I shouted hotly. ‘How many more times?’
‘Be quiet,’ ordered Charles Talbot. ‘Please be quiet. We just might be getting somewhere at last.’ He eyed his mother. ‘Ma, you’ve already heard what this man has to say. It doesn’t really change anything, when you think about it. At least – it confirms what you thought.’ He frowned, and chewed his lower lip. ‘Although—’
‘If I understand him, it means Drew’s in the clear,’ Thea interrupted. ‘And that means she wasn’t murdered at all, and there shouldn’t be an exhumation.’
I hadn’t expected her to reach this point so soon. She was deviating from the script, leaving me to flounder.
‘Or…someone we know did it,’ said Charles, again giving his mother a thoughtful look. ‘And we might be sorry to have it brought into the open.’ He might be slow, but he was certainly functioning more effectively than most people in the room.
I caught Harry Richmond’s eye. He seemed to be feeling something close to triumph, his eyebrows twitching manically.
Time was passing far too rapidly for comfort. If everyone was to have a say, and the goal achieved of averting the exhumation, a lot had to happen in the next half-hour.
‘Helena Maynard sent me a very nasty letter,’ I said, hoping to shift things along a bit. ‘Completely out of order it was.’
