A Cotswold Killing

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Joel did do the milking on Saturday afternoon, I assume?’

  ‘According to his father, yes, he did.’

  ‘So we still assume he was alive when the Reynoldses boarded their plane?’

  ‘Within half an hour or so, yes. They finished the milking at seven. Then Joel had his supper as usual, at eight. His dad went to bed at nine. The flight actually took off at nine thirty—’

  ‘So with checking-in and everything, the Reynoldses have to be in the clear.’

  ‘I’m not really at liberty to discuss these details with you,’ said the man again. Thea was fully aware that he had already told her more than he should have done. It was amazing what a smile could do, accompanied by an open and innocent demeanour.

  ‘But his brother was shot, wasn’t he? Isn’t it unusual for the same killer to use different methods?’

  He sighed, and switched his weight to the other foot. ‘It’s very unusual for one person to commit more than one murder,’ he said. ‘Unless it’s someone who goes berserk and shoots a whole schoolful of kids all at once.’

  Thea wished she’d invited him to sit down. He seemed jaded, almost bitter, and she felt he was due some sympathy. But it was too late for that. ‘I should be getting along,’ he said.

  The house plants had been badly neglected for two days, but did not appear to bear any grudges. Leaves spread glossily, stems maintained the perpendicular and incipient spring shoots were evident everywhere. Thea recalled a time in her life when she’d been the proud owner of a windowsill full of succulents and busy lizzies, and warmed to her charges. They were, after all, impressive. The sort of thing you could pay £50 for in a garden centre. She suspected that if she allowed any of them to die, the value would be deducted from her eventual payment. She would dust them and spray them, she pledged to herself, the day before the Reynoldses were due to come home.

  Later that evening, she fetched her laptop from the bedroom and booted it up. It was her favourite possession, her link to the world, her entertainment. On it she sent and received e-mail, played games and balanced her accounts. Without it, she could not have indulged her fond and foolish passion for playing online Scrabble.

  It was an addiction she seldom disclosed to anybody. She had found an internet Scrabble club, mostly composed of Americans, and she routinely played four or five games a day. She noted unusual words everywhere she went, listing them alphabetically and very often using them to excellent effect. But the competition was fierce, and others in the club frequently used words she had never seen before. She was, she freely admitted, ruined for the real thing with a board and a living breathing opponent who would demand to know what jota or odic actually meant. Who would not take kindly to repeated use of qat and zax and hmm and vav. It was a perversion of the original game, but she didn’t care. She was hooked, and that was that. Too late to go back now.

  She used the Reynoldses’ phone socket for her modem, aware that this would block any incoming calls, but not concerned. There was always the 1571 thing if anybody needed to leave a message.

  Her first game was close, but she won by four points. The second one, played against a person calling himself BeesNeez, started badly, until she managed to place the K on a triple letter square going in two directions, which boosted things nicely. She liked the K almost best of all the letters, investing it with a personality all its own.

  Hepzibah sat close to her, but not in physical contact. Thea had to sit up at the small table under the window of the lounge, and the dog was curled on a rug near her feet. Despite calling themselves ‘laptops’, it had been obvious from the start that to try to use it on a lap was uncomfortable and frustrating. And the battery never lasted very long, so she almost always operated it from the mains. The resulting cables could make working on a lap even more complicated.

  BeesNeez had the Q, which he (she supposed it was a he) used to only moderate effect, and then the X, making XENON and OX simultaneously, and Thea felt that failure was inevitable. It was a fifteen-minute game and time was running out. She lost by twenty points, and was unreasonably downcast about it.

  She had postponed checking for any e-mails until after the game, saving it as a small treat in the event of losing. For a year now, life had been composed of just such small mood-boosting strategies. Acutely aware of where she stood on the elation-depression spectrum at any given moment, she had doggedly collected these goodies, storing them up and doling them out when required. It worked, but it was not much of a substitute for Carl’s ready attention and reliable companionship.

  There were eight e-mails: one selling a new penis-enhancing drug; two from desperate Africans wanting a sponsor to get them to the UK; two from an outfit called My Offers, which Thea suspected she had carelessly signed up for two or three years ago; one from Jessica; one from brother-in-law James; and one from somebody wanting her to house-sit in July. She read the last one first – a family living on a few acres near Stroud, with a cat, poultry and elderly pony. Sorry about the rather short notice, but liked the look of her advertisement, and would she please reply quickly.

  She sent a brief response, saying the diary was free for July, and she would phone them the next day. Stroud was only a few miles away from her present position, she realised. She might go and see them during the coming week.

  This was as good as she could have hoped for. Her two dearest relatives, and the prospect of more work in the pipeline. The spam was quickly deleted, and she concentrated on the messages from real people.

  Hi, Momma, wrote her daughter, knowing she hated to be addressed like that. How’s the job turning out? Can’t wait to hear all about it. Phone me! I handed in my dissertation this morning! Hooray!! Only five more weeks and then we’re free. Still haven’t decided what to do with the summer. Advice please? How’s sweet Hepzie? Uncle J. says he wants to talk to you – should be an e-mail from him. Gotta go. There’s a gig at Collingwood. I’m singing. Aaarghhh! Loadsalove, Jess. xxxxx

  The message from James, flagged up like that by Jessica, put her in something of a flutter. A kindly man, desperately wounded by his brother’s sudden and horrible death, he had put a lot of energy into concern for Thea. Too much, she had eventually realised; it hadn’t done either of them any real good. An undercurrent of attraction, a sense of being thrown together in their grief, had made Thea uneasy. James had a wife and career. Thea had no intention of intruding herself into either one – but she was grateful for his abiding presence in her life, just the same. And she was more than grateful for the way he had immersed himself in Jessica’s life, listening, helping, encouraging. In that respect he was the personification of the word avuncular. Pity it was too long ever to feature in a game of Scrabble.

  His message did nothing to assuage her flutters.

  Thea – I hear you’re in the Cotswolds this week. Forgot just when it was going to be. I never got around to telling you that I know Clive Reynolds slightly. Heard about the dead man in his field – are you involved? Listen, love. Be very careful. There’s something going on in your area. Funny people. And I don’t mean funny . I’m coming down there on Wednesday. Tried to phone you, but your mobile’s not taking calls. Switch it on, there’s a good girl. I spoke to Jess, but hope I didn’t worry her. Tricky time for her, finals and everything. Anyway, see you on Wednesday. Lock the doors. Love, James.

  One of the most irritating things about James was his obsession with security. It went with the job, of course. He spent his working day listening to terrible tales of burglary, mugging, rape and assault, until nobody could blame him for believing the world to be rife with criminal behaviour. Danger lurked in every doorway for him, and even without a dead man in the field, he would have shared Clive Reynolds’s cautious approach to doors, lights, gates and dogs. Not that the dogs showed any sign of understanding their role as guardians; they never even woke up when blood-curdling screams shattered the night.

  Still, it would be nice to see him, and intriguing to get a new angle on the murde
r of Joel Jennison. Funny people, hmm? In Duntisbourne Abbots itself, did he mean? Thea found that difficult to credit. There was obviously money in the area, and where there was money, there would probably be a level of anxiety and self-interest beyond the point of comfort. Envy, deviousness, stress – all were obvious concomitants of an affluent lifestyle. Some of these houses were changing hands at half a million pounds or more. Money on that scale had to carry with it a lot of bad vibes, as well as the more normal feelings of pride, complacency and self-indulgence.

  Or had he meant something else entirely? Was he talking about a covert drugs cartel operating from one of the cottages beside the church? Or a child pornography ring meeting secretly in one of the local farms? Anything was possible, she supposed, albeit with a large dash of scepticism. Possible, but surely unlikely? In any case, the implication was that Clive Reynolds was on the right side. One of us. He might have been an adulterer, but not, apparently, anything ‘funny’.

  She took the dogs out into the dark garden, last thing before bed. The garden didn’t remain dark for long, with an automatic power-light suddenly blinding them in its beam. There, she thought. Security lights working perfectly.

  Bonzo and Georgie trotted quite cheerfully from tree to tree, relieving themselves copiously in the process. Hepzibah squatted on the edge of the lawn, and Thea concluded that all was well in that department at least. All three dogs would make it through the night with no urgent calls of nature.

  She took a moment to appreciate the evening. The moon was close to full, flickering through fast-moving patchy clouds. For a moment she wondered how come it had been so dark the night before, until she realised there had been a thick cloud cover. It was breezy, and she caught the tang of agricultural activities. Partly it was the sheep in the Reynoldses’ field, she suspected. Several of them had mucky bottoms, and Thea had noticed a whiff coming from them at close quarters. Apparently it intensified at night. The only sound was the breeze in the trees, and a car engine almost beyond earshot. It felt calm and safe, and natural. Just the way it had felt that first evening, shortly before the man from the neighbouring farm met his violent end.

  It had been a strange day, full of scrappy encounters and elusive wisps of information concerning the Jennisons. She could detect no pattern to anything, including the peculiar existence she was expected to endure for the next three weeks. Every time she thought about it, the period seemed to expand, until three weeks felt like infinity. A glimpse into the future suggested that she would be a very different person by the end of her stay at Brook View.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Tuesday arrived noisily. The breeze had turned to something much more businesslike, and the treetops behind the house swirled and bucked alarmingly. Thea tried to calculate their distance from the house, wondering whether the roof was at risk from a falling cypress or beech. She had a feeling that beech trees were particularly susceptible to strong winds, having shallow root systems. Fortunately, both the proud occupants of the sweeping lawn were much too far away to cause concern.

  ‘OK, chaps,’ she told the labradors, as she let them out of their night quarters in the back kitchen, ‘we’ll face it together, shall we?’

  Throwing open the front door, she found the wind less awesome than expected. Despite the tossing vegetation and the constant noise, the air on her face was comparatively gentle, and not at all cold. It must be coming from the south, she concluded, to judge from the mild temperature. She held her face up to it, relishing the fresh sensation, closing her eyes and letting it ruffle her short hair. The dogs seemed to be happy out in it, too. Hepzie’s long ears flapped, and the feathering on her legs streamed decoratively behind her as she ran across the lawn. ‘Better look at the sheep,’ Thea muttered aloud, turning left along the side of the house, to the yard and gate into the field.

  The sheep were nonchalantly grazing, with their backsides to the wind. Their fleeces were obviously very thick and heavy, hardly ruffling in the airflow. Thea tried to imagine them after shearing, half the size and suddenly clean and white again. How would their own lambs recognise them, she wondered.

  She satisfied herself that they were all present and correct, that no trees had yet blown down, and retreated back to the house, with the dogs following her. It was only nine o’ clock, and the day began to loom somewhat emptily ahead.

  Briskly, she refused to give in to any inklings of gloom. Already she had made the acquaintance of the two closest neighbours, savouring the sense of possibility inherent in a new relationship. The discomforting fact of Joel Jennison’s violent demise had probably assisted in forging links, however transitory, with Helen and June. She recalled the group of villagers clustered at Brook View’s gate and wondered which of them she might get to know next.

  The absence of a local Post Office struck her as a severe deprivation. Where did they go for their gossip? No shop, either, nor even a village pub. What an odd place this must be, where the people jumped into their cars every morning to drive off to work in Cirencester or Gloucester, or else shut themselves into an attic room to labour all day designing software. Young mothers perhaps organised coffee mornings in each other’s homes, and the old – well, what did happen to the old? Even the middle-aged might not all have work to go to. What about Virginia and Penny, the village stalwarts who organised the gossip network and turned up at murder scenes even before it was officially a murder scene? Did they sit in the churchyard on a sunny day and reminisce together? Did they gather in that quaint little village hall to play bridge and knit squares for Oxfam blankets? Did they catch a daily bus into town, and bustle about the shops buying goods they didn’t need? Thea rather doubted that a daily bus would be on offer, or that more than a scant handful would use it if there was.

  All of which indicated that there was only one way to meet people: the way she had so far adopted with some success. She had to go to their homes and knock on their doors. The only requirement was foreknowledge of their names. She had memorised Harry Richmond and Susanna something, besides Virginia and Penny. Plus the Staceys, who had from the outset struck Thea as important. They were neighbours to Brook View, for one thing, Fairweather Farm being only a short way down the lane to the left of the front gate.

  Pondering all this, Thea realised she was not constrained by the usual rules of protocol. It didn’t matter if she blundered into rudeness or embarrassment. She was only there for three weeks. She had nothing to lose and much to gain. She was, presumably, the object of some curiosity, not least because of the murder. There might also be sympathy for the shock she’d suffered. Plus, if her assessment of daily village life was at all accurate, there would be a number of locals starving for a bit of conversation, during the long quiet hours of Monday to Friday.

  One big decision was whether or not to take Hepzibah. It had worked well with Helen, having the dog alongside. It would have been close to disaster at Barrow Hill. But the dog liked wind blowing her ears inside out, and Thea loved her company, so that was decided upon.

  They followed the same footpath as on Sunday morning, when investigating the route to the village, before the grim discovery in the pool. Emerging onto the road from Brook View’s gateway, they turned left, where to turn right would bring them to the Barrow Hill entrance. Barely twenty yards along, there was a stile on the other side of the road, and the well-maintained pathway, which ran past a farmhouse that had to be the back of Fairweather Farm and two cottages before arriving on the edge of Duntisbourne Abbots.

  The farmhouse was substantial, flanked by a stone barn on one side and a newer building on the other, made of steel girders and sheets of corrugated iron. The area between the house and lane was entirely different from that of Barrow Hill, being clean and dry. Thea realised that the proper entrance must lie on the other side of the house, with a driveway opening onto the road at some more distant point. It was difficult to be sure, but it seemed very probable that the land adjoined that of the Jennisons of Barrow Hill. This realisation reminded
her of her theory that the murders might have something to do with rapacious neighbouring farmers, greedy for extra acreage.

  Whilst Thea paused to assess her courage levels, Hepzibah seized the initiative and wriggled under the gate into the yard. Instantly there was a great flurry of snarling and shrieking, which Thea correctly interpreted as sudden attack from a sizeable black and white collie on her small soft beloved spaniel.

  ‘Hey!’ she shouted, struggling to open the gate. ‘Stop it!’

  Serious dog fights were rare, in her experience. Hepzibah’s habit of unconditional submission had so far disarmed every dog she encountered and there had never been a moment’s trouble. This time things were different. The collie had the spaniel’s long right ear between its jaws, and was shaking it viciously. Blood flew in an arc all around Hepzie’s head and she howled at a pitch designed to elicit maximum distress in any listener. Thea became frantic. Somehow getting through the infuriating gate, she kicked out as hard as she could, shouting through clenched teeth. Hepzie was howling at the top of her voice, an unearthly sound of fear and pain which tore at Thea’s heart. If the dog was killed…if this bloody beast of a collie didn’t let go…she kicked out again, causing a muffled yelp, but no sign of surrendering its prey.

  Desperately, Thea grabbed the aggressor’s jaws. It was, after all, only a collie. A Rottweiler or bull terrier might have given her pause. But this was not a breed designed to hang on at all costs. It had long jaws, relatively easy to get a purchase on, and force open. This was what she did, with strength she hadn’t known she possessed. With an ominous crack, she achieved her goal, and the spaniel pulled free, still howling and spraying blood from the torn ear.

  Fiercely, Thea addressed the collie, before letting it go. ‘Now just you behave yourself,’ she said, far too angry to fear anything it might do to her. She need not have worried. As she relaxed her grip, she realised she had dislocated or even broken its jaw. Pathetically it sank onto the ground, pawing at its own face and whimpering. ‘Serves you right,’ Thea said loudly, while beginning to feel a surge of remorse. After all, Hepzibah had invaded its territory. If this was another bitch – and Thea thought it was – that was a risky act. Too late, she wondered if she ought to have kept the spaniel on a lead.