A Cotswold Killing

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘That’s right.’ Now what? Why the hell had she stopped, anyway?

  ‘Will you come and talk to me for a few minutes?’ he invited, with a very direct look. His eyes were a shade of brown that was almost yellow. They had a quality to them that Thea couldn’t quite identify. Not exactly fierce, or defensive, but full of energy and intent. With surprise, she realised she liked this man.

  ‘OK then,’ she said, and turned off the car engine. ‘Is this your house?’

  ‘Handy for the pub,’ he said, with a weariness that revealed the words as having been repeated so often they’d lost any meaning. He didn’t strike her as much of a drinker. ‘Do you mind leaving the dog in the car? I have a cat who passionately dislikes dogs.’

  She followed him through the garden gate, noticing an exuberant lilac tree just inside the hedge, awash with deep purple blooms, impossible to ignore. Across the front of the house a clematis clung and spread, with a thousand small pink flowers. The effect was of bounteous excess, not just in colour and texture, but scent, from the lilac. The rest of the garden was equally overflowing. No lawn, but narrow paths between beds overflowing with clumps and clusters, buds and boughs, all packed closely. In the summer it must be chest high with delphiniums and lupins and daisies and a dozen other things.

  ‘Wow!’ she breathed. ‘I love your garden.’

  He ducked his chin, as if accepting what was due. ‘Come on in,’ he said, and pushed open the front door.

  It was dark inside, as they stepped into a windowless inner hall. The man took her into a room on the left, where the light was dappled by the clematis outside, which straggled halfway down the window. They were in a sitting room furnished with plump armchairs and a deep-piled red carpet. Thea tried to find evidence of a wife, but the search was inconclusive. There was no sign of the dog-hating cat.

  ‘I should introduce myself,’ he said. ‘Harry Richmond.’

  ‘Thea Osborne. Pleased to meet you.’ She held out her hand and he took it in a dry assertive grasp. She felt the loss when he let go again.

  He didn’t bustle or dither, but directed her to a deeply comfortable chair and left her to put the kettle on for tea. He was back in less than a minute. Thea only had time to scan the row of books on a built-in shelf beside the chimney breast. Wilbur Smith and Ruth Rendell seemed to feature most prominently.

  ‘I’m sorry if this seems rather odd,’ he said, sitting down in the opposite chair. ‘I promise I haven’t abducted you. We’re supposed to be careful about approaching young women these days.’

  ‘Wasn’t that always the case?’

  He smiled. ‘Of course. Even more so at times, actually. It’s just – I suppose we didn’t talk about it so much then.’

  She waited, rehearsing things to say, and rejecting them all. If this was some sort of game, then the next move was surely down to him.

  ‘Do you know this area at all?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes. I only live in Oxfordshire. I know Gloucester quite well, and Cheltenham. I hadn’t actually been to the Duntisbournes before, though. It’s very pretty round here.’

  ‘So you don’t know anybody?’

  ‘No, not really. I’ve spoken to Helen Winstanley a couple of times.’

  ‘And you went to visit Barrow Hill, I gather?’

  Was the gentle hint of reproach all in her imagination? ‘I did, yes. I felt so sorry for the farmer, old Mr Jennison.’

  ‘Really?’ The wry amusement on his face was a shock. ‘And how did he receive your sympathy?’

  He was definitely playing with her. ‘You probably already know I never managed to speak to him. I still haven’t seen him.’

  He got up from his chair, with no sign of stiffness. ‘I’ll just go and make that tea. Do you have milk? Sugar?’

  ‘Just milk, thanks.’

  She waited impassively for his return. He had an agenda, which she did not. She didn’t think he wanted to upset or frighten her. It could simply be that he’d understood her loneliness, and wanted to assuage it. He couldn’t have known she would come driving past his gate, so he must have acted very swiftly to get into position as he had. Thinking about that, she realised he must have noticed her drive past, towards the pub, identified the vehicle, and decided to present himself as she returned – knowing she had no choice but to come back the same way.

  Cleverly, he hadn’t flagged her down as she returned, but merely stood where she could see him, giving her the chance to recognise him and stop. This explanation made sense as far as it went, but it still seemed riddled with coincidence and unexplained motivations. He came back with two mugs of tea. No tray or biscuits, no saucers or teaspoons. This was a man who had kept up with the times. She suspected he hadn’t used a teapot, either, but merely dunked a teabag into first one mug of hot water, then the other. The tea did not look very strong.

  ‘I should reveal my interest,’ he said. ‘You must be wondering what I’m playing at.’

  She took the mug he offered, and set it down on the floor beside her. ‘Go on then,’ she invited.

  ‘You met June and Lindy at Barrow Hill. It was Lindy who described your visit to me. She’s my great-niece, as it happens, and we’re the greatest of friends. We have a regular date every Tuesday evening, when we play chess and catch up with the gossip. Nothing can keep us from it, not even the sudden violent death of her uncle.’

  ‘Or the sudden violent death of her father, two months ago?’

  ‘Well, we did miss two weeks then,’ he admitted. ‘He died on a Saturday, and wasn’t buried for a while afterwards, with all the police work and so forth.’ He shook his head. ‘Lindy’s the one you should be feeling sorry for, not her blasted grandfather.’

  Thea tried to work it out. ‘Is he your brother?’

  ‘Not likely! No, my sister was married to him. Muriel, her name is.’

  For the first time, Thea gave a thought to this woman whose two sons had been killed in rapid succession. Was her heart not broken? How on earth must she be feeling? And as if this belated sympathy had shifted something inside, she felt a surge of real horror at what had happened. She gasped with it, aware in that moment of how successfully she’d so far kept herself detached from the emotions involved. It hadn’t been her problem; the people were strangers to her. Now this defence crumbled, and sadness rushed in.

  ‘Poor woman!’ she said. ‘What must she be feeling?’

  Harry Richmond eyed her consideringly. ‘Do you have children? Sons?’

  ‘A daughter. Jessica. She’s twenty-one.’

  ‘And you’re a widow, I gather?’

  ‘Right. Did Lindy tell you that, as well?’

  ‘To be frank with you, I knew already. Clive Reynolds and I are friends, you might say. We’re both on the Parish Council, among other things. He talked a little bit about you, trying to reassure himself that the house would be in capable hands. He’s a worrier, poor old Clive.’

  Thea struggled not to be diverted. ‘So the Jennisons, Paul and Joel, were your nephews. June said your sister ran off?’ It sounded impertinent, but there’d been an unspoken pact from the start not to be unduly polite. She didn’t think Harry Richmond valued politeness very highly.

  ‘It wasn’t an easy thing she did, leaving those boys. There are people who will never forgive her, never even speak to her, because of it. That’s after more than twenty years.’

  ‘Did she have more children?’

  ‘A girl. She’s twenty-one now, too. Like your Jessica.’

  ‘Is she still with the man? The one she ran off with?’

  ‘He died, as it happens. Last year. He was older than her, by some years. Got the dreaded prostate trouble, which went into his pelvis. Very unpleasant, poor chap. Didn’t know where to put himself, in the last few weeks, for the pain.’

  Thea lapsed into one of her familiar reveries, in which she compared the different ways of dying and tried to decide which might be preferable, given a choice, which of course you weren’t.

&n
bsp; ‘Where is she now?’ she asked, eventually, aware that the woman Muriel was the key element in this conversation.

  ‘Oh, she’s not far away.’ He looked into her eyes, challenging her to join in the game he was playing. Thea was hooked, wondering whether she was about to hear that Muriel was landlady of the pub up the lane, or head teacher at the nearest primary school.

  She cocked her head and widened her eyes, knowing how pretty she looked when she did that. Harry Richmond responded as men generally did, with a slight tension, a slight upward lift, as if a magnet were drawing him towards her. He didn’t take his eyes off hers. She didn’t want him to.

  ‘My sister lives in Bisley. Do you know it?’

  Thea shook her head.

  ‘It’s only two or three miles, as the crow flies. The lanes make it further, but you could say she’s local, still.’

  ‘Brave lady.’

  He shrugged. ‘She’d never get on anywhere else. Some people are like plants – you can’t uproot them without killing them.’

  Thea wondered at the paradox of this. The woman had, after all, uprooted herself from Barrow Hill, in a manner that even these days was exceptional, and twenty years ago was close to blasphemy. Not a lot of women abandoned young sons as well as a husband. She urgently wanted to know more about Muriel Jennison – or whatever her surname was now. She wanted to know what sort of person had produced that very pleasant Joel, and was sister to this seductive elderly man.

  ‘So – the killing of Paul and Joel. Are you trying to say it’s somehow a family matter?’

  ‘Whoa!’ He blinked and shook his head. ‘Have a care.’

  It was such an odd old-fashioned caution that she smiled. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m still trying to understand.’

  ‘Of course, in one sense, it’s obviously a family matter. They were brothers, after all. The police set out with the attitude that Paul must have been shot by some travelling person, poaching a long way from his own home patch. They couldn’t find a match for the threads and hairs and stuff from the hedge. It was a horrible tragic thing to happen, left everybody sick and frustrated – but it suited us to imagine it’d been a stranger that did it, probably by accident. He certainly didn’t panic – thoroughly cleaned the gun of fingerprints and left it by the body, before running away. Tried to make it look like suicide, you see, though not very convincingly. Clive seems to have disturbed him by charging out with his torch and his stick. We were just starting to settle down again, thinking, well, he’ll never rest easy in his bed, to his dying day, whoever he might be. Saves the taxpayer the cost of a trial. Won’t bring Paulie back. One of those things. Then Joel got himself killed, and it’s as if everything came back, fifty times over.’

  ‘Everybody was so quiet, on Sunday morning, standing by my gate. It was uncanny.’

  ‘Not your gate,’ he reminded her. ‘But I know what you mean. We were stunned senseless. When Helen phoned me, I just couldn’t believe it.’

  ‘But why did everybody turn up like that, and just stand there? It was uncanny – or worse than that. Ghoulish. Like gawpers at a motorway crash.’

  ‘I imagine there are as many answers to that as there were people gathered. Young Johnny Baker was just passing on his bike. Martin and Isabel would be concerned merely on the grounds of living so close by. Virginia and her friend might have persuaded themselves they could do something useful.’

  ‘And you? Why were you there?’

  ‘That’s something I asked myself, as soon as I arrived. Helen said something about more trouble at Brook View, which I believe I heard as trouble for the Jennison family, almost from the start. I’ve never been a very patient man. It seemed intolerable to sit at home and wait for news.’ He shook his head, with a rueful smile. ‘I can’t really explain, if I’m honest.’

  ‘You were very concerned about that Monique girl. What was all that about?’

  He scratched the back of his neck. ‘In actual fact, I was just looking for an excuse to break up the crowd. I didn’t think it was very wholesome the way they all just stood there. Not very nice for you, after such a traumatic discovery, either.’

  ‘Oh, I’m used to shocks,’ she said. ‘Immune, probably.’

  ‘Nobody’s immune, my dear. It always catches up with you eventually. Sometimes the second time’s even worse than the first.’

  Thea shook her head. ‘Only if you’ve sidestepped it the first time around.’

  ‘Balderdash!’ he said, with a self-mocking smile. ‘Utter baloney.’

  ‘So how was it for you?’ she asked, knowing this moment had been coming all along and wondering whether everyone in this secretive little village had a tragic tale to tell.

  ‘Wife had motor neurone disease. She died two years ago, inch by horrifying inch. Nothing unusual. She was seventy-two. It was just an unhappy twist that her mother outlived her.’

  ‘Offspring?’

  ‘Just the one. He’s thirty-nine and homosexual. We find it hard to understand each other, but he has a very good heart, as Grandma always said. I consider myself fortunate, compared to a lot of people.’

  ‘We still seem to be talking about families,’ Thea mused. ‘Do you think that’s the way the police are looking at the murders now? Something in the family?’

  ‘I’m not privy to how the police are thinking. I gather you’re better placed for that than I am.’

  Aha! Of course! Now she knew why he’d flagged her down, why she was so interesting. It was James. Clive Reynolds had passed on the fact that she had a senior policeman as a brother-in-law. She almost laughed with relief at having settled that particular question. It did nothing to diminish her liking for and interest in Mr Harry Richmond.

  Who had not actually flagged her down; he hadn’t needed to be so unsubtle. She had the feeling he’d given the matter a lot of thought. She might almost be persuaded that he’d sent out some sort of magic spell that made her divert her route past his garden gate.

  Well, he deserved a reward for his patience. ‘Actually, James seems to think it’s something rather more sinister than that,’ she said.

  CHAPTER TEN

  It was not unlike waking from a deep dreamless sleep. A sleep you knew you oughtn’t to be having, because it was morning and you should be somewhere. It was like rewinding a video and watching it again properly, putting aside the ironing or newspaper that you’d used as distraction. This time you turned up the sound, watched for every little detail, realising how inattentive and unobservant you’d been before.

  Why had the police allowed her to get away with so much? Their questions had been vague, their sense of her importance minimal. She had merely been the individual who discovered the body. ‘Found in woodlands by a man walking his dog’ had always been one of the less interesting lines in reports of a corpse turning up. The man was never publicly interviewed, or named or given a leading role in the proceedings. Did he receive counselling afterwards for his trauma? Did he dream of decomposing flesh and fingers mistaken for sticks to throw for his Jack Russell?

  Joel Jennison had not told her anything during his fleeting visit that could possibly be construed as a cry for help, a warning or a clever clue as to whatever dreadful crimes might be going on in the village. He had been relaxed and friendly. He had asked her whether Thea was short for Dorothea or Anthea, in a funny clever way. So June’s suspicion that he had been visiting for an urgent reason seemed wrong.

  He hadn’t handed her a small important package, or passed on any messages. If he was in a state-sponsored spy ring, she had completely failed to notice. If he was trying to alert her to a midnight assembly of the local coven in Clive Reynolds’ orchard, it had apparently never materialised.

  Instead, he had got himself into the field behind the house, during the night, losing his neckerchief and his life in the process.

  And now, five days later, Thea was feeling deeply distressed by this. She bitterly mourned the cheerful young man, who’d been full of life and humour. She co
nceived a rage against the faceless nameless killer who had slaughtered him and then dumped the body face down in a muddy pool. And she acknowledged a determination to do all she could to bring this monster to justice. All this, and more, Harry Richmond had elicited from her before she left his cottage. She had even told him the full story of Carl’s accident, and the helpless hatred she still felt for the careless lorry driver who had sent him to his death. Neither of them had needed to articulate the consequent desire to prevent another killing from going unavenged.

  He had given her another mug of tea, this time with buttered toast and honey. It was two hours before she remembered the dog in the car, clapping her hand to her mouth with self-reproach. There had been no sign of Harry’s cat, but he did not invite Hepzibah in. Instead he’d just waited for her to leave, standing in his hallway, smiling gently.

  ‘Come again,’ he’d said. ‘Any time.’

  Thursday evening was disjointed. Remembering her duties to the Reynoldses, she vacuumed the living room and stairs, checked for telephone messages, inspected the sheep in the fading light, and organised a brief romping game for the labradors on the side lawn. Then she e-mailed James, despite there being no message from him.

  It was good to see you yesterday, sorry it couldn’t be longer. Have met an interesting man, name of Harry Richmond, related to the Jennisons. I hope he’s not a police suspect. Are they (you?) getting anywhere? Everything seems terribly quiet.

  Rain’s forecast for tomorrow, darn it. But I’ve survived nearly a week here now, and haven’t spent more than a pound or two of my own money, which can’t be bad. Even with corpses turning up, this is rather a good way to earn a crust.

  Anyway, hope to see you again soon. Love to Rosie, and I hope the back’s eased up now.

  Thea.

  It had taken some careful thought to strike just the right tone. Cheerful, self-sufficient, and mindful of poor Rosie, but not letting him off the hook regarding the police enquiry. If his visit the day before had been motivated by a wish to pick her brains, then she’d earned the right to be kept informed. The extent of his concern for her welfare was a matter of some doubt, in her mind. She’d been tempted to hint at nervousness, but in the end decided against it. It was too risky a path to venture down, playing the woman in jeopardy. The last thing she wanted was to start believing it herself.