A Cotswold Killing

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Don’t you miss him?’

  Helen turned and gave Thea a straight look. ‘I see plenty of him,’ she said. ‘And he comes back here now and then for a visit.’

  ‘Ah.’ Thea took a chair and rested her elbows on the kitchen table. Everything was clean and tidy, the air smelling of some chemical freshener, the windows sparkling. The hand of a cleaning lady was very evident.

  ‘I’m here for another two weeks,’ she said, looking at the pine table top. ‘That’s a long time to stay in the dark.’

  ‘You want more gen about the Jennisons?’ Helen chuckled at her own word play.

  Thea nodded without a smile. ‘I probably wouldn’t care if I hadn’t met Joel. It feels as if he drew me in, just in those few minutes.’

  ‘Not to mention finding his body,’ Helen suggested.

  ‘Right. Right. I am involved, like it or not.’

  ‘You could have killed him,’ Helen said, with a slow thoughtful delivery. ‘They might think you did it.’

  ‘What – that I’m a paid assassin? I don’t think the police suspect me.’

  ‘They might just be waiting for you to give yourself away.’

  Thea wasn’t sure how seriously to take this. ‘I have wondered, now and then, how it might be to kill somebody. What level of rage or hatred you’d need. I’ve never met a murderer.’

  ‘They’re usually quite pleasant people, I gather.’

  ‘Well, Helen, I promise you I didn’t kill Joel Jennison. But I do quite badly want to know who did, and why, and how. Every day that feeling gets stronger. But I’ve got no idea how to find out the answers. I’ve never seen myself as a private detective. I don’t think they really exist in this country, do they?’

  ‘Only to follow adulterous wives, or chase up bad debts, I think.’

  ‘Mmm. But you know the people. You’re not working. You could help me.’

  ‘How do you know I’m not the killer?’

  Thea did smile this time. ‘Good question. I never thought of that.’

  ‘You’re not going to be very good at this, are you?’

  ‘Give me time. I’m just a bit of a slow learner.’ She looked into Helen’s eyes. ‘Did you kill Joel and Paul Jennison?’

  The reaction was interesting. Helen flushed, and her gaze flickered away from Thea’s. She put her hands together, palms at right angles. ‘No, Thea, I didn’t,’ she said, in a low quiet voice.

  ‘Do you know who did?’

  Helen shook her head. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘Do you think it’s likely that it’s somebody you know?’

  ‘I can’t answer that. I haven’t yet lived here long enough to understand all the background stuff. Things go back for generations in a village like this. Plus you get all these incomers, like me, stirring things up, skewing the whole community. Trampling on the old patterns. It probably shouldn’t be allowed.’

  ‘Do you know Harry Richmond?’ Thea was beginning to enjoy herself. How easy it was to ask questions!

  ‘A bit. He was at your gate on Sunday morning.’

  ‘I know he was. I’ve met him again since then.’

  ‘Is that the end of my cross-examination?’

  ‘I doubt it. There’s something with the Stacey people, isn’t there?’

  Helen flushed again, more deeply than before. ‘It isn’t relevant.’

  ‘So who are Monique and Paolo?’

  ‘Casual workers. They help Martin with packing his herbs, seasonal jobs. There’s always something. Loads of people work for him on and off.’

  ‘And he provides accommodation, does he?’

  ‘For a few. Some bring tents or caravans, if they live too far to come daily.’

  Helen’s answers came ready-formed, as if rehearsed. ‘Monique didn’t look the type, somehow. She’s living in a tent, is she?’

  Helen grew irritable. ‘I don’t know. She might be in the house. There are two spare rooms at least. She’ll be gone by next week. Why worry about her?’

  ‘I’m not worried about her. I’m interested, the same as I am in Virginia and Penny and everybody else living round here. What are they all like?’

  ‘They’re just people. A mixed bunch. No obvious saints or sinners.’ Helen spread her hands in a gesture of defeat. ‘There are more of them than you might think from a first glance.’

  Thea thought about her brother-in-law’s tentative hints. He seemed to suspect the presence of one or two sinners. It was still hard to credit, or even properly understand.

  ‘Well, I’d better stick to the people I’ve met, for now,’ she decided. ‘Old Mr Jennison, June, Lindy, Harry Richmond, you and…that’s about it. Not a very comprehensive list.’

  ‘I can introduce you to some others, but it would be at random. No suggestion that they’d got any reason to kill the Jennison boys.’

  ‘Did Joel have a woman?’ Thea wondered why this question hadn’t occurred days earlier. It suddenly seemed a glaring omission.

  ‘He did have, until last summer. Then they broke up.’

  ‘Did she live with him? Were they married?’

  ‘No, she kept on a flat in Gloucester, but she was here most of the time. She was at your gate on Sunday, too. Susanna, with the woolly hat.’ Watching Helen’s face, Thea noticed the shadow flickering over it at the utterance of the name. Unless she was much mistaken, Helen had some sort of feeling for this Susanna person. Feeling that had been hidden beneath the brisk account of the woman’s presence, until she’d been forced to name her. Thea knew the signs. Even now, it stung to utter the word Carl aloud.

  She remembered the tall quiet young woman who had been instructed by Martin Stacey to take the pale Monique back to the farm.

  ‘Why did they break up? Susanna works for Martin as well, does she?’

  Helen pushed out her lips consideringly. ‘She only comes at weekends and summer evenings. She’s got her horses on Martin’s land. Mainly she comes to see them – rides around the bridleways. Various theories flew around about the breakup. Nobody really knew for sure. The old man’s difficult to get along with, although I gathered he quite liked her. There was some talk of another chap.’

  ‘That’s another thing – the old man. He was very rude to me this morning. Is he like that with everyone?’

  ‘He isn’t the most tolerant person in the world. A man of very strong views, you might say, and doesn’t care who knows it. That’s the main thing about the Jennisons. They used to be quite strict churchgoers and we went along one Sunday, just for good form, really. Felicity – my wretched daughter – was with us, wearing some outrageously short skirt and whatever the fashion was then. Spiky green hair, probably. Anyway, the old man made no secret of his disapproval. That might not have been too surprising, but his sons joined in. I mean, boys not yet thirty, dressed up in suits and ties, like Mormons, looking down their noses at poor Flick.’

  ‘I can’t imagine Joel in a suit.’

  ‘No, well, they mellowed a bit since then. And the farm’s gone down the pan, just about. Lionel was never very good at it. Not born to it, you see.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘No – hasn’t anybody told you? He came into money when he was twenty-one, and bought Barrow Hill with it. His dad was a bank manager in Bournemouth. I think even then Lionel was a misfit. He’s never been able to accept the way ordinary people behave.’

  Thea remembered Joel’s invitation to call in. Dad always likes a visitor, he’d said. Was that a bare-faced lie, or what? Had they become so isolated that old habits had changed? If so, Mr Jennison had quickly reverted to type, if that morning was anything to go by.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  It was after four when she got back to Brook View and there were dogs to see to, washing to get sorted, thinking to do. After all that, she was hungry. Bored with scrambled eggs and cheese sandwiches, she inspected the freezer, mindful of Clive Reynolds’s invitation to take anything she fancied. How to feed oneself was a factor in house-sitting that she hadn�
�t thought of at first.

  There were six packets containing ‘Fisherman’s Pie’ or ‘Ocean Bake’, both of which she was partial to. Reading on the box that they took 45 minutes to heat through in a conventional oven, Thea decided to use the microwave. This was courageous, since she had never possessed such a gadget herself, and was hazy on the detail of how to use them. She was utterly defeated from the outset. The instructions told her to ‘remove the foil tray’. However, the pie was inextricably welded into the tray. Getting it out was impossible. Perhaps the thing had defrosted somewhat during the journey home from the shop, and become unduly sticky when frozen again. If so, the same was true of the next one she examined. The only conceivable course of action would be to hack the foil away in strips, using strong scissors. But before that, she read the next sentence on the box. ‘Place onto a microwaveable plate.’

  Was ordinary china microwaveable? She thought so, but couldn’t be certain. If it wasn’t, would it explode, or simply poison her? Thinking about it, she concluded that it must be all right, because people put coffee mugs in, when they let their drinks go cold. This, in fact, was the only usage that had ever tempted her to get a microwave for herself. She almost settled to some foil-stripping, until checking the rest of the instructions. They comprised a line of words, with numbers beneath. It appeared that you had to opt for either 800w or 650w, combined with an E or a C. And then you had to let the thing cook for eight (or nine) minutes, stand for one minute and cook for three more minutes. This was considerably longer than she’d bargained for. Allowing for all the preliminaries, it wasn’t a huge improvement on 45 minutes in the oven. She could pop a baked potato in as well, and perhaps find the wherewithal to make a nice sponge pudding. In fact, she was beginning to feel decidedly enthusiastic at the prospect of some proper cooking.

  She turned her back on the incomprehensible microwave and switched on the oven.

  The doorbell rang just as she’d assembled everything for the pudding. The Ocean Bake was sitting unworryingly inside the oven, alongside the potato. It was the policemen again. They were almost like old friends, and she asked them in with a sense of being mildly pleased to see them. ‘How’s it going?’ she asked.

  The response was a shock. ‘We’re not at liberty to say, madam,’ replied the one who customarily did most of the talking. Thea wished she’d taken more notice of their names – this third encounter felt like high time they started on a more amicable footing. Except this didn’t appear to be a mutual wish.

  Their faces were severe to the point of wooden. It seemed strange, after all the police dramas featuring detectives in plain clothes, that these same two uniformed men kept showing up. Wasn’t she important enough to warrant a detective inspector wearing a worn sports jacket and brown shoes? Should she complain to James about being undervalued as a witness?

  She needn’t have worried. ‘Mrs Osborne, we’d like to you come to the station with us, in Cirencester. Detective Superintendent Hollis wants to have a word with you.’

  Detective Superintendent! She almost laughed. ‘What? Now? I can’t – I’ve got something in the oven. It’s half past five – why now?’

  ‘Turn the oven off, then, madam. It’ll still be there when you get back.’

  ‘Why doesn’t he come to me? Isn’t that the usual way it happens?’

  ‘He’ll explain all that when you see him.’

  Curiosity prevented any further argument. She turned off the oven, suddenly aware of how hungry she was. Well, that would have to wait. There wasn’t any instant food in the house, apart from handfuls of dried fruit, or a slice of bread and jam. She’d just have to hope that the Hollis man offered her a cup of tea and a biscuit.

  She took very little notice of the police station as she was hurried down a corridor and into a small empty room. She was left alone for over ten minutes before a man joined her, followed by a young uniformed policewoman. Explanation, at least in part, was no longer required, once she was face to face with the man. After a terse introduction (‘I’m Detective Superintendent Hollis and this is Police Constable Herring’), ‘I should have come to you by rights,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t normally send out a car for you like this. But –,’ he indicated his leg, which she had already observed. ‘ – I’m in plaster for another five weeks, and it makes getting out and about a bit tricky.’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be off work?’

  ‘Probably. But I can still function well enough to be of some use here. And this is my case.’ His chin jutted out like a schoolboy’s. Thea diagnosed a severe case of stubbornness.

  ‘Well, how can I help?’ she asked. ‘The blood-soaked scarf, I suppose?’

  The chin jutted even further. ‘You found it in a tree, I understand.’

  ‘That’s right. We thought it must have blown up there, but then we decided it was probably thrown. Hurled.’

  ‘In point of fact, we tend to the latter interpretation. It does not, however, assist very much with our failure to discover the exact scene of the killing. There must be a considerable quantity of blood somewhere.’

  Thea said nothing. She had not come across a pool of blood and had no helpful suggestions to make.

  Hollis drifted off the subject. ‘Your brother-in-law called me yesterday. He’s worried about you.’

  ‘Oh,’ Thea flapped a hand. ‘That’s a permanent state, I’m afraid.’

  ‘He thinks you don’t take enough care of your own personal safety.’

  ‘Well, I’m still here, aren’t I?’

  ‘Apparently. But I’m not giving you the full picture. You’re here as a witness, not as a vulnerable potential victim, whatever your brother-in-law might think. Now, let’s get down to it – there’s another reason it was better for you to come to us – we wanted to have the gadgets to hand. And I’m afraid we’re working rather long hours just at present.’

  She was reminded of the microwave and the undesirability of gadgets.

  ‘It’s not a lie detector test, is it?’ she joked nervously. Hollis was her sort of age, broad-shouldered, sharp-jawed, clean and tidy. His accent was from somewhere not far north of Birmingham, and his eyes were brown. He frightened her, which was unusual. She was very seldom frightened of men.

  ‘It’s about that scream,’ he explained. ‘We’re going to try to work out just what it was. That’s all.’

  She leant back in the chair a little, feeling her shoulders loosen.

  Of course – what else did she have to contribute, after all? ‘It’s been almost a week,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, yes. Very remiss of us. It’s been busier than it looks, believe me.’

  She was tempted to remark that that wouldn’t be very difficult, but thought better of it. This wasn’t a man to banter with.

  ‘We’ve got a few tricks to help you remember. Nothing very sinister – just recordings of different sorts of scream, to help you pick out the kind of thing you heard.’ He was standing beside a small table on which an electronic machine sat winking a red light at him.

  ‘Aren’t you worried that that might give me wrong ideas?’

  He looked at her without a trace of humour or very much patience. ‘It sometimes works very well,’ he said.

  ‘All right then. Ready when you are.’ The bravado was slipping, but she refused to let it go altogether. She threw a quick glance at the Herring girl, wondering what her nickname was likely to be. The glance was caught and exchanged, but with ill-concealed boredom. She was merely there as chaperone, a role assigned to the junior female officers, Thea supposed.

  ‘It might help to close your eyes, and try to think yourself back to that night. Tucked up in bed, dark outside. A strange house, all on your own. Probably not sleeping too well.’ His voice was low and slow, switched into a totally different timbre. Before she knew it, Thea was leaning forward on her elbows, propped on the table, face in her hands, eyes closing.

  ‘That’s it. Let yourself drift back through the days to Saturday. You’ve only arrived that day
, it’s all new to you. Your dog isn’t sure what’s going on. You’ve got a whole lot of things needing doing. So you want to get a good night’s sleep. It’s half past three, quarter to four. Something wakes you up…’ The sound of a hooting owl filled the room. ‘Was it something like this?’

  ‘No,’ Thea muttered. ‘Nothing like that.’

  ‘Good. Well, something else woke you. Maybe a different sound…’ The sudden high-pitched inhuman screech of another type of bird made her jump.

  She had to think about it, listening for the echo as it faded inside her head. ‘Well, that’s more like it,’ she said.

  ‘Fine, fine. Similar, but perhaps not quite right.’ She was ready when the next recording came up. It was an unearthly high-pitched single-note yowl. Thea recognised it. ‘That’s a fox,’ she said. ‘I get them a lot at home.’

  ‘It’s a disconcerting sound, in the dead of night,’ Hollis suggested.

  ‘True.’

  ‘Could it have been what you heard?’

  ‘I think not. I wouldn’t have been so startled if I’d heard a fox. I’d have realised what it was, right away.’

  ‘OK, then.’ He flicked the switch for the next piece of tape. Thea listened to a girl screaming, a stylised Hollywood scream, obviously acting. ‘Nothing like it,’ she said, with a dismissive shake of her head. ‘That’s a girl. I heard a man.’

  ‘Did you?’ He was trying to keep the eagerness out of his voice, trying to maintain the soothing hypnotic tone. The fifth sound seemed horribly authentic after the one before. A man howling, uttering the word No-o-o-o! within the howl. It didn’t sound like acting at all, and yet how could the recording have been made? She tried not to pursue that line of thought.

  ‘I heard a man. He wasn’t howling like that, but screaming. With physical pain. And fear. That tape’s a sound of sadness and despair. Mine had other things.’

  She sat up and looked round at Hollis. ‘A man screamed outside Brook View at three forty-five on Sunday morning,’ she said.