A Cotswold Killing

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘They come quietly, in little groups,’ he said. ‘And then they forget all about us. Most people just see the church, and the general prettiness, and leave it at that. They overlook the history and the quirkiness of the setting.’

  ‘But the church and the views are basically it, surely?’ She was half serious, half teasing, hoping he’d come up with something surprising.

  ‘Maybe if you’re just passing through, that’s enough.’ He sounded wistful, as if coming to an unpalatable conclusion. ‘Maybe it is, at that.’

  ‘Everywhere’s got history. Human lives. Tragedies and miracles. Is this place anything special?’

  ‘Possibly not. I can’t pretend to any expert knowledge, and haven’t heard of any dramatic stories. But look at these gardens, the way they’ve been fitted into every nook and cranny. Look up there – fancy perching a house that size on the side of a hill. Imagine the problems! And see how it looks as if it’s always been there, growing out of the ground. Doesn’t it thrill you?’

  ‘It’s lovely. It is lovely. I never questioned the beauty – how could I? But what lies beneath the chocolate box imagery? Why is everything so quiet? Where is everybody?’

  ‘Obviously, a few of these cottages are holiday lets, or second homes,’ he said, with mild irritation. ‘And where would you expect them to be? Wandering about the street in local costume? Shepherding their shaggy sheep back and forth? It’s Sunday afternoon. Either they’ve taken the kids to the pictures or some sports thing in Cirencester, or they’re watching the telly, or playing computer games. Look – there’s somebody!’

  Almost sounding relieved, he pointed to a woman in a garden, bending over a tidy flowerbed with a trowel. She looked up at the sound of his voice and stared at him unsmiling.

  ‘Too many tourists come through here, just gawping, and expecting some sort of entertainment. That’s what she thinks we are.’

  ‘Doesn’t she know you?’ Thea asked. ‘You only live half a mile away.’

  ‘I know very few people in the village itself,’ he said. ‘There’s no shop, you see, or post office. Nowhere to congregate and get to know each other.’

  ‘That’s awful. They can’t have much sense of community, or belonging, living like that, all in their private boxes.’

  ‘Isn’t it like that where you live?’

  She hesitated. ‘Well, I know most of the people living within half a mile of me. Four or five of them are quite good friends.’

  ‘Well, you can’t have everything. At least most people here have deliberately chosen it for its visual appeal. I think that shows something about them. Good taste, finer feelings, that sort of thing.’

  ‘And the ones who were born here?’

  ‘Are mostly out of the village and working their fingers to the bone. Different kettle of fish entirely.’

  ‘That’s enough clichés,’ she laughed. ‘Why don’t you come back to Brook View for some tea? I ought to be exercising those labradors, the slobs. And I rather like acting the hostess in someone else’s house.’

  ‘So James Winstanley had a point,’ Harry flashed. Thea took a moment to get the allusion, and then gave him a quick look of surprise. She had been sure he hadn’t heard the exchange in the pub garden.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Harry Richmond took a cup of tea, but no biscuits, after accompanying Thea and the three dogs around the garden at Brook View. ‘This must be over an acre,’ he said, with envy clear in his voice.

  ‘And the field is another nine, I think. Must be worth a bit.’

  ‘Astronomical. A goldmine.’

  ‘They’ve been here some time, haven’t they?’

  ‘Twenty years at least. The boys were young, I remember. I had charge of them as Boy Scouts for a while. Seems an age ago, now.’

  ‘Isn’t there any sort of gardening club in the village? With people like you and Jennifer so keen?’

  He laughed. ‘Keenly competitive, you might say. No, I don’t think either of us is the sort to join a club like that.’

  ‘You make yourself sound like quite a curmudgeon.’

  ‘Not really. At least, I hope not.’

  He only stayed an hour. On the doorstep he turned and gave her one of his long looks, meeting her eyes. ‘Thank you,’ he said, and put both arms around her in a hug that caught her completely off guard. ‘Thank you for a lovely day. You’re a very beautiful woman, Thea Osborne. It’s been a treat to spend time with you.’

  Belatedly she returned the hug, savouring the warmth, the male scent, the broad chest. ‘My pleasure,’ she said.

  Telling herself she was being silly, she could not suppress a burst of euphoria that lasted the rest of the day. Neither could she deny the erotic charge that had flooded through her at the contact with a new man’s body. It brought back memories from twenty years ago, when she’d been aware that somebody new was almost always immensely more exciting than a familiar lover. She had felt vaguely guilty about that, but fully accepted that it was so. It had been one of her worries when she agreed to marry Carl. Would she be able to stay faithful to him, when there were so many desirable men in the world?

  As it turned out, she had been pregnant within six months, and so preoccupied with the baby for so long that other men faded from her consciousness. The idea of adultery simply never floated up. Carl was exceptionally good at being married, which helped. He skilfully maintained the balance between admiring her independence and being there when she wanted him. He told her when he was angry or anxious, seldom leaving her to develop unhealthy fantasies about other women or loss of affection. He was funny, and generous and…Stop it, she ordered herself. We’re not thinking about Carl, just at the moment.

  It made her smile to think that a man close to seventy, a solitary gardening widower, should be the one to rekindle the coals. A smile that turned rueful, when it struck her that Harry was only a few years younger than her father, and could very easily have been older. Obviously there could be nothing in it, no future, no further development. If he thought her beautiful, then that was well and good. He wouldn’t be the first person to mention it, and Thea had come to regard it as a simple statement of fact. She looked like Kristen Scott Thomas with a touch of Amanda Burton for good measure. It was a quirk of her skeleton that everything was in proportion, her eyes deepset and clear, her jawline sharp against a long neck. It would be folly to take any credit for it, or to think it meant anything.

  Still in the same aroused mood, she e-mailed James.

  Good afternoon. How’s it going? I’ve had a very nice day, taken out to lunch by Harry Richmond, who you will recall, no doubt. Saw several other locals, even though we were some miles away from the village.

  June Jennison was here last night, visiting the scene of the crime one week on. Is she a suspect? In my humble opinion, I would say not.

  I can’t see this murder investigation getting much further. If everybody closes ranks and protects each other, it’ll never get solved. Even old Lionel was at the pub today. Is HE a suspect, I wonder?

  June was at school with Jennifer Reynolds, did you know? I don’t suppose it matters. And Helen Winstanley is as odd as ever. Another of today’s pub people. Still haven’t talked to the Staceys.

  Give DS Hollis my regards if you see him.

  Hug Rosie for me.

  Love, Thea

  It amused her to list murder suspects in e-mails to James, hoping it would irritate him. She hadn’t forgiven him for being so obscure and contrary when he last came to see her. It felt now as if he’d really come to check that she was safe and unafraid, and not to recruit her into his team as an undercover agent at all. This might be kind of him, but it was disappointingly unexciting. It left her wondering just how much he cared about the Jennison brothers – were they just small local murders, possibly connected to larger criminal activities, but just as possibly not?

  She tried again to reconcile the idea of unspecified but serious misdemeanours with the facts as far as she knew them. An
obvious one would be stealing valuables from the affluent homes in the area and then disposing of them profitably. Obvious and rather dull. Not to mention difficult in these times of paranoid security and registration of any object worth more than a hundred quid.

  Child pornography would be considerably closer to the mark, if only James hadn’t explicitly ruled it out. Unsuspected in this polite and civilised corner of England, and therefore all the more possible. Anything could be going on behind those firmly closed, electronically alarmed front doors. Everybody had computers and scanners and digital cameras. They could be uploading horrendous images to each other to their hearts’ content, and nobody would ever guess. In fact, it was virtually certain that many were doing precisely that, given the statistics. Thea tried to avoid knowing about such depravities, but there were inevitably moments when the radio or television forced it on her.

  Giving it up, she treated herself to a nice leisurely game of Scrabble, a 25-minute game, which allowed ample time for cheating on both sides, if she or dezzyduks had felt so inclined. She hadn’t brought a dictionary with her, and didn’t search for a Reynolds-owned one, either. But she hardly had need of it these days. She knew by heart a vast assortment of improbable words, and also knew when to take a risk on something. YOWE had turned out to be allowable, which was a surprise. Her opponent put KOTO, which she challenged, as surely not on. But it was. Koto? Koto? Maybe, she decided, it was lazy American spelling for kowtow?

  She successfully placed RAJAH in a high-scoring position, quickly followed by TOQUE, which was a personal favourite. But in the end she lost by 15 points, when dezzyduks used all his/her letters near the finish, with a very boring REDRAWN.

  The day drifted on, with the inner contentment still intact despite Scrabble defeat. Outside the light was fading and it was getting chilly. The penalty for a clear sky in late April. ‘Come on, dogs, let’s have some air,’ she invited. ‘Time to count those sheep again.’

  At last she plucked up the courage to take the labradors into the field. They’d earned a good run, and she couldn’t think of anywhere else to take them, in the failing light. It seemed reasonable to assume that they would more willingly stay close if it was getting dark. She promised herself that she would keep a close eye on them, and whistle them back if they went too far towards the hedge. Being in the field, in any case, was not completely relaxing, after the previous weekend’s discovery. She found herself glancing over her shoulder, up into the trees, and down into the ditches. The chances of finding another body – or of becoming one herself – were clearly infinitesimal, but reason was famously adrift at times like this. It wasn’t, she assured herself, so much that she was afraid as that she really didn’t want the complications that would ensue from another murder. Actually, she decided, she was much more worried about being considered a potential murderer by the police, than she was of being killed herself.

  When she caught a sudden movement, she believed for a moment that it was pure imagination. Only when Bonzo, followed by a daftly exuberant Hepzibah, suddenly charged towards the same spot, did Thea trust her own eyes.

  A figure had been standing in a shadowy part of the hedge, she realised. If he or she had kept still, Thea would almost certainly never have noticed anything. But it might not have seemed like that to the person concerned. The movement she now watched with disbelief was an odd diving motion, the body bent at the hips, then down on its knees and gone!

  This was so exactly how the killer of Paul Jennison had been described as behaving that Thea’s heart started to thump wildly. What on earth was going on?

  Bonzo reached the spot, and she called him to stay. Rather to her surprise, he obeyed, but her own foolish spaniel ignored her call. Georgie had trundled off on some business of his own under the hedge near the top of the field, and was blissfully unaware of any excitement.

  Thinking mainly about her dog, Thea strode to the spot, and bent down to look. ‘Hepzie!’ she called sharply. ‘Come back here this minute.’

  There was another field beyond the hedge, which was at least preferable to a road in this poor light. All around was silence. She peered at the vegetation, certain she was in the right place, and eventually a kind of tunnel manifested itself, very low down. Little more than a fox run, it had clearly been used regularly, the roots and twigs framing a hole that was difficult to see. But not so difficult that the police could be excused for missing it, surely? Heedlessly, Thea pushed her head and shoulders into it, and found herself tumbling like Alice down the rabbit-hole into the adjacent field.

  So like Alice’s experience was it, that she almost laughed. She was now lying flat out in a much deeper ditch than the one on her side. Looking back, she couldn’t see the hole at all – just a thick clump of brown ferns, with the small new shoots of this year’s early growth at their roots. Perhaps, she surmised, the police had tried to be clever, and examined the hedge most carefully from this side. If so, they’d made a big mistake.

  ‘Your dog’s OK,’ came a voice. ‘You were brave, coming through like that.’

  Maybe she was in Wonderland after all. The voice seemed to be coming from above her. She blinked and squinted, and identified the silhouette of a girl against the indigo sky.

  ‘Lindy?’ she ventured. ‘Is that you?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s me. I didn’t think you’d see me. Why’d you come following me? Now everyone’s going to know about the secret hole.’

  Thea climbed awkwardly out of the ditch and brushed at her trousers. ‘But – isn’t this where your father’s – er – attacker, disappeared? It matches what June told me.’

  ‘What if it is?’

  ‘Well – doesn’t that mean it isn’t really so secret, after all?’ A nasty thought occurred. ‘I mean – that’s assuming you weren’t – I mean, didn’t…?’

  The girl snorted.

  ‘In any case, I doubt if I could find it again.’

  ‘Somebody did find it though,’ Lindy went on. ‘The person who shot Daddy. It’s right what you said. I forgot that.’

  ‘It’s very neat. Is it a fox run or something?’

  ‘No, it isn’t. Daddy made it. For me to use to escape from horrible Mrs Reynolds.’

  ‘Look – come and have a cup of tea with me, and tell me all about it,’ Thea ordered. ‘If we can get back into my field, of course.’

  ‘It’s not your field, and no, I don’t expect we can. It’s very important not to squash the bracken on this side. It only works if you sort of roll through, without breaking it. You managed that quite well.’

  ‘Purely by accident, I assure you. What about the dogs?’

  ‘We’ll have to go round by the road and call them. They’ll be all right. Yours is nice, isn’t she?’

  For the first time, Thea noticed that Lindy had Hepzie slung without dignity over her shoulder. The dog hated being carried, her centre of gravity never quite right, and no position entirely comfortable. Now this girl seemed to have effortlessly worked out the way to do it. ‘She doesn’t like being carried,’ she said. ‘Put her down.’

  ‘No,’ snapped the girl. ‘She does like it.’

  The abrupt change of tone came as no surprise to Thea. It wasn’t long ago that her own daughter was this age, and she still remembered the inconsistent swings from child to adult and back, from minute to minute. ‘Well, if she starts wriggling, I want you to let her go.’

  ‘She won’t wriggle.’

  And it seemed she didn’t. They arrived at Brook View, having gone out onto the road through the field gate, and walked back to the house up a gentle slope. By the time they arrived it was very nearly dark. Miraculously, Bonzo and Georgie were both standing forlornly by the gate between the field and the garden, waiting to be allowed home again. Thea let them through, with a relieved pat for each one.

  ‘I love being out at night, don’t you,’ said Lindy.

  ‘It depends.’

  ‘Huh.’ The scorn was all the more chastening for its lack of elaboration.


  ‘I don’t suppose you drink coffee?’ Thea led the girl into the kitchen and then stood indecisively in front of the cupboards.

  ‘Milk, if you’ve got it, thanks.’

  There wasn’t very much milk, and what there was had been sitting around for days. Thea had bought four litres from a garage some while previously. She still hadn’t properly got to grips with the shopping.

  ‘I can’t really care about Uncle Joel, you know,’ Lindy said, sitting down at the kitchen table. ‘I used up all my caring on Daddy.’

  ‘That makes sense.’

  ‘Does it? Harry said that when a second awful thing happens, it often feels twice as bad as the first one. More than twice as bad, sometimes.’

  ‘I think that’s usually when you haven’t really faced up to the first one. I mean, if you’ve just told yourself that it isn’t really so terrible, and you’re coping all right, and it’s not OK to make a fuss. Then if there’s something else, even years later, you’re overloaded, and all the stuff you should have felt the first time comes bursting out, and you’re knocked flat.’

  Lindy frowned. ‘You mean I got it right with Daddy?’

  ‘Well – I wouldn’t put it like that, quite. It’s not such a deliberate thing as that. You’re lucky if the people around you are talking about it, and showing their feelings and not making up rules on how to do grief. It depends on the whole family, I think.’

  Lindy laughed her understanding. ‘Nobody made up any rules,’ she said. ‘It was like being dropped onto another planet where you’ve got no idea at all what you’re supposed to be doing.’

  ‘Your mum was here last night. She talked a bit about your dad.’

  ‘She tells lies about him.’ It was a plain unemotional statement.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘She says she can’t have loved him properly because she hasn’t cried about him dying. She thinks she wasn’t a proper wife, because she can get along so well without him. But she’s got it all upside down.’