by Rebecca Tope
And so, more or less by default, she started yet again to consider the details of the killing of Joel Jennison. At college, where she once took a short extra-mural course in philosophy, which included a Logic component, she had acquired a habit of argument backwards, from effect to cause, more as an exercise than anything really useful. She tried it now. The chief effect of the deaths of the brothers had been to cause havoc at Barrow Hill. The old farmer could not manage alone, his daughter-in-law was showing little sign of long-term commitment, his ex-wife was out of the picture and his grand-daughter too young to be up to the task of keeping things going. Was all this the intention, or merely an unimportant side-effect, in the mind of the murderer? If the latter, then what else had changed with the two deaths?
Unless June and Lindy moved back, and actively participated in running the farm, it looked as if it would have to be sold. There was likely to be a prospective buyer waiting in the wings, salivating at the prospect of acquiring the acres and the not insubstantial farmhouse. The acquisition of property was a well-established motive for murder, after all. But Thea wasn’t sure she credited it with plausibility in this particular instance. Being a prospective buyer was too vague a role. Unless you were guaranteed to inherit the place, it seemed just too long a shot for comfort.
Which took her back to Fairweather Farm. The Staceys might well be the impatient would-be buyers, perhaps even given verbal assurance in the past that they’d have first refusal if Barrow Hill were ever for sale. The herb farm could expand conveniently to the adjacent land, along with any other enterprises they had in mind. Martin had the strength and the opportunity to kill the brothers. He could easily have the motivation. Thea just doubted that he had the necessary ruthless streak to plan and execute something so vicious. Granted she had scarcely met him, and knew herself to be a shaky judge of character, but there had still been something in his eyes that told more of benevolence and concern than vice and greed.
Acknowledging the inconclusive results thus far, Thea pressed on. What themes were emerging, in connection with the killings? Cheerless relationships and families with sad histories, going back to that between Lionel and Muriel, which had broken up twenty years ago. Joel and Susanna had separated more recently. Helen and James Winstanley didn’t appear to like each other very much, and June had admitted her ambivalence towards her Paul. Finally, Clive and Jennifer Reynolds had some unhappy history between them, for which this expensive cruise was intended as a remedy. Only Harry Richmond claimed to have loved his wife, and to have grieved for her loss in a normal and dignified fashion. And, interestingly, the Staceys gave every sign of getting along amicably.
Then there were the odd alliances: Helen Winstanley and Martin. The Winstanleys and the red-haired Susanna. Harry Richmond and Lindy. There were probably others which Thea had not yet observed. She had a feeling that Muriel Isbister lived quite near Susanna, and that there’d been some reference to the young woman when Harry had taken Thea to meet Muriel.
There were loose ends. The peculiar telephone message for Jennifer Reynolds from a man she thought was Martin Stacey; the apparently half-hearted police investigation into Paul Jennison’s death; the doubtful level of competence of old Lionel. These and more might or might not have anything to do with the murders.
Murders…she repeated the word to herself, startled by the sudden power it carried. The huge fact of death, which washed over her at odd moments, without warning, was here again. It came at random times and places: driving through open countryside and suddenly seeing a freshly killed rabbit on the road; hearing a news report on the television; being told that her sister’s dog had died unexpectedly. Man or beast hardly seemed to matter – it was the horrifying cessation of life that impacted on her. The inability to relax and trust that what was here today would not be gone tomorrow, which kept a perpetual tension in her chest. She seldom admitted to herself that she’d detached, at least in some secret central part of herself, from her daughter, as well as from friends and wider family, because she didn’t think she could survive if one of them died as well, unless she somehow steeled herself for it.
The abrupt and senseless killing of the pleasantly friendly Joel had reinforced this fear, she understood now. And it meant, of course, that she would never find the courage to get any closer to Harry Richmond. The man was approaching seventy, for God’s sake. Due to die in no time, just as she might permit herself to love him.
She prepared herself a lonely little lunch, comprising a piece of frozen haddock and some frozen peas. Chips would be too much trouble and there didn’t seem to be much else available. Raiding the Reynoldses’ freezer was becoming a habit, through the past week, and it was already beginning to look very depleted. Had they really meant for her to eat all their stores, she wondered belatedly? Was it just something people said, without expecting you to act on it? Should she go and buy replenishments before the end of next week? They were, after all, paying her rather handsomely, and here she was, using their electricity, eating their food and making a somewhat rudimentary job of exercising their dogs.
This last could at least be rectified. The dogs needed stirring up, with balls to chase and romps to enjoy. Feeling rather like a nursery school teacher, she rounded them up and urged them out into the garden. It was breezy but mild and dry – the morning sun disappearing behind a light covering of cloud. Not bad for a British bank holiday, she decided.
Stricken with a persistent guilty conscience, she played strenuously with the dogs for almost half an hour. Their energy levels seemed to rise the more she threw the ball and stick, and she began to wonder whether she’d cruelly cheated them by merely strolling around the garden with them in the past few days. Eventually, she took Bonzo and Georgie back to the house, and invited Hepzibah to join her in an inspection of the sheep.
The Cotswolds were contentedly gathered under a tree, looking rather warm in their thick fleece. They eyed Thea warily, but made no attempt to get up and flee. The lambs had surely grown since she arrived, and she experienced the small pang of pride that shepherds must habitually feel at the health and fitness of their charges. Never particularly interested in sheep, she indulged in a few moments of contemplation of their nature. Passive to the point of imbecility, she had always assumed, and these specimens had done little to alter that impression. Their lives were routine, their instincts defensive. There was something pathetic about their lot, raised for their flesh or fleece, with scant consideration for their eventual fate. She was aware of the unpleasant final hours of their short lives, in most cases: the lambs bundled into terrifying trucks and lined up to be shot and skinned, dismembered and displayed in sterile supermarket trays. Platitudinous stuff, perhaps, but real for all that.
There was an incongruity to the Reynoldses keeping sheep that had nagged at her ever since she arrived. Clive and Jennifer did not present as natural shepherds. If they had rented out their grass to farmers in need of pasture, that would have made sense. But Clive had been very clear that these animals were his own. He’d even admitted that they had names, although he wasn’t always guaranteed to know which was which without a close examination. He had given her at least as many injunctions on how to care for them as he had for the dogs. It made Thea further doubt her own assessment of character, as had other encounters during the week. Who was trustworthy, and who was not? Who had honest motives and who did not?
The person at the heart of these questions was, of course, Harry Richmond – but he was closely followed by Helen Winstanley.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Her scrutiny of the sheep continued, despite the impatient dartings back and forth on the part of the spaniel. The afternoon was far warmer than any day of her stay so far, and it seemed folly to return to the house and waste the sunshine. Inevitably the events associated with the field began to intrude yet again, beginning with the sudden realisation that these sheep had almost certainly witnessed the slaughter of Joel Jennison and the dumping of his body in their watering hole.
It was an unsettling idea. Had the animals rushed to a distant corner in a panic – or had they dozed on as usual, ignoring the strange inscrutable human behaviour? Could you perform one of those bizarre Victorian experiments and analyse the contents of their brains or the impressions on their retinas, to glean the facts of the matter?
There was a moment in early May when all the trees were in full fresh leaf; the birds in full throat; the hedgerows full of energy and colour; a moment when it would be criminal not to simply pause and experience the full glory. Thea had learnt, through grief and fear, how to do this. Wise words from a distant ante-natal instructor came back to her, again and again: ‘If you’re all right now, in this present moment, then you’re all right. No more to be said or feared. Animals live by this maxim, and so should we.’
It wasn’t entirely true, or always by any means achievable, but it helped. Now was one of those moments when it was not only easy but obligatory. Thea breathed the balmy air, smelt the natural smells, watched the passive sheep and let her own bloodstream take over.
The downside, she had learnt, was that such moments were impossible to recapture later. They were by definition transient. Joy left the most fleeting memory trace, and was elusive when needed. Only pain could be reliably accessed on demand and Thea could see no escape from this harsh truth.
And so her mind regained control, and back came the darkness. The face of the crushed old farmer, the loss of both sons an injury beyond tragedy, beyond hope or understanding. A loss infinitely greater, Thea forced herself to admit, than her own. And her own had been, after all, an accident. Nobody had willed it, with black vengeful motives. By contrast, somebody had deliberately removed Lionel’s reason for living – or so it appeared. Nobody had hinted at disharmony between the father and his sons, at conflict over property or morals, decisions or methods. The farm was struggling, but it had sounded as if the struggle was a shared one, the goal freely agreed on.
It was a new pain, this contemplation of the man’s distress – and perhaps its very newness gave it a vigour she found energising. For the first time in several years, Thea wanted to rescue somebody, to ameliorate their suffering and find answers to at least some of their problems. Perversely, she realised, the churlish ingratitude of the man had only increased her concern for him. He was a wounded old fox, with dignity and independence the only things left to cling to. She recalled the image of him slumped morosely over the Coke in the pub garden, and wondered at the unkindness of taking him there in the first place, to parade his misery in public.
Which took her thoughts back to Helen, and her galumphing husband Jim. One of those men who hammered so hard on their computer keyboards – which they resented having to use, because surely typing was always women’s work – that it was impossible to forbear from imagining them in the bedroom, equally heavy-handed and insensitive. Men who have to be laboriously taught how to watch out for other people’s delicate spots, and where not to make jokes or references – and still they got it terribly wrong more often than not. For decades the blame had been wryly placed on the British boarding school system, but somehow that no longer quite hit the mark. ‘Oh, all British men are Aspergic,’ was a mantra Thea had begun to hear, rather to her irritation, despite the grain of truth it contained. Except it hadn’t fitted Carl, and she didn’t think Harry Richmond lacked sensitivity, either.
She started a circuit of the field, with no particular purpose in mind. The remembered presence of June Jennison, and then her daughter Lindy, gave rise to a flood of thoughts about the killing of Joel and Paul in this very place. There were no traces, either physical or spiritual, to be discerned. The elusive pool of Joel’s blood seemed unlikely to materialise now. Instead it would merely become a part of the normal processes that characterised the long history of human activity in Gloucestershire. The chances were that quite a few people had died within a hundred yards of where she was standing – some by violence, some by quiet and natural causes. Death, as she often tried to persuade herself, was part of life. It happened constantly, predictably, normally. It wasn’t some extreme outrage, some exceptional piece of bad luck or calamity. It happened all the time, to everybody. Why, then, was such a tremendous fuss made about it? Thea did at least know the answer to that, and so did the grieving June, whether she admitted it or not. Or if she didn’t now, she very soon would.
The sun was briefly covered by a billowy white cloud, and a light breeze blew. ‘Time to go in,’ Thea said, looking round for the dog. She scanned the centre of the field in a few seconds, before turning closer attention to the hedgerows bordering it. She was never going to forget this patch of land, and the encounters she’d had in it. There it sat, a tiny part of the pattern across the county, well-proportioned, gently sloping, a delight for the senses, mutely providing sustenance for the incurious sheep. But for the moment it appeared to have swallowed up her spaniel, and this was mildly worrying.
‘Hepzie!’ she called. ‘Come on in now.’
Normally the white tip of the animal’s ludicrously long tail betrayed her whereabouts, even in the longest grass. Now there was no sign of it. Thea’s breath was caught by the reminder of vulnerability, here of all places. Shooting, strangling, drowning – what unforeseen disaster would befall her beloved pet?
‘Hepzie!’ she shouted again, her voice sharp. ‘Come here.’
And there she was, trotting obediently across the grass, head held awkwardly high so that the thing she carried would not drag on the ground. Even as she wondered with foreboding what the thing might be, Thea observed with a pang how lovely the spaniel was.
It’s a cliché, she told herself. Dog digs vital piece of evidence out of the hedge. Probably never happens in reality – and anyway, we already found Joel’s scarf in the tree last week.
‘Drop it!’ she ordered. Dropping things was not one of Hepzibah’s talents. She was never disposed to release her trophies. Thea inserted a finger between the soft jaws, and levered. It was something rigid with caked soil and the ravages of long exposure to winter weather. Something basically made of cloth, but so shapeless and colourless now as to be unidentifiable. She couldn’t believe it was anything significant, or related in any way to either of the murders. Just an old rag, discarded months ago – or even longer.
Except that people like Clive and Jennifer Reynolds probably didn’t chuck old rags into the hedge. They would bring everything back to the house and dispose of it responsibly. She worked at one corner, flaking off the mud, and scratching the surface with a thumbnail to try at least to ascertain what kind of cloth it might be. And then a piece seemed to detach itself and dangle towards the ground. Curiously Thea examined it, and found a lead weight tied onto a length of tape, sewn securely to the body of the cloth. It meant nothing to her, but did raise her interest to a new level. She was going to have to show it to someone; someone who would know what it had been for. She tried to recall the direction from which the dog had come, and concluded it had been the hedge not far from Lindy’s burrow. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the cloth had been hidden in the undergrowth, or even partly buried in the softer leaf mould of the hedgerow.
‘Come on,’ she ordered the spaniel, who was sitting prettily, watching Thea’s handling of her new treasure with concern. ‘No, you’re not having it back. It’s mine now. Good girl for finding it, though.’
She did nothing with the discovery, just laid it out on a sheet of newspaper, where the dogs couldn’t reach it. If it did have any links to the murders, she knew she ought to leave it as untouched as possible. She was, however, frustrated at not knowing what it was. Somehow she felt she ought to, that it was obvious to any real country person, and she was being ignorant and suburban in not being able to work it out.
She played four games of Scrabble that evening, with Americans who were not having a public holiday. At the end of that marathon, she felt sated, and slightly disgusted with herself, as if she’d drunk a whole bottle of solitary wine, or indulged in a frenzy of masturb
ation. But she had discovered a few new words. Insoul, Gleet and Carnie had all been used to good effect by opponents. What in the world, she wondered crossly, did gleet mean?
‘Almost halfway now,’ she told the dogs next morning, having counted the days on her fingers, twice. All of a sudden she found herself wishing it was time to go home. She was lonely in Duntisbourne, after the solitary bank holiday. Lonely and sad, she admitted. This was not how it was supposed to be. She’d been intending the three weeks as a restorative interlude, enjoying the glories of the countryside and abandoning the muddle that was her own daily life at home.
She’d got up slowly, and was actually still in her dressing gown when someone rang the doorbell. The dressing gown was an indulgence she’d only recently adopted. It was big and warm and bright red in colour.
The red matched, almost exactly, the hair of her visitor. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you Susanna? You were at the pub on Sunday.’
‘Right. Can I come in? Is this your little dog?’ The visitor seemed unaware of the informal attire and resolute in her aim of entering the house.
Thea stood back and let Susanna have her way. There was something off centre about this visitation, a misfitting piece of the jigsaw. Thea thought of Helen Winstanley and the way her voice had altered when speaking of Susanna.
