by Rebecca Tope
‘But …’ moaned Drew yet again. ‘I don’t want to sell it. I created it. And who on earth would want to buy it?’
‘There’s no rush—’ Den started to say, but Thea interrupted him.
‘You can’t ever get away from death, you know. Don’t you think it rather diminishes you to just escape to some rosy future like this?’
The room crackled. Three faces looked at her, making it clear that she was the misfit here. They had all known each other for much longer than they’d known her. They had history, which included Karen, Daphne Plant and a farmer’s daughter called Lilah. Den had wanted to marry Lilah, before he met Maggs. They were mere names to Thea, subjects of old anecdotes conveyed by Drew bit by bit during cosy morning chats in bed, or late-night snuggles on the sofa.
‘Okay. Sorry,’ she muttered. ‘But it’s a valid point, all the same.’
‘Nobody’s trying to escape anything,’ said Maggs. ‘I’m not saying I regret anything about working for Drew. It’s been a privilege. I know I’ve helped hundreds of people. I know I’ve got a talent for it. But I’m not getting anywhere at Peaceful Repose. I’ve done all I can. Now it’s just the same old routines, saying the same things every time. The people change, I know. They’re all different in the details. But basically it’s all a bit too easy. I want to be stretched.’
Den gave a snort, and seemed about to make another of his slightly too obvious jokes. Maggs and Drew both repressed him with a look.
‘You don’t know what you want,’ Thea accused her. ‘You’re contradicting yourself. All I can hear is that you want more money. And I seem to remember you insisting loud and clear, only a year ago, that you didn’t care about that side of it at all.’
‘Thea!’ Drew’s voice contained a rare warning. ‘You’re not helping.’
‘No, I don’t suppose I am. Because I can’t see how anybody can help if it’s got to this stage. All I can see is that we’ve got a bloody awful weekend ahead of us, trying to stay cheerful for the children and pretending everything’s all right when it’s not. Well, luckily for me I’ve got something else to think about.’ She turned to Drew. ‘Do you remember a woman called Juliet Wilson, in Stanton? The one who took that white Alsatian with the torn ear?’ She didn’t wait for a reply, but stormed on, ‘Well, she’s gone missing. Gladwin wants me – us, even – to help look for her. They’re almost sure something terrible’s happened to her. So, I’m going out tomorrow to see if I can help. You obviously don’t need me here.’
Again the room hummed with the unaccustomed emotion. The knowledge that of the four she was being the most immature and uncontrolled only made Thea want to shout and accuse even more vigorously.
Den, the former policeman, witness to enough unpleasant crimes to recognise the signs, was the first to speak. ‘What’s this? Is that what the detective woman came to tell you? And you’ve been letting us carry on as if nothing was happening? Who is it that’s missing? Where do they want us to search? Is she a friend of yours? How old is she?’ He stood up, looming tall and urgent over the others. ‘Well?’ he demanded.
Thea was struck momentarily silent. ‘Well … Um … There’s nothing we can do about it tonight. She’s in her thirties, and has some problems. Learning difficulties, I suppose. Nothing too major, really. She’s extremely good with dogs.’
‘I remember her very well,’ said Drew. ‘In fact, I saw her this week. It must have been Wednesday afternoon. She was in my burial field looking at the graves.’
‘For heaven’s sake,’ said Thea unfairly, ‘why on earth didn’t you say something?’
‘Why on earth should I? We only spoke for a couple of minutes and then I forgot all about it. There was nothing peculiar about her that I could see. When did Gladwin say she went missing?’
‘Tuesday. Nobody’s seen her since Tuesday.’
‘Well, I have. And she looked fine. She’s probably just … I don’t know … gone off for a long walk on the wolds.’
‘For three days?’ It was Den who made this incredulous remark. ‘You mean, sleeping in the open? In the middle of May? It must have been about five degrees last night.’
‘She does do that sort of thing,’ said Thea. ‘Well, maybe not sleeping out, but roaming around the countryside.’
‘Except this must be different, for the police to be involved,’ Den pointed out. ‘She sounds pretty vulnerable to me.’
‘Once a cop, always a cop,’ sighed Maggs fondly. ‘He’ll be out at first light tomorrow, volunteering to join the search. And dawn’s about five o’clock at this time of year.’
Thea felt sidelined, not for the first time. There had been occasions when she had been the first to discover a dead body, only to be pushed away by bustling paramedics or uniformed police. She was, in the final analysis, only an amateur. She had no proper qualifications, no special talents – just curiosity, raw intelligence and a low threshold for boredom.
‘Drew, you’ll have to tell them, right away,’ she said. ‘If nothing else, it’ll give them a better idea about where to look for her.’
‘It’s half past ten,’ he objected. ‘They won’t be searching any more tonight, surely? It’ll wait till morning, won’t it?’ He was looking to Den for professional advice.
The former policeman pursed his lips and looked dubious. ‘Well, it’s not a child that’s missing,’ he said. ‘I very much doubt they’ve got twenty-four-hour search teams out there. Unless there’s been a very obvious threat of violence, I’d think tomorrow would be soon enough.’
‘Good. So now we should all go to bed,’ said Drew. ‘Looks like an early start tomorrow, one way or another. What time does Meredith usually wake up?’
‘Six,’ said Maggs. ‘She likes the birds. I swear she talks to blackbirds in their own language.’
‘We’ve got a blackbird, right outside her window,’ said Thea. ‘It starts before six, though.’
‘Oh joy,’ said Maggs, and everyone laughed.
Saturday morning turned out to be grey and cool, the blackbird rising late for once. Nobody in the house stirred until almost seven o’clock, and then it was Timmy who first emerged. The spaniel in her basket in the kitchen had been on the alert for movement, and once the little boy opened the door, she rushed up the stairs to find her new friend Meredith. Timmy poured himself a glass of milk, drank it, and then went upstairs as noisily as he could. Between them, he and Hepzie effectively roused everybody in the house.
But there was no sociable communal breakfast. Awkwardness prevailed, much to the confusion of the three children. ‘Where should we go to help with the search?’ asked Den, with determination.
‘You’re not serious?’ Maggs demanded. ‘You’d leave me with the kid all day, just like that?’
‘What search?’ asked Stephanie. ‘Is something lost?’
Thea aimed for a tone of calm good sense. ‘Drew’s got to call Gladwin anyway, so she’ll tell us all that sort of thing.’
‘I’ll leave it until half past eight,’ he said. ‘And then we can see if we can make some plans for the day.’ He went to the kitchen door and looked out. ‘Not raining, anyway,’ he reported.
Stephanie was not satisfied with any of this. ‘What’s happening? Why are you all being so funny? What do we have to search for?’
‘There’s a woman who’s got lost somewhere near here,’ Drew told her. ‘The police think she might have got hurt or something, so we thought it would be helpful if we went out to look for her. Thea knows her, and I do a bit, so we could recognise her.’
‘But what about us? And Meredith? You can’t all go, can you?’ She looked at Maggs. ‘You’re not going, are you?’
‘No way. If you ask me, it’ll end up with nobody going. The woman’s probably been found by now. It sounds to me as if she’s just gone off for a long walk, and there’s no sense in worrying about her in the first place.’
‘Hasn’t she got a phone? Couldn’t she just call someone if she got hurt?’ The child’s face was genu
inely puzzled. Like everyone in her generation, she had been schooled in what to do if she got into difficulties, the central element in any emergency being quite obviously the mobile phone.
‘I think it’s quite likely she hasn’t got one,’ said Thea. ‘Some people haven’t, you know.’
‘Like me,’ said Timmy.
‘Next birthday, Tim,’ said Drew. ‘Not long now.’
‘I thought we were all going on an outing,’ Stephanie persisted. ‘You said we were. The farm park, you said. Meredith would love that. Or the model village. We’ve only been there once.’
‘Or the Roman villa,’ teased Drew, having discovered that his offspring had yet to perceive much of interest in the details of Roman Britain. Even the excellent Cirencester museum had failed to significantly engage either of them, despite efforts from both Drew and Thea. The only aspect of local history that had really fired their imaginations was the canal system, thanks to Thea’s own passion for them.
‘Erghh!’ groaned Timmy.
It was all going to work out fine, Thea assured herself. The normal bickering over how to spend the day that went on in any weekend group was something she was well used to. Her own family had been experts at it. If a decision had been made by half past ten, that would be seen as a major triumph. But this time there was the lurking image of Juliet Wilson adrift in the deceptively tame-looking countryside. There was also the echoing voice of Mr Clovis Biddulph, promising her that he was not going to go away. All was not well, even before Maggs dropped her own special bombshell. A threefold crisis was developing before her very eyes, and there was little hope that any of it would be acceptably resolved by bedtime.
She sighed. ‘We don’t know what we’re doing until Drew’s spoken to Gladwin,’ she said. ‘I’ve got a direct number for her. You could call it now. It’s gone eight.’
She was surprised and slightly amused to realise that he was mildly nervous about making the call. He had met Gladwin a number of times, but seldom been directly involved in her investigations. The only exception was when he himself had been under a cloud of suspicion – which Thea supposed might be the cause of his hesitation now. ‘She’ll be really grateful,’ she encouraged.
‘Why don’t you do it?’ he said, nudging the phone towards her. Their mobiles sat side by side on the kitchen worktop, one of the few areas of their domestic life that had clear rules and routines. ‘Use yours, if the number’s in the memory already.’
It made sense, so she willingly obliged. The detective answered almost instantly. ‘Gladwin,’ she said briskly.
‘Hey, it’s Thea. Listen – Drew says he saw Juliet Wilson in our burial ground on Wednesday. We would have called you last night, but we thought you would most likely have suspended the search until this morning.’ She stopped, afraid she might be prattling.
‘Hold on.’ Gladwin’s voice was tight and strange, Thea finally noticed. ‘You’re telling me she was seen on Wednesday? Somewhere near Broad Campden?’
Before Thea could agree, there was another voice, apparently speaking close to Gladwin. ‘What? Oh … can you wait a minute? Hello … Thea? Are you still there? The thing is, I’m about two hundred yards away from your burial ground at the moment. And we’ve just found Juliet’s body. She’s only been dead a few hours at most.’
Chapter Six
The argument was muted, thanks to the presence of the children. Den was the least controlled, bursting out repeatedly with accusations, recriminations and general anguish. After a while, Maggs took hold of his arm and shook it. She was at least ten inches shorter than him, which did nothing to diminish her authority. ‘That’s enough,’ she said. ‘Everyone feels guilty already without you going on about it. We can’t change it, and it’s not our fault. There’s no guarantee that she would have been found, even if Drew had phoned last night. Stop saying she would. We’ve got no idea where she was between Wednesday and now.’
Her grasp of the whole picture had impressed Thea, who was still grappling with her own sense of responsibility and disabling grief. Juliet had been such a loveable person, with her lack of guile and perpetual wish to make friends. And Rosa! That poor bereft mother, whose entire adult life had been devoted to her needy daughter – what would be her future now? The fact that Juliet had moved to a degree of independent living might have left some space for Rosa to develop other interests, but they were unlikely to have any effect in filling this sudden void.
Maggs had taken everything in at a glance. Her own role in distracting Drew had been considerable. She had plunged him into a crisis from which he was not easily diverted, playing down a somewhat vague and distant search for a missing woman. Maggs knew Drew extremely well. She knew that he would now be accusing himself of a lack of due concern. And yet the postponement had seemed entirely sensible to all four of them, at the time – except possibly for Thea, until she had been persuaded by Den that it could wait.
But only Drew had heard what Gladwin said when Thea handed him the phone. ‘Why the hell didn’t you tell me that last night? We could have saved her. She was killed this morning, don’t you understand? A quarter of a mile from where you saw her two days ago.’ And then she had made a sound rich with exasperation and growing rage. Drew reported most of it to the others, apparently in full agreement with the detective.
Den had quickly drawn the same conclusion, his face pale with remorse. ‘We should have phoned,’ he said over and over. ‘Why didn’t we phone?’
‘If we had,’ Maggs said now, ‘we can’t be at all sure they’d have done anything at all. They’d have relaxed the worry about her, and phoned her mother, and said everything would come right in the morning. They’d have assumed Juliet was doing her own thing, in no danger at all. She’s an adult, after all, and not completely helpless.’
‘Was,’ said Drew. ‘She was an adult. Now she’s a corpse.’
Both his children looked at him on hearing the final word. He never used it to describe the people he was employed to bury. They were ‘the deceased’ or, more usually, given their actual names. Once in a while he might refer to ‘the body’. Timmy had once started making facetious remarks about corpses, only to find himself reprimanded. ‘It’s disrespectful,’ said Drew.
‘That’s not respectful, Dad,’ Stephanie said now. ‘Who are you talking about, anyway?’
Thea answered her. ‘We told you – a woman has been missing. Now they’ve found her dead body. Nobody knows what happened to her. She might have got too cold, staying out all night.’
The young girl eyed her reproachfully. ‘It’s not winter, is it?’ she said with due scepticism. ‘How could she die of cold?’
‘Then maybe she hurt herself somehow, or got poorly. We don’t know, Steph, but it’s very sad. Lots of people knew her and liked her, and it’s going to come as a shock to all of them.’
‘Right,’ said Stephanie. She knew a lot about the consequences of death, especially when it was a woman in the first half of her life. ‘Did she have any children?’
‘No. No she didn’t. She might have had a dog, though. She was very fond of dogs. And other animals.’ Thea turned her head away, feeling a rush of tears. Poor sweet Juliet! How in the world could she be dead?
Timmy was watching and listening just as keenly as his sister, uneasy at the strange atmosphere, so different from the sociable fun the weekend had promised to be. ‘You said she was killed,’ he said to Drew. ‘You said that’s what the police person told you. That means murder, doesn’t it?’
His father met his worried gaze. ‘I’m afraid that’s right, Tim. That is what she said. And that makes it all a whole big lot worse.’
‘You don’t say “a whole big lot”, Dad. That’s not good English.’
‘It’s right, though,’ said Den. ‘There’s really nothing in the world worse than murder. Everybody knows that, don’t they?’
‘Thea knows it, anyway,’ said Stephanie ‘She’s been around lots of them. There was one in Winchcombe, and one in Blockley
, and one in Snowshill, and one in—’
‘Stop it, Steph,’ ordered Drew. ‘Just stop it.’
‘Okay,’ shrugged the child, unrepentant. ‘So what happens now? Are we going out anywhere?’
Meredith, who had been diligently munching through a mixture of banana, toast and raisins, raised her head at this encouraging new tone. The foregoing conversation had struck her as much too adult and dull to warrant her attention. But Stephanie’s question seemed to carry the promise of some interesting action at last. ‘Out, out, out,’ she said supportively.
‘Some of us probably are,’ said Maggs. ‘We might not all go to the same place, though.’ She looked round the crowded room. ‘My guess is that Thea and Drew might have to be somewhere else. But Den and I can take you kids somewhere nice. I expect,’ she finished.
‘Does Gladwin want to see you?’ Thea asked Drew. ‘What did she say about that?’
‘She said she’d call back when things had got a bit clearer. She was in the middle of all that police doctor stuff. Photographer and so forth. You know more about all that than I do. I only get called when they’re ready for a removal – and then it’s hardly ever me they call, is it?’ As an alternative undertaker, conducting natural green burials, his clientele was a small proportion of the whole, and almost never were they victims of sudden attack or accident. Mainstream undertakers had the resources for rapid collection of bodies from a wide range of situations, which Drew did not.
‘You did Mr Fleming’s funeral yesterday,’ Thea remembered. ‘The field must have been full of people. Do you think Juliet was hanging round, watching, for some reason? Maybe she knew him?’
Drew flipped his head to indicate confusion. ‘What? What are you talking about? The field wasn’t “full of people”. I think there might have been seven of us, in total, including me and Andrew. If Juliet knew him, she could have come and joined in. She’d have been welcomed.’
In the same instant, they both remembered another funeral where certain people would be far from welcome. ‘Not like the Biddulphs,’ Thea said.
