Death in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  After nearly an hour of that, I was ready for some air. Outside the trees were blowing about, the first autumn leaves coming off in clouds, banking up along the sides of the street and collecting in gateways. The villagers didn’t like that. They brushed and gathered and burnt great sackfuls, adding to the misty smoky atmosphere on windless days.

  I set out towards the north, past the village church, up the lane to the little gate that opened into the beech avenue.

  It was noisy under the trees, but fairly sheltered, considering the wide exposed sweeps of land on either side. Farming had grown to an industrial scale in our area, with fifty-acre fields a commonplace. Hedges and copses had been ripped up, gateways widened or removed entirely, for the massive machinery required to harvest the corn and other crops.

  Ahead of me lay Notgrove, a smaller village than Cold Aston, with a very different history. Notgrove had a special claim to my attention during Samhain, because of the Barrow. The burial chambers had been excavated a long time ago, exposing the stones that were part of the construction. But then the powers that be had deemed it prudent to protect the site from vandals, and had covered everything up again. They called it backfilling, which seemed an oddly technical word for what they’d done. Many of us considered it little better than another form of vandalism. I had never seen the stones, except in photographs. Ursula, and one or two others, disagreed with my point of view on the subject. ‘It’s much more authentic as it is now,’ she said. And she did have a point, I suppose. All you could see was a small hillock, with grass and wild flowers growing on it. To the south side was an indentation, and all around were big trees. The northern edge was bordered by the A436 – a horrible road, with traffic zooming along and no proper footpath.

  People came to see the Barrow in all seasons, courtesy of English Heritage, who put no restrictions or charges on visitors. The mere fact that it dated back 4000 years was enough to attract Americans and other tourists, although I daresay they found it disappointing when they got there.

  I went in through the small gate, with my head full of death and the clever inventions that people have used to make it bearable. I thought about this burial place, the care lavished on the bodies, the impossibility of ever truly understanding the ideas and hopes of those who constructed the place.

  I walked to the top of the hummock, where the summer grass now lay limp and mushy. Hogweed seedheads rose eerily all over the site, the brittle stalks bare of leaves by that time, looking like the skeletons of triffids. In summer, you could see flattened circles where people had picnicked or had sex – or both. In October, such activities had ceased and the place had an abandoned air, despite the unseasonal mildness and the surprising greenness of the trees. The Samhain ceremony would be conducted at the highest point, in full view of traffic from the road, if they chose to look. Almost nobody ever did, being far too intent on overtaking each other on the sudden thrilling section of straight.

  Then I did what I usually did, which was walk down the side of the hillock, towards the bowl-shaped hollow that had formed to the south, probably unintentionally, giving shelter from observation.

  My mind was still on death, so it seemed at first no more than a slightly more concrete manifestation of my thoughts when I observed a form, lying tidily in the hollow, frosted slightly with the morning’s drizzle. A hedge sparrow perched on its shoulder, as if on a tree stump. I blinked and looked again, and my heart thumped huge and loud in my chest.

  Facing away from me, on her side, was the inert body of a woman. When my brain finally informed me of this fact, I had to sit down on the wet sloping edge of the depression, fighting a giddiness I’d never known before, summoning the courage to move closer. I had to see the face, to know exactly what I was looking at. Until then it could be a dummy, or a living person sleeping off drink or drugs. But a living person wouldn’t lie like that on the wet grass, so utterly unmoving, offering a perch to a wild bird. With a sick horror I gave thanks that it hadn’t been a crow or a magpie, seeking the unexpected bounty of a juicy eyeball. In February it would not have taken them so long to snatch such a prize.

  Moving at a bent, crabbed angle, as if suffering from acute stomach ache, I skirted the perimeter, keeping a few feet between me and the thing in the grass, until I was staring down at its profile. Half hidden by hair and a few dry stalks of dock, it was still quite easy to identify.

  My friend Gaynor was lying dead in Notgrove Long Barrow, with a long slender piece of metal protruding from her body. Her hands were folded together against her throat, her feet precisely parallel to each other and at right angles to her lower legs. The knees were tightly bent. It was the attitude of a sacrificial victim.

  CHAPTER SIX

  I didn’t have the mobile with me. There was a phonebox in the middle of Notgrove, only five minutes away, if I ran. But how could I leave poor Gaynor there in the long grass, where crows might peck at her? Fighting to calm down and think rationally, I squatted beside her and put a hand on her shoulder, where the sparrow had been.

  She was wearing a sleeveless body warmer over a shirt. The ghastly weapon sticking out from her front coalesced as I stared at it, horrifying me all over again when I finally understood what it was. Grey, with a neatly shaped head at its end, I finally identified it as a knitting needle. A slender 2.5 mm knitting needle, which must have been pushed with great force through Gaynor’s ribcage. Pointed they might be, but certainly not sharp enough to kill a person easily.

  There was a small patch of blood at the site of entry, but no more. Didn’t that mean she’d died instantly, before there was time for any bleeding? From what I could see of her face, she didn’t seem to have suffered any terrible agony. Or did the dead features simply relax into blandness, whatever the final few moments had been like?

  The flesh was cold and hard under my hand. There was a smell of damp, an oddly dirty smell. Her eyes were open, filmed over appallingly like an animal you might see in the butchers. She was so completely other – not in any way the friend who’d eaten lunch with me only the day before. Whatever I might have thought I understood about death before this moment became ludicrously inadequate. I had not had the least idea of the absolute transformation from life to death. I had seen it in animals, but never in a person. It was beyond words, almost beyond acknowledgement. I found myself quivering with shock and fear and horror.

  Somebody had killed her. This detail had slipped away into a less important place as I tried to commune with the remains of my friend. Unless – I examined the weapon again, the way Gaynor was lying – unless she could have done it to herself. But no – if that had been so, she’d still have her hands on the length of steel – or whatever they make knitting needles of these days – and would be lying awkwardly, legs sprawling. Instead, she had been neatly arranged, or so it seemed to me, by other hands. Placed squarely in a space created thousands of years ago for another dead human being, whose bones had been carried off to a museum, or excavated by rodents before the archaeologists reached them.

  Recoiling at the implications, I stared dumbly at the scene. Somebody had put Gaynor there deliberately, as some kind of Samhain message. That appeared as obvious to me as if a large announcement had been pinned to the body. Somebody who knew what was planned for the Barrow in a few days’ time and had wanted to sully it. Somebody who had a powerful animosity towards paganism perhaps. But why Gaynor?

  I knelt there trying to understand, before I could summon assistance. I needed to have some sort of explanation for myself before I could speak of it to anybody else. Because I knew already that the police would never understand unless somebody like me talked them through it. They would hear the word pagan and get no further than that. They would think this was the work of one of my group.

  In a sort of fugue state I paraded the individual members before my mind’s eye. Pamela, with her bright smile and cheerful enthusiasm; Ursula, argumentative and frustrated; Verona, mystical and inscrutable – and Daphne, the wife abandoned fo
r the Freemasons. The two men, Kenneth and Leslie, hovered more faintly behind these four women. Kenneth was kindly, colourless and very gentle. I had never heard him speak angrily or seen him make a violent gesture. I liked Kenneth in an unthinking casual sort of way. I believed everybody did. Leslie was similar in his lack of overt masculinity. Quietly intense, was Leslie. I realised I hardly knew him, or what he was capable of.

  At last I got myself out of the little gate and onto the verge at the side of the road, where I started trying to flag down a passing car. It felt over-dramatic, almost ridiculous, but I kept at it, and the traffic kept storming past me. Five minutes later somebody finally stopped. It was a local man who I knew by sight. He left his car in a layby some yards further ahead and came running back to me. When I dragged him to the concavity and showed him my discovery, he took over with admirable efficiency. He called the police on his mobile, and in no time there were uniformed men and women running about, asking questions, including whether I knew the dead woman, taking photographs and notes, speaking into phones, tying yellow tape across the Barrow. The trauma of all this activity was greater than that of finding Gaynor – or if not greater, then different and barely tolerable. They trampled the Barrow, not knowing what it was. They shouted and moved jerkily in their excitement at having a full-scale murder on their hands. I hated them so much I could hardly hear or see or speak. Somebody put me into the back of a car and drove me home.

  I was shaking as they walked me to my house, unable to properly understand what was being said to me. There was a constant muttering going on, with glances at me that seemed to contain suspicion, concern, kindness, wariness, impatience in a dreadful kaleidoscope. I wondered whether they thought I might have killed Gaynor, and would shout at me until I confessed. And then I remembered Phil Hollis.

  I had a friend in a high place. This thought was briefly reassuring, something to hold on to in a world that had gone insane. I kept feeling Gaynor’s shoulder under my fingers, stiff and cold. I kept rerunning the previous day when she had been alive, walking, talking, knitting, breathing. She might have been annoying at times, demanding an uncomfortable level of sensitivity from me, but I couldn’t grasp that she was dead.

  Somebody joined me and the police officer on my doorstep, as I groped for my key. I looked at her blankly, unable to remember who she was. Then it came to me. It was Thea, Phil’s new girlfriend, the woman with the dog.

  ‘I’ll sit with you, if you’ll let me,’ she said. Her voice was pitched low, but sounded full and sweet, a voice you could rely on.

  ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled. ‘I’ll be all right soon.’

  There was more muttering and then the two of us were in my living room, sitting at the table. I glanced at the sofa, wondering why we hadn’t gone to it first. I’d crammed a lot into this main room to leave space in the small back room for all the wool stuff. This was where sitting and eating and talking all happened.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ Thea ventured, when the police people had all finally gone. ‘But I do know what it’s like. It’s happened to me twice this year.’

  I wasn’t interested. Her experience meant nothing to me. I was struggling to escape from all the sights and sensations and smells of Gaynor dead. It all reran, over and over, making anything else seem distant and insignificant.

  She went into the kitchen, the tiny area where there was a sink and a couple of cupboards and a place for chopping things. I heard mugs clinking and then the electric kettle starting to boil.

  ‘I never use the electric,’ I said confusedly. ‘There’s hot water on the Rayburn already.’ It annoyed me that she hadn’t the sense to see this for herself.

  ‘Does it matter?’ She side-stepped into the doorway so she could look at me.

  ‘Not really.’ I held my hands out in front of me, wondering at the shaking. ‘Look at me! Isn’t it weird.’ I laughed raggedly. ‘I’m supposed to be the one who’s all right with death. I give talks on it.’

  ‘I don’t think anybody’s all right with death,’ she said quietly. ‘I’m going to put sugar in this tea, if I can find some.’

  ‘That’s all right. I take sugar anyway.’ And for some reason this seemed immensely funny and I began to laugh. Then I found I couldn’t stop and there were tears everywhere and Thea was cradling me against her front.

  We talked after that for an hour or more. I told Thea all about Gaynor, her shyness, her fabulous knitting skills, her inoffensiveness. ‘Just a timid little Welsh girl, out of her natural environment,’ I summed up. ‘How could anybody possibly want to kill her?’

  Thea asked very few questions and supplied no answer to this one of mine. She just shook her head and glanced at her watch.

  But my own words were echoing in my head. Who? I stared at the blank screen of my television across the room. There was nobody. ‘It must have been a total stranger,’ I decided. ‘Somebody up to no good at the Barrow and Gaynor saw them.’

  ‘Did she often go to the Barrow?’

  How was I to explain? I looked at her helplessly. ‘It’s Samhain,’ I said.

  ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what that means.’ She did look genuinely sorry, as if she’d put me to a dreadful lot of bother.

  ‘The old pagan festival to mark the end of summer. Bonfires, slaughtering the livestock, all that. It’s around November the first, but it really gets going from the middle of October.’

  ‘Hallowe’en,’ she said.

  ‘Sort of,’ I sighed.

  ‘So – Gaynor was a pagan?’ she prompted.

  ‘No. But she liked Samhain. Ghosts and divinations. She thought it was exciting, I think. Took her out of herself.’ Speaking about Gaynor had acquired a horrible significance. For the first time I had to really think hard about every word I said. I couldn’t simply wheel out all the usual unexamined phrases as if they were pure truth. ‘I’m not sure,’ I admitted, hanging my head. ‘I think I might have known her less well than I thought I did. It’s a scary feeling.’

  Most people would have come out with some truism about nobody really knowing anybody else. Instead, this woman took my hand, holding it lightly in hers. ‘I know how that goes,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid it gets worse. You forget exactly what they looked like.’

  I tested this, finding to my relief that I could conjure Gaynor’s face with very little effort. The clear blue eyes, wide-spaced; the thin lips and pointed chin. ‘I can still visualise her,’ I reported.

  ‘I’m still not sure about the Barrow,’ Thea said. ‘It’s a pagan site, is it?’

  ‘It’s a burial place, pre-Christian. It’s quite atmospheric in the early mornings, before the traffic gets going. The traffic spoils it.’

  ‘Traffic spoils everything,’ Thea muttered. It felt like a lapse into something personal. Then she remembered herself. ‘So that’s why Gaynor went there? For the special atmosphere?’

  I stared at the sheepskin on the floor in front of the Rayburn, noticing a grubby mark on it. ‘I don’t know,’ I said, forcing myself to think. ‘Even if she hadn’t been – you know – I’d have been surprised to see her there. I’ve never known her to go there before.’

  ‘Perhaps somebody took her there by force.’

  ‘Maybe. But that would be difficult, wouldn’t it? She could have screamed or run away.’

  Thea nudged my tepid tea towards me. ‘Drink up,’ she urged.

  I took a half-hearted sip. ‘I think she must have gone because of the thing with Oliver,’ I decided. ‘And interrupted something going on and got killed for it. By a total stranger.’

  Thea didn’t pick up the reference to Oliver. Instead, one eyebrow kinked upwards in a gentle scepticism. ‘I think it hardly ever is a total stranger,’ she said. ‘The myth of the bogeyman and all that.’

  ‘Right,’ I nodded. This was more familiar ground. ‘It’s easier to think that, isn’t it?’ I tried to embrace the notion that somebody I knew had murdered Gaynor. It was impossible.

  ‘Phil’s lik
ely to be back soon,’ she said, rather wistfully. ‘They’ll want to ask you lots of questions, I expect.’

  It took me a while to catch up with the meaning behind this. Eventually I got it. ‘He’s doing the investigation?’

  She nodded, with a sigh. ‘It’s technically in his area.’

  I struggled to think. ‘So why wasn’t I taken to the police station? Why this wait?’ I was still very cloudy-minded. ‘What’s going to happen next?’

  ‘They have to do all their forensic work and take Gaynor for a post-mortem and inform her family. The questioning is the next stage.’

  ‘You know a lot about it.’

  ‘I’m afraid I do,’ she said, with no further explanation.

  ‘She hasn’t got any family. I’m probably her closest friend.’ I remembered a few of the questions at the Barrow. Did I know the deceased? Did I have her full name and address? I had supplied the facts automatically, without the need for thought. I supposed that henceforward it would be much less simple.

  ‘How did she earn her living?’

  ‘Her father left her a bit and she sold the house and got a little flat. She manages quite well; I pay her as one of my knitters and she does other handiwork. She can make lace and braid. This is a good area for that kind of thing. There are still a few people who want everything done by hand.’ I heard myself using the present tense, knowing it was wrong, but unable to correct it. It was difficult enough to explain Gaynor, without getting my grammar right.

  Thea breathed in deeply, seeming to brace herself for something. It took me a few seconds to notice. ‘What?’ I asked her. ‘What’s the matter?’

  ‘This is going to seem like a wanton change of subject, so tell me if it’s too much for you. But I suppose we’ve got to talk about something while we wait.’