Death in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  We had become good enough companions to be able to walk along without saying much. I watched her now and then, assessing her. She was in her early forties, still lovely, but soon destined to fade. In her case, I could see that it wouldn’t matter. She had so many virtues that had nothing to do with looks, that losing them might almost be a relief. I could imagine how burdensome it could be, attracting people simply by letting them see your face. Not that I’d ever had that problem. They looked at me, yes, because I was big and vivid and confrontational. But they weren’t magnetised like they were with Thea. Just spending a few minutes on the pavements in Stow had demonstrated how it was with her. They softened at the sight of her. They slowed their steps, and somehow bathed her in approval. And not just the men.

  But there was a large unspoken matter lying between us. Daphne’s accusations still rang in my ears and I assumed Thea must be hearing the same echo. She must at the very least have questions for me, to straighten out the ragged contradictions over the tortured business of Freemasonry. I had tried, I assured myself, to avoid telling any direct lies. I had convinced myself that the details I had failed to mention were in any case irrelevant. I had foolishly overlooked Daphne and her obsession.

  Three or four times, the spaniel came back to Thea, and stood on its back legs, reaching up to adore her. She always stopped, bent down and fondled the mottled black and white face. Usually she crooned a few words of nonsense at the same time. It was all perfectly easy and unselfconscious. Fancy letting yourself go like that, I marvelled. Fancy allowing such naked love for an animal its full expression. I felt tears prickling, the third time it happened. Alarmed at myself, and the obvious onset of some sort of insanity, I picked up a stick that was lying by the path and started whacking nettles and dry dock stalks.

  ‘Watch out,’ came a voice that was not Thea’s. ‘I’ve got a nettle down my neck.’

  I turned, and not far behind me was Ursula Ferguson, approaching from the left, which was roughly the direction of Turkdean.

  ‘Well, you shouldn’t creep up on people,’ I said.

  Thea had been slow to realise we’d got company, having gone trotting ahead with the dogs. When she did finally stop and turn to see what was happening, she jumped. ‘Where did you spring from?’ she gasped.

  Ursula pointed back the way she’d come. There was a dip, which might have once been an old road or waterway, which had hidden her from view. ‘I’ve been trying to catch up with you,’ she said. ‘But I didn’t like to call out.’ She glanced around as if wary of invisible marauders.

  ‘Which one are you?’ Thea asked, with a visible effort to attach a name to the face.

  ‘I’m Ursula. The one who taught the Hollis children when they were at school.’

  ‘Got it!’ Thea clicked her fingers. ‘Nice to meet you.’

  Ursula smiled briefly. ‘Actually, I thought you would have gone by now. Weren’t you only staying the week?’

  ‘Phil’s gone,’ said Thea. ‘I’m staying on for a bit. We didn’t finish the job properly, you see.’

  ‘Job?’

  ‘Clearing Auntie Helen’s house,’ Thea elaborated. ‘But I’m taking a break. We’ve just had lunch in Stow.’

  Ursula looked as if she had no need of such information. She looked hot and worried. But she was unfailingly polite. ‘I like Stow,’ she said. ‘When you think of the state the rest of this country is in, you can hardly fail to appreciate the wonderful little towns we have all around us.’

  ‘It’s certainly very law-abiding,’ said Thea, trying to be diplomatic.

  ‘Oh yes,’ I said, feeling increasingly angry. ‘The only law that gets broken around here is the one about killing people.’

  We were within earshot of Arabella’s domain. She could hear us, and I could just detect her questioning grunts, as she asked herself who might be coming to visit. ‘Better hold onto the dogs,’ I said to Thea. ‘After last time.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ she assured me. ‘They’ll keep their distance.’

  Arabella was unmistakably hungry. She surged towards my bag, frustrated by the intervening fence, which seemed suddenly rather insubstantial. ‘Sorry, babes,’ I said. ‘I’ve been keeping you on short rations, haven’t I? We’ll move you back to the village this week, where I can feed you up.’

  She gobbled the apples and beans with no ceremony whatsoever. Watching a pig eating is a salutary experience. They appear not to use their tongues at all, but operate the lower jaw like a shovel, sometimes tossing food up and grabbing it just before it lands, getting a better hold. The clichés and references people use about pigs’ feeding habits are perfectly apt. You can argue that pigs are not dirty, but you can’t claim delicate table manners for them.

  ‘Heavens,’ said Ursula, rather faintly. ‘She made quick work of that.’

  I was still wondering why Ursula had come to join us the way she did. Had she seen us across the fields and decided on a whim? Had we coincided with a more purposeful trek onto the upper levels of the wold? ‘Do you often walk up here?’ I asked her.

  She shook her head. ‘I don’t usually have time. I wanted some space to think. Annie’s got her ghastly music turned up to deafening pitch and I had to get out.’ This was quite a change from the paranoia of the morning, but I was tired of seeing conspiracy everywhere. In fact, I was feeling generally weary, after a full week of the worry and confusion that followed Gaynor’s death. All I wanted to do was slump in front of my spinning wheel and let the world get on without me.

  ‘You haven’t met Arabella before, then?’ Thea said.

  ‘Oh, yes. When she was in Ariadne’s back garden, I saw her quite often.’

  ‘What did you need to think about?’ I interrupted, surprised that Thea hadn’t switched into detective mode herself and picked up on Ursula’s remark about needing to think.

  ‘You can have three guesses,’ said Ursula.

  ‘I gather you were with Eddie Yeo early this morning,’ I said, still in my no-beating-about-the-bush mode. ‘Before I dropped in on you at nine o’clock.’

  ‘What if I was?’ she flashed. ‘What’s it to do with you? And it was half past nine, not nine o’clock.’

  ‘I just can’t imagine what you and Eddie could have to talk about,’ I said.

  ‘Can’t you?’ she asked me. ‘What do I have to talk about with half the people around here?’

  ‘School, I suppose,’ said Thea. ‘You must know most of their kids.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Ursula. ‘Tom Yeo is a boy with problems, causing a lot of disruption in class. His father has been asked to attend several meetings and totally failed in his duty. I took it upon myself to flag him down this morning when he came through Turkdean. I didn’t want him in the house, waking Annie, so I sat in the car with him and gave him a serious drubbing about the boy.’ She took a long self-satisfied breath. ‘And I think I can say I finally got through to him.’

  ‘Well done you,’ said Thea.

  ‘He even ended up promising to start fundraising for the Biology lab, at his Lodge. We need a lot of new equipment, and the Head says the budget can’t stretch to it.’

  Thea threw me a look, as if to register that she knew this was a delicate area between us, which would soon have to be confronted. ‘We had lunch with Daphne today,’ Thea said to Ursula. She made me think of poker players, throwing down an unwanted card, leaving everyone to guess whether it was significant or not. ‘We wanted to talk to her about Eddie.’

  ‘Oh?’ said Ursula. ‘And what did she say about him?’

  Thea laughed gently. ‘That he doesn’t much like women, apparently. Which is a bit of a surprise, considering he seems to spend a lot of time with them.’

  ‘You mean you wanted to find out what’s going on between him and Caroline,’ said Ursula, with a dash of impatience. ‘Well, they’ve always been friends, haven’t they? Their fathers knew each other, or something. What’s all the drama about?’

  The word drama was still in my ears
when there was a sudden shout. Thea’s dog set up a frenzy of barking, which badly upset Arabella. And that made her repeat, with considerably more serious consequences, her clumsiness of a few days earlier.

  There was some crashing about in the undergrowth, which confused the pig even further. With a long series of loud warning grunts she rushed off to investigate.

  When a large sow makes that particular noise, even her beloved owner knows the only thing to do is to back off. Pigs are very heavy. And they can run faster than most people assume.

  Arabella had never really taken to men. Mostly this was due to unfamiliarity, but I think she must have been ill-treated as a youngster. But she had no malice in her. All she meant to do was see what was going on in the woodlands she regarded as her territory. But she never could see very well, and somehow the man and the pig – just as the pig and dog had done – found themselves on a collision course. We heard the impact. The pig emitted loud sounds of concern, and the human being gave one scream of agony and then fell silent.

  ‘My God,’ said Thea. ‘She’s killed somebody.’

  Somehow all three of us managed to clamber over the fence and run to see what was happening under the trees. Thea’s dogs waited cautiously on the safe side of the barrier, which earned them my respect, even in the midst of the crisis.

  We found Kenneth sitting on the ground cradling his right leg.

  ‘It wasn’t her fault,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘It’s my stupid bones. But I’m very much afraid I’ve broken something.’

  For a few seconds the three of us stood gaping, each waiting for the others to take action. For some reason I expected Thea to be hugely efficient in a crisis, well versed in first aid and a thoroughly calming presence. In fact, she showed no initiative at all, and it was Ursula who stood forward and asked Kenneth if he thought he could walk at all.

  ‘Of course not,’ he grated.

  ‘Haven’t you got a mobile with you, any of you?’ Thea demanded.

  Ursula and I both shook our heads. Kenneth seemed to find the question too ridiculous to bother with an answer. ‘Haven’t you?’ I said.

  ‘I left it at the house,’ she admitted. ‘One of us had better run for help, then. I suppose I’ll do it.’ The logic was opaque, but we all seemed to feel it made a sort of sense.

  ‘If you cut across that field there —’ I pointed, ‘you’ll come to a farm just behind those trees. It’s only ten minutes if you run.’

  ‘What if there’s nobody in?’ she said. ‘I won’t know where to go next.’

  ‘It’s a normal working farm,’ I said. ‘There’s always somebody in.’

  ‘The dogs’ll follow me,’ she worried.

  ‘Let them,’ I said, glad to have them out of the way.

  She went off at a trot, cutting the awkward figure that running women generally do. The three dogs scampered merrily round her, until she shouted them out of her way. I watched her for a full minute before attending to the casualty. He was beyond pale and into green. ‘What on earth were you doing here anyway?’ I asked him, trying to remember what we’d been saying and whether he might have overheard anything important. Had he somehow followed us, and if so, why?

  Arabella had found something edible in Kenneth’s bag, and I leaned down to examine it. It looked like a jumble of nuts, mushrooms, sloes and haws. The pig was finding much of it less than delicious, or so it seemed from the way she nosed through it without taking much into her mouth.

  ‘There’s your answer,’ Kenneth choked. From his greenish colour I understood that he must be in considerable pain.

  ‘I see. Gathering nature’s bounty,’ I said, trying to sound as if this was perfectly normal. ‘I think haws is going a bit far. They’re utterly tasteless.’

  ‘Jam,’ he mumbled.

  ‘Jelly, actually,’ Ursula corrected. ‘And it’s still tasteless, even then.’

  ‘Kenneth,’ I said, ‘does this have anything to do with the rumours about you being short of cash?’

  ‘Ariadne, please,’ Ursula insisted. ‘It really isn’t the time for that.’

  But I’d guessed that it would help to distract him if I could keep him talking. He seemed to be of the same mind. ‘If you like,’ he said. ‘Free food, you see. Can’t spend anything till the end of the month.’

  ‘Well,’ I consoled him, in terribly bad taste, ‘at least now you’ll get some free meals in hospital.’

  He managed to laugh, which endeared him to me and seemed to make him feel a bit better too.

  Ages seemed to pass, while Kenneth twitched alarmingly, his legs jittering as if with extreme cold. But the pain was apparently easing. My main – though unspoken – worry was that Arabella would be in serious trouble, and so would I by association. Although Kenneth had admitted that it wasn’t her fault, she had caused him injury and the woods were open to the public, with a footpath running through them, not to mention the Gloucestershire Way just to the north. There was no place for homicidal sows in this pastoral scene. My best hope was that I’d be ordered to confine her where she could do no further damage. She looked so innocent and unconcerned in the middle of the disaster she’d wreaked, as if human beings were irrelevant and even perhaps invisible to her. She was such a peaceable animal, self-possessed and contented. It was sheer bad luck that Kenneth had managed to get under her feet as he did. And it had to be Kenneth, of course. Anybody else could just have rolled aside, with no harm done. His brittle bones simply weren’t up to such a steamrollering.

  At last a battered Land Rover came into view, driving in a straight line across open fields. A grizzled farmer emerged from one side and Thea from the other. ‘Ambulance be coming,’ he said, in an accent one seldom heard any more. He must have been over seventy and I was surprised to note that I didn’t recognise him.

  ‘Will it be able to drive out here?’ Ursula asked.

  ‘It’s an air ambulance,’ said Thea, with a hint of importance. ‘Helicopter.’ We heard the whirring in the sky a few seconds later. Thea and the farmer ran out into the open field and started waving.

  A landing helicopter is a thrilling event. The noise and wind and aura of crisis made everything seem overwhelming. Afterwards I couldn’t properly remember the sequence of events, but they bundled Kenneth onto a stretcher and into the bowels of the machine. At the last moment, Kenneth stirred himself and fished in the pocket of his trousers. He produced a set of car keys and handed them to me. ‘It’s in that layby on the main road,’ he panted. ‘Someone’ll nick it if it’s there for long.’ Then off went the helicopter like a frenzied bee. We were left just looking at each other. ‘We’d better get hold of Pamela and tell her what’s happened,’ said Ursula. ‘I’ll do it.’

  Thea and I trudged back to Cold Aston hardly speaking. The dogs had apparently got the message that there was no more fun available, and they followed us meekly, heads down. We felt drained and shocked, and there didn’t seem to be anything much to say. The afternoon was fading, and neither of us had much idea of what happened next. ‘It’ll have to be reported, I suppose,’ said Thea. ‘The hospital will have to alert the police.’

  ‘Poor Arabella,’ I sighed. ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean any harm.’

  Thea retrieved her mobile phone from Greenhaven, rather rueful at having failed to take it with her on our walk. ‘Phil’s going to tell me off about that,’ she said, showing little sign of apprehension at the expected chastisement.

  By an unspoken agreement, she came into my house, having shut the dogs in Greenhaven. It was half past three, and the sky had clouded over. Inevitable thoughts of the dark evening ahead began to loom.

  ‘Isn’t Phil coming over this evening?’ I asked her. Something about the way they’d parted earlier in the day seemed to imply something ominous.

  ‘That’s what I’m going to ask him,’ she said. ‘It depends how busy he is.’

  She spoke to him unselfconsciously, in my main room, starting with a brief factual account of the accident to Ken
neth’s leg. She laughed at something he said, and then, with a glance at me, reassured him that there was no need to worry. There were several minutes more, which I tried not to listen to, but he had obviously asked her about my pig, among a lot else. Then she asked him if she would see him that evening. The threads of need, or desire, or even anxiety were barely discernible in her voice.

  She was quiet for a while, listening to something lengthy from her lover. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘Good luck.’

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  It was a short interlude of calm. We were both on edge, waiting for something to happen. ‘I wonder if Pamela’s going to be furious with me,’ I said. ‘Letting my pig almost kill her fiancé.’

  ‘Why was Daphne so beastly to you?’ Thea asked, at last. It was uttered casually, as if it followed naturally on what we’d been saying, but I knew it was an important question.

  ‘She got it wrong,’ I said, needing to convince her. ‘I was never remotely tempted to join Caroline’s silly Lodge. I truly never knew she’d got it off the ground. She approached me two or three years ago, very obliquely. I hardly even understood what she was talking about. I don’t know where Daphne got the idea that I was involved. That’s the thing with the Masons, you see. It’s so much whispering and false rumours, all kinds of stories get around.’

  ‘But it was a secret – the all-women Lodge. You had no idea that Gaynor and Verona had joined?’

  ‘Right!’ I almost shouted. ‘I still can’t believe it.’

  ‘And Daphne thought you’d joined them as well. She was so furious about it.’

  ‘She’s been scratchy with me for most of the time I’ve known her,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think she really believed I was a secret Mason. She would have said something earlier. I think she’s only just been told, by somebody who’s trying to stir up trouble, or else she’s just got hold of the wrong idea.’

  ‘And it all blew up because you said she was in the clear as the murderer,’ Thea remembered. ‘That really pressed a button.’