Shadows in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  Thea had called him, he reminded himself. She had made the first move. Whether or not that was relevant was obscure to him, in his adult persona; to the adolescent who never quite disappeared completely, it was highly significant. For the girl to make the call meant the rules had changed, and the boy was expected to remain alert and serious. Karen had often made the first call in their long-ago courtship. It struck him that the pattern was unlikely to change now, whatever happened. He was required to remain alert and serious for ever, where women were concerned.

  So he phoned her. He used his house phone, because it was cheaper, and he sat in the hall, at the bottom of the stairs, automatically picking up the pen that was firmly tied to a nail in the wall. In his business, the telephone was crucial and making notes an essential part of almost every conversation.

  She answered quickly, warmly. ‘How’s it going?’ he asked her. ‘Are you still in Winchcombe?’

  ‘I am. My mother’s staying another night. The others have gone. We’ve got an identity for the girl, thanks to you. A lot’s been happening.’

  ‘Thanks to me?’

  ‘Absolutely. Nobody had made the connection with the London trial. I’m not sure they ever would have done, without you – unless Fraser had spoken up. He was hoping it could be kept quiet, I think. He declined to tell Gladwin where his brother was, when he was being questioned.’

  ‘Fraser?’

  ‘The middle brother. The one my mother’s with. Or whatever the phraseology should be. Did I tell you about that? They knew each other in the sixties and he’s just found her again. It’s all very weird.’

  ‘Yes, you told me. It sounds like something we should probably be worried about.’

  ‘That’s what Gladwin thinks as well. He seems to remember a lot more than she does. I’m not sure she’s even convinced it’s the same man.’ She was speaking softly, presumably not wanting her mother to hear.

  Drew considered for a moment. ‘And how do we go about proving it, either way?’ he wondered. ‘I suppose she does remember his name?’

  ‘His first name, anyway. You know – I think she might well have forgotten his surname. It was a very brief affair, and not serious on her side, at least.’

  ‘Fraser’s not a common name. If the man she knows now really is Fraser Meadows, then I suppose it must be right. Anyway, tell me about the Melissa person.’

  ‘She’s their half-sister. Fifty years younger than Cedric. Isn’t that amazing! Gladwin sent a London detective to talk to Oliver, and he told them, just like that. As far as I can work out, he and Cedric are the only ones who knew about her. Fraser was in Australia when she was born. I’m not even sure she knew who her father was. She called Oliver “Uncle Ollie” and she told me she was Fraser’s daughter. I think she really believed it. It’s still very vague. Poor Gladwin’s in a terrible state, with two murders to investigate. I never get a proper talk with her.’

  ‘And the other chap? Today’s victim?’

  ‘Reuben Hardy. Early thirties, married. He lived near here but worked long hours at something lucrative. I met his wife on Saturday and him on Sunday. They’ve got a lovely dog.’

  ‘God, Thea – you met him?’

  ‘And I found his body. Did I tell you that?’

  He snorted. ‘You did mention it, yes. You told me the whole thing in about forty-five seconds. I was very impressed.’

  ‘It’s all such a whirl,’ she complained. ‘I can hardly remember who said what, and when. And we have no idea why Reuben should be killed, except that he must have seen something or known something that might incriminate Melissa’s killer. We thought at first the two murders were almost identical, but now we’re not so sure. There are some differences.’

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘Her face was terribly pale, and there was a horrible mark round her neck. He looked a fairly normal colour and I couldn’t see any marks at all. Priscilla said he was cold.’

  ‘Priscilla?’

  ‘Oh, a local woman who knew him vaguely. She came round this evening, and we went a little walk with her. She’s nice, in a horsey sort of way.’

  ‘And she felt his body?’

  ‘Yes. She turned up soon after we found him, and she felt his cheek. She says he was cold.’

  ‘But he was outside, and it’s what – twelve degrees or so today. He’d get cold in no time. That doesn’t prove anything.’

  ‘They were arranged, Drew, both of them. Laid out, like statues on top of a tomb. Hands folded, eyes closed. That alone shows it was the same killer both times.’

  ‘I suppose it does,’ he agreed. ‘So what happens next?’

  ‘I have no idea. I imagine Gladwin will wait for Oliver to give his testimony, whenever that happens.’

  ‘That’s tomorrow, I think. According to the news, anyway.’

  ‘So then she’ll bring him back here for a proper interview.’

  ‘Maggs has met Henry Meadows,’ Drew remembered to say. ‘That’s what I called to tell you. She says he’s youngish, charming, self-confident. I forget exactly what she said, now.’

  ‘Charismatic, probably. I wonder whether Cedric is the same. And I wonder what this trial is doing to Henry. It must be excruciating for them all. They must really hate Oliver.’ Somehow she had failed to fully grasp this aspect of the story until now. ‘And I have no idea how Fraser feels about it all. He manages to keep everything calm, with no sign of any emotion. Even when he was told his daughter was dead, he kept his head.’

  ‘Thea, stop. I thought I was keeping up, until now, but you keep throwing in bits I haven’t heard before.’

  ‘Sorry. I suppose it would take all evening to tell you every single thing. Melissa said she was Fraser’s daughter, so that’s what I told the police. Then Fraser showed up here with my mother, and the police asked him to identify the body, and he said he had never seen her before in his life. And he did it all with very little sign of emotion. Does that cover it?’

  ‘It certainly helps.’

  ‘So, I’ll tell Gladwin what you said about Henry. She’ll probably have some ideas, and maybe some forensic findings or something. At least they won’t have to do a DNA test now. Anyway, I should go. My mother’s going to feel neglected at this rate.’

  ‘Keep me posted, okay? Tell me if there’s more I can do.’

  ‘Thanks, Drew.’

  When he put the phone down, a little voice floated down the stairs. ‘Daddy? Have you been talking to that lady? The one on the telly? I heard you saying her name.’

  He sighed and turned to reply. ‘Go back to bed, Steph. You should have been asleep ages ago. There’s nothing for you to worry about.’

  When had his own daughter turned into a miniature version of Maggs, he wondered?

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Oliver assured the Button person that he would be perfectly all right to get himself back to Norfolk Square. She had insisted on knowing where he was staying and how he could be contacted.

  ‘I’ll be here again in the morning,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that enough for you?’

  ‘You’ve just had a shock, sir, in the middle of something that must already have been extremely stressful. You need to be gentle with yourself. Have an early night. It’s unfortunate …’ She tailed off with a little frown, before starting again. ‘It’s a pity you have to stand witness again tomorrow. Perhaps your counsel could get it deferred, in the circumstances.’ She spoke uncertainly, as if on shifting ground.

  ‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ he said with feeling. ‘I’ve waited far too long already. There’s nothing I can do for Melissa now. She was a good girl, with everything ahead of her. It’s a terrible thing for someone to have done. But I can get through another day of this before I let myself dwell on that.’

  But he found he couldn’t. He found himself comparing the evil done to himself with that done to Melissa. For all the good he’d achieved in his life, for all the value he’d been to anybody, he might as well have been murdered in his yout
h, just as she had been. He had behaved like a dead man for much of his life. If it hadn’t been for the birds and the technical challenges he’d set himself in photographing them, he might have permitted himself to slide into some chronic sickness and early death, purely by abandoning all interest in living.

  He supposed there must be a bus that traversed the route from the Strand to Paddington. There were probably several. Somewhere in his memory he knew which they were, if he made the effort to recapture it. The streets of London had been stencilled onto his mind as a boy and would remain there for ever. He knew the way without thinking about it, the diagonal clear before him, cutting off Oxford Circus and bringing him out at Marble Arch, from which it was a short stroll to the hotel. A bus would find itself snarled up at Piccadilly Circus, and then crawl jerkily along Oxford Street, even with the reduced traffic wrought by the congestion charge. He had been surprised at how little change that had made to the progress of the buses, when it first came in.

  He did not even consider the tube, despite the easy Bakerloo run virtually from door to door. He had never liked the underground and the strangers who stared blankly just past your shoulder. People were less uncomfortable to be with on a bus.

  So he set out on foot, scarcely lifting his gaze from the pavement in front of him, not even thinking in any coherent way. He felt old and unnecessary. His effect on other people was to embarrass them at best and humiliate them at worst. His wretched brother was facing retrospective contempt and disgust that would overshadow his lifelong reputation as a caring professional. The one person who had genuinely enjoyed his company from time to time was now dead, killed within hours of his turning his back on Winchcombe. Poor Melissa, he kept thinking. That poor, poor girl.

  He avoided Regent Street, which he had always found to be tiring, with its insidious long incline, and instead wove his way through the smaller streets and squares that he would normally relish seeing again. He had never lost his affection for London, with its constant cosmetic changes which only served to emphasise its permanence. Shopfronts modernised, and evolved into coffee bars or expensive restaurants; the method for disposing of rubbish swung from bins to bags to boxes, and back again, stacks of discarded materials of every sort cluttering the pavements. He had noticed this especially in Norfolk Square and Sussex Gardens, where the hotels evidently created daily mountains of refuse which were noisily collected at first light. But he was still some way short of Marble Arch, and everywhere lights were on, as evening took hold. It was close to seven o’clock, he realised, and he ought to eat something. He would go to one of the small grocery shops in London Street, a minute away from his hotel, and eat it in his room. He tried to increase his speed, looking up at the street names at each junction, still aware of the glamour with which some of them were imbued. Grosvenor Square conjured indelible images from the sixties, with the anti-American protests, as he walked around it and into North Audley Street. Again, it had changed in many respects, and yet was essentially the same. He had taken no part in the Vietnam marches, but many of his contemporaries had, and he recalled the songs and the slogans quite vividly, despite never voicing them himself.

  He emerged onto the western end of Oxford Street, with the cacophony of traffic and the complexities of scaffolding around the eternal remodelling of various buildings. Something massive and futuristic stood just to his right, which had certainly not been there last time he looked. But across the street the buildings were reassuringly familiar, especially the upper floors. He had often wondered what lay inside those third- and fourth-storey windows – did people live there, or were they merely storerooms for the shops below? In other cities, they would all be dwellings. In Lisbon people lived in the very heart of things, keeping the place alive all day every day. He had liked that aspect of the place more than anything, on a rare moment of adventure when he was forty.

  He passed the Marble Arch tube station, and turned right. Edgware Road had been stretched, it seemed, and strangely mutated into a small piece of Arabia. Women in long black burkhas, men smoking hubble-bubbles, the signs in Arabic – it came as a welcome distraction to observe this particular alteration to the London he remembered. Idly he wondered at the process by which it had happened, and what the area would turn into next.

  Star Street was his goal. He had made a particular note of it as the most direct route to take. The instant change of atmosphere, with the absence of traffic and the houses with their deep basements and yellowing plants outside, was a relief. If he ever came back to London permanently, he thought, it would be perfectly acceptable to live in Star Street.

  His feet grew heavier as he reached Norfolk Square and the big inviting garden in the middle. He could see the door of his hotel welcoming him with a bright light over its name, and he began to fumble in his pocket for the key they had given him. The prospect of buying food seemed suddenly burdensome, and he decided against it. He would eat the free biscuits in his room and drink coffee and survive quite well till morning.

  When the figure came out of the shadows of the public garden, he barely even saw it. ‘Oliver!’ came a voice, and he stopped. It was an old woman, hair silvery blonde in the streetlights, neat figure corseted and straight. ‘Oliver, it’s me, Sylvia.’

  ‘Sylvia?’ He had no idea who she was. ‘What do you want of me?’

  ‘You don’t remember me.’ She sounded sad. ‘Cedric’s wife. Your sister-in-law.’

  ‘Good God! Sylvia!’ He peered at her, searching for any familiar features. ‘I would never have known you.’

  ‘We only met a few times, after all. Weddings, funerals.’

  ‘How did you know where to find me?’

  ‘You’re a predictable man, Ollie. It was easy enough to guess you’d come here for a room. You stayed here when the old man died.’

  ‘Did I? Are you sure?’ He could not recall any of the organisational details at that time, ten years earlier.

  ‘Henry drove you back here afterwards. I’ve been waiting for hours. You took a long time to come back.’

  ‘I walked. And the police … Did you know about Melissa?’

  ‘What? Melissa who?’

  ‘Our sister. Thirty-one years old. Murdered on my land at the weekend. They couldn’t identify her until they asked me. They caught me at the end of the trial business.’ He swayed on his feet, suddenly unbearably weary. ‘What do you want, Sylvia?’

  ‘Come and sit down, for heaven’s sake. You look ready to collapse. There’s a seat just inside the garden. It’s nice in there. This is a much more pleasant part of London now. Funny how it changes. I remember Paddington as awash with prostitutes and homeless drug addicts. Everyone seems quite respectable now.’

  ‘I was thinking something along those same lines,’ he agreed. He still couldn’t reconcile this person with the girl his brother had married so long ago. It was like a fairy tale, where the princess appears disguised as a crone. ‘Are you really Sylvia?’ he demanded pettishly. ‘I don’t recognise you at all.’

  ‘You’ll have to take my word for it. Sit down, Ollie, please.’

  The relief was almost frightening. Surely he wasn’t so old that his legs could no longer manage a stroll through the West End? ‘You shouldn’t be being so nice to me,’ he objected confusedly. ‘You must loathe the very sight of me.’

  ‘It’s got beyond that,’ she said, sounding almost as tired as he felt.

  ‘So you’re not here to ask me to withdraw my accusations? To nobble me somehow, so I can’t testify tomorrow?’

  ‘Not really, no. It’s rather late for that. I wanted to try to make you understand that the whole business has come far too late. Cedric is unlikely to live more than another year. He’s got prostate cancer, and his lungs are in an awful state.’

  ‘Why? He never smoked, did he?’

  ‘He had pleurisy about four times, in his forties. It left them damaged. Nothing to do with smoking.’

  Oliver absorbed this information without emotion. ‘So he doesn’t
know about Melissa?’

  ‘I don’t expect so – no. How would he?’

  ‘I think it’s been on the news.’

  ‘We don’t watch the news these days. You probably can’t imagine how it feels to see yourself and hear what they say about you, when it was all sixty years ago. It’s literally like the worst sort of nightmare – where everybody gets you completely wrong and you can’t do a thing about it.’

  ‘He did look very … shrunken,’ Oliver acknowledged. ‘But he’s eighty. What does he expect?’

  ‘And you’re not so much younger. Neither of you is the same person as when all that stuff happened. Your mother was useless; the war had knocked everybody sideways. Your father was a local hero and pretty well ignored you boys. Cedric went off the rails. It was horrible, what he did, but it wasn’t regarded as the unspeakable evil that it is now.’

  ‘It was by the victims,’ Oliver protested, while knowing this was not entirely accurate. It had all been so very much more complicated than that. Evil was beside the point. ‘And not being able to speak about it made it worse. You talk about nightmares – that’s exactly how it was. Homosexual rape was regarded as completely unmentionable, even as a joke. Everybody pretended that such a thing could never happen, except perhaps in the most vile of prisons. Even the Nazis were never accused of that. They might bayonet babies and roast them on a fire, but the idea that they might rape young boys never even occurred to anybody. It was utterly taboo.’

  ‘Yes, all right,’ she shrank a few inches away from him. ‘That’s all true, I know.’

  ‘You don’t, though. You have no idea. You wouldn’t want to know what happens, what it does to an unwilling body. And that’s only a small part of it. Bodies heal. Minds very often don’t.’

  ‘Stop it, Oliver. Stop dragging it all up again. What good can it do? Cedric is ruined. He’s dying. What more is there to say?’

  ‘Nothing more. But it needs to be said loudly and often. Other men need to be deterred from doing it. I can’t afford to care about Cedric. As you say, it’s too late for that. He has been a dark shadow across my whole life, and yes, I really do dream about him, even now. The things that happen to you when you’re fourteen get branded into your brain for ever. They form the person you are for the rest of your life. That’s Cedric’s bad luck, as well, as it’s turned out. But he lived his life in the world, a success, admired by everyone, with a family and all the trappings. While I … well I’ve been a hollow shell for sixty years. He did that to me. It’s no small crime, Sylvia, and it shouldn’t be hidden any longer.’