by Rebecca Tope
‘Preferably dead,’ said Maureen sagely. ‘That would save her the heartbreak.’
They were off the impossible subject of sex, Thea realised with relief. Murder was much easier to deal with. They now had a theory to explain the killing of Melissa Anderson. Presumably Gladwin had arrived at a similar hypothesis, given the same set of facts and relationships. In the morning, they would speak again, filling in more details, dredging up more snippets of conversation. But now it was almost time for bed.
‘Better take the dog out for a widdle,’ said Maureen. ‘Do you want me to come with you?’
Thea went to the back door and pulled it open. Everything in the woods beyond was silent, the sky to the south pitch-black, but the lights of Winchcombe casting a glow in other directions. ‘We’ll be all right,’ she called back. ‘I don’t think we’ll go far.’
Hepzie squatted on a patch of grass lit by the light from the doorway. Thea applauded with the obligatory ‘Good dog!’ and thought about Oliver’s neglected birds. First thing next morning, she would go to the hide and feed them again. In a day or two they would return, she hoped, as if nothing had happened. The nervous woodpecker might take longer, and the opportunistic tits could have found a better bird table somewhere else, but no great harm would be done. Oliver could step back into his routines easily enough. Except his friendly young sister was gone for ever, and his humiliated older brother might prey on his mind, especially if he was ending his days in prison. And Fraser would take her mother to bed, which was a terrible thought.
‘Come on, then,’ she called the dog in, and closed the door.
They went to their separate beds at ten, conceding to each other that it had been a tremendously long day. Thea’s final waking thought was, ‘But why kill Reuben?’
Chapter Twenty-Six
Tuesday morning was drizzly and autumnal. Although the leaves in the hedges were still almost universally green, the grass was rapidly losing its colour. Across the allotments there were wilting stalks and a sense of everything bracing itself for the first frost. Dahlias and tomatoes alike would blacken and die the moment the temperature dipped below zero. The bright Cotswold gardens would lose much of their colour, sinking into winter dormancy more or less tidily, according to the diligence of their owners.
‘I’ll have to plant some bulbs next week,’ said Maureen, over the breakfast toast. ‘I like to do it in the middle of September.’
Thea thought about her own neglected garden, back in Witney, which was forced to fend for itself for far too much of the time. She had, however, given it a concentrated week of attention recently. ‘I put some tulips in last week,’ she said. ‘I really like tulips.’
‘Everybody does. The squirrels take the bulbs, though. It can be very disappointing.’
‘Hepzie sees them off, when she’s there. And next door’s cat is very helpful. I think it’ll be all right.’
‘I had a dream,’ Maureen remembered. ‘Damien and Jason were fighting. It was quite nasty.’
‘Have they ever met?’
‘Fleetingly. I don’t know why my unconscious should see them as enemies, though. They’ve got nothing to fight over.’
‘What was it in the dream?’
‘The locket – sort of. Damien was only about twelve, and Jason was big and angry. Damien stood up to him, and held the locket behind his back. When Jason tried to take it, he kicked him.’
‘Damien kicked Jason? Gosh! What did you do?’
‘Nothing. I was just an observer. You know how it is in dreams. You often don’t get to participate.’
‘We’ve been forgetting Jason,’ said Thea thoughtfully. ‘Which is odd when you realise he was gone just at the time Reuben was being dumped in the alley.’
‘Thea! Jason couldn’t have killed him. He was cold. Priscilla said so.’
‘I didn’t say he killed him.’
‘So what do you think he did? Found the body somewhere and took it into the alley for safekeeping?’
‘I had a dream as well,’ Thea remembered. ‘Something about Reuben and Oliver’s brother Cedric.’ And Drew, she recalled with a sudden flash. ‘There was a funeral. It’s all very hazy.’
‘This time yesterday we were sitting here, Fraser and me, wondering what you were up to with that detective woman. Fraser was saying she seemed very unconventional, and I said you liked that sort of person. He ate all the biscuits and said you’d fallen short as a hostess, not cooking bacon and eggs for us.’
Thea laughed, taking no offence. ‘I don’t regard myself as your hostess. It isn’t my house.’
‘That’s what I told him. He wasn’t looking forward to Mo and Jason arriving. Poor old boy – he finds everything very hard, you know. He gets very agitated at times.’
‘Really? I’d have thought the exact opposite.’
‘He hides it well.’
‘He said he’d never seen Melissa in his life. Do you really think that’s true?’
‘Oh, yes, I’m sure it is. He was in Australia, remember. There’s all sorts of things he’s lost track of here. Sometimes he seems quite adrift. He doesn’t know Mo very well, actually. He missed out on most of her growing up.’
‘So you think he’s trying to make up for lost time? With you and her? Isn’t that rather futile?’
‘No, I don’t think so. It’s never too late – I hope you’ll learn that for yourself eventually. He’ll always be her father, and they obviously like each other. She’s got very protective of him.’
‘But he didn’t want her coming here?’
‘It didn’t seem right to him, everybody invading Oliver’s hideaway. And it made rather a nonsense of persuading him to have you here. He was all for leaving the birds to fend for themselves for a bit. We said there should be somebody to keep things going.’
The familiar sense of being manipulated washed through Thea. ‘Why?’
Her mother flushed. ‘I thought you might need some distraction. You always seem so aimless when you’re there in that cottage in Witney, with nobody but the dog. At least the house-sitting is a change of scene.’
‘Thanks, Mother,’ said Thea dryly. ‘So all this is your fault. I might have known.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
A knock on the door saved the moment. ‘I bet that’s Gladwin,’ said Thea, in some relief.
She was right. The detective was alone, and almost ran into the house as soon as the door opened. ‘This’ll have to be quick,’ she panted. ‘We’ve got a busy day ahead. Wall-to-wall interviews all morning. All the important people seem to be in London, which is a real pain.’
‘Coffee?’ Thea offered.
Gladwin shook her head. ‘I’ll explode if I have any more. Look at me.’ She held out a quivering hand. ‘I’m a wreck already. Forty-eight hours exactly, since all this began, and I’ve had practically no sleep. Two murders is more than we can cope with, let’s face it. The townspeople have woken up to it, as well, so the phones are red-hot. You wouldn’t believe the number of people who see it as a personal affront.’
‘Who are you interviewing?’
‘Melissa’s mother, for one. She’s as bad as Mrs Reuben, apparently. Worse, probably. We tracked her down last night and somebody went round to give her the news. She’s got some sort of chronic illness, and practically dropped dead on the spot. All very unpleasant, but we’ve got to ask her some questions, if we can.’
‘Like why her daughter lived out of suitcases and kept so much of her stuff here?’ Thea suggested.
‘Right. And how close she was to the Meadows family in London. Did she even know who her father was – or did she really think Fraser was her father?’
‘Tricky,’ Thea agreed.
‘To say the least. Then there’s that Jason chap. He hasn’t turned up, you know.’ She gave Thea’s mother an intense look. ‘It would have helped to have Fraser and his daughter still here, actually.’
Maureen almost shrugged. ‘Not a lot we could do to keep them, if they wa
nted to go,’ she said. ‘You’ve interviewed Fraser, anyway, haven’t you?’
‘Not since we found Reuben. And that’s another thing … a very big other thing.’
‘Tell us,’ Thea urged.
‘The post-mortem was done this morning. Started at half past seven, would you believe? I went along myself. He wasn’t strangled …’
‘I said there were no marks on his throat,’ Thea triumphed. ‘What was it, then?’
‘Overdose, by the look of it.’
‘What? So he wasn’t murdered at all? But surely …’ This was so shocking that Thea sat down heavily on a kitchen chair. ‘He didn’t seem the type. He was here, on Sunday, with his wife, all charming and greasy. People like that don’t kill themselves.’
‘Thea, we’ve talked about this before,’ Gladwin reminded her. ‘Stop making assumptions.’
‘You think somebody poisoned him, then? That’d be his wife, if so.’ The one who screamed for ten minutes, she remembered.
‘Stop it! We have to keep to the facts. You haven’t told me properly why he came here on Sunday. What did he want?’
‘He’d heard about Melissa, sometime during the afternoon. When we saw him in the pub, he obviously didn’t know what had happened – just that there was a disturbance here in the woods.’
‘That doesn’t seem very likely,’ Gladwin interrupted. ‘His bedroom window looks over the very spot. He could practically have seen the body.’
‘Wait a minute!’ Thea tried to visualise it. ‘That can’t be right.’
‘Well, it is. He’s got a flat at the top, and if he leant out and looked to his right, he could see most of the land belonging to this property.’
‘But could he see through the trees to the hide and the bird feeding station?’
‘I think so. Most of it, at least. In any case, he’d see the police tent and the yellow jackets and the general activity. Anybody with half a brain would realise there’d been an unexplained death. Most would assume it was a murder.’
‘So you think he was lying to us in the pub? Hoping to trick us into giving something away? You think he knew it was Melissa?’
Gladwin was not sitting down, but jittering on the spot. It made Thea feel restless and anxious. ‘I don’t know. But he wasn’t just an innocent local, was he?’
‘He might have seen it happening,’ Thea realised. ‘If he was awake and looking out of the window, he might have seen her being killed. That’s what we thought all along – that he had to be killed because he’d seen too much.’
‘Except—’
‘Except he wasn’t killed in that sort of way,’ supplied Thea’s mother, who had been quietly following the conversation. ‘If it wasn’t suicide, it must have been carefully planned. And it was all so quick. It doesn’t make much sense, as far as I can see.’
‘And why put the body in the alley? That seems so crazy,’ Thea persisted. ‘How long had he been dead – do you know?’
‘Something like four hours. Not more than that.’
‘About the same time as we were walking down there, then.’
‘Down the alley, and right past the silk mill building where he lived. Precisely.’ Gladwin’s expression was anguished. ‘We were in full view, looking at the stream, admiring those houses, chatting about Melissa. Anybody might have heard us. I can hardly believe I was such a fool.’
‘Why?’
‘I’m the senior investigating officer in a murder enquiry. You found the body – both the bodies – you’re a major witness. There we were like any two gossipy women, for all the world to see. It looks bad. It looks unprofessional.’
‘Since when did you care about that?’
Gladwin snorted. ‘They’re going to make me care, if I don’t clear this up quickly. The boundaries have been blurred, and they don’t like that. Your role has always made them nervous; and now they see me as almost as bad.’
‘So you’re here now as a professional – right?’
Gladwin sighed. ‘Not entirely. If I’m to interview you according to the book, we need another officer, a recorder, a closed environment where we can’t be overheard, and you can’t be influenced. And so forth and so on. The waste of time is phenomenal if you do everything properly.’
Thea shook her head as if to clear it. ‘Henry Meadows,’ she said. ‘We were talking about him last night. Have you seen him yet?’
‘Of course we haven’t,’ said Gladwin crossly. ‘We aren’t likely to see any of them. The people in London will have to do it by proxy, at least initially. That trial is confusing everything. Either it’s the whole explanation behind what’s happened here, or it’s a major distraction that’s just getting in the way.’
‘Henry’s likely to be badly affected by it, isn’t he? A business like that relies on being respectable and trustworthy. Even if he’s pure as pure himself, he’s bound to be tainted. His father and grandfather have always been pillars of the community, according to Drew.’
‘You’re still ahead of me on all that,’ Gladwin admitted. ‘I’ve never known an undertaker socially. I can’t believe it’s quite like the stereotype.’
‘It is, I think, even now,’ Thea observed. ‘But surely you must have met several of them, in your line of work. Socially as well as professionally. Don’t you invite each other to the Christmas party?’
‘Oddly enough, no. The coroner’s officer is the kingpin, the go-between. He gets to every party there is, not to mention being top banana at the Freemasons. But I’ve never been at a party with an undertaker, to my knowledge. I gather they don’t go out very much, as a rule.’
Thea laughed. ‘I really don’t know, either. Drew’s not at all traditional or conventional. We’ll have to ask him how the more orthodox ones behave.’
Gladwin looked at Thea’s mother, strangely conspiratorial. The sort of look one woman gives to another when romance is in the air. ‘Have you met Drew?’ Gladwin asked.
Maureen shook her head. ‘I’m still not really sure who he is. She mentions him quite a lot, though.’
‘He’s good-looking, clever and kind, from what I’ve seen of him. Which is very little, I admit.’
‘Sounds promising.’
‘And his wife has just died,’ said Thea, too loudly. ‘He’s struggling to keep his business going and he has two small children.’
‘Poor man. He obviously needs a lot of help and support,’ said her mother, with another smile at the detective.
‘Stop it, you two. I can’t bear to be teased.’
‘I remember,’ sighed her mother. ‘You always were far too serious for your own good.’
It wasn’t the way she thought of herself, and the maternal pulling of rank felt unfair. ‘What does this have to do with anything, anyway?’ she demanded. ‘I thought it was a police interview.’
Gladwin moaned. ‘Slave driver!’ she protested. ‘So where were we?’
Neither mother nor daughter responded. The thread, if there had been one, seemed irretrievably lost. Thea tried to think. ‘There were some bits and pieces I thought I should tell you, about Melissa and Reuben, but I’m not sure they matter now. We know she was close to Oliver, and he can fill in any gaps about how much she knew of her family. Reuben and his wife came here on Sunday, once they’d caught up with who’d been killed. Did I tell you that?’
Gladwin dipped her head, and threw a reproachful look from beneath her straight black fringe. ‘Thea Osborne, you know you didn’t.’
‘Sorry. I never really got the chance. It was all such a shock, so soon after Melissa. And then everything got rather out of control for all of us.’
‘So you saw him in the pub at lunchtime on Sunday, and then he came here with his wife? When, exactly?’
‘About five or half past, I suppose. They were both rather pushy. Offering us their help or protection against monstrous criminals lurking in the bushes. I thought they must be from some peculiar church, the way they talked. Like evangelicals, trying to make you like them. His
face was positively shiny, and she stood behind him, sort of egging him on. The dog was with them.’
‘That makes almost no sense at all,’ Gladwin concluded. ‘Do you think they knew Melissa?’
‘I couldn’t tell for sure. They might have been telling bare-faced lies. Reuben must have known something, surely, to have died so soon afterwards. Mum sent them packing in the end.’
‘Oh?’ Again Gladwin gave Maureen a long look.
‘I didn’t like them,’ said Thea’s mother simply. ‘Neither of them. I thought they were unwholesome.’
‘That’s an excellent word,’ Gladwin applauded. ‘I must remember that.’
‘It’s true,’ Thea realised. ‘Him especially. Something in his eyes, I think. She wasn’t so bad. And she obviously loved him, if she’s in such a state about him dying.’
‘Right,’ said Gladwin slowly, her mind patently elsewhere. ‘That’s the first link of any sort between the two victims. Up to now, they’ve been like two magnets turned the wrong way. No amount of force would bring them together. Mrs Hardy flatly insists they never saw Melissa or knew anything about her existence. They very rarely saw Oliver Meadows either, according to her.’
‘And yet they live so close by,’ said Thea. ‘If you use the back way from here, you’re almost under the Hardys’ window.’
‘But they don’t have a back way. And if you used the front in both cases, they’re really quite a distance apart.’
Thea mentally walked the route from door to door: up Oliver’s track, turn right, along Vineyard Street to the square they called Abbey Terrace, past the pub in the high street and right again down Castle Street, before turning left into Silk Mill Lane. ‘That’s true,’ she agreed. ‘But I met the wife in the Sudeley grounds, so she obviously comes this way with the dog.’
‘But, Thea, you know what people in villages are like,’ put in her mother. ‘Especially if they’ve got busy lives. They might know each other by sight, but they often have no idea of names or personal details. How many people do you know in Witney?’
