Shadows in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Not a thing,’ he said forcefully. ‘I told you.’

  ‘I will go with you, if it’s all right with Thea,’ said her mother. ‘It’s rather a godsend, actually. We were going to have to find me a train, otherwise. Where is Fraser now?’

  ‘Back at Mo’s. Silly old lad went off to London first thing, and upset his brother so much they had to stop the trial. It was all over by ten, as far as I can see. He got home somehow – from Paddington, I s’pose – and phoned from the station. Mo says he’s in quite a state.’

  ‘But it’s only half past twelve now. How did you get here so quickly?’ Thea could not help but question.

  ‘There you go again. I was on the road, Burford way, when Mo called me. There’s such a thing as mobiles now, you know. Sent me over here asap.’

  ‘But she told us you never use a mobile.’ It was Maureen’s turn to doubt him. ‘Said you thought it would make you into a caricature.’

  Jason rolled his eyes. ‘Blimey! Spanish Inquisition’s got nothing on you two, has it! I keep one in the car, all right? Hands-free, ten years old. Only works when it’s in the right mood. Only two people even know the number, and one of them’s Mo.’

  Thea refrained, with difficulty, from asking who the other was. He told her anyway. ‘And the other is Janice, my assistant. She handles the caravan park, bookings and so forth. About three times a year she needs to check something with me, so she calls me. Otherwise she can manage it all herself when I’m not there. Just like in the olden days.’

  Thea laughed. There really was something very endearing about the man. ‘All right, you win,’ she said. ‘Take my mother off with you, if you must.’

  ‘You trust me with her, then, do you?’

  ‘She’s old enough to look after herself. We’ll walk down to the house and meet you there, shall we?’

  ‘Um … yeah, okay.’ It was the rapid glance to his rear, and then across the street that alerted Thea. All her reluctant faith in him evaporated in an instant. He was afraid of being seen; afraid of spending another minute in Winchcombe. But she said nothing, feverishly calculating what her next move should be.

  ‘She’ll have to pack up her things. Give us fifteen minutes or so. Have you had any lunch?’

  He shook his head. ‘I thought we could stop somewhere on the road.’

  ‘Okay. Well, we’ll be as quick as we can. You can wait outside for us. It’ll only slow us down if you come in and we get talking.’ It sounded feeble in her own ears, but he seemed to accept it.

  ‘I’ll get the motor and find somewhere to park, then,’ he nodded. ‘Might be further down, by those big gates.’

  ‘We’ll find you,’ said Thea.

  The moment they were around the corner, Thea called Gladwin, hoping desperately that she would respond quickly. The countless possibilities as to where she might be and what she might be doing were dizzying.

  But the detective answered on the second ring. ‘Thea? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Jason’s here. He says he came to fetch Mum and take her to Fraser, but he’s acting oddly. I don’t think I should let her go with him.’

  ‘Hey!’ protested Maureen. ‘What are you saying about me?’

  ‘Where, exactly?’ asked Gladwin.

  ‘We’re in Vineyard Street, going back to Oliver’s house. We said we’d meet him in fifteen minutes. I don’t know what he’ll do if we don’t show up.’

  ‘Are you scared?’

  Thea hesitated. ‘Not exactly. I just don’t think we should let him get away again. He says the police haven’t seen him, just spoken on the phone.’

  ‘That’s true, but it’s not the whole story. We haven’t had time, do you see? It’s all happening so quickly.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘Stall him as long as you can. I can’t come for a bit yet, but I’ll send Jeremy. He can keep him talking until I get there. I’m working on something at the moment …’ A faint voice apparently spoke to her in her other ear. ‘Yes … I’m coming,’ she said before returning to Thea. ‘Do you know what his car looks like?’

  Thea removed the phone from her ear and asked her mother. ‘What sort of car does Jason drive?’

  Maureen’s eyes widened helplessly. ‘Goodness, I don’t know. We should have asked him, shouldn’t we? I think it’s black, and fairly old.’

  Thea reported these scrappy details, and added that he was planning to wait by the gates into Sudeley Park.

  ‘Jeremy will find him,’ said Gladwin. ‘See you in a bit.’

  She was never to know just what DI Jeremy Higgins said to Jason, what he threatened him with, or how he appealed to his better nature. But the two of them appeared at Thistledown within half an hour of the phone call to Gladwin, and asked if they could come in.

  ‘Mr Padgett and I will wait here, if that’s all right,’ said Higgins, with a quick smile. ‘The DS is going to want to talk to him.’

  Jason was a shadow of his former self. His head hung heavy and he could barely raise his gaze from the floor. ‘Oh,’ said Thea. ‘Oh, dear. What has he done?’

  ‘One thing at a time, Mrs O,’ said Higgins, deftly reminding her that the two of them had a bit of history; enough for a certain degree of informality, but not enough to warrant any breach of protocol. ‘Least said the better, for the moment.’

  Thea’s mother was less forbearing. ‘But I want to go,’ she insisted. ‘Jason said he’d take me. I’ve been ready for ages.’

  ‘Why don’t you phone Fraser and tell him you’ll come as soon as you can?’ Thea suggested. ‘I don’t expect this will take long.’

  Her confidence was far less stalwart than she made it sound, but the prospect of her mother nagging and chafing for the rest of the afternoon was too grim to ignore. There was a chance that Fraser would reassure her that he was in good hands and could easily wait another day if necessary before they were reunited.

  The phone call took place upstairs and took a long time. Before it was finished, Gladwin had arrived. In stark contrast to her previous visit, she was composed and collected. ‘Ah, Mr Padgett,’ she greeted Jason. ‘Just the man I’ve been wanting to meet.’

  Jason shuffled his feet like a teenager and mumbled, ‘Don’t know why.’

  ‘Yes you do, sir. Don’t let’s be silly about it. Now, I think the best thing would be for you to come with us to see Mrs Hardy, don’t you? You can tell her what happened on Sunday morning, and we can get it all straight, in one fell swoop, so to speak.’

  Thea’s ears pricked up at this, and she took a step forward. ‘Um …’ she said. ‘Does this involve me at all?’

  Gladwin gave her a look. ‘Not really, love. That is … you were at the scene, of course. I’m guessing you’d like to be in on it, if that’s possible.’ She glanced at Higgins. ‘What d’you think, Jeremy?’

  ‘Mrs Osborne might well have a contribution to make,’ he said. ‘And I dare say she’ll know when to keep quiet.’

  ‘Mum – can you stay here with Hepzie? Is that okay?’

  ‘Doesn’t seem as if I’ve got any choice,’ said Maureen ungraciously. ‘Does it?’

  ‘Won’t take long, with any luck,’ Gladwin breezed. ‘Come on, then. We may as well walk.’

  They followed the identical route to that taken earlier by Thea and her mother – the walk that had been aborted by the horrible death of Jenny’s puppy. Thea wondered whether she should try to tell Gladwin about that, before turning up at the Silk Mill Lane house. It seemed unkind to all concerned to remain silent, but she had been obliquely warned not to talk, and the story was too raw to simply spill out in a few words.

  Jeremy remained in the street outside, while they walked up to the Hardy residence. Jenny opened the door warily, her eyes swollen and red. ‘What do you want?’ she asked. ‘Can’t I have any peace?’

  Thea had not seen the woman since Sunday evening, when she had turned up with Reuben. She wasn’t sure that she would have recognised her, except for the hair, and even that seemed to
have faded and flattened during the intervening days.

  ‘Mrs Hardy, we have here a witness to your husband’s final moments, and we thought he should come and tell you about it himself,’ said Gladwin.

  ‘What’s she doing here?’ Jenny glared from Thea to Jason. ‘If this bloke’s your witness. Who is he, anyway? I don’t know him.’

  ‘His name is Mr Jason Padgett, and he was in your street yesterday morning. If we can come in, he’ll tell you all about it himself.’

  Jason was somehow urged forward, and the four of them collected in the small living room. Thea edged herself towards the large window and found herself looking straight down into the woodland surrounding Oliver Meadows’ hide. It only required that she angle her head slightly to get a perfect view.

  ‘Go on, Mr Padgett,’ Gladwin encouraged. ‘I’m sure Mrs Hardy is anxious to hear what you have to say.’

  ‘Right. Well …’ Jason coughed. ‘Well, I was planning to go and see the railway museum, on the Greet Road, and I did go, just so people there could say they’d seen me, if it came to asking questions, and I only stayed ten minutes or so.’

  ‘You wanted an alibi,’ Gladwin said flatly.

  ‘No, no. Not really. I mean …’

  ‘Mr Padgett, you’ll need to start from the beginning. Where did you go when you left Thistledown House?’

  ‘To get my car. I’d parked it down a narrow little street. It turns out it was this one – Silk Thingy – up the far end.’

  Everybody nodded, even Jenny, who was on the edge of her settee, eyes fixed on Jason’s face. He sat forward in an unconscious imitation of her, but avoided her gaze.

  ‘So, it was at the far end, as I say, and before I reached it, I’d come across this geezer, staggering round like a drunkard. “Steady on, mate,” I says. “You’ll fall down if you carry on like that.” He was in that little alleyway by then, wheeling about and holding his guts.

  ‘“I’m not drunk,” he says. “I’ve taken something, and I want to be left alone.”

  ‘“No, no, old son,” I tells him. “That’s not the ticket, now is it?” If I’d had a phone on me, I’d have called an ambulance there and then. ’Course I would. But he looks right at me, and tells me it’s too late, he knows what he’s about, and his liver would never stand a chance after what he’d taken. Scared me rigid, I can tell you. There wasn’t a soul to be seen, and I didn’t like to shout for help, not understanding the situation at all. And then, all in a minute, he folds up on me, right there on the floor, and breathes his last. Just like that.’ His pale face and quick breathing added further horror to his fantastic tale.

  ‘And you never called anybody?’ Jenny stared at him in disbelief. ‘How could you be so callous?’

  ‘He was dead, love. Dead and gone. I didn’t see much sense in shouting about it. And I wasn’t too keen to be involved, truth to tell. As I said before to Thea, I had a few reasons for keeping my car out of sight. Besides, it wasn’t going to matter if he stayed there a bit longer. I never did anything wrong, not really.’ His face acquired an earnest expression of appeal to their better feelings, clearly wanting them to agree that he was guilty of nothing more than a piece of selfishness. ‘He’d pegged it before I could have got through to the ambulance people, it was that quick.’

  ‘Did he say anything else?’ Gladwin asked. ‘Anything about why he’d done such a thing?’

  Jason ducked his head and gave her a shifty look. ‘Not that I can recall,’ he muttered.

  ‘All right. So then what did you do?’

  ‘It’s daft, I suppose, but I laid him out tidy, and closed his eyes for him. I knew I was wrong, just to leave him there like that, but someone was sure to find him soon, and as I say—’

  ‘Yes, yes. So then you drove away?’

  ‘No. I went and sat in the car, up at the far end. I was too done up to drive, tell the truth. Must have been there half an hour or so, just sort of stunned. Nobody went past in all that time. Never known such a quiet place, and that’s an honest fact. Then I went to the railway place, which was daft, I know. Wasn’t ever going to make a difference to anything. I wasn’t thinking straight.’

  ‘What time was it?’ Gladwin wanted to know. ‘When you first met him?’

  ‘Dunno. Half ten, maybe.’

  ‘Because you see, sir, the times are puzzling me. When the police doctor examined him at one-thirty or thereabouts, he thought he must have been dead for about four hours.’

  Jason bristled. ‘I’m telling you God’s honest truth, so help me,’ he protested. ‘How could I make up something like that? Besides, those doctors never get it right, do they? The poor bloke was shivering, said he’d been out most of the night – he was already cold when I found him.’

  At the window, Thea silently agreed with him on all counts. The sheer strangeness of his story served to make it credible. But it must have been later than ten-thirty when Jason first saw Reuben, all the same.

  Gladwin cleared her throat. ‘We are, as you know, investigating the murder of Miss Anderson, sometime during Saturday night. Could you help us, Mr Padgett, in resolving that case?’

  ‘I guess he did it. He was mumbling her name, sobbing about it.’ He threw an agonised glance at Jenny.

  Gladwin’s eyebrows met in a glare of acute severity. ‘Mr Padgett, are you telling me now that you let the police waste two days of their time in an investigation that you could have resolved for us on Sunday morning? That’s a criminal offence, let me tell you. Obstructing the course of justice.’

  To Thea’s surprise, Jason hung his head in a sheepish acceptance of the detective’s tirade. ‘Right,’ he muttered. ‘Sorry.’

  But it’s hearsay evidence, Thea inwardly protested. It would hardly have affected anything.

  ‘All right,’ Gladwin took a deep breath, having flashed a warning glance at Thea. ‘Then we can proceed on the clear assumption that Mr Reuben Hardy, at some point between six pm and midnight on Saturday evening, did unlawfully kill Miss Melissa Anderson by means of strangulation. His name will be officially and publicly registered as her killer.’

  ‘No!’ howled Jenny. ‘No, no, no. Reuben didn’t kill her. He loved her.’ She jumped up from her seat and stood face-to-face with the detective.

  A deep silence enveloped them, as all three stared at her. ‘Pardon?’ said Gladwin, eventually.

  ‘Reuben loved her. They were having an affair. He bought me the puppy as a guilt offering.’ Tears began to stream down her face – more for the puppy than the errant husband, Thea suspected.

  ‘So he killed her because …? Was she trying to finish with him, perhaps? Or threatening to tell you?’ Gladwin spoke gently, persuasively.

  Jenny’s head moved heavily from side to side. ‘Of course not. They were going to go away together. I found it on his phone, the bloody idiot.’

  ‘So it was his car outside the pub!’ Thea burst out, unable to contain herself any longer. ‘He was waiting for her there. She said there was someone at the pub. But why was she in the woods?’

  ‘She was early. I sent her a text from his phone, saying to meet at seven instead of six, but I’m not sure she ever saw it. And I tried to make him late by insisting we watch something we’d recorded, before going out.’

  ‘You knew he was going out?’

  ‘He said it was to play poker with some mates.’

  ‘So he met Melissa sometime before seven, in the woods?’ Gladwin repeated carefully. ‘Is that what you’re saying?’

  ‘No, no, of course it isn’t.’ She wiped her sodden face with one hand, and threw herself back against the cushions. ‘Won’t you even try to understand?’

  ‘All right,’ Gladwin said patiently. ‘You made him watch something you’d recorded, because you wanted to make him late.’ She looked briefly at Thea, with an expression that said I don’t know about you, but I’m not convinced this makes any sense.

  Jenny nodded. ‘Yes. Priscilla was coming here at seven, to watch Doctor Who with me
. She often does. We both love it,’ she added with a defensive glance around the room, as if aware that her fractured shards of information were seriously lacking in coherence.

  ‘When did Reuben go out, then?’ asked Gladwin.

  ‘That doesn’t matter, does it? He took the car up to the high street at about six, and came back here, when he should have been waiting at the pub. He thought they were due to meet at six, you see.’

  ‘And you were here then, as well?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Where were you?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’

  ‘You have to tell me, Mrs Hardy. Either here or at the police station. Well, both, actually.’

  ‘Reuben must have seen me going into the woods from here. See – the window looks over most of it. But he didn’t understand, at first, what he’d seen. It was getting dark, and there are trees in the way. But he did see enough to know something had happened. It took him until Sunday to work it out. He came back here on Saturday evening, when Priscilla and I were watching the telly, saying he’d changed his mind about the poker. He just wanted a quiet night in. I suppose he thought Melissa had stood him up. He was very quiet and distracted, obviously upset and confused, but no more than that. He went to bed early.’

  Thea remained by the window, looking out at the place where Melissa had died. She could see little of Winchcombe, looking to the south across the fields and woods and a few dotted houses, but she was aware of the fairy-tale town at her back, with its useful little river and the other-worldly gargoyles. She remembered the varied house frontages and their deliberately preserved roofs, free from modern technology. She wondered what effect, if any, this messy weekend of death would have on the people. Finally, she thought about Reuben again. ‘We saw him at Sunday lunchtime,’ she interrupted, both her own diversionary thoughts and Jenny’s disjointed confession. ‘Did he know by then that Melissa was dead?’

  ‘He hadn’t the slightest idea. I was careful to keep him busy all morning, with shopping and stuff. We took the puppy out in the car, for a run. Then he insisted on going to the Plaisterers for some lunch, on his own. I couldn’t think of a way to stop him.’