Because there really had been a murder in the house next door. The high level of police activity in the street and the house itself made that very obvious. Surely Higgins should have come to see her by this time? He would want to ask her whether she’d seen the victim alive, and if so when. All the usual questions would have to be asked and answered. But perhaps he felt he knew the answers already, from their encounter earlier in the day. She had not known who Natasha was, and had never even glimpsed her. All she had seen was the Callendar widow and her sons in the funeral cars, fleetingly, without knowing who was who. Natasha, presumably, had walked to the church and hijacked some of the mourners afterwards. The police already knew the basic facts of the two women in the man’s life, from normal local gossip.
There had been blood; that much Thea knew. The people who broke into the house had it smeared on them when they reappeared, including Cheryl and Dennis, who had both patted worriedly at themselves. The ambulance men looked almost as pale as the neighbours, when they came out shaking their heads and muttering about massive blood loss. A severed artery, perhaps, gushing like a fountain with every struggling beat of the woman’s heart. Drifting in and out of sleep, unsure of what was dream and what was real, Thea’s imagination constructed several possible explanations as to what might have happened. It all seemed remote from her own immediate concerns. She was ill. Her body hurt. If she tried to stand for long, she folded up and landed on the floor. She couldn’t face food. She hadn’t got her car, and it was now only two more days until Christmas. Christmas Day loomed like a grinning monster, demanding a set of behaviours that it was almost impossible to avoid. You had to speak to all your loved ones; eat a lot of food; drink a lot of alcohol; be nice to everybody; listen to carols and Bible stories on the radio and watch the same old movies on TV. It was all preordained. But Thea was ill, and was not expecting to obey a single one of the ordinances.
Despite the temptation to simply lie there on the sofa for the whole night, she did eventually drag herself upstairs, having made another Lemsip and let the dogs out for a final pee in the garden. Both animals were subdued, and when Blondie was shut into the kitchen for the night, she gave a single low protesting moan before flopping onto her bed. ‘Sorry,’ Thea told her. ‘I’m doing my best. It won’t be for long.’
Hepzie went upstairs with her, as always, and curled quietly at the foot of the bed, adapting herself to Thea’s legs in the soft, warm way that endeared her to her mistress more than anything else. But Thea’s feverish tossing and turning proved an impossible trial to the dog, so that after an hour or so, she jumped down and made a nest for herself on a sheepskin rug by the bed. Thea’s dreams were horrible: threatening winged creatures that came right up to her face and then shrank to pinpricks, teasing and tormenting her in unpredictable waves. She was hot and threw the duvet aside. She was thirsty and reproached herself viciously for forgetting to provide herself with a bedside glass of water. She was at the back of the house, and all was dark and silent. She imagined a ghost next door, dripping dark blood and smashing endlessly at the window, in an eternally futile attempt to get help.
Eventually it was morning. For a minute, she thought it was Christmas already and her father would be coming any moment with her bulging stocking that had been filled downstairs overnight by Santa. All four children would have to wait patiently until their father fetched them from the fireside, and delivered them solemnly to their recipients. Nothing else throughout the year came close to the euphoric anticipation, the unique atmosphere of love and mystery and delight. The rest of the day would generally slide into a slow anticlimax, once all the presents were opened and the turkey demolished. The afternoon wreckage would stay in Thea’s mind’s eye for several weeks, from the age of about eight. The new toys became familiar and shabby, but that moment when the stocking was delivered never palled.
When she dragged herself out of bed, she could smell a sour sweat on her pyjamas that carried associations of old people and unwashed clothes. Her head was throbbing painfully, exacerbated by movement. Her eyes hurt when she turned on the bathroom light. ‘I thought these things were always better in the morning,’ she muttered. Hard as it was to admit, the fact was that she was significantly worse than the day before.
Who would come to help her? Panic washed through her with the stark truth that there was nobody. The Dennis man was going away, as was the Cheryl woman. Her mother was otherwise engaged. Her sisters were entirely occupied with their own concerns. Her daughter was frightened of rats. There was Damien, though. Her big brother, who lived not so very far away and had no children. Nobody would ever take him for a nursemaid, with his annoying proselytising, but he would come if asked. Until that moment, it had not for a second occurred to Thea to ask him.
His number was in her phone, but she could not properly see the buttons or the writing on the screen. Frowning fiercely, she forced it to do her bidding. There he was, in the list, D for Damien. She didn’t think she had phoned him for at least the past three years. Not since Carl had died and there were ceaseless phone calls to and from everybody, in a crazy surge of emotional conversations, plans, and a simple need to maintain contact. The phone wanted to know for sure that it was her intention to make a call. She blindly pressed the same green button, wishing it would just get on with it.
‘Peaceful Repose Funerals,’ came a wholly unexpected voice. ‘How can I help you?’
‘What? Who’s that?’
‘Thea?’ The voice came gentle and questioning. ‘Is that you?’
‘Drew! I was calling Damien, not you.’
‘Both in the Ds,’ he said lightly. ‘Easily done. Are you all right?’
‘Not at all, no. I’ve got flu. It’s horrible. My head’s killing me. I can’t see properly.’
‘Where are you? Not house-sitting again, I hope?’
‘Stanton. Yes, I am.’
‘But it’s Christmas.’
‘I know. You sent me a card, and I sent you one.’
‘The flu’s a disaster. Maggs has got it, and Stephanie looks rather hot this morning, so she’s probably getting it. You’ll have to go home. You can’t work if you’re ill.’
‘It’s not exactly work. There’s only a dog and some rats. But I can’t just leave them.’
‘Well, at least there hasn’t been any murder, then.’ He laughed.
‘Actually …’
‘No! Don’t tell me.’
‘Next door. A woman. Yesterday. At least, it might have been an accident, or suicide. I don’t know for sure. I had horrible dreams about it,’ she remembered.
‘Thea, you sound pretty awful. How long have you had it?’
‘Um … Friday evening it started. It’ll soon be gone. I’m sorry about poor Stephanie. I hope it doesn’t spoil her Christmas.’
He made a sound that reminded her that this would be the first Slocombe Christmas without Karen, and likely to be somewhat flat accordingly. What would it be like, she wondered, trying to go through the usual traditions with two young children and no mother? ‘Have you got them lots of presents?’ she asked.
‘Nothing special. Steph suggested we ignore it completely, as a sort of memorial to Karen, but Timmy thought that was the worst idea he’d ever heard. He’s right, really. Karen wouldn’t take kindly to such self-denial. She always liked Christmas – made everything herself, of course. Pudding, pies, trifle. It’s all bought stuff this year.’
‘I got myself a few nice things at a supermarket on Thursday. I think that’s where I caught the flu, actually. Now I can’t face eating anything. It’ll all get thrown away.’
He tutted and went quiet for a moment. ‘Isn’t there anybody with you? Surely you’re not having Christmas there by yourself?’
‘Don’t you start. I’ll be fine. I never meant to tell you about the flu. I haven’t told Jessica or Jocelyn or anybody. Only Jeremy Higgins, and he’s going to be busy with the business next door.’
‘Remind me.’
‘He
’s a DI. I don’t think you ever met him. He shows up fairly often. He rescued me yesterday when I killed my car.’
‘DI? Don’t tell me … um … um … Detective Inspector! I knew really. Is your car dead, then?’
‘I put diesel in it instead of petrol. I think they can fix it. It’ll probably come back today.’
‘It all sounds like a great deal of trouble, one way and another. What’s the house like?’
‘It’s old and lovely. In the main street. The dog is gorgeous, but she’s depressed. Missing her people, I suppose. And I’m neglecting her terribly. I would have taken them up onto the Cotswold Way if I’d been all right. We had a Great Dane here yesterday as well.’
‘Listen, Thea – I’ll have to go. We were in the middle of breakfast. Den’s coming soon, and babysitting while I go and see a man at the hospice. Funerals don’t stop for Christmas, unfortunately.’
‘Surely they do?’
‘I meant dying doesn’t stop.’
‘How will you cope if Maggs is ill?’
‘With great difficulty. It must have been like this in the Black Death – nobody around to do any of the vital work.’
‘Except they all died. Nobody’s dying of this flu, are they?’
‘Some are, of course. But not many. Apparently it attacks people under fifty for preference. You have to admire these viruses,’ he added whimsically. ‘They really are very clever. I sometimes think they’re the real rulers of the world, with proper societies and value systems, and long-term ambitions.’
‘You sound nearly as delirious as me.’
‘Are you delirious?’ He sounded worried.
‘A bit, in the night.’
‘I should come and look after you. It’s ages since I saw you. But … with Steph sickening, and Maggs … well, I don’t see how I can.’
‘Drew, I promise I phoned you by mistake. I absolutely intended to call Damien and tell him I was poorly. He’s the only person doing nothing, as far as I know. He’s a bit of a pain, admittedly, but he’d come if I asked him to.’
‘I thought he was a thoroughgoing Christian? Doesn’t that mean he’ll be busy over Christmas?’
‘Ah – well, that’s the thing. He doesn’t really belong to any proper church. They meet in each other’s houses, and study the Bible and stuff like that. But they don’t do the ritualistic song and dance. The idea is to live like real Christians – which would definitely include rushing to the rescue of a sister in distress. The trouble is, he isn’t actually a terribly kind person, so he’d do it in a martyred sort of way, And he’d be all bossy and organising. But at least Blondie would get all her walks. If I told him that was the top job, he’d take it very seriously.’
‘That sounds pretty awful.’
She sighed and said nothing for a moment. ‘You’ve got to go,’ she reminded him. ‘You were going five minutes ago.’
‘I’m thinking. Stanton’s another village in the Cotswolds, right?’
‘Right.’
‘You know I’ve still got the house in Broad Campden. I was just thinking yesterday it was time I did something with it. It’s a wicked waste just letting it sit there. But after Karen died, I sort of forgot all about it. I’ve had it nearly a year now.’
‘It’s not that long. It took six months or more for all the legal business to get done.’
‘The house doesn’t know that,’ he joked. ‘It’s been gathering cobwebs and mice and wet rot for all these months. It’ll fall down if I don’t do something soon. I’ve already had letters about the garden from a neighbour. Apparently there’s a giant hogweed by the shed.’
‘Wow. I love giant hogweed.’
‘So do I.’ He spoke with a boyish wonder, which made her laugh. ‘But most people regard it as the spawn of the devil.’
‘So what are you saying? About the house?’
‘I don’t know. But let me get breakfast sorted, and the hospice visited, and I’ll phone you back. Midday sometime, I expect. I’ll have to find out how Maggs is before I decide anything.’
Her spirits leapt at the implications. Already her headache seemed to be fading. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Nice to talk to you.’
‘And you.’
She felt so much better after that conversation that she wondered whether the whole flu thing was psychosomatic after all. Had she been so full of self-pity at spending a solitary Christmas that she had made herself ill with it? Of course not, she decided – but perhaps there was an element of that, all the same. The pleasure at hearing Drew’s voice had quelled the activities of the sneaky virus for a while, at the very least.
It was Sunday, December 23rd, she reminded herself. Before long the church bells were sure to start ringing. Outside, the sky was brighter than the past few days. When she opened the back door to let the dogs out, the air was crisper. A perfect day for a walk on the wolds, if she’d been up to it. The shortest day had passed, and slowly the year would turn. It was a moment for pagan reflections about the reliability of the seasons and the timelessness that came with their predictable repetitions. A day for musing on the human condition and what it all meant. Drew would be good at that – and Damien would be hopeless. The undertaker trumped the fundamentalist Christian when it came to facing the eternal verities. Drew had freely stated that he didn’t really believe in God, that he couldn’t see a place for that whole layer of additional explanation and power that went with the idea of a deity. ‘I prefer to think of everything just getting along by itself,’ he said. ‘No need for a higher intelligence controlling it all.’
Thea hadn’t argued with him, but somewhere deep down she still wondered whether they might be missing something, and in due course would choose after all to embrace an extra dimension involving interactions between people that somehow weren’t covered by Drew’s scenario. She found she was rather looking forward to a future in which matters spiritual might take a larger role.
So she did not phone Damien after all. She forced herself to eat two Weetabix and drink a large mug of coffee. When the headache came back in full force, she took two more painkillers. They were half gone already, and there was only one sachet of Lemsip left. Only then did she remember her car, and how she was stranded in a village with no shop on a Sunday.
There were two police cars outside, and sounds of activity in the house next door. Plenty of scope for a whole team of SOCOs, she supposed. Who would be the senior investigating officer this time, she wondered? Most likely Sonia Gladwin, who would not want to give up Christmas with her twin sons and long-suffering husband. Thea had a confused picture of people like the detective superintendent and Drew Slocombe wading through a morass of obligations and distractions, determined to give their children the attention that other people’s had. Her sister Jocelyn was married to a civil servant who took the full complement of bank holidays without a second thought. He would throw himself into games with the children and abandon all thought of the outside world. The fact that he had once meted out violence to his wife had tainted him, admittedly, but as a father he was irreproachable.
And Jeremy Higgins was another thwarted family man, she supposed. He had referred briefly to kids once or twice, and gave every sign of being ordinarily married. He would have to interview and question a range of witnesses and suspects in this killing.
She found she was having difficulty in paying attention to the events next door. She had never met the woman who had died, and found little space in her aching self to care about her. This was bad, a small voice insisted. It had clearly been distinctly horrible for the victim. There were factors that implied a painful, panicky and lonely death, to which Cheryl Bagshawe had almost been a witness. And Thea had shared the final moments at close quarters. She definitely ought to care.
It was suddenly half past ten and she had done nothing but let the dogs out and watch sporadically out of the window as dreamlike white-clad figures came and went. She should check the rats, poor things. They too were having an unusually restricted time, com
pared to the freedom their people generally gave them. Why had the Shepherds bothered to get a house-sitter, if not to ensure their animals had uninterrupted routines? The ferns could have lasted without water at this time of year. Blondie could have gone to kennels, and some local boy could have come in to feed the rats. It was an extravagance they might come to regret if they knew how feebly she was performing her duties. But at least she was a deterrent to burglars, she supposed – until she remembered the woman walking unimpeded through the back door on Friday evening.
She had not given Juliet and Rosa a thought for twenty-four hours or so, except to realise that the ransacked grave in Willersey had most likely been that of their relative. She had almost forgotten their names, in fact. They had comprised an odd interlude that she might almost have believed a figment of a fevered imagination. There had been something dreamlike about them, anyway. They were like characters from a fairy tale. Perhaps they hadn’t existed in the real world. What was real anyway?
‘Don’t start that now,’ she muttered to herself. That way madness lay.
It was with inordinate relief that she heard the door knocker. Some white knight had come to save her sanity. And despite knowing it could not possibly be, she acknowledged a glowing hope that it might be Drew Slocombe.
Chapter Seven
It wasn’t Drew, of course, but a thin young man wearing a heavy sheepskin coat and a fur hat with earflaps. ‘Hello?’ said Thea.
‘Sorry to bother you, but I’ve been trying to get into next door and they won’t let me. I want to know exactly what happened, you see.’
‘Oh.’ She had to accept that she didn’t really see; nor did she care to. ‘Well, I don’t know how I can help.’
‘You’re her neighbour, for God’s sake. You must have things you can tell me.’
‘Actually, I’m not. I mean – I’m just a house-sitter. I only arrived on Friday. I don’t know anybody. Or anything.’
Trouble in the Cotswolds (The Cotswold Mysteries) Page 8
