Trouble in the Cotswolds (The Cotswold Mysteries)

by Tope, Rebecca

  Despite the physical violence, Thea found herself visualising the killer as female in her overactive imaginings. Dennis Ireland was the predominant man on her list of possible candidates, and he had struck her as lacking the necessary rage or resentment for the deed. As did Ralph and Edwin Callendar. In contrast, she had met a number of angry, unusual, unpredictable women. Rosa Wilson, Cheryl Bagshawe, Marian Callendar, Juliet Wilson, the vet’s mother and the Callendar sons’ wives all crowded into her mind clutching sharp knives and raging at the faceless Natasha. And if Natasha Ainsworth had been capable of seducing one woman’s husband, she might well do so again. There could be Stanton wives working themselves up into such frenzies of suspicious jealousy that the only recourse had been to kill the woman before she could snatch their own Rupert or Henry, Justin or Adam.

  As she tried to shake her head free from such unwholesome meditations, Thea experienced a small revelation. It came in a flash, and seemed both blindingly obvious and completely new. House-sitting was boring. Sitting in somebody’s house while they enjoyed exotic holidays or fulfilled complicated obligations elsewhere was almost the dullest occupation there could be. All you could do was explore the neighbourhood and interfere in the lives of the surrounding people. She had done this time and again – although there had also been occasions when the neighbours had forced themselves onto her attention. Her reputation as a harbinger of calamity was only justified by a long series of contingencies that all turned out to have logical explanations. It was her persistent habit of getting involved that marked her out as special. And that had effectively been due to her relationship with the police. Having found a body during her very first commission, she did not, as most would have done, settle back into the house and keep her head down. She roamed the village talking to people. She befriended them and made deductions about them. Her dead husband’s brother was a senior police officer – a fact that had shown her that the police were human beings, approachable, fallible, and very often extremely grateful for her assistance. It had somehow enabled her to unreservedly enter into a relationship with Detective Superintendent Phil Hollis, and treat him as she would any other man. Here her conscience gave her its familiar stab, at the memory of how badly she had actually treated Phil. She had developed a habit of rationalisation that took over every time she thought of him. She had been punishing him for not being Carl. She had felt constrained to show him her darkest side. She had been in the grip of turbulent hormones, so common in a woman’s forties. She had panicked at the increasing intimacy and instinctively acted to repel any further closeness. Or all of the above, she thought glumly.

  The thing about having a fever and a headache and heavy clumsy limbs was that your thoughts ran away with you. The suffering brain created pictures out of nothing, enhancing and illuminating the thoughts with fantastic illustrations. There was no stopping them, if you couldn’t jump up and take the dogs for a long winter walk. If you didn’t trust yourself to let the frustrated rats out for a run, because you weren’t sure you could catch them again. You saw the world through a mist, with the usual clear boundaries between yourself and everything else oddly blurred. You might reach out for a rat and discover you were clutching your own other hand.

  ‘I’m worse!’ she realised, speaking out loud. She looked around the room, unaware of the time and only dimly mindful of the place. She was stiff and cold. There was a noise outside. She listened carefully to it, and finally concluded that it was rain. Somebody had told her it would rain for Christmas. How horrible! She couldn’t recall a Christmas Day where it had rained. Rain was for Good Friday and Royal Occasions. And Wimbledon.

  ‘Stop it!’ she muttered. There was movement against her legs and she reached down to encounter long soft hair. Her spaniel was stirring, at the sound of her voice. Her wicked treacherous spaniel who had done a very terrible thing and was unpleasantly tainted as a result. ‘Oh, Hepzie,’ she sighed. ‘We are in trouble, aren’t we.’

  The dog slowly wagged its tail and turned its big soulful eyes onto her face. In the kitchen there was a lonely abandoned Alsatian with a painful ear. It ought to be the other way around. Poor Blondie was hormonal and pining for her people. She would have been better off in kennels, or left in the house by herself with somebody dropping in to feed and walk her twice a day.

  Other troubles began to crowd in on her. She had allowed Marian Callendar to use the house as a way into next door. She had almost killed her car. She had distracted Gladwin from her rightful work. She sank weakly into the cushions of the sofa and wondered whether anything would ever be right again.

  She managed to get up to bed, having laboriously checked that everything was off in the kitchen and fed the rats. Blondie refused to go out into the wet garden and Thea lacked the strength to drag her. If she peed on the floor in the night, so be it. Who could blame her? Hepzie followed her up the stairs and onto the bed, as always.

  ‘It’s only flu, not the Black Death,’ Thea said. ‘And it’s always worse in the evening. I’m not going to die.’ But she could not avoid an impression that dying might be rather like this. A jumbled forgetting of reality, a sinking into self-pitying befuddlement. An inability to separate the important from the trivial. And above all, a stark loneliness, so that in reaching out you encountered nothing more substantial than a small spaniel or your own cold hand.

  The night seemed an eternity, fuelled with anxious dreams about Jessica and Jocelyn and the nameless student who had been outside the house next door when the murder victim was found. He sailed around like a cartoon ghost, expanding and contracting and weeping red tears. There was something urgent about him, some imperative task that Thea was supposed to perform. A voice shouted a list of names from somewhere invisible. She knew, through much of this, that it was all a dream, and yet she believed it was real and relevant at the same time. When she struggled awake at intervals, she could not be sure whether this was a real awakening, or merely another level of dream-ridden sleep. Outside it was raining loudly enough to penetrate the single glazing and Thea’s fever and add a sinister background music to the apparitions conjured by her fevered mind.

  At last it was morning. The sky outside was grey and thick-looking, but at least there was light. A new sound reached her, but it was minutes before she identified it as Blondie howling down in the kitchen.

  ‘Oh, no!’ she groaned, and forced herself out of bed and down the stairs to investigate.

  There was blood on the dog’s bedding and a large puddle of urine on the floor. The injured ear was bleeding and ragged-looking. ‘Oh God, you stupid animal – you’ve pulled some of the stitches out.’ The self-reproach flowed through her in a bitter tide. She should have attached the plastic collar, as instructed. How would she ever face the vet again and admit her omission? How could she even get Blondie back to Stow for his attentions? The dog lay miserably in its bed and avoided her gaze. Feeling guilty about the puddle, Thea supposed, as well as suffering from a painful ear.

  Her own illness forgotten, she knelt down to inspect the wound more closely. The vet had shaved away some of the hair, leaving a swollen-looking area at the base of the ear, marked with ugly black stitches. There was dry blood scabbing over, making it hard to see exactly what had happened. ‘I’ll have to bathe it,’ she said. ‘Stay there.’

  She found Dettol under the sink, and added it to warm water. A small hand towel would do for swabbing. The dog squealed once, when she touched the bruising, but lay still after that. Miraculously, it appeared that all the stitches were still intact. The blood came from the one closest to Blondie’s head, where the lips of the gash had separated. ‘Another stitch ought to have been put in there,’ she muttered critically, while at the same time enormously relieved to find the damage less than first thought. ‘Now, my girl – you’re having that collar, like it or not.’

  Attaching the clumsy thing was no easy task. It had to be threaded around the dog’s own collar, and adjusted to fit, leaving no space for a scratching paw. The lo
vely Alsatian looked like a clown, and clearly felt ridiculous. ‘Now I’ll have to mop up that puddle,’ she told herself. The fact of having something to do made her feel considerably more human than she had expected to. She was doing the work she was paid to do, acting responsibly and functioning more or less normally. She had let Hepzie out into the garden, holding onto her as they traversed the kitchen, and closing the door on her. She was now scratching to come back in. ‘Wait a minute,’ Thea shouted.

  The mopping finished, she relented and readmitted the spaniel, who came in looking as if she’d been for a long underwater swim. ‘Blimey, Heps – it’s not that bad, is it? I thought the rain had stopped.’

  She peered out at the back garden, and saw that she’d been quite wrong. Water was dripping from all the bare branches and accumulating in any depressions in the ground. It splashed off the stone wall surrounding the Shepherds’ ground, and filled the containers that were scattered around. A metal bucket was already brimming over. The water butt that had been cleverly attached to a downpipe from the house roof must have reached capacity hours ago.

  Thea firmly closed the door and went to see how things were at the front. Without a proper pavement, with associated gutter, it occurred to her that there were no real barriers to prevent water running off the road and under the front doors, all along the street. Some sort of defence must have been devised, she supposed, over the years, but the position of the village at the foot of an escarpment must make it vulnerable to run-off. Water would cascade down the hill, and quickly find itself in the village street with nowhere to go.

  Peering out of the window, she could not immediately see any cause for concern. A car passed by, making a swishing sound on the wet tarmac, but nothing worse than that. There must be drains and gullies usefully positioned to deal with whatever the heavens threw down. Gloucestershire had suffered badly a few years earlier, when rivers overflowed their banks – but Stanton was not on a river, and this was only one night of rain, after all. Annoying and isolating it might be, but there was no need for panic. Ever since Lower Slaughter, and the indirect consequences of a rainy evening, she had associated such weather with disaster.

  Next door still had police tape around the entrance, but no sign of any personnel. The SOCO people seemed to have concluded their searches, departing at some point the previous day. Perhaps they had bundled up carpets, computer and clothes, taken all their pictures and samples and decided they had enough to be going on with. So far as they knew, the house would remain untouched until they chose to come back for more investigating.

  A dilemma was niggling at the back of her mind, and the more she thought about it, the less complicated it became. She would have to tell Gladwin about Marian Callendar’s invasion of the sealed house. She owed no loyalty to the woman, after all. It had been a disgraceful thing to do, by any standards. How could she possibly expect Thea to stay quiet about it, when by doing so she would be obstructing the course of justice? Perhaps if Gladwin hadn’t been a friend she might have left it, pleading illness or forgetfulness or Christmas as an excuse, if the truth ever emerged. As it was, she could not contemplate the shocked expression of betrayal on Gladwin’s face if she ever found out.

  Thinking it was still early, she decided to leave it for a while. Only when the reproduction grandmother clock in the hallway began to chime did she revise her idea of the passage of time. Idly she counted the first eight notes, expecting it to stop there. When it did two more, she trotted out to stare at it, and check it against another clock in the living room. Her watch was still upstairs beside the bed. The kitchen only offered a small digital read-out on the cooker, which was hard to see. ‘Ten o’clock!’ she gasped. ‘It can’t be.’

  Ten o’clock was halfway through the morning. It made her feel breathless with a whole lot of urgencies. Her car. The rats. The police. Blondie. Christmas, for heaven’s sake. She should compose messages for her family, to be sent in various forms depending on who it was. And Drew. She wanted to make a special effort with Drew, hoping for a chance to give him a careful expression of her hopes and concerns involving him and her. For the past weeks, she had kept Christmas as the moment for a proper conversation with him; the moment when his own obligations would be most apparent to them both, and the future possibilities for their friendship could be identified. With the looming new year the prospect of solitude and singleness was at its most acutely unappealing. People killed themselves in those final days of the year because Christmas had forced them to see how lonely they were, how unloved and insignificant. There was no risk of her or Drew doing anything so extreme – but they were still quite likely to make resolutions concerning each other. Too much time was being wasted, for no good reason.

  Much of this was perfectly clear in Thea’s mind. But there was a lot more that remained confused. Drew’s children had to take priority, as did his business. He earned shockingly little money from his alternative funerals, taking handouts from relatives and top-ups from the state in order to buy shoes for the kids and meat for his freezer.

  But it was ten o’clock already and she had to put her day in order. The flu was in abeyance, fortunately, and two large mugs of tea seemed to send it off even further. She would call Gladwin first and get that out of the way. Resentment against Marian Callendar was forming a tightness in her breast as she realised that without her, the whole business of the murder could have stayed firmly out of mind. It was a distraction too far, an annoyance she could well do without. If her own unwholesome curiosity had motivated her on previous occasions, this time it was almost entirely absent. She was being dragged reluctantly into it, simply by being in the neighbouring house when it happened. Anybody would agree that she had been deposited in the middle of something in all innocence. Something that had probably started with the death of Douglas Callendar nearly two weeks earlier, and which had nothing whatever to do with Thea Osborne.

  So she made the call to Gladwin’s mobile, the number of which was in her own phone’s memory. It was answered swiftly, in a voice that conveyed a sort of brisk patience, that Thea found reassuring. As if the detective was saying I will listen to you, on condition that what you have to say is important and relevant.

  There was no preamble. No ‘How’s the dog?’ or ‘Is your flu any better?’ Instead, Gladwin simply said, ‘Thea. What can I do for you?’

  Normally quite fluent, Thea stammered out the first few words. ‘Mrs Callendar, the widow, came here again. She pushed her way in. I couldn’t stop her. She’s very forceful …’

  ‘What did she do?’

  ‘She went next door,’ said Thea flatly. ‘Round the back. Over the garden wall.’

  ‘She went in? How?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose she knew where Natasha kept a key.’

  ‘To the back door?’ Gladwin sounded sceptical.

  ‘Why not? She was gone ten minutes or so. She came back carrying something. She said she’d gone for CDs, but that wasn’t what she had in her hand.’

  ‘So …?’

  ‘It was a sort of metal flask with a label on it.’

  Gladwin was silent for some moments. ‘We emptied her fridge and checked the contents of her freezer. We looked in the bathroom cabinet. Nothing like that anywhere. I’ve seen the whole of the inventory.’

  ‘It looked like something medical, I think. I mean – what else would it be? She’s not going to go to all that trouble for a thermos to put soup in, is she? She told me it was CDs she wanted, which was totally untrue.’ The barefaced dishonesty of it was a shock. She wanted Gladwin to understand how she felt, and was not entirely disappointed.

  ‘But she let you see it. Wasn’t that odd? Wouldn’t she know you’d tell the police?’

  ‘Maybe she didn’t care. She seems to think she’s above the law, pretty much. She said it had nothing to do with your investigation. She just wanted to rescue something that was hers. But she did say it was CDs. And it wasn’t.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Gladwin sounded worried.
‘She could deny the whole thing, of course. Her word against yours.’

  Thea had no reply to that. It was oddly offensive to be put into that position. Was it possible that Marian Callendar had thought this through already and knew exactly how it would turn out? She could insist that Thea had imagined the whole thing, and in her fluey condition, people might well believe Marian rather than her.

  ‘Not your problem,’ said Gladwin. ‘Don’t worry. Now listen – Jeremy says you have to do something about your car. They need your permission, I think. You have to call them today, if you want it back before the end of the week.’

  ‘Who? Who do I call?’

  ‘The AA, I suppose. They must have sent you a text. That’s what they always do these days.’

  Panic set in without warning. She had no reference number for the incident, no idea where the car had been taken. She had spinelessly let Higgins take over, without asking any sensible questions. No doubt he would have brought her up to date on Saturday if he hadn’t been distracted by the murder. She could hardly blame him. Even if there was a text, that would only be the start of it. She had the unappealing prospect of being endlessly transferred and put on hold through far-away call centres. ‘Bloody hell,’ she said.

  Gladwin was not sympathetic. ‘Come on, Thea, it’s not that difficult, is it?’

  ‘You don’t know the full story. It’s going to take me all day.’

  ‘I doubt that. But I advise you to crack on with it. There’ll be charges for the space it’s taking up, otherwise.’