by Rebecca Tope
When the two officers were back at ground level, the doctor must have given some subtle signal because one of them turned to her, and ushered her firmly away. ‘We’ll have to ask you a few questions,’ he said. ‘Can we go into the house?’
Only then did he register that he had seen her before. It was a moment Thea had been anticipating with some embarrassment, ever since her realisation that one of the officers in attendance had been involved in the sudden death Thea had reported at her previous house-sit. ‘Oh!’ he gasped. ‘Wasn’t it you…?’
‘I’m afraid so,’ she muttered. ‘Quite a grim coincidence, don’t you think?’
His face wooden, the constable followed her into the house and asked rather more questions than she suspected was usual. The need to recapitulate the morning occupied all her thoughts for some time. Yes, she had gone into the stable, at about eight fifteen, to feed the pony. No, she had not seen a dead man hanging from the roof at that time. Given the behaviour of the pony subsequently, she could be almost certain that the body had not been there then. The hanging must have occurred while she was out on her walk. The door had been left open and the pony escaped. Her walk lasted for roughly two hours, from nine thirty to eleven thirty – plenty of time for the young man to do his suicidal deed.
But why choose Juniper Court? Thea strove to rationalise the fact of a second sudden death on a property under her care. ‘He probably thought it made a good spot, with the people away,’ she said feebly. ‘And at least this one’s suicide, and not murder.’
‘Or so it would appear,’ agreed the man. She could see bewildered suspicion leaking out of him, his eyes half closed, his teeth thoroughly sucked.
‘What does that mean?’
He made no reply to that. ‘We’ll have to ask you not to enter that shed until further notice,’ he told her. ‘It’ll have to be examined by Forensics. As will the yard and other buildings.’
‘Seems a bit excessive for a suicide,’ she commented. ‘But I assume you know what’s needed.’ Then she added, ‘The thing that does seem just like last time is that we’ll need to contact the family, I suppose.’
‘Family? I thought you said you didn’t know who the deceased was?’
‘I don’t mean his family. I mean the Phillipses. The people who live here.’
‘Tell us about them, please.’
She enumerated the members of the Phillips family, and confirmed with effortful emphasis that this dead youth was not one of them.
‘So you’ve never seen him before?’ the police sergeant repeated.
A flash of memory occurred. ‘Well…’ she prevaricated. ‘I don’t think I have. But…’
‘Yes?’
‘Saturday afternoon, when I was walking, I saw somebody just for a moment, dodging behind a barn.’
‘Where?’
‘Somewhere over there,’ she waved. ‘I could show you. A fair-sized stone barn – the sort that usually gets converted into a house these days. I imagine it’s the only one left for miles around. But it probably isn’t the same person. There’s just something…’ She stopped to think, trying to pin down the elusive image. ‘I saw a tall man, or boy. He had a bit of a limp. There’s just something about this chap – he did seem quite tall.’ She swallowed. What was she saying? ‘And his hair’s the same colour. You could tell, I suppose, if he had a bad leg.’
‘Indeed.’ The sergeant nodded at his subordinate, who made a note in his jotter. ‘But you didn’t speak to him at all?’
‘No. I didn’t even see his face. I’d forgotten all about him. He just slipped behind the barn as I walked past the field. I didn’t take any notice, really. Why would I?’
Her initial sense of doom was overlaid with a growing irritation, a strong desire for this nuisance never to have happened. She wanted to relax into her assignment, to slob out, reading, walking and playing online Scrabble. She did not want to help the police with their enquiries or hear beastly stories of man’s inhumanity and miserable boys choking to death in Pallo’s stable.
‘So why would it be him?’ The policeman was nibbling his pencil, thinking hard.
It was a good question that was difficult to answer sensibly. ‘I just think it probably was,’ she said inadequately.
Had it been some bizarre premonition that accounted for the frisson of foreboding that she had so quickly suppressed on glimpsing the youth beside the barn? Or had there been something about the narrow hunched shoulders and painful-looking limp that screamed victim in those few seconds?
‘He looked like some sort of outcast,’ she went on. ‘Ducking away out of sight, up to no good. Homeless, drug-addicted – that sort of thing.’
‘All based on one quick sighting of him?’
‘Right.’
She sat with her hands hanging limply between her thighs, staring unhappily at the floor. The constable’s next words did a lot to revive her.
‘I expect it was him, then,’ he said.
She looked up. ‘Really?’
‘There aren’t too many of that sort around here. Nobody’s reported a man missing. This chap needed a shave and a wash and a haircut.’
It was only then that she thought to say something about the man in the sporty car.
The policeman gave the story full attention for about a minute, noting the detail of the man’s wet trousers, and showing signs of real interest when she recounted her second sighting, earlier that morning. Then he earned Thea’s admiration by asking, ‘And why do you think he might be relevant?’
Most people would have skipped that particular question, if she was any judge. ‘I didn’t like the way he looked at me,’ she said. ‘As if he had some secret plans for me – or perhaps more that I was in the way of something he wanted to do. And now this has happened, I’m wondering if there’s some connection. Except,’ she added helplessly, ‘if this was suicide, then there’s no reason why anybody else would be involved, is there?’
The man didn’t reply to that. He stared at the photo of Desmond Phillips with his fish for a long unfocused moment, before closing his notebook. ‘If you think of anything else, please contact us,’ he said, handing over a card with the phone number of the Cirencester police. ‘There’ll be quite a bit of coming and going outside. We’d be glad if you’d stay indoors for the next hour or so, with your dog. Oh—’ he checked himself on an after-thought, ‘—and don’t speak to anybody about this for the time being. Okay?’
Trying not to resent these instructions, she drifted around the house for a few minutes before settling irritably in the living room with Hepzie, flipping through more of the magazines the Phillipses had accumulated. But she wasn’t seeing them. She was thinking about death.
The image of the dead boy flickered in and out of her mind, like a scene from a particularly graphic film. In fact it was less horrible than most cinematic scenes – the man with the top of his skull removed in Hannibal gave her a much deeper shudder when she conjured it. Equally strong were the might-have-beens, the things that had never actually happened, or even appeared on film, but could have done. And dreadful accidents involving animals, full of unbearable screams and futile human struggles to rescue the unrescuable. By the age of forty-two, anybody’s head contained a goodly stack of such visions, to be glanced at from time to time out of some basic human need to acknowledge that life was never going to be peaceful and painless for long.
All of which highlighted the glaring omission of any actual feelings. Having no name or background information on the young man made it impossible to care directly about him. He was like a tramp found dead in a ditch. Now and then a local philanthropist would pay for a proper funeral, out of some murky motivation involving perceived obligations, perhaps – but nobody could really care, in a personal sense. ‘Each man’s death diminishes me’ or whatever it was that John Donne said, was a fine sentiment, but Thea had never experienced it as viscerally true. Much closer to her own honest reaction was Orson Welles at the top of that big wheel in Vienna,
describing the people below as ants, whose disappearance couldn’t truthfully be expected to make any difference to a total stranger who couldn’t even see their faces.
Films, she realised. How much of our moral reasoning apparently derived from them. How graphically they could present us with a situation, a dilemma, an act of appalling cruelty. If the hanging boy had been displayed in some opening scene – features blank, body slowly twisting in the warm air of the stable, a fly delightedly exploring this bounty of potential breeding ground – would Thea have been any more or less impressed than by the three-dimensional reality?
She didn’t know, and this lack of certainty was much less shameful to her than other people might have expected. Thea Osborne had earned a bagful of moral credit when her husband had been snatched from her so young. She had been down to the mouth of hell and come back again tempered by the experience. If this boy had parents and friends and siblings, then they would grieve for his loss. And rightfully so. But to Thea, he was just a boy, gone out of the world before she had known he was in it.
His death, if she was quite brutally honest with herself, was primarily a nuisance and an embarrassment. Why hadn’t he chosen some other place to finish himself off? Apart from anything else, it must surely have frightened the precious pony.
The moment the hour was up, she went outside. The pony claimed her attention first. Police tape stretched across the doorway of his shed, and as she crossed the yard, side-stepping the continuing police activity, a van appeared containing two more police officers. Determined not to be banished to the house again, Thea marched into the barn without even giving them a wave.
It was obviously going to be impossible to return the pony to his rightful home for the foreseeable future. There was a smaller shed as well as the stone barn, but it was dark and smelt of mildew, which couldn’t possibly be healthy. It seemed unkind to keep him tied up, but risky to let him loose in the barn, even if she moved the bags of food and bales of hay. Barns had hazards lurking under the scattering of straw, or behind the planks standing up in one corner.
Doggedly, Thea began to partition off one end of the space, using some of the planks and an old metal gate that had been replaced by a newer wooden one, and was propped against the road fence. Carrying it was almost too much for her, and none of the police people offered to help, but she refused to give up. The remaining stretch was barricaded by a roll of wire netting attached to the gate and barn wall by lengths of plastic string she located neatly looped over a post by the barn door.
It took nearly an hour, and effectively prevented her from reflecting on the grisly discovery she’d made. Neither would she permit herself to envisage the coming solitary nights in the house, adjacent to the scene of pain and suffering.
What would the Phillipses expect her to do? Was the dead boy somebody they knew? A relative? By now the police would have called Desmond’s mobile and told him the news. They’d probably come home and dismiss her from her duties. She more than half hoped they would.
At least her police detective brother-in-law James wasn’t going to come and interfere this time. Even if he hadn’t been off to Deauville, he would hardly bother with a suicide, however unpleasant and mysterious. South Gloucestershire was not his official territory and the local people would be unlikely to welcome a second intervention from a West Midlands Superintendent.
Presumably, anyway, once the body was identified, the family notified, the scene certified free from suspicion, things could carry on much as before. There would not be investigations and SOCOs and worries about lurking killers. Except, she realised, the police were already showing a disproportionate amount of interest in the scene of a suicide. If everything had been clear and straight-forward, surely they’d have left by this time?
She went to the taped-off stable door and peered inside. There were two figures in white suits standing in the centre of the floor staring up into the roof. One of them caught sight of Thea and smiled over his face mask. ‘Almost done,’ he said, in a muffled voice.
‘Have you come to any conclusions?’ she asked.
The eyes became veiled. ‘Too early to say,’ he replied curtly. With no warning, Thea found herself to be quite seriously frightened. Her insides were clenching painfully and she made a rapid departure, heading for the loo with a sudden urgency.
The ringing of her mobile phone reminded her of Jocelyn for the first time since her walk. Her sister’s voice, when Thea answered the call, was strained and impatient.
‘Where have you been?’ she whined. ‘I’ve been phoning since ten this morning.’
With some surprise Thea noted that it was already past two.
‘I went for a walk. Then I was outside a lot. Sorry.’ She wanted to explain, to splurge the details of this latest death and her own sense of victimisation, but not to her sister, and definitely not on the phone. Jocelyn had never been a very good confidante, and it sounded as if she was currently even more useless than usual.
‘Can I really not have your house? It’s very mean of you.’
‘Not until I know what this is all about. I’m here for a fortnight. I don’t want you making free with my stuff for all that time.’
‘Thea, we’re not children any more. I’m not going to spoil your jigsaw or scribble in your favourite storybook.’
It was enough to bring Thea up short, aware that this was very much the kind of reaction she’d been experiencing. Jocelyn had been a tremendous pest as a child, forcing the older children to hide their possessions from her, in case she broke them. It was chastening to discover that this image still hung around her, thirty-five years on.
‘No, I know you’re not. It’s just that I need to understand what’s going on first. I don’t want to be accused of sheltering a wanted criminal, do I?’
‘What?’ Her sister sounded utterly bewildered.
Thea forced a laugh. ‘That was a bit uncalled-for – sorry. It’s because I’ve just been interviewed by the police, you see. It’s the way my mind’s working today.’
‘Police? Why?’
Thea sighed. ‘I can’t tell you the whole thing over the phone. Look – can you come and see me, face to face?’ A sudden idea struck her with the force of a punch on the ear. It seemed impossible that she hadn’t thought of it sooner. ‘Actually, if you’re desperate for sanctuary, you’d be better off here, assuming I’ll be staying for the agreed time. You can share the house-sitting with me and we can talk everything through properly. And, to be honest, you’d be doing me a big favour as well.’
‘But—’
‘It’s not so far away. And it’s a lovely place. Loads to explore.’
‘Oh.’ Thea could hear the thinking going on at the other end. ‘I suppose that might be all right. I really do have to get away from here. What’s that place you put in your email? Muddlehampton or something. I’ve never heard of it.’
‘Minchinhampton. It’s south of Stroud.’
‘I have no idea where Stroud is, either.’
‘Hang on. I’ll find a map.’ Carefully, Thea directed her incompetent sister up the M5 from Bristol, and off at Junction 12. ‘I’ll meet you outside the church in the middle of the town, at four,’ she said. ‘You can’t miss it – it’s only a small place.’
The next half hour was occupied with assembling a quick belated lunch and trying to guess what might be wrong with her sister. She felt jangled and stressed, but strangely upbeat after the wobbles of a short while earlier. The prospect of having Jocelyn in the house with her for a few days was primarily an appealing one, chasing away any worries about prowling strangers who might have suicide or murder on their minds. There would, she hoped, be no more police visits, once they were satisfied that the death had indeed been self-inflicted – unless they made a courtesy call to update her on the identity of the dead boy. She would focus on more local walks, and perhaps a spot of historical research if she could find a decent library, with her sister as deputy in pony care and cooking. And she could find o
ut what in the world was the matter with Jocelyn.
Siblings, as she had recently realised, were the longest relationship anybody had in their lives, and the patterns were determined from the outset. Thea and the others had always competed, at the same time as sensibly colonising different areas of interest and experience to make the whole thing bearable. Thea had not initially elected to be clever. Her studies had come later than normal, and she was drastically outshone by Damien who got four A-levels and a first class degree and worked for British Airways doing something frightfully responsible. Neither had she been pretty in her early years. Her good looks were a feature of her adulthood, when some magic had transformed her into a beauty at twenty. The second child and first daughter, Emily, on the other hand, had been a curly-headed cherub from infancy, content to rely on this as her passport through life.
Which left Jocelyn and Thea to wrestle for more complicated ground. Thea had been her father’s soulmate. She had asked questions and shown interest. She had walked alongside him, encouraging him to reminisce about his own early life, and had read books under his guidance. Jocelyn, the youngest, had inevitably been kept close to her mother for longer than the others. They boasted a telepathic bond which did at times seem impressive. Jocelyn wanted to do what her mother had done – produce a family of apparently healthy happy children. She was brilliant at nursery rhymes, fairytales, knitting, first aid. She had passed her exams half-heartedly, and taken an unambitious degree in Fine Arts, which, as far as Thea could see, never taught her anything at all.
Where Jocelyn scored the highest points was in her maternity, and she had always made much of it. All of which meant that, in her unexpected abandonment of the role, Thea was left in floundering confusion as to just who her sister now was.
