by Rebecca Tope
‘Are there any girl peacocks out there?’
‘I think not.’
‘So what’s the point?’
‘I imagine they’re hoping to attract a female from the other side of the valley – or perhaps across the Bristol Channel in Somerset. The crazy thing is, Julia never told me about them. Imagine the shock when I woke up on Sunday morning to that.’
‘Just about the same as the shock I’ve just had, I would guess.’
By this time they were irrevocably awake, and Jocelyn appeared in Thea’s doorway, wearing a long T-shirt and nothing else. ‘Shall I make some tea?’ she asked. ‘I bet there’ll be police people turning up straight after breakfast, anyway.’
‘Might as well,’ Thea said. ‘But we’ll be horribly tired by this afternoon if we get up now.’
‘We’ll have a siesta, then. Looks as if it’ll be a hot day.’
They drank the tea with minimal conversation. Everything had been said the night before, taking them till nearly midnight, Jocelyn far from keen to go to bed, despite being so tired. Thea tried not to worry about having less than five hours’ sleep. As Jocelyn said, they could catch up during the day if necessary. In spite of their troubles and worries, there didn’t seem to be any major tasks ahead of them.
‘Just so long as I keep that pony alive,’ Thea had said firmly. ‘That’s the main thing.’
* * *
Jocelyn’s prediction turned out to be entirely accurate. Two police cars arrived at eight thirty, disgorging a pair of officers from one who proceeded to don white jumpsuits, and Superintendent Hollis from the other. ‘And me still in my nightie,’ Jocelyn muttered.
‘It’s still a murder investigation, then?’ Thea said, as she opened the front door to him.
‘That’s right.’ He stood looking down at her, eyes wide open and not quite focused, as if a whirl of distracting thoughts was happening behind them. Thea’s heart-rate accelerated stupidly.
‘It’s incredible that this should happen to me again,’ she said. ‘I feel like a jinx.’
‘As well you might,’ he agreed. ‘Although as one of my Inspectors observed, it isn’t quite as extraordinary as we first thought.’
‘Really?’
‘If the killer assumed the place was empty – if he knew the family were away – it might have seemed like a safe place to use.’
‘But when he saw the pony, he’d have realised somebody must be here to keep an eye on him.’
‘Not necessarily. A neighbour could be dropping in.’
Thea glanced back into the house. ‘Do you want to come in?’ she asked.
‘Why don’t we go for a little walk instead? I take it your sister’s still here?’
‘She is, yes. All right, then. Can I bring the dog?’
He hesitated, and she understood that this was not to be just a sociable stroll across the fields.
‘Better not,’ he said. ‘Just in case.’
Thea didn’t ask just in case what? She pushed Hepzie back indoors and called to Jocelyn not to let her out.
Hollis led the way purposefully into the paddock behind the house, pausing halfway across it to look back the way they’d come. ‘Attractive place,’ he said.
Thea followed his gaze. ‘I haven’t seen it from this angle before. It’s absolutely lovely.’
The house had its back to them, the row of windows under the roof smaller than those at the front. The stone barn was at an angle, and the duck pond with its fringe of reeds and grasses added to the timeless image. The scene of the hanging was hidden from view, but the small flower garden was between the paddock and the house, further enhancing the picture.
‘The Cotswolds are the most beautiful place on earth,’ he said, matter-of-factly. ‘There’s everything that’s best about the world in this one small area. I never get tired of it.’
‘It’ll be spoilt eventually, though, don’t you think? I saw a lot of new building on my way here on Saturday. The stone’s a dreadful bright yellow in some cases.’
‘It’ll mellow,’ he said. ‘It was all that colour to start with.’
‘Are you sure?’ She was sceptical of his tolerance, remembering how Cecilia Clifton had spoken of new development and its effect on the residents. ‘I wouldn’t put it past the Phillipses to try and exploit some of their land here. They wouldn’t be allowed to build a row of holiday chalets in this paddock, would they?’
Hollis snorted. ‘Don’t get me started on planning matters,’ he warned.
‘Right,’ she laughed. ‘Sorry. I don’t know why I sounded so reactionary. I don’t mind a few new buildings, if they’re well built. Nothing lasts forever, I suppose.’
‘Your husband died, didn’t he? Have I got that right?’
‘In a car crash, last year.’
‘It must have been – well, you know what I’m trying to say.’
‘It was. Whatever words you can find, that’s more or less it. Quite predictable, on the whole. All the usual stereotypes came true, and a few new ones.’
‘You look better than you did in May. Lighter.’
‘As in – I’ve lost weight?’
‘You know I didn’t mean that. Lighter in spirit. More buoyant.’
‘I expect I am. I’ve got the hang of living in the moment, which helps a lot. If I’m all right today, then I’m all right, full stop. I’ve been working on it for a while now, to the point where it’s got fairly automatic. It really does help.’
‘Hmm.’ Thea did her best to ignore the note of disapproval, the doubt as to the wisdom of such a lifestyle. ‘It’s probably quite useful at times like this, but I wouldn’t recommend it permanently.’
‘Wouldn’t you?’
‘Just as long as it’s working, who am I to criticise?’ he placated. ‘I must say your poor sister looks like something that’s been left out in all weathers for a month or two.’
Thea laughed. ‘How rude!’ she spluttered. ‘But yes, she’s got problems. I’ve no idea what she’s going to do, to be honest.’
‘Which makes you feel even more okay yourself,’ he said, perceptively.
‘Maybe it does,’ she admitted.
They were walking towards the woodlands at the bottom of the sloping paddock. ‘Where are we going?’ Thea asked.
‘Did you know there’s a footpath through these woods? It’s the old towpath of the canal, actually.’
‘Julia mentioned it, and I did a bit of exploring yesterday, but I didn’t start here. I walked into Frampton Mansell and over the railway line. It felt terribly daring. I suppose I told you about Cecilia Clifton giving me a little lecture on Sunday about what there is to see. Although she seems to have rather a thing about the canal.’
‘Pro or con?’
‘I couldn’t really tell. She changed the subject.’
‘They’re supposed to be restoring it,’ he said vaguely.
‘I know. Isn’t that fantastic! But what a job! Something like twenty-five locks to rebuild, and all that scrub clearance. The mind boggles.’
‘I went on a canal holiday once, about thirty years ago, with my big sister and her boyfriend. It was the most tedious week of my life.’
Thea’s laugh was genuine and quite prolonged. ‘You’re as bad as Jocelyn,’ she said. ‘You’ve got no souls, either of you.’
‘You like canals, do you?’
‘I’m mad about them.’
‘Hmmm. Well, don’t say that too loudly in these villages. Not everybody would agree with you.’
‘Julia, for one,’ dismissed Thea.
‘Oh?’ A sudden sharpness entered his voice, reminding Thea that he was a professional, there to do a job.
‘She said I might be approached by canal people, but it was unlikely. The restoration is coming this way, apparently, and it obviously affects her land. It must be right about here.’
‘And she isn’t happy about it?’
‘That was the distinct impression I got.’
‘Which puts her in th
e forefront of public opinion then,’ he said thoughtfully.
‘They’re just lacking in imagination, that’s all. It would be fantastic for the area to have it open again. Really invigorating.’ Thea was still fighting to comprehend any viable grounds for opposing the efforts to recreate the canal in all its glory.
‘Be that as it may, we won’t go down to the canal. I was thinking of heading uphill to the west and doing a loop back towards Chalford. We might get as far as Cowcombe Wood.’
‘Cowcombe! What a wonderful name!’
‘It links up with another path which I think must be the one you used on Sunday, when you saw the young man with a limp. The only barn I can find belongs to Greywood Manor, home of the Innes family.’
Thea groaned. ‘If we see that Valerie, I warn you – I’ll run away.’
‘We won’t see her,’ he said confidently.
It took Thea several seconds to grasp the import of these words. ‘Why? Is something going on?’ She stared at the landscape in front of her. ‘Have you got people out there, keeping the Inneses out of the way?’
‘Not exactly. But we don’t do things on a whim in this sort of situation.’
Thea felt young and foolish for never suspecting the background machinations. ‘So we’re investigating the barn, are we?’
‘In a way,’ he agreed. ‘I thought we might have a look at it and you can show me exactly where you saw your vagrant. And at the same time, I can see if there’s any sign that this path has been used recently. You haven’t been this way, have you?’
‘No, I came back down the lane. Shouldn’t you be doing this with another police officer, rather than me?’
He turned to look at her. ‘Seems as if we’re getting into bad habits, doesn’t it? Remember last time?’
She grinned at him. ‘I remember,’ she said. ‘But Jocelyn’s going to wonder where I am if we do the whole walk. Won’t it take ages?’
‘Not according to my map. It’s probably less than half a mile from here to the barn you described. We’ll be back in forty minutes at most. I don’t think she’ll panic, will she?’
Thea shook her head.
They found a path through the woods, which was largely composed of well-grown trees but with plenty of smaller saplings and underbrush. ‘Looks well used,’ Hollis remarked, his head turning constantly from side to side as he gave everything a forensic quality of attention.
Thea pushed at dense undergrowth. ‘There doesn’t seem to be a way through. The path disappears. Does this upset your intentions for our walk?’
‘A bit. We’ll have to go back the way we came, and then over to the corner of the woods. I think there’s a stile there.’
He forged ahead of her, clearly in some haste. She began to wonder about the real motives for this expedition, and why her presence had been required.
‘Are you going to tell me about the…victim? How you know it wasn’t suicide, for one thing.’
‘You really want details?’
‘I really do. I’ve been thinking about all those prisoners who manage to kill themselves with a towel and a doorknob, or the taps on a basin. I’ve never been able to imagine how they do it.’
‘We try not to publicise precise descriptions, for obvious reasons. But I can explain a bit about the pathology of it.’
‘Go on, then,’ she invited.
‘When a person puts pressure on the carotid artery at just the right point, the result is very often an almost instantaneous cardiac arrest. The blood stops flowing, so the face doesn’t become suffused.’
‘Hang on. You mean it’s very quick and more or less painless?’
‘That’s right. And terribly easy. Much easier than most people expect. Fortunately, it very rarely happens by accident.’
‘But – surely that doesn’t prove anything in this instance? There must be more to it.’
‘The actual hanging could have happened as I’ve just described,’ he said carefully. ‘He died from cardiac arrest, not strangulation or a broken neck. That’s true of the majority of suicides by a ligature around the neck. But the killer made a series of mistakes. The most serious one was the positioning of the rope for the hanging. It didn’t coincide very well with the marks made by the ligature that killed him. It wasn’t even the same piece of rope. And even more of a giveaway – he’d been dead for some hours before the second rope went around his neck. The police doctor had his suspicions right away and the post-mortem confirmed them.’
‘So he didn’t die in the stable.’ The relief this brought was almost disabling. ‘Somebody brought his body to Juniper Court while I was out, and strung it up from that beam. But why?’
‘Good question,’ he said. ‘To which the answer possibly lies in that barn.’
‘Owned by Valerie Innes and her family,’ Thea added. ‘Why do I suddenly hope you can pin it all on her? I don’t normally take against a person like I did with her.’
‘I don’t think you’re alone,’ Hollis revealed. ‘Judging from what we’re beginning to glean from the interviews.’
‘Interviews? Already?’ She remembered belatedly that Valerie Innes had threatened to bring her boys over to Juniper Court the previous evening, but had never materialised. Had that been because they were occupied with helping police enquiries? If so, she could have hugged DS Hollis for that reason alone.
‘No time to waste,’ he said absently, his attention clearly on the path, the fields and the road beyond.
‘There’s a gate, look.’ She pointed to the further corner of the field, which they had been approaching steadily. ‘We can get out on to the path that way.’
He looked at her, his eyes twinkling. ‘I thought I was leading this walk,’ he said.
‘Carry on, captain.’ She waved him forward. ‘I’ll maintain a respectful position in the rear.’
‘We’d better speed up a bit – and I’d better concentrate. I need to confirm the way these paths connect up.’ They walked more briskly for half a mile or so, saying little.
Thea noticed that he seemed quite comfortable with her joke about following in the rear – indeed when she dropped back, he made no demur. Then she realised they were alongside the barn, which looked somehow different from her glimpse of it on Sunday. ‘That’s it – I think,’ she said. ‘And this is why we didn’t bring Hepzie, right? In case she roused somebody, or messed up some clues.’
‘Something like that,’ he agreed, his gaze scanning the building. ‘Ah,’ he added, in a Sherlock Holmes sort of way. ‘Just as I hoped.’
Thea followed his gaze, and discovered a grey car parked unobtrusively in the lane beside the barn.
‘Is that one of yours?’ she asked.
‘Let’s go and see,’ he invited, increasing his pace.
Thea enjoyed the brief scene that followed. Two figures in white jumpsuits emerged at Hollis’s call, waving him into the doorway of the barn, to show him something. Nosily, Thea peered around him.
Part of the barn floor was covered with paper sacks, flattened and laid out like carpet, along the end wall of the building. There were sleeping bags and blankets folded and piled in a corner, and several cardboard boxes stacked beside them. Everything was tidy. There was nothing overtly agricultural about the place – no old implements or dried manure. No mouldy straw bales or lengths of baler twine. Instead, Thea spotted a camping stove, a shelf stacked with mugs, plates and a saucepan. There were tins of beans and a well-wrapped loaf of sliced bread. ‘Good God,’ she gasped. ‘Is that a computer?’ It was a chunky laptop, perched on a makeshift table made from an old door.
‘We’d better take that,’ Hollis said to one of his officers. ‘Finished collecting your samples, have you?’
‘Somebody’s been living here,’ said Thea wonderingly. ‘Was it the dead boy, do you think?’
‘Not sure yet. We still don’t have a name for him. Any signs of violence or struggle?’ he asked the forensic people. They both shook their heads, although one seemed unsure.
The man pointed at the opposite end of the barn from the sleeping quarters. ‘A fresh scrape along the whitewash, sir,’ he said. ‘Probably not important. The floor’s scuffed in several places, but that could be explained in all kinds of ways.’
‘You’ve copied the prints? What sort of footwear?’
‘Trainers, wellies, bare feet,’ the man enumerated. ‘And one pair of size 9 walking boots, which seem to have stopped in the doorway and not gone any further.’
‘See if you can find any more prints,’ Hollis ordered the men. ‘Match them with the dead lad’s trainers, and we’ll be getting somewhere.’
Thea realised the men must have already been at work for hours. ‘Is this where he was killed, do you think?’ she asked, her mind working slowly.
‘Hard to say,’ Hollis replied. ‘Come on, we’d better go. If you could just show me exactly where you saw your man, first.’
It took her a while to orientate herself. ‘I wasn’t this close, you see,’ she apologised. ‘I must have been climbing over that stile—’ she pointed. ‘So he’d have been disappearing around this corner here.’ She scratched her chin. ‘I suppose.’ The barn was positioned at the edge of a field, forty or fifty yards from the road. But a clear track had been carved from the gate to its wide wooden door. The grass had been obliterated by tyre marks in two parallel lines. ‘Looks as if plenty of people come here without trying to hide the fact,’ she noted.
‘Planning officers, builders, tractors, and squatters for a start,’ Hollis agreed.
‘Planning officers?’
‘There’s an application in for its conversion to a luxury four-bedroom executive home,’ he quoted wryly.
‘Oh,’ said Thea. ‘And they’ll get it, won’t they. Without any trouble.’
‘That would have been true, up to yesterday. Now – well, there might be a bit of a delay to the proceedings.’
‘Seems a shame,’ she sighed. ‘As a barn, it’s rather romantic.’
‘And as a house it’s just another status symbol,’ he supplied. They smiled in agreement, before Hollis spoke again to his men, suggesting they make some attempt to identify tyre marks around the front of the barn.
