by Rebecca Tope
Tiredly she climbed the stairs, feeling the clammy comfortless weight of the clothes against her skin. It took a long time to peel them away, shivering in the bathroom, burdened by questions and obstructions. She wanted to be free to get to know Phil Hollis without the tangle of the murder investigation dragging him down. She wanted Jocelyn and Alex to go home together reconciled and safe. She wanted Pallo and Hepzie and all the poultry and furry pets to flourish under her care. She wanted Milo to be alive again, and the Cotswold Canal to regain its former glory. All these wants jabbed at her, with the hot water from the shower head.
Downstairs again, in layers of dry clothes, too warm for the outside temperature, she confronted Alex as he stood in the kitchen doorway. ‘God, what a day!’ she sighed. ‘How did you find us, anyway?’
‘You put it in an email to Joss. I meant to come sooner, but I couldn’t just abandon the kids.’
Foolishly, Thea looked around as if expecting to see them strewn about the house. ‘So who’s looking after them?’
‘Oddly enough, your mother.’
This was deeply unwelcome news. ‘What on earth did you tell her?’
‘That we were having a bit of a crisis, and I needed some time alone with Joss.’
‘Does she know she’s with me?’
He nodded. ‘Why not? It isn’t a secret, is it?’
Thea couldn’t begin to explain the complexities of any answer she might give to this. Jocelyn had always been their mother’s favoured child, giving rise to resentments and compensations that could never be fully untangled or explained. And Thea knew her mother would somehow blame her, would find cause for reproach and criticism. Just as she knew that if she voiced this to any of the siblings, or to Alex, they would laugh and accuse her of fantasising. They would say her mother only had her welfare at heart, and never for a moment thought her to blame for anything. And Thea would feel worse, and shy away from encountering her mother for another chunk of time, until the natural family force sealed the rift again and normality resumed.
‘Listen, Alex,’ she said, leading the way into the living room, only to discover the still wet and muddy spaniel curled forlornly and damagingly on the sofa. ‘Oh, hell,’ she moaned. ‘Look at the mess she’s made.’
‘Never mind the dog,’ he spat, from outside the room. ‘Just tell me what’s happening.’ He took a step down the hall towards the front door, but needed to say more to Thea before he could leave.
‘Quite a lot,’ she returned, pulling Hepzie off the cushions and brushing uselessly at the large damp stain. ‘You awful dog! Look what you’ve done!’
‘Thea,’ called Alex warningly.
‘Oh, for heaven’s sake.’ She went to the hallway to face him. ‘We went for a walk in the woods. It started raining – torrentially. A thunderstorm. Water everywhere. Joss slipped on the towpath and fell into a lock. She hurt her arm and her ankle and I couldn’t see how to get her out. I ran for help, and a whole lot of men came to the rescue, and called an ambulance. We all got very wet.’
‘Has she broken anything?’
‘I don’t know, but that chap who just brought me home said he didn’t think it was very serious. She’s been taken to Cirencester.’
‘How far’s that from here?’
‘Not far. Six or seven miles, I suppose.’
‘Well, I’m going to see her. Now.’
Thea paused, sensing a chink of release. ‘If you go, then maybe I don’t need to,’ she said, recognising a familiar pattern: two parents discussing which of them should rally to a needy child. ‘We needn’t both go,’ she said, echoing a line she and Carl had often used.
Alex gave this a moment of thought. ‘Right,’ he said uncertainly. ‘Or maybe we could phone them and ask how long she’s likely to be there?’
‘You can try. I doubt if they’ll tell you, if she’s still in casualty.’
He dithered, and Thea suspected he was suddenly nervous of meeting his wife face-to-face without Thea to moderate them. ‘I’ll have to bring her back here to collect her car,’ he worried.
‘She probably won’t be able to drive.’
‘So – how are we to manage?’
Thea’s teeth clenched involuntarily at the helplessness of men. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. Alex and Jocelyn were no longer her problem. She could wipe them off the crowded whiteboard that was her jumble of obligations and concerns. ‘I’m being paid to watch over this place. And believe me, that’s quite enough to be going on with. You probably didn’t know that there was a murder here on Monday.’
He barely reacted. Murder, after all, was not a word that tripped lightly into normal daily discourse. There were no pre-ordained rules as to how to deal with it. If anything, he seemed to think she was joking, or using the word in some new and metaphorical sense.
‘Did you hear me?’ she repeated.
‘You mean – somebody was killed?’ As she had just done, he looked vaguely around the room as if expecting to see a dead body.
‘Yes, I mean somebody was killed. Look at that!’ She pushed him into the living room where he couldn’t fail to see the daubed writing on the wall.
‘Get out of here,’ he read, with a bewildered frown. ‘That’s not written in blood, is it? Where are the police? Why are you still here? What about Jocelyn?’
‘I assure you the police are very much involved. Joss was keeping me company, otherwise I don’t suppose I’d have stayed.’
‘Thea,’ Alex said slowly. ‘Wasn’t there a murder in the last place you did this house-sitting nonsense? Isn’t that a terribly big coincidence?’
She inhaled deeply. ‘A bit,’ she admitted. ‘But we think there could be some sort of explanation for that.’
‘We?’
‘The Detective Superintendent and me.’
He snorted. ‘Sounds like a music hall song,’ he said. ‘Now, I’m sorry to leave you with all this trouble, but my place is by Jocelyn’s side. I’ve left it much too long as it is.’
‘Don’t be so pompous.’
Something in her tone alerted him. He paused, one hand on the doorknob. ‘She told you then?’
‘That’s right, Alex. She told me.’
Rather to Thea’s surprise, news of Jocelyn’s accident reached Hollis by the middle of the afternoon, leading to a phonecall to enquire about her progress.
‘She’s not too bad. They’ve done X-rays and the arm isn’t broken. Her husband showed up in the middle of it all and he’s going to take her home.’
‘You mean this evening?’
‘So it seems. Joss phoned me only ten minutes ago. He’ll bring her back here for her clothes and things, and then take her back to Bristol.’
‘So you’ll be on your own.’
‘At some point, I will, yes. I don’t know precisely when, though.’
‘Would you phone me, as soon as they’ve gone?’
‘If you like.’
Several middle-sized worries persisted: the dirty mark on the seat of the sofa, the requirements of the pony, the increasingly unsettling silence from Julia Phillips and her family and what to wear for Hollis. Plus whether or not to cook for him, and if so, what? A bigger worry was the sense of a murderer close to discovery, just beyond the front door. There had been unusual traffic movement past the gate, she’d noticed when outside seeing to the livestock, which might well be plain-clothes police officers gathering for the kill.
Except that if that was the case, Hollis would hardly be taking time off for some canoodling – as she hoped and believed was his intention.
The thunderclouds a dim and scarcely credible memory, it was turning into a fine warm evening. Catching Hepzibah skulking in the kitchen after her chastisement, Thea saw no option but to give the dog a thorough wash. At home, this would be done in the bath, but the resultant splashes could turn the whole room into something resembling a mud-wrestling aftermath, so it seemed more sensible to do it outdoors, if she could find some sort of tub for the purpose.
She found one eventually – a galvanised steel hipbath hanging on the wall in the barn containing the freezer and the Lamborghini.
It was a makeshift bath compared to their usual ritual. No dog shampoo, no carefully warmed water. ‘Serves you right,’ she told the spaniel. ‘You should have known better than to sit on that sofa in your condition.’
Five minutes later, a pathetic shivering little animal gazed reproachfully at her, pretending to be at severe risk of hypothermia. Thea gathered her into the towel she’d found upstairs, hoping it would not show any telltale signs of use after she’d washed and dried it again.
‘How sweet,’ came a voice from the gateway. ‘I seem to have missed all the fun.’
It was Valerie Innes, smiling in a genuinely friendly way. Thea was almost pleased to see her. ‘You would have got very wet,’ she said, noticing that the cuffs of her sweatshirt were unpleasantly damp from bathing the dog. ‘It’s a day for getting wet.’
‘I know – that rain! You weren’t out in it, were you?’
‘I’m afraid so. That’s why I’ve had to wash the dog. She got dreadfully muddy. And Jocelyn fell into one of the canal locks.’
Valerie’s face was a riot of feelings. Horror, disbelief, amusement and something like calculation in the narrowing of her eyes. ‘I don’t believe it,’ she said. ‘Nobody would be such a fool.’
‘She couldn’t help it. The path was awash with the sudden downpour and she just skidded in sideways. The foolish bit was when I didn’t realise I could have got her out from one end.’
‘Was she hurt then?’
‘A bit. Nothing too serious. What’s so incredible about falling into a lock?’ She remembered the reactions of the rescuers and Robert Craven’s partial explanation.
Valerie crossed her arms over her stomach, as if nursing a special story. ‘Around here, it’s a very sensitive matter,’ she said. ‘Plenty of people have good reason to detest the canal and its locks.’
‘But why? There hasn’t been water in the thing for fifty years or more.’
‘Fifty years isn’t very long for someone who’s lost a precious son. The ripples last much longer than that.’
‘Do they?’ Thea wondered whether Carl’s death would still be resonating in 2050. For Jessica, his daughter, she supposed it would. ‘Who lost a precious son, then?’
‘Quite a few people, as it happens. For instance, there was a very affluent mill-owner from Chalford, somewhere around the turn of the century, who had a son and three daughters. The son was the baby of the family. He was going to inherit the business. And then he fell into one of the locks at Cowcombe and drowned. The heart went out of the old man, the business failed, the daughters had smaller marriage settlements than they expected, so their lives were affected. The mother’s sister had a fine upstanding son of her own, which bred jealousy between the two women. And so it went on. There’ve been others, too, rather more recently than that. The main one was right here, in Siccaridge Wood.’
‘Samuel Davy Willis,’ muttered Thea.
‘What?’
‘There’s a grave in the churchyard of a boy. It says he died in the canal.’
‘Samuel Davy Willis was the older brother of Robert Craven’s mother. See what I mean? Living with a canal isn’t all rosy and romantic. It can claim lives, and there are plenty of people around here who do not want to see it restored.’ Valerie smacked her own upper arm in emphasis. ‘Now do you understand?’ she repeated, as if it was important.
‘I’m not sure,’ Thea said slowly. ‘What exactly are you trying to tell me?’
‘That feelings against the canal are very strong, even now.’
‘And your sons are prominent in the campaign against its restoration. You must hear a lot of talk about it in your house.’
Again, Valerie’s expression was of real emotion, the prime one akin to fear. ‘They won’t listen to me,’ she complained.
‘You mean you told Dominic not to break in here and try to intimidate us? Last I heard he was in police custody. That must be very upsetting for you.’
‘His father’s absolutely furious. But he’s out again now. They couldn’t keep him, of course.’
Thea remembered that this was not Dominic’s biological mother. ‘What about Jeremy? I saw him today and he seemed very bothered about something.’
‘Of course he is. He was fond of Nick Franklyn, for one thing.’
‘So who killed Nick?’ Thea burst out, with the single burning question that had to be answered. ‘If everybody liked him so much and agreed with his opinions, why did he get himself strangled?’
Valerie pushed her face closer to Thea’s. ‘You don’t have to worry your pretty head about it, do you? You can just carry on your cosy little affair with the handsome detective and let us worry about the important things.’
Thea rode the wave of fury, and hugged the damp spaniel closer to herself. The infuriating part was that the woman had a point. The murder really wasn’t any of her business. But the intrusiveness, the sense of being watched and judged sickened her. She cast politeness to the winds.
‘Mind your own business,’ she shouted. ‘All I want is for the truth to come out. It’s going to be dreadful for poor Julia, coming home to all this mess. What do you want from me, anyway? Why don’t you just leave me alone?’
Valerie behaved as if Thea had not even spoken. ‘I came, actually, to warn you,’ she said, with an air of adult forbearance in the presence of a hysterical child. ‘If you’re thinking of staying here alone tonight, my advice is, don’t.’
‘Why? What’s going to happen? Why do people keep talking about a crisis that’s going to happen here?’
‘You’d better ask your nice friendly policeman about that,’ said Valerie, before she strode away.
Centuries ago, Thea remembered, before she and Joss had embarked on their ill-fated walk, Hollis had said something to the effect that he expected the whole murder investigation to be resolved before the end of the day. That didn’t leave him much time. Or had the two accidents – to Franklyn’s knee and Jocelyn’s elbow – set the whole thing back? Or had he shelved it in favour of a rendezvous with Thea, alone at last, when they might drink wine, and tell stories about their lives…her insides turned warm and liquid at the thought.
Instead, the sound of an approaching engine caught her attention and she paused on the doorstep. Other traffic did pass the gate, of course, and she was no expert on the sounds of differing types of vehicle, but something made her think it was Alex bringing Jocelyn back to collect her things.
And she was right. ‘Here they are,’ she said to Hepzie, before they’d even turned in through the gate.
Jocelyn’s arm was in a sling, bound tightly to her body, remarkably disabling. ‘And it really isn’t broken?’ Thea asked for a second time. ‘Why do you need all these bandages, then?’
‘It’s chipped, I told you,’ said Jocelyn. ‘It needs to be kept in exactly the right position, so it can heal over properly. Elbows are very complicated,’ she added importantly. ‘If I started trying to use it, it could grow a spur, or something. It’d lead to trouble later on.’ Thea refrained from querying this typical vagueness.
‘How long is all this for? And what about the ankle?’
‘Ten or twelve days, they think. It’s not like being in plaster for six weeks. I have to go and have another X-ray before they take the bandages off. And the ankle’s only sprained. They’ve bound it up tight and it hardly hurts any more.’
‘Well, you won’t be able to drive,’ said Thea.
‘Or cook or wash up or change sheets or about a million things,’ said Jocelyn with some smugness. ‘It’s worse than having no arm at all, in a way. They told Alex I had to be treated like a porcelain doll.’
Thea glanced nervously at her brother-in-law, who was sensibly keeping his distance, much to Thea’s relief. Having to cope with the response of a violent husband to his wife being likened to a china doll was an irony too far, under the
circumstances.
‘Shall I make us something to eat?’ she offered, hoping they would decline. Surely they were eager to get home, see the kids, relieve the babysitting grandmother of her duties? But it seemed not. Jocelyn and Alex both responded enthusiastically to the suggestion.
Suppressing a sigh, Thea listed the options. ‘There’s sausages and bacon, and some frozen fish – though I’m not sure we ought to eat that. It looks a bit special.’
‘Sausages will be fine,’ said Jocelyn. ‘Somebody will have to cut them up for me.’ She giggled.
‘And eggs,’ Alex added. ‘Could you find us some eggs?’
Jocelyn snorted. ‘The place is overflowing with them, thanks to all those birds outside. More than we know what to do with.’
Chapter Fourteen – Friday
Jocelyn had become a different person in the presence of her husband. She was tense and self-effacing. When he spoke, she flinched. Thea scanned her memories of recent visits to them, wondering if she’d failed to notice this changed behaviour. After half an hour she was almost ready to punch her sister herself.
The question was, had she become like this because of the violence, or had the way she acted provoked the assaults? Surely it could only be the former. Which left the same bewilderment as to what exactly had motivated Alex in the first place.
She told them about Valerie Innes’s visitation, just for something to say. But Jocelyn had evidently withdrawn all interest from the murder investigation, and when Thea attempted to run a few theories past her, she waved them away as if they were annoying insects. Alex showed a polite attention, but it was clear that his own thoughts left little space for evildoing in a remote corner of the Cotswolds. Hepzie, mindful of her bath and the trauma in the woods, kept her distance, turning her back on human beings until they saw the error of their ways and apologised.
But Thea could not ignore the rising crescendo of excitement inside her. Hollis was going to spend the evening with her. She would have him to herself at last. Even if they spent the time discussing the killing of Nick Franklyn, they would be learning about each other, joking, smiling, and possibly even touching. Her emotions leapt from anticipation to anxiety, through impatience, self-mockery and a nameless sense of falling away from promised light back into the grey flat place she had inhabited a year ago, because anything else was too much to expect or hope for.
