A Cotswold Ordeal

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘But—’ Desmond was evidently thinking fast. ‘She’s seen me,’ he stuttered. ‘She knows I’m here.’

  ‘Bad news,’ Robert sympathised.

  ‘What did you hear just now?’ Desmond demanded of Thea. Even as he spoke she could see him working out that it was an ill-advised question. She tried to remember precisely what she had heard, and what it had implied.

  ‘You killed Nick Franklyn,’ she said, before grasping just how very stupid her own words were. ‘Everybody thinks you’ve been in Ireland all week. You’ve scarcely been mentioned or thought of.’ She lowered her head, hugging the spaniel to her. ‘Oh dear.’

  ‘Now what?’ muttered Robert. As a henchman, Thea was beginning to judge him sorely inadequate.

  ‘Get in,’ Desmond ordered. ‘Back seat.’ He ran round to the driver’s side and threw himself into the car. Before Thea could make a move, he had started the engine and was reversing down the track. Surely, she thought, Hollis would hear them and give chase? But she could see no other headlights, or even torchbeams, in the gathering darkness. Hollis was busy with his cat and mouse game, with no attention to spare for the woman and dog waiting obediently in his motor.

  She had never taken the time to wonder what it would be like to be held captive, under any circumstances. In a car with two men, it was turning out to be entirely terrifying. A car supplied complete freedom to go anywhere. They could drive to the north of Scotland or the centre of London. Even if word went out to the police across the country, the procedure for identifying and intercepting them was bound to be cumbersome. But that was the rational part, which was crowded into a small corner by the more primitive dread of being separated from her familiar life. Even though her precious dog was with her, she still felt like a small child snatched from the pram in the garden by wicked fairies.

  ‘We’ll have to dump the car,’ Robert urged from the back. ‘They’ll find it in no time.’

  Desmond made an inarticulate sound of rage and indecision. He smacked the steering wheel, before swinging it violently, manoeuvring the car into the country lane that led back towards Frampton Mansell.

  ‘Des,’ Robert repeated. ‘Leave it, and we’ll walk.’

  ‘She’s got a dog,’ Desmond snarled, as if only just realising this fact. ‘A bloody dog.’

  Thea hugged Hepzibah tighter and said nothing. She was searching her memory for useful information from films or books that might help her to cope. All she could come up with was how unreal such depictions were. The victim would whine and plead for a few minutes, before gathering her wits and asking for details as to how and why the murder had been performed. This sort of behaviour was well beyond Thea’s capabilities. Her insides were cramping, hot and tight, making her fear for the security of her bowels. People on films never soiled themselves – or if they did it was soldiers under ferocious bombardment, and never a female person. They were far too dignified for such appalling loss of control.

  She glanced at Desmond’s face, trying to reconcile it with the tall smiling husband and father she had seen a week before. Now it was taut and damp with sweat. His hands were claws, his voice thick with panic. This, unlike the half-hearted Dominic of Thursday morning, was the real thing. This man could kill. The difference was that between a tiger and a hamster, a Cape buffalo and a newborn fawn. Her bowels surged more powerfully, and she struggled to contain them.

  The women in the movies would start by accusing. ‘How could you kill that innocent young boy?’ Then they’d bargain. ‘I promise I won’t say a word, if you’ll just let me go.’ Then they might threaten. ‘You can’t possibly hope to get away with it, you know.’ None of these tempted Thea. They all seemed designed to further enrage her captor. But one strategy did seem viable, and she twisted slightly in her seat.

  ‘Robert?’ she croaked. ‘Please – Robert.’ Full sentences were beyond her.

  ‘He thought you were Flora,’ Robert explained superfluously. ‘That’s why he showed himself.’ He seemed to be wondering at the way events had turned. ‘The sort of thing you couldn’t possibly predict,’ he went on. Thea began to doubt Robert Craven’s sanity, despairing of him as a potential saviour.

  ‘She’s like Flo, though, isn’t she,’ Desmond said, joining in the wonderment. ‘You couldn’t blame me.’

  ‘Nobody’s blaming you, Des. Just dump this bloody car, will you.’

  The headlights had finally been turned on, as they put a half-mile or so behind them. Thea made no attempt to work out where they were going.

  ‘Leave it at Sapperton,’ Robert said. ‘We can walk back from there.’

  Desmond made another wordless gargle, which could have been agreement. Thea’s body began to misbehave in another direction. ‘I’m going to be sick,’ she said. And before anybody could react, she was. Even as it was happening, she managed to acknowledge that it was marginally preferable to losing control of the other end.

  Vomit seemed to fill the car. It went on Hepzie, the seat, the floor, and Desmond’s trousers, as she leaned helplessly towards him. Somewhere behind her Robert was half laughing, half registering disgust. When it was over, Desmond was still driving, but much more slowly.

  ‘Urgghh,’ said Thea.

  ‘Now we’ll have to dump the car,’ said Robert.

  The next hour was full of the stuff of nightmare. A strange dark route led downhill through fields and then into woodland. The men took an arm each and marched her along, ignoring stumbles. They complained about the smell of vomit at first, but soon all three of them grew used to it. But the worst thing, by far, was Hepzie. She had been left behind in the car, and when Robert had pointed out that she would bark and bring notice to the vehicle, Desmond had wrapped a white handkerchief tightly around her muzzle. The dog’s shocked response to this piece of violence had broken Thea’s heart. ‘She’ll suffocate,’ she had wailed. ‘She’ll die of thirst.’

  ‘I’ll kill her now then, shall I?’ Desmond had flexed his strong tense hands. ‘That might be a better idea anyway.’

  Thea had gone silent then, and ice cold. ‘No, no,’ Robert had protested lightly. ‘No need for that. Don’t get carried away, like you did with the damned cat.’

  For which mercy, Thea was already eternally grateful to Robert Craven, whatever he might do to her in the coming night. Learning that it had been Desmond who had run over the Siamese was shocking in itself, but not on her immediate list of things she had to think about.

  The nightmare became even more unreal when they reached their destination. A waxing moon combined with the last moments of daylight was giving enough illumination for Thea to recognise where they were, just before she was pushed down into squelchy sludge that reminded her all too vividly of the accident in the lock earlier that day. ‘It’s the tunnel!’ she said, surprise jolting her into lucid language. ‘The canal tunnel.’

  ‘Right,’ confirmed Robert. ‘And I can promise you nobody’s going to find you in here.’

  A new thought hit Thea. Hepzie would find her. When she was eventually released from her prison, she would detect her mistress’s scent and lead the police directly to her. But the hope this generated was tainted by dread that the spaniel would be intercepted and strangled by Desmond, before anybody could stop him. And in any case, it would be hours and hours before that could happen. The car had been tucked into a gateway, where it could remain unseen for days. The dog could die before anybody found her. Virtually all the fleeting hope drained away, and Thea slumped between her captors, not caring if she fell in the stagnant mud.

  The clinging remnants of vomit on her clothes made Thea abhorrent to herself. Her body cringed inside the besmirched garments, struggling to get away, to shrivel into a smaller protective shell. She was stiff with the effort, hardly knowing herself in these extremes of fear and dread.

  Inside the tunnel, to a distance of some twenty or thirty yards, a platform had been erected, stretching across the whole width. It was raised only a foot above the floor, giving enough head
room to stand up, although Desmond had to crouch slightly. It smelled of rotting vegetation and mouldering stone and was almost completely dark. ‘They’ll never find us here,’ said Robert again. There was a boyish glee in his voice, a pride at having discovered the perfect hideaway.

  ‘Quiet,’ said Desmond.

  Thea watched the pewter flickers of light on the watery mud at the mouth of the tunnel, miserably aware that their footprints had already disappeared. It was, as Robert had said, a very good hiding place.

  Slowly she grasped that the next phase had not been planned. The men had no idea what to do with her. She was a spanner in the works, and nothing more than a panicky instinct to hide had brought them here. Although, she suspected, this must be where Desmond had spent the greater part of the past week. Had he been here when she and Jocelyn had come to look at the tunnel? The thought exhausted her with its implications and ironies.

  She tried to conjure Hollis, the concerned professional, who would institute an efficient search unclouded by emotion. He would find his car – of course he would. He would have patrols out searching at this very moment. It wasn’t late – not much after ten. Things could not possibly be as desperate as they seemed.

  Robert spoke, his voice echoing in the closed space. ‘I’ll have to get back. Frannie’s going to worry. I told her I was only going for a drink. If she thought I’d been with you—’

  ‘You’re not going anywhere,’ Desmond grated.

  ‘Come on, Des.’ The forced lightness did not quite conceal the nervousness beneath. ‘Frannie isn’t going to take much more of this. She hasn’t liked it from the start. If she knew what had really—’

  ‘Shut up,’ Desmond snarled. ‘Frannie’s not my problem.’

  Thea edged up against the dank brickwork, curling herself into a small huddle of misery. When this was over, she thought, her account of how she’d behaved would be deeply unimpressive. She imagined Jocelyn’s disappointment in her. ‘Didn’t you give them a good telling off, like you did with that Dominic?’ she’d say. The idea made her shudder, and once begun, she found she couldn’t stop. Her whole body began trembling violently.

  Desmond detected the vibrations. ‘You’re not going to spew again, are you?’ he asked her.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ she stammered. ‘I’m just cold.’

  ‘Can’t you phone her?’ Desmond returned to Robert and his troublesome wife.

  ‘And say what? How do I explain a quick pint turning into being out all night?’

  Desmond gave up arguing. ‘Well I want you here. No more to be said.’

  ‘Why, though? What good’s it going to do? We can’t stay here forever.’

  ‘Let me think.’

  Thea kept her eyes on the mouth of the tunnel, willing someone to come, ready to scream at the slightest sign of anyone. Desmond’s uncertainty had given her a fleeting sense of possibility, if only she could get her brain to work. But not being able to see the men’s faces was a severe handicap. They sat on the platform, shifting their weight from time to time, but moving little. She had no idea what provisions there might be, although she’d felt a piece of fabric as they’d lifted her into place, which suggested some sort of mattress or bedding. A dark shape at the further end was just visible, which could possibly be a box containing food or drink. Or guns, knives, ropes…

  ‘Listen,’ Desmond ordered. ‘They’ll have arrested the Innes lads by this time, and have them charged with killing Nick. Once that happens, they’re not going to worry about any more investigations. They still think I’m in Ireland anyway. I can get away tonight, and disappear.’ He spoke tightly, forcing the words out through rage and the panicked frustration of the fugitive.

  ‘Disappear,’ Robert echoed. ‘Big change of plan is that, Des.’

  ‘Thanks to this bitch,’ Desmond snarled, thumping Thea in the ribs. ‘I ought to throttle her and leave her here. They’d never find a body behind the landslide further up the tunnel.’

  ‘They might,’ Robert warned. ‘For God’s sake, don’t make things any worse.’

  ‘I thought it was Flora,’ Desmond grieved at his own fatal mistake. ‘She looked like Flora.’

  ‘Right. She did. I thought it was her as well. Especially—’

  ‘Especially what?’

  ‘Well, being near the barn. I mean, that’s where Flora would go, isn’t it.’

  ‘That bastard!’ Desmond’s voice went high with hatred. Thea heard the passion of the killer and her shivering increased. ‘I’d do it again, Rob. Knowing what he was up to with Flo – he deserved what he got.’

  ‘Yeah,’ Robert endorsed. ‘’Course he did. Her being so young, what else is a dad meant to do?’

  Thea barely registered that she’d just heard the explanation for Nick’s killing. That hadn’t mattered to her for quite some time now.

  ‘Okay, here’s the plan.’ Desmond inhaled shakily. ‘We stay here till midnight or a bit after. Tie this cow up and leave her here. You can go home and explain to Frannie – say you got playing cards in the upstairs room or something. I’ll have to—’ Thea could hear the sudden understanding in his silence. She knew what he had done. With her alive he would never be safe. Given that he trusted Robert never to reveal the secret, he could have reappeared as if returning from the Ireland holiday, and simply carried on his normal life. Working on the assumption that the police would persist in prosecuting Dominic and Jeremy, even if they were eventually acquitted, the lapse of time would remove both evidence and urgency from the case. It was shaky, but probably worth the risk.

  ‘Jesus!’ Desmond exploded. ‘I’ll have to kill her. You see that, don’t you?’ Thea wasn’t sure whether he was addressing her or Robert, and couldn’t see that it mattered. She’d worked it out ahead of him, anyway.

  ‘Wait,’ Robert urged. ‘She might not talk. Explain it to her. She’ll see it your way. Nick Franklyn was a slimy little pervert, no good to anybody. You did the world a favour. She doesn’t have to go running to the police.’

  Thea remembered the glimpse she’d had of Nick Franklyn, a solitary limping figure she’d taken for a vagrant. She hadn’t felt drawn to him, hadn’t really cared even when she’d found his body. If it meant she might be spared, she didn’t think it was beyond the limits of her conscience to agree to Robert’s suggestion.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Yes what?’ Desmond snapped.

  ‘Yes, I can see it your way.’ Talking hurt her throat, roughened by the vomiting and constricted by fear. She realised she was very thirsty.

  ‘You’d say anything now, though, wouldn’t you?’ he sneered. ‘What about for the rest of our lives? I don’t think so.’

  ‘I would – for Julia and the others. Such a nice family. And Flora. Lovely girl.’ She was gasping for breath, not knowing if she was making any sense.

  Suddenly he was shining a torch in her face, hurting her eyes with it. ‘You called the cops soon enough when you found her, didn’t you? What d’you do that for?’

  ‘No choice,’ breathed Thea. ‘Ask her.’

  She was still thinking about Nick and the fulsome promises she was eager to make. Was it too great a betrayal to conceal a murderer? Could the dead possibly care about justice? She visualised his pale face above the damaged neck. Surely he was beyond it all now. Surely it couldn’t matter what she vowed – provided innocent people weren’t imprisoned because of it. Already she knew she couldn’t go as far as that. She frowned at the light, still bright through her closed eyelids. ‘Switch it off,’ she said.

  ‘Anyway,’ Robert said. ‘You’ve got the alibi. It’d be her word against yours.’

  ‘You won’t let me down, then, Rob?’

  ‘No way. It’s all sorted. Cast iron. Nobody can be in two places at once.’ He laughed grimly.

  To Thea’s relief, the torch was switched off. When she opened her eyes again, she couldn’t see the tunnel mouth any longer. Everything was deeply black. Death must be like this, she thought.

/>   Silence fell, while the situation impressed itself on the three of them. Some of the tension seemed to lift in the absence of sights or sounds. Thea waited, barely thinking. There was certainly nothing further she dared say, until Desmond revealed his decision.

  ‘We’ll stay here quietly for a bit,’ he ordained.

  ‘That’s fine,’ said Robert. ‘Doesn’t do to be too hasty.’ But Thea could hear worry, and remembered his wife expecting him at home.

  For the first time, Thea understood the meaning of the term ‘to marshal one’s thoughts’. They had to be tightly controlled in order for them to be bearable. The first one to be bound and gagged was any idea of Hepzie. To entertain an image of the frightened dog locked in the car, thirsty and hungry and miserable, could only lead to hysteria or despair. And Hollis was a no-go area, too. Intent on his mistaken quest for the wrong people, he had abandoned her to her fate and might never redeem himself. Which left the murder itself. A murder case now solved and explained, but perhaps never to be closed. Except – she jerked spastically at the fresh thought.

  ‘Why did you hang him in the stable?’ she croaked, before she could consider.

  Desmond reached out and gripped her upper arm. ‘What?’

  ‘The body. Why did you hang him up there hours after he was dead?’

  ‘I didn’t,’ said Desmond, his voice oddly blurred.

  ‘Somebody else did that.’

  ‘Who?’

  Desmond didn’t reply. After a long pause Robert spoke. ‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘We don’t bloody know.’

  * * *

  Time passed in a stupor, with Desmond now and then shining the torch on his watch and prevaricating as to his best course of action. Nothing had been resolved, but Thea permitted herself the conclusion that she was not shortly to be strangled. The dangerous energy of panic had dissipated, mainly thanks to Robert Craven and his very ordinariness. Although it hadn’t been stated, she somehow assumed he had not been present at the killing of Nick Franklyn. Robert was an accessory after the fact, but not an active accomplice. But Desmond was still to be feared. Whatever that elusive element that maintained civilised behaviour in daily transactions might be labelled, it was missing in this man at this point in time. He had laid violent hands on another human being, and in doing so had crossed a line that set him apart. And he knew it. Something inside him was broken, and Thea suspected he was only just understanding the implications.