A Cotswold Christmas Mystery

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Nothing for you to worry about. You go back to the house now. I’ll see you in a while.’

  When mother and daughter were safely out of earshot, Bronya sat down at the kitchen table, and faced father and son squarely. ‘Mrs Frowse,’ she began without preliminaries. ‘Where is she? There hasn’t been a sign of her for days now, has there?’ The car has been gone since Thursday, to my certain knowledge. In fact, she and my stepfather both went missing at very much the same time. I want you to understand that I’m not making any accusations – merely stating the undeniable facts. And wondering what you yourselves make of it.’

  Ant felt the ground caving in beneath his feet. ‘Whose side are you on?’ he demanded. ‘One minute you’re sticking up for us against your own family, and now you’re saying my mother must have murdered Blackwood. What does it all mean?’

  She gave a rueful smile. ‘I told you before. I like to keep everything clear and honest. Not always possible, I admit. We all have our shameful secrets, after all. But as far as possible, I think we should face the truth. That business with the necklace – I was doing nothing more than saving time. If Annika had gone to the police with that ludicrous accusation, they would quickly have seen it for what it was. It would have angered them and thrown suspicion onto us as a family. Do you see? It would have tainted the water, and cast doubt on our probity. I couldn’t let that happen. As it is, my mother will ensure that the necklace is removed entirely from the picture. Except,’ she held up a finger, ‘except that it was the cause of a strong disagreement between your mother and Rufus. To that extent, it could be useful.’

  ‘You’re saying you have every intention of stitching up my wife for the killing of your stepfather,’ said Digby. ‘Or have I got that altogether wrong?’

  ‘I’m stating obvious facts, that’s all.’

  ‘And what about certain facts that I have knowledge of?’

  ‘Ah – now we get to it.’ She leant forward. ‘Tell me – what are these facts?’

  ‘I’m saying no more. It’s obvious that you inherited your sister’s share of the brains, and a bit more. Too clever for me, I shouldn’t wonder. Let’s wait and see, shall we? For all we know, the old man just expired quietly from his heart trouble. Maybe the famous pacemaker wasn’t as wonderful as he thought. Maybe they won’t find any signs of foul play, after all.’

  ‘A consummation devoutly to be wished for,’ said Bronya, to the perplexity of both men.

  ‘Just go home, dear,’ said Digby wearily. ‘We’ve played enough games for one day, and it’s barely even coffee time.’

  She left them then, and five minutes later, Ant texted Thea Slocombe.

  Trouble with Carla and Co. Necklace found. Everything utterly confused. Can I call you?

  Chapter Sixteen

  There was a strong sense of hanging about waiting for things to happen, back in Broad Campden. The weather was chilly but fairly bright, and Jessica kept saying they were wasting the fresh air.

  ‘We could play my new train game,’ said Timmy hopefully. ‘We should have done it yesterday, but I fell asleep.’

  ‘We can’t embark on it now,’ said Thea. ‘Games are for afternoons. It’s a law.’

  ‘It’s not,’ said Timmy, uncertainly. ‘Is it?’

  Jessica disappeared for twenty minutes, saying she had to catch up with some of her friends and thank them for gifts she had brought with her. Thea busied herself with housework. ‘I’ve got to tidy away all this wrapping paper and other rubbish,’ she insisted. ‘And I suppose you’ll be waiting for something for lunch.’

  ‘I’ll do that,’ said Drew, without conviction.

  ‘No, you won’t. But you can go and wash up the breakfast things, and some more pans. We didn’t finish them all yesterday.’

  Everyone attended to their varied activities for ten minutes, and then Thea evidently had an idea.

  ‘I wonder if we ought to ask Mr Shipley over, as Stephanie suggested. Now we know for sure he’s here, it seems a bit mean not to,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes!’ Stephanie endorsed the idea enthusiastically.

  ‘Really?’ Drew asked Thea. ‘That’s not what you said yesterday.’

  ‘I know. But he’s been nice to Steph, and he is our neighbour, after all.’

  ‘True. I’ve never really known what we’re supposed to do about neighbours. My father always said they were God’s way of making us behave ourselves. He didn’t mean it nicely. He thought the ideal was not to have neighbours at all.’ Then he said, ‘Are you sure you’ll even be here at lunchtime? I thought we were all on standby for a summons from your friendly detective lady.’

  ‘You and Timmy can entertain him by yourselves, then,’ she flipped back at him. Then she softened. ‘I imagine we’ll be here for some lunch, whatever happens.’

  ‘Can I have that in writing?’

  ‘Oh, Drew, stop it,’ Thea sighed. ‘There’s no reason to get agitated about it. It was just an idle thought. He can come for tea, or evening drinks – or leave it a few days. I just thought perhaps he might be feeling unloved. I expect he usually went to his sister, and now she’s died, there isn’t anybody. Not as far as we know, anyway.’

  ‘Or he might be revelling in the peace and quiet,’ said Jessica. ‘If he was that miserable, he could have asked us to go over there.’

  ‘All five of us?’ said Drew. ‘I don’t think so. He’ll have seen we’ve got a strange car outside.’

  ‘You’re overthinking it,’ said Thea to her daughter. ‘And why should you care anyway?’

  Before Jessica could reply, Drew interceded. ‘No need to get tetchy, anybody. We’ve agreed that we can’t make any plans until we’ve heard from Ms Gladwin. We’ve all got things we can be getting on with, and if we choose to be neighbourly, we can ask Mr Shipley over when we have a better idea of what we’re doing. Is that okay with everyone?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ said Thea, throwing him one of those smiles that made Stephanie’s heart swell with relief.

  ‘Time for some more drink, if you ask me,’ said Drew. ‘It is still technically Christmas, after all. How about some sherry?’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Thea with a laugh. ‘Wonderfully decadent. And don’t you say anything about driving, either,’ she warned her daughter, lightly. ‘Whatever happens next, we can do it on foot.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say a word,’ said Jessica.

  Then Ant’s text came through, and the air thickened again. ‘They found the necklace,’ Thea reported. ‘He wants to talk to me.’

  ‘Nobody’s stopping you,’ said Drew.

  ‘No rush,’ said Thea, sipping her sherry. ‘Let’s just wait for Gladwin. I’ve had enough of being caught between those two.’

  It seemed to Stephanie that she was not the only one who made very little sense of this remark.

  It was twenty past eleven when Ant’s phone jingled. Before he knew it, his mother’s voice was in his ear. ‘Happy Christmas, a bit late,’ she said. ‘Are you all right, both of you?’

  ‘Of course we’re not all right,’ he shouted back at her. ‘We thought you were dead.’

  ‘No, you didn’t. Don’t be silly. Anyway, I’m coming back this afternoon. You’ll have to tell your father.’

  ‘Tell him yourself. He’s right here.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said quickly. ‘I’ve only got a minute. Less than a minute. I don’t want to talk to him.’

  Digby was flapping at him from his chair, pushing Percy aside so he could get up. Ant didn’t know what to say. ‘Whose phone are you using?’ he asked his mother.

  ‘Winnie’s. I’m in her guest house in Oxford. I told you that on Friday.’

  ‘Your phone cut out. I thought you were saying Winchcombe. Who the hell is Winnie?’

  ‘My old friend from school. She’s really called Janet, but we always knew her as Winnie.’

  ‘I wish you’d stop sounding so normal. Everybody thinks you killed Blackwood.’ But the line had gone dead before he could be
sure she’d heard him. Digby gave a snort, half frustrated, half amused.

  Ant’s mind was whirling helplessly, like a toy car lying on its back, wheels still spinning. His parents’ marriage suddenly seemed to be at the heart of this whole mystery. Had Beverley gone off because Digby had said or done something she couldn’t tolerate? He had noticed that she was getting increasingly tetchy with him as he got older and slower. ‘I’m going to call her back,’ he said. ‘I’ve got the number now.’

  ‘She won’t answer,’ said his father, with a fatalistic sigh. ‘What did she say to you?’

  ‘She’s coming home this afternoon. And she’s staying with somebody called Winnie. Or Janet. I have no idea who that is.’

  ‘Yes, you do. She came to visit when you were about nine. Stayed nearly a week and drove us all mad. She’s a throwback to the seventies, all feminism and short hair and big shoes.’

  ‘I don’t remember that at all.’

  ‘Typical,’ said Digby. ‘Though I would never have guessed that’s where she’d gone, I have to admit. I thought she’d be in Winchcombe with her sister. That’s where I was going to start looking if she didn’t come back.’

  ‘Auntie Laura? Isn’t she about a hundred by now? Is she even still alive?’

  ‘She’d be ninety-one. She was twenty-two when Bev was born. Half-sister, of course. Not much good as a relative, but that’s the only place I could think of starting with “Win”. Not many wits left, last I heard, poor old Laura.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t Mum speak to you?’

  Digby shrugged. ‘She’d said it all to you already. Why did you have to say that about Blackwood? That wasn’t very bright, was it?’

  ‘Wasn’t it? Why not?’

  ‘If you can’t work it out for yourself, I can’t explain it to you.’

  Ant’s confusion deepened even further. It was beginning to look as if his father had some specific agenda, to which everyone around him was failing to conform. Including Ant himself. ‘Sounds as if nobody’s doing what you want them to,’ he said crossly.

  ‘That’s just about the size of it,’ said Digby.

  ‘I’m taking the dog out,’ Ant decided. ‘I need to have a think.’

  The morning was typical of December. The sun might be relatively high in the sky, but it was faint behind misty clouds. The temperature was close to freezing. The bare trees looked dead and slightly threatening where they marked the line of the Monarch’s Way, up over the hill towards Broad Campden. But their dormancy would be short-lived. Already, with the passing of the shortest day, their sap would be stirring, the buds rapidly swelling, even now, in midwinter. There would be snowdrops in another two or three weeks, and he had seen the little green daffodil shoots nosing through the grass in their scruffy garden. Beverley had planted two hundred bulbs, nearly twenty years ago now, when she had been happy to live in the cottage, tied as it was to Digby’s job. Since then it had come to feel less and less as if it was theirs – the landlord so clearly determined to dispose of them, and probably pull the whole building down the moment they were gone.

  Ant spent several minutes reproaching himself for wilful blindness to the state of his parents’ marriage. Suddenly everything came into focus, and the full extent of the unravelling became impossible to ignore any longer. The separate bedrooms, the absence of anything resembling conversation. Beverley’s refusal to discuss their meals, to plan a holiday, share in any outings – it all pointed to a loss of affection – ever perhaps an active dislike. For the hundredth time he reran his mother’s Saturday phone call and came to the startling conclusion that she could have said He’s dead to me and I can’t come home. There had been a crackle on the line, a noisy street competing for his attention. Could she have been talking about Digby all along?

  The only things his parents really had in common were grief for Aldebaran and animosity towards the Blackwoods. And, he supposed, his own welfare. He wondered whether he was actually doing them any good by hanging around and behaving like a teenager. He was in his thirties, for heaven’s sake! When anyone hinted that it was high time he set up home on his own, he experienced a panic that he struggled to conceal from himself. ‘Can’t afford it, mate,’ he would say lightly. But to himself he insisted that his parents could never function without him. They would be at the mercy of Rufus and Carla, trapped inside that dreadful fence, harassed and intimidated. ‘And the dog would miss me,’ he might add. The dog was mostly his, but Beverley loved it as much as he did, and Percy himself was very fond of Digby. It would be a cruel violence to either remove him, or leave home without him. He watched now as the lithe brown body cantered along the track, delighted to be having the first real freedom of the day. Percy was a most excellent dog, obedient and undemanding. His parentage was something vaguely gun dog – some retriever in there and a dash of setter, perhaps. He’d come from a rescue, a few months old, and nobody could say what his forbears were. ‘He was in a dustbin,’ the Frowses were told.

  But now something drastic was happening, right under his nose, and he was at a total loss to understand it. Everything had changed. His mother had abandoned him and his father on Christmas Day, to go to a distant friend who had not been mentioned for at least ten years. The landlord was dead, and his wife was in danger of losing her wits, thanks to the bizarre games her daughters were playing. Had one of those women killed Rufus, for fairly obvious reasons to do with financial gain? He tried to think back, to remember whether he had seen a strange car arriving, or heard strange voices at any time between Wednesday and Friday. The big house was within earshot of their cottage, but with no direct line of sight. Cars came and went along their fork of the driveway, and the Frowses did their best to ignore them. Beverley had, a year or two ago, found herself obsessively monitoring all the traffic, until she realised how unhealthy that was. ‘Why should I care about his life?’ she asked herself aloud. ‘He doesn’t care about mine.’

  ‘Quite right,’ said Digby.

  They could not ignore the airborne visitors, however. The noise of a helicopter landing a hundred yards away was enough to drown all conversation and set the dog barking wildly. The very fact of a helipad made the whole family furious. It was ostentation of the most sickening kind. It was a signal from the Blackwoods that they were not just rich, they were hugely rich. They were the aristocracy of the Cotswolds, with money to burn, and nothing could stop them.

  ‘We owe it to the workers of the world to bring them down to earth,’ said Digby once. And he made even more of an effort to strew messy objects around the garden, and let the grass grow shaggy. ‘We’ll be the thorn in their sides, the clouts in their coffee, the mote in their eye, if it kills us,’ he added.

  ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ Ant had laughed. For himself, he could see that the Blackwoods were an outrage, but he never took it quite as personally as his parents did. But now Blackwood was dead in very mysterious circumstances, and there were police people swarming about. Everything was in flux, and Ant could not work out where solid ground might lie. The phone call from his mother had not answered any of the important questions. His father’s reactions had been peculiar from the start. The behaviour of Carla and her daughters was beyond bizarre as well. ‘Well, Perce, old son, we’re surely going to remember this Christmas, whatever happens next. Don’t you think?’ He muttered the words aloud, confident that nobody would hear him on this exposed upland in the heart of England. An England that accommodated more than its share of super-rich characters and émigrés from just about everywhere. People who operated under entirely different rules from those of the sentimentally English John Major or even Jeremy Corbyn. They were both essentially naive politicians who followed rules and assumptions from their grandparents’ day, and let menials from lower down the ladder handle the complexities of the incomprehensible present.

  The dog glanced over his shoulder, hearing his master’s voice. He knew there was something odd going on, with the mistress absent and the walk routine disrupted.
His dinner had been outrageously late the previous evening, and as far as he could tell no food at all had been consumed on this day so far. There were strange smells inside and outside the house, and the terrifying wire fence might have something to do with it. Percy had touched it once, when it was first erected, and had never forgotten the appalling result. His nose still throbbed at the memory.

  Ant was sorely tempted to keep walking until he came out on the Broad Campden road, opposite the pub. From there it was about three minutes to the Slocombe house, where the very clever Thea lived. Hadn’t she plainly said she wanted to help with the mystery of Beverley’s disappearance? Should he not tell her that there’d been a phone call and there was no obvious cause for concern? The sad fact was that there was nobody else in Ant’s life to whom he might confide any of these thoughts. No wise friends or elderly relatives, and, tragically, no sister. Aldebaran had been his best friend as he grew up, his protector and guide. She had explained the world to him, and accepted his limitations as of no importance. She knew he would never venture far from the Cotswolds, never train for a profession or create anything lasting. And she loved him anyway. Thea Slocombe was no substitute for Aldebaran but she was certainly the next best thing.

  In addition to that, Ant had been quietly but instantly smitten by Jessica Osborne. Not that anybody had noticed, nor would they be very interested if they had. She lived somewhere miles away and probably had a partner already. She would never give him a second glance. Women seldom did, for some reason. But this added element in an already disastrously complicated Christmas was almost a final straw. Everything was happening at once, and poor Ant Frowse, who only wanted to be a gardener and handyman, found it all too much.

  He did not go into Broad Campden, but turned round at the gate that had been lying off its hinges in the hedge for years now. He liked the sad, abandoned sight of it, a patch of untidiness in the all-too-neat Cotswolds. He would often give it a quick pat when he was walking that way. Leaving it behind him, he headed back under the watery sun and was home fifteen minutes later.