by Rebecca Tope
‘What? How?’
‘Oh, that’s still a bit muddled, but she was sure he was going to be on his own, with nobody worrying about him all that week. She’d fixed the girlfriend somehow, which also took care of the mother. But she didn’t know Vicky would send her friend check up on him. Apparently, that was just one more thing that went wrong. Took us a while to figure it out, but Lucy believed Vicky would be otherwise engaged for the relevant days. She wasn’t too busy to get poor Ms Shapley to go round to check on Ollie, though.’
Thea went on trying to fit it all together. ‘She said Kevin was a menace to women – implied it, anyway. That he ruined lives. But I don’t really get it …’
‘She said that to us, as well. Kevin was an absent father, messed up badly and the kids were never altogether right emotionally. We’d worked that out already. Then he seemed to get his act together when they were teenagers, and was all over them for a bit, trying to make up for the past. But it didn’t last. The sister got away, seems to be making a decent life for herself, but Ollie never really got straightened out. Things went wrong for him.’
‘But no drugs.’
‘Nope. He wasn’t at all self-destructive, just a bit hopeless and unlucky. Lost all ambition once he was too old for the competitive stuff, although the films he was making sound pretty good to me. He never quite stopped wishing he could get his parents back together, according to the girlfriend. Immature, probably.’
‘What about the Latimers and the women next door?’
‘What about them?’
‘Well – the affairs and all that. Bobby’s youngest is Ollie’s child, she told me. And Artie was sleeping with Faith. And Lucy was stirring it all up.’ Thea frowned. ‘Except, when I thought about it again last night, I wasn’t sure it made any sense. I mean – they were all cheerfully together on Wednesday, with no sign of any of that sort of thing.’
‘The operative words are “Lucy stirring it all up”, I should think. She was addicted to spreading rumours. Telling people that Hunter Lanning was a fascist, for example. He’s nothing of the sort. He kept trying to give Lucy another chance to be a proper part of the community, but she always threw it in his face.’
‘And then she had the nerve to get him to drive her to Oxford,’ said Thea, for whom this detail still rankled. ‘After I’d refused.’
‘He’d already offered, apparently. He’s a bit of a fossil, I know, but he’s really a nice man.’
‘He thinks Northleach is really a community, does he?’
‘You think he’s wrong?’
‘I didn’t see much sign of it. They all seem to be at each other’s throats, or else breaking up each other’s marriages. You know, Bobby Latimer herself said she’d had an affair with Ollie. And Artie admitted to having sex with Faith. That much is true.’
Caz grinned. ‘Okay – but isn’t that just normal small-town stuff? Take any village and half the kids will be the biological offspring of some other man than their mothers’ husbands. If you follow. It’s always been the same. Good for the gene pool, presumably.’
‘I thought Artie had killed Ollie,’ said Thea humbly.
‘Well he didn’t. And I think we can safely say that the Latimers will weather the storm and all will be fine.’
‘And we might never know about Faith and Livia,’ sighed Thea.
Later, she tried to give a final account of it all to Drew, but he cut her off. ‘Spare me,’ he said. ‘Just tell me you won’t be going to Northleach again for a while. And let me tell you what Fiona suggested today.’
‘Go on, then.’
‘She’s offered to work here, as well as Andrew. There she was, all along, right under our noses, ready and able. From now on, it’s Slocombe, Emerson & Emerson. And the first thing we’re going to do is get cracking on the new building in the field. It’s onwards and upwards for us.’
Thea knew better than to cry, But what about me? Nor did she mention that she had just received an email from a man in Oddington who was having great difficulty in finding someone to watch over his houseful of animals at the end of June.
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By Rebecca Tope
The Cotswold Mysteries
A Cotswold Killing • A Cotswold Ordeal
Death in the Cotswolds • A Cotswold Mystery
Blood in the Cotswolds • Slaughter in the Cotswolds
Fear in the Cotswolds • A Grave in the Cotswolds
Deception in the Cotswolds • Malice in the Cotswolds
Shadows in the Cotswolds • Trouble in the Cotswolds
Revenge in the Cotswolds • Guilt in the Cotswolds
Peril in the Cotswolds • Crisis in the Cotswolds
Secrets in the Cotswolds • A Cotswold Christmas Mystery
A Cotswold Casebook • Echoes in the Cotswolds
The Lake District Mysteries
The Windermere Witness • The Ambleside Alibi
The Coniston Case • The Troutbeck Testimony
The Hawkshead Hostage • The Bowness Bequest
The Staveley Suspect • The Grasmere Grudge
The Patterdale Plot • The Ullswater Undertaking
The west Country Mysteries
A Dirty Death • Dark Undertakings
Death of a Friend • Grave Concerns
A Death to Record • The Sting of Death
A Market for Murder
About the Author
Rebecca Tope is the author of three bestselling crime series, set in the stunning Cotswolds, Lake District and West Country. She lives on a smallholding in rural Herefordshire, where she enjoys the silence and plants a lot of trees, but also manages to travel the world and enjoy civilisation from time to time. Most of her varied experiences and activities find their way into her books, sooner or later.
rebeccatope.com
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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This ebook edition published in Great Britain by Allison & Busby in 2021.
Copyright © 2021 by Rebecca Tope
The moral right of the author is hereby asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–2727–8