by Rebecca Tope
But what she was really running away from was that look in his eyes. The look that said the unthinkable is actually perfectly thinkable, that guilt and suspicion are everywhere, with very good reason. Freddy and Basil were guilty, all along. Mike Lister was an opportunist, seizing his chance to get back at Cedric Angell for some old injury. And police reconstructions might turn up much less acceptable results than she had bargained for.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
The night walk turned out to be an unexpected enchantment. To his credit, Galton switched into a whole new mode, pointing out things that ought to have been invisible. They passed by a large group of sheep lying scattered across a field, breathing noisily, smelling of fermenting grass and damp. A few got up, and Thea regretted the disturbance to their slumbers. ‘They never really sleep,’ said Galton. ‘They’re still too scared of wolves, after all these centuries.’
‘With good reason,’ said Thea unhappily, thinking of the mangled tups.
‘Nature’s natural victims,’ he agreed. ‘Magpies, buzzards, foxes, badgers – they’ll all have a go at a sick sheep, long before it’s dead.’
And then, as if by magic, a pale shadow crossed silently just in front of them. It disappeared across the field, only to return, slightly further away. ‘What’s that?’ Thea whispered.
‘A barn owl. That’s the first I’ve seen for months. Isn’t it magnificent!’
‘I hardly saw it. It seemed very big.’
‘They’re a fair size. And the numbers are increasing, around here. I think they’re glorious.’
‘And do they attack sheep as well?’
He snorted his amusement. ‘Definitely not. They like the thrill of the hunt. A sheep wouldn’t be nearly enough of a challenge.’
‘That’s a relief,’ she said.
He left her at the front door of Hawkhill, and went striding off with minimal ceremony. She watched him for a moment, full of jumbled regretful thoughts. On the other side of the door, her dog was scrabbling, desperate to greet her after such a long confinement.
Ignatius was asleep, even without his nighttime cover. It was almost eleven, and Thea crawled up to bed, surprised at how tired she felt. Hepzie followed her closely, nudging the backs of her legs as if to assure herself the return of her mistress was real.
* * *
Jeremy had not given a precise time for the Cirencester debriefing. Nor had he offered a lift. What would happen if she just stayed where she was and tried to forget the whole business? They’d send Phil, she decided. Even if he told them how things were between Thea and him, they’d still assume he must be the one for the job. Or Chaz. She’d got on well with him, in a detached sort of way.
But they would all know her for a conscientious, law-abiding citizen. She’d taken part in the re-enactment, hadn’t she? She obviously wanted to find Webster’s killer as much as they did. Why wouldn’t she present herself as required, without any prompting?
It was Sunday – a day that felt less and less special with every passing month. Thea was too young to have experienced the full shutdown of the Sabbath – the taboos against certain activities, the slow pace and general habit of sleeping through much of the day. Her father had described the way his own father had always spent Sunday afternoons in bed, catching up on sleep from his busy farming life. There had been books and magazines that were proscribed on a Sunday, even though it was far from a religious household. You were supposed to wear nice clothes, and brush your hair properly, even if you weren’t going to see anybody. God, everybody still vaguely believed, was watching you a lot more attentively on a Sunday than on any other day of the week.
And how could Thea note the day without also calling to mind the Reverend Peter Clarke? He would be busy conducting services, and she found herself wondering what sort of a job he made of it. She had almost never been to a standard church service that was not a wedding or a funeral or a Carol Service. The mysteries of the Prayer Book and the Collect remained entirely closed to her. The fundamental point of it was ever harder to grasp. Listening to a man speak lines made meaningless by repetition, answering automatically and equally meaninglessly – it surely required a major effort of will to gain any succour from it?
It might, though, seem very different to others – Ariadne, for example. She was a practising pagan, in the sense that she led ceremonies and rituals designed to bring to mind the essential importance of the seasons, the realities of birth and decay, the interdependence of different forms of life. It probably wasn’t a very big step from all that to an Anglican service. She’d have some of the necessary conditioning, at least.
All this went through her mind as she fed the animals, then herself, deliberately not hurrying. It was well past ten when she finally got in the car and drove south to Cirencester. She knew exactly where the police station was, thanks to her association with Det Supt Hollis. She knew the man on the front desk by sight, and he knew her. He pointed her down the corridor to the room where DI Jeremy Higgins was waiting for her. And no, DS Hollis wasn’t in this morning.
It was all quite calm, at least on the surface. There was coffee and remarks about the weather and a few words about the joys of house-sitting in somewhere as lovely as Lower Slaughter. And then it began. ‘So – what did you make of the reconstruction, then?’ he asked, abruptly, as she was sipping her coffee.
‘I’m still not convinced of its usefulness,’ she said. ‘After all, nobody passed by except Henry Galton.’
‘That’s true,’ he nodded. ‘It would have been nice to have a few more people to quiz, I agree.’
Thea remembered all over again that her sister had been the sole and solitary witness to the events of that Saturday evening. The single voice speaking up as testimony to what had happened. She too would surely have appreciated a supporting informant to confirm her story. But it wasn’t crucial. ‘Well, it looked as if Emily gave a good account of it all,’ she asserted. ‘It all held together pretty well, I thought.’
‘Did you? Did you really?’
‘Of course. The gateway and the layby and the mud – it was all as she said.’
‘Oh yes, they were all where she said they were. And there were flakes of paint from her car on that gatepost, as well.’
‘So?’ She was resisting so intensely that her back began to ache. The worst thing was the half-hidden look of pity in Jeremy’s eyes.
She had never taken much notice of Jeremy. He was always polite, almost deferential, when she’d been with Phil. He had a big round head and a thick neck to support it. But his shoulders were disproportionately narrow, which made him look like a baby. Not especially tall, his hair a very English light brown, he gave no cause for undue attention.
‘Mrs Osborne – Thea – I’m going to ask you to do something for us.’
‘Something else, you mean,’ she flashed.
‘Yes, that’s right. Although I think this is something you’d want to be included in, anyway.’
‘Go on.’
‘Will you come with us this morning to Aylesbury?’
She spoke quickly, needing words to fill the sudden hollow inside her. ‘To Emily’s house, you mean? What for?’ But she knew. Somewhere far away in her bones, she knew.
‘We need to take her in for questioning,’ he said, not meeting her eye.
* * *
It wasn’t strictly orthodox, she supposed, to take the suspect’s sister along when you went to arrest her. It was a special dispensation because of who she was, and her involvement in the case from the start. From before the start, she reminded herself miserably.
But still the inner resistance was strong. She argued relentlessly throughout most of the drive, repeating herself over and over, getting no satisfactory answers from Jeremy. ‘But how can she possibly be involved? She’s far too respectable. She doesn’t know anyone who’d commit such a terrible crime.’ Because she had assumed that Emily was in the spotlight Phil’s initial suspicion that she knew the killer had somehow returned wi
th bells on. That somehow the reconstruction had demonstrated the probability of this, because how could the killer have run away so completely unless Emily had aided him? Why had she behaved in such a fearless way unless it had been somebody she could rely on not to attack her as well?
Jeremy had begged her to stop. ‘I can’t say anything that might influence you,’ he said. ‘I want you to think it through for yourself.’
‘But she’s my sister,’ she persisted. ‘I’m not going to do or say anything that’ll get her into trouble, am I? I don’t think I’m going to be of any use to you at all. You’re hoping I’ll lure her into a confession, aren’t you? Why would I? Where do you think my loyalties lie?’
He had looked at her then, in the bright August light that filled the car. ‘I know you well enough, Thea Osborne, to trust you to do what’s right.’
That had frightened her more than anything that had happened thus far. It finally silenced her, for the last ten miles of the journey.
Bruce answered the door, looking tousled and startled and generally out of control. There were bags under his eyes and stubble on his chin. An alternative Sunday stereotype, Thea thought wildly. The morning after the Saturday night before.
Jeremy had a female police constable with him, a stout woman who had not spoken a word during the drive from Cirencester. Thea had wanted to stay in the car, but the DI had politely and firmly asked her to come to the door with them.
‘Mr Peterson, we’d like to speak to your wife, please. Might we come in, do you think?’
Bruce then conformed to a different stereotype, glancing anxiously up and down the street to check that no neighbours had observed the visitation. Some hope, thought Thea, certain she could see at least three twitching net curtains already. The stout PC’s uniform was a real giveaway.
Emily was huddled into a corner of their expensive cream corduroy sofa, which Thea had cause to loathe because Hepzie had once committed the appalling sin of jumping up onto it, and been smacked for her offence. The familiar room took on a sinister atmosphere with two police officers in it. Both Jeremy and the PC seemed to give off intimidating vibrations that sent Emily even deeper into the cushions.
And their mother was also in the room, sitting very upright on the edge of an armchair, as if braced for any eventuality. ‘Thea,’ she said, in only the mildest surprise. ‘Thank goodness.’
Automatically, she went to her mother, reaching down to take her hand. ‘Still here, then?’ she said, feeling as if somehow they’d slipped back in time to the days following her father’s death. Those gentle days when they had all been so careful with each other, exchanging ruefully intimate glances, sharing the sense of being on a tiny island of bereavement that only they – the immediate relatives – could experience.
‘They want Emily, do they?’ said Mrs Johnstone.
‘That’s right. They need her to help them a bit more.’
‘I see. Well, she’d better go, then.’ She directed her gaze at her eldest daughter. ‘Emily, you must go with them. Get up, darling. Thea’s going with you.’ When Emily made no move, the tone sharpened. ‘Go on now. Think of your father – what he would have wanted.’
It was a cruelly powerful thrust and Emily flinched. ‘Thea?’ she said, having taken a strangely long time to recognise her sister. ‘Is Phil coming as well?’
‘No, it’s just us. How are you, Em? You look pretty grim, I must say.’
‘Bruce made me go to the doctor, and they put me on some pills. They’ve made me all woozy.’ And it was true that her voice was slurred, her eyes barely focused. Thea wanted to pummel the DI on the chest and tell him to go away and leave well alone. What good did he think he could do, bullying a woman in this condition?
‘We have to ask you some more questions, I’m afraid,’ he said, stepping forward. ‘We’d like you to come with us, back to the police station.’
Bruce cleared his throat, but his voice still emerged as a squeak. ‘What for?’ he asked. ‘And why is Thea with you?’
‘Do you mean the Aylesbury police station?’ Emily wondered. ‘Do you mean now? I’m not dressed, look.’ She stroked the blue dressing gown that enveloped her. ‘I can’t go like this, can I? Where are the boys? Bruce, where are they?’
‘Two are still in bed and the other one’s on the computer. Don’t worry about them.’
‘Come along, then,’ said the policewoman. ‘We can wait for you to put some clothes on. We’ll have to go to Cirencester, you see.’
Emily closed her eyes, and Thea wanted to go and put her arms around her, shielding her from the cruel power of the enforcers of the law. She wanted to shout, ‘Leave her alone, will you? The man’s dead, isn’t he? All this isn’t going to bring him back to life.’ Instead she went and perched on the other end of the sofa, and tried to speak soothingly to her sister.
‘It’ll be all right,’ she said. ‘They only want to get the full story. They want to catch the man who did that terrible thing, that’s all. Think of poor Sam, who never did anybody any harm. Doesn’t he deserve your help to settle what really happened to him?’
Emily stared at her, eyes wide and wild. ‘If only you knew how stupid you sound,’ she said flatly, hopelessly.
Thea recoiled. Emily had called her stupid on a daily basis for about ten years, a detail she had forgotten completely until now. Emily was her clever big sister who got three Grade As at A-level, at a time when that was an almost unimaginable achievement. Thea got a B and two Ds. She was therefore manifestly stupid, and Emily had been right all along. Now she was stupid all over again and her brain closed down accordingly. ‘Sorry,’ she muttered, which seemed an even more stupid thing to say.
Bruce made a bleating sound, not attempting to help his wife. Thea caught him giving Emily a look that bordered on dislike. Instinctively, Thea adopted a sisterly protectiveness. This was Emily in the kind of trouble that never happened to normal people. Somehow she had stepped across a line, and like it or not, her family had to go across it with her. And that included Bruce. ‘What are you going to do to her?’ The question came from their mother, still sitting rigidly on the chair, hands clasped tightly over the upholstered arms.
The DI cast a pained glance around the room. ‘Just ask a few questions,’ he said ponderously.
‘Can Bruce come as well?’ asked Thea, more for her brother-in-law’s benefit than anything else. She already knew there wouldn’t be space for him in the car.
‘Sorry,’ said the DI. But the purpose had been served. Bruce lifted his head and sighed, as he was forced to acknowledge his rightful place in the picture.
‘When will you bring her back?’ he asked.
‘Can’t say, sir, I’m afraid. I expect Mrs Osborne will keep you informed.’
The drive seemed to last much longer than the identical outward journey. Emily sat silently, watching the countryside flow by, apparently in a state of suspended animation. When Thea managed to glimpse her face, there was no sign of deep thought or naked emotion. It appeared that her sister was simply waiting for whatever would happen next.
Thea felt as if she was thinking for both of them. Emily’s accusation of stupidity had not been a random piece of habitual sibling sniping: she really did think that Thea was being stupid. She had got something idiotically wrong, and she tried to remember exactly what she’d said. Sam Webster never did anybody any harm – was that it? Was it the case that Webster had somehow injured Bruce or Emily, and deserved no sympathy for his fate? Knowing Emily, it could even be that she blamed him for getting himself killed, and dragging her into something so unpleasant. And yet, the degree of trauma during the past days suggested that her personal feelings had been deeply stirred by whatever it was that had happened.
It would be a mistake to overlook sheer squeamishness, of course. The sight of another human being’s head split open and leaking its contents onto your clothes might easily suffice to explain a severe case of hysterics afterwards. Bad dreams, inability to concentrate, self-p
ity – they were all quite acceptably normal, under the circumstances. And they wouldn’t be entirely surprising in Emily’s case. Doggedly, Thea repeated these thoughts to herself, insisting that there was no real cause for concern, nothing to account for the frantic roiling and griping of her own stomach as her body drew conclusions that her mind refused to face.
Jeremy spoke to somebody on his mobile, estimating times and muttering about ‘positions’. They were not going to Cirencester, it seemed, but to the Slaughters. They were yet again revisiting the scene of the crime. Only when they turned off the A429 did Emily’s eyes widen and her head jerk round in suspicious recognition. ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.
Where do you think? Thea wanted to reply. ‘The place where it happened, I suppose,’ was her actual muted answer.
‘What for?’
Thea merely shrugged.
Jeremy turned round in his seat, unsmiling. ‘There are a few discrepancies, you see,’ he said. ‘We’re hoping you can sort them out for us.’
Emily shrank into the corner of the back seat. ‘I can’t,’ she whimpered. ‘I can’t bear to think about it any more.’
‘Well, you’ll have to,’ said Thea. She wanted to adjure her sister to be grown up, to behave responsibly, to pull herself together. But you didn’t address your older sister like that, even when you were both over forty. At least, you didn’t do it repeatedly, she corrected, thinking back over some of the sharper remarks she’d made in the past week. She regretted them now, seeing the misery on Emily’s crumpled face. Misery and fear and a vestigial seam of defiance were all apparent, and Thea knew better than to say anything that could bring about any further collapse.