Fear in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Probably,’ he said thickly.

  It all took an unreasonable length of time. A biting wind had sprung up. Every step took effort, and Thea’s legs were aching. Few words were exchanged, everyone silenced by the unusual conditions. For most English people, snow recalled carefree childhood memories, with the schools closed and dads extracting half-forgotten toboggans from the back of the garage. It represented a sudden holiday, something to relish for its beauty and strangeness.

  ‘How much further is it?’ asked the young constable.

  ‘Just at the end of this fence, in a dip down there,’ Thea told him. ‘And then you’re going to have to carry him all the way back to the road – aren’t you?’

  ‘Eventually,’ said the sergeant, who was the nominal leader of the group. ‘First the doctor has to certify life extinct, and a close examination of the scene undergone.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Thea, fully aware of the procedures. ‘And he has to be identified. And I don’t have any idea who he is.’ As she spoke, she suddenly remembered the tall grey man she’d glimpsed on the first day.

  ‘Plenty of time for that,’ said the sergeant. ‘Once we’ve seen what sort of a state he’s in.’

  Finally the corner of the fence was visible. ‘There,’ Thea pointed, knowing the men would be able to see it before she did, walking ahead of her as they were. The photographer was in the lead, raising his camera to look at the display screen, swinging it round as if making an amateur video.

  ‘Where?’ said the sergeant, his head following in a slower arc than that of the photographer.

  Thea surged ahead, impatiently. ‘That last lot of snow must have covered him up,’ she panted.

  She was in the corner, with fences stretching in two directions, her arms outstretched in a gesture of bafflement. ‘He’s gone,’ she said unnecessarily.

  Opinion instantly divided as to whether Thea was mad, bad or simply incompetent. ‘Must be the wrong field,’ said the constable.

  ‘If this is a hoax…’ began the doctor, who was middle-aged and overweight and had grown increasingly breathless during the walk.

  ‘Are you absolutely sure he was ever here?’ said the sergeant.

  ‘Look,’ Thea ordered them. ‘You can see there was something here.’ The snow was indeed compressed and disturbed in the place they were all staring at. ‘He must have got up.’ She pointed towards a clump of trees less than a hundred yards away, and a muddled track of prints leading to it. ‘Something’s been over there,’ she added.

  ‘Those cows, look,’ said the photographer. Sure enough the Herefords had moved to the lee of the trees, and were standing in a ragged group, heads down.

  ‘If it was your dead man, he’ll be home by this time,’ said the sergeant.

  The photographer snorted as if at a joke.

  ‘We ought to follow that track and see,’ Thea urged. ‘He might have managed to crawl that far, and then died. But he was dead. I know he was. He was cold. The snow was settling on him. And there was a bottle,’ she remembered. ‘He wouldn’t have bothered to take the bottle.’

  All four men looked at her. The doctor was the only one to manifest anger. The photographer examined her with his head tilted as if assessing her potential as a model. The two police officers simply looked tired, as if this sort of thing happened just that bit too often.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ said the constable. ‘The cows made those tracks, if you ask me. They don’t look human.’

  ‘And before long they’ll all be covered up anyway,’ said the photographer. It seemed to Thea that this only added urgency to their quest for the dead or dying man, but none of the others appeared to share this view.

  She had never felt so stupid. Had she mistaken a sleeping drunk for a dead man, and caused all this bother for nothing? She remembered the apparently empty bottle as a much more significant detail than she had previously acknowledged. She stammered out a confused theory, which the four men heard in silence, whereby an alcohol-induced stupor had been mistaken for death. ‘But he was so cold,’ she repeated, ‘and stiff. He really did seem dead. The snow hadn’t melted on him.’

  The enormity of the situation seemed to engulf them all. The snow stretched obstructively on all sides, making any decisions about a search utterly daunting. Gradually Thea regained her self-possession. ‘He was here,’ she insisted. ‘You have to believe me. Even if he did get up and stagger away, he’ll be ill and freezing somewhere. We ought to search for him. It’s barely two hours ago, after all.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Well, nearly three now,’ she amended. ‘You took such a long time to come.’

  ‘We do believe you,’ said the sergeant, slowly. ‘Why would you invent such a story? The question is, where would we begin to look for him? We could have a look in those woods, I suppose – but I’m inclined to agree with Paul that those tracks were never made by a human being.’ He walked a little way towards the trees, peering closely at the ground. The photographer plodded after him, holding his camera.

  ‘Come back,’ pleaded the doctor. ‘This is getting beyond a joke. I’m not here to search for missing bodies.’

  ‘Aren’t you?’ muttered the constable, giving Thea a wink. The sergeant and photographer paused indecisively.

  The snow was disorientating: an endless white blanket covering mysterious humps and bumps, which could be anything. Thea knew there was little prospect of further investigation. ‘Why would the cows come over here?’ she wondered aloud.

  ‘Curiosity,’ said the photographer. ‘If there really was somebody lying here, they’d come over for a look.’

  ‘So the fact that they then went up to the woods means they followed him,’ she said earnestly. ‘And so should we.’

  ‘No!’ Again it was the irascible doctor. His nose had turned blue, and his teeth were chattering. It made Thea feel a lot colder, just to look at him.

  The sergeant was rubbing his chin vigorously. ‘We can’t see any human footprints on this side of the fence except for ours,’ he repeated. ‘Nor any wheel marks, so there hasn’t been a tractor over here this morning. Even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t know where to start searching. Best get back,’ he decided. ‘Nothing we can do here for the time being.’ He gave Thea a look that was almost kind, when compared to the doctor’s baleful glances. ‘No harm done,’ he added.

  ‘But—’ Thea felt a surge of alarm at the implications. The afternoon was already half over, the long hours of darkness not far off. ‘You can’t just go,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m absolutely sure he was dead. Somebody must have moved him.’ She shuddered. ‘And why would they do that?’ She wasn’t sure which explanation was more alarming – that a dead man had been spirited away, or a live one had dragged himself off somewhere and was in the process of dying that very moment. She tried to spell this out for the sergeant. ‘What if he’s over there in those trees?’ she demanded.

  ‘If he could get that far, he could get to a house,’ said the sergeant, with a shake of his head. ‘It’d be a wild goose chase to go off trying to find him. We’d be better waiting to see if there’s a missing person reported.’

  The four men were arranged in a semicircle around her, all embarrassed to a greater or lesser degree. ‘It isn’t very likely anybody took him, is it?’ The doctor spoke for them all. ‘Let’s face it – it would be quite a job to lug a dead body anywhere in all this. Look how worried we were at the idea of having to do it.’

  ‘Besides, it would leave marks,’ said the photographer, repeating the obvious, much to Thea’s irritation. He had been scrutinising the ground assiduously for the past five minutes, with an air of frustration. ‘There’s no sign that anything was dragged away from this spot. Is there?’ he challenged to nobody in particular.

  Thea’s fertile imagination conjured images of a half-dead man crawling doggedly over the fields to Lucy’s Barn, and then either dying on the doorstep, or forcing entry to the house and accusing Thea of interfering with some complicated plan. These were quickly follow
ed by even more alarming visions of a hugely strong man, carrying the frozen body out of the field and away to some unspecified point where nobody could find him. There he would lurk, dangerous and unpredictable, until the snows melted.

  ‘Come on,’ whined the doctor. ‘Why are we standing around like this?’

  ‘Good question,’ muttered the constable, and by mutual accord they began the return journey.

  Hepzie and Jimmy were curled together in the grey light of the conservatory, the snow on the glass roof obscuring much of the daylight. Spirit, the black cat, was on the back of the sofa, staring out at the snow through half-closed eyes. The donkey had been standing with his head and shoulders out of the shed, observing the unfamiliar world with a very Eeyore-like expression. Thea had been left to the company of the animals by the bemused police people, with a half-hearted instruction to call them again if anything more happened. She almost felt sorry for them, watching them struggle with the impossible facts. Tempting as it might be, they couldn’t go so far as to disbelieve her whole story. There were marks in the snow, compatible with a human body lying there. Easiest to assume he had only been asleep, not dead, and had simply got up and stumbled home. During the return to the Barn, this was what they had concluded, slowly exchanging remarks that fortified the theory, until Thea herself was close to believing it.

  She knew she should apologise, abasing herself for the outrageous waste of police time. But that would be to admit the credibility of the theory that the man had not been dead, and this she could not do. He had been dead. The snow wasn’t melting on him, there was no sign of breathing, he was stiff to the touch. The convenient explanation was understandably the one the men adopted – but she knew it was wrong.

  CHAPTER SIX

  Darkness closed in shortly after four, the sky having clouded over again. Tuning to the local radio station again, Thea heard with dismay that there was no foreseeable prospect of a thaw. Aged countrymen were rounded up to recall the five-week freeze of 1947, or the barely less unthinkable Big Snow of 1963. With irritating relish, the presenters had already decided that this was another memorable winter which would go down in history for the length of the white-out.

  The police had expressed a fleeting concern for Thea’s plight, unable to get the car out, and with no guarantee that the electricity supply would survive. Heavy branches, weighed down with snow, could bring cables down. Snow could do unpredictable things, as everybody knew. ‘So could you ask the council to send the snowplough down here?’ she suggested, trying to keep her nerve.

  The sergeant pursed his lips. ‘Not our department, I’m afraid.’ Every time he spoke, she heard a ghostly unspoken madam at the end of each sentence. Didn’t they say that any more? Had it gone the same way as love and pet? How were they supposed to address female members of the public these days?

  When they first arrived she had waited to see whether they knew who she was – the former girlfriend of Detective Superintendent Phil Hollis, and active participant in investigations into a number of violent deaths in the Cotswold area over the past year or two. By the time they’d reached the second field she had concluded that her anonymity was safe. There was no hint of any familiarity with her name, or role as house-sitter. She was just a slightly unreliable woman in her forties who had brought them out on a wild goose chase, possibly because of a hormonal problem, or the trauma of the snowfall.

  ‘OK,’ she said to the dogs, having taken a deep and bracing breath. ‘You two have to go out, like it or not. The rabbits need fresh bedding, and I ought to find the cat. Then tomorrow, we’re going to walk out to the road and see what’s going on in the bustling community of Hampnett. We will not give dead bodies another thought. Right?’

  Hepzie looked at her, with a slow tail wag, but Jimmy merely sighed gently and laid his long nose on his narrow paws.

  The evening was an ordeal, by any standards. The enveloping blanket of snow created an unnatural silence that led to the impression that the world had disappeared, leaving nobody but Thea and the animals in her care. And perhaps a superhuman figure who could bring himself back to life at will. Repeatedly, the memory of the tall ghostly man from Saturday intruded into her mind, embellished by subsequent events, until she was convinced he had been the same as the ‘dead’ man in the field. The mental quote marks around the word annoyed her, even while they refused to go away. She argued obsessively with herself about the logic of believing him to have been a genuine ghost. Logical, because it fitted at least some of the facts; impossibly foolish because she had touched him and found him to be all too convincingly solid. Ghosts were insubstantial, fading away at the very idea of touching them. No, she reproached herself – they weren’t even that. They were nothing, they did not exist.

  Although, persisted a small inner voice, if they were ever going to exist, this was absolutely the right setting for it. How many ghost stories began with snowy nights, and a lone woman in an isolated house, awaiting the attentions of a supernatural visitor?

  She turned the television up loud, watching a costume drama which made no less than fifteen blatant historical mistakes in ten minutes, with such a hopelessly anachronistic tone to the whole thing that she could hardly bear to stay with it. But all the other channels were even worse, and she couldn’t summon interest in any of the available DVDs, so she left it on. At least it helped her to forget the various threatening aspects of the world outside.

  At last it was ten-thirty and she could decently go to bed. Jimmy was escorted outside, to a point only five yards from the house, where he cooperatively relieved himself in the beam of light shining from the open front door. The snow was becoming a fixture, the strange light and the absence of sound already half familiar. But Thea barely looked at it, her attention fixed on the welcoming light from the house, and the shivering dog at her heels.

  * * *

  Saturday morning dawned with a fleeting hope that by some miracle all the snow would have vanished in the night, only for it to be dashed immediately. There was no mistaking the flat light and muffled silence outside the window. ‘Here we go again,’ she sighed as she rolled out of bed and went to the window.

  Automatically she was sweeping the visible scene for fresh footprints, for a renewed reason to fear that inexplicable things were going on out there during the night. There were plenty of footprints, but she was satisfied that they had all been made the day before, and their visibility meant that no further snow had fallen. Her resolve to walk up to the road was firmly in place, and she dressed in layers of warm clothes, with this intention in mind.

  The rabbits were subdued, but their shed felt bearable, temperature-wise. The nest of babies was just as before, and a quick check reassured her that they were still very much alive. ‘Better muck you out today,’ Thea told them. ‘You’re a bit whiffy.’ Lucy had shown her a bale of wood shavings behind the hutch, used for their bedding. She would do the living area, letting Jemima’s sanctuary remain as it was for a few more days.

  Jimmy was much as usual but the donkey’s temper wasn’t good. He tossed his head irritably when Thea tried to stroke his ears, and she saw that he had been lying in a pile of his own excrement. ‘You’re meant to do that outside,’ she reproached him, realising she was in for a second session of mucking out at some stage that day.

  As she returned to the barn, she heard the phone ringing. ‘Another broken computer, I suppose,’ she muttered to Hepzie.

  But she was wrong. It was Lucy Sinclair, speaking from the Canary Islands. ‘I’ve just heard about your snow,’ she began, her voice warm with lazy sunny days. ‘I can’t even imagine it. Are you all right?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Thea, without even pausing to think. ‘It’s all rather an adventure.’

  ‘Have you seen Kate? Has she come past?’

  ‘No, I don’t think she can get along the lane. The snow’s quite deep.’

  ‘Oh, she will. She’ll use the tractor if necessary. I’d have expected her to have done it on the first morn
ing. She’s very resourceful, and she likes to be useful.’

  ‘I ought to check that she’s all right, then – do you think?’

  ‘You don’t have to worry about her. She can get out the other way. It’s you I’m concerned about. She’s your best hope of clearing a path. Try phoning her.’ Lucy gave the number from memory, and Thea jotted it down. ‘Although she’s one of those annoying people who lets a phone ring if she’s not in the mood to talk. She hasn’t even got 1571, so you can’t leave a message.’

  ‘I might walk down later on, if there’s no reply. How far is it?’

  ‘Over half a mile. If the snow’s as bad as you say, you’d better not. It’s quite a winding track, with a lot of stones and potholes. But you can see the house from the first bend – you could have a look to see if there’s smoke coming from the chimney, or any other sign of life. How’s Jimmy?’ The question burst out as if it couldn’t wait another second.

  ‘He’s absolutely fine. Hepzie has won him over and they’re good friends. He licks her.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Lucy did not sound enthusiastic about this news. ‘I hope he won’t miss her when she goes.’

  ‘I know – I wondered about that. But I couldn’t really stop them.’ She could, of course. She could keep her dog out of the conservatory fairly easily. The truth was she didn’t want to – it was sweet seeing them snuggled together.

  ‘I expect he’ll just forget her. I don’t think his memory works much any more.’