by Rebecca Tope
This was definitely not for Dorothy’s ears, and Thea put a quick stop to it by ushering her visitors out to their car, and closing the door on them. After they’d gone, she arranged a rug over the sleeping Nicky, and briefly considered running back to the car to rescue her dog. How stupid of me, she thought, not to ask Barbara to at least do that for me. As it was, she had no way of knowing how long she might have to stay in post – minding a little boy, when she was being paid to mind a dog and a donkey and a barn.
It was clear that somebody had dropped poor Nicky in the process of handing him from one person to another earlier that morning. Had he been sent outside to wait for his lift, all on his own? Why had he not been wearing a coat, if so? And where on earth was Janina?
Part of her wanted to punish the useless Bernard for sheer criminal incompetence, but a larger part simply wanted to forget all about him, so she could concentrate on Nicky.
She sat down on the sofa with Nicky and tried to think. The apparent neglect of the child was much less culpable than she had first thought. Bernard had been trusted to do as asked, and if Nicky had been allowed to stand by himself at his own front door for a few minutes, that was hardly a crime. When the man never arrived, the little boy had walked up to the church, and stayed there all morning. At some point he had shed his coat, but no real harm had come to him. Janina or Simon had been unavoidably delayed somewhere, and would have assumed that Nicky would be taken home with Dorothy and given some lunch and kept safe until collected. Sorted!
At least…a scenario that would have made perfect sense fifty years ago was no longer so convincing in an age where children were obsessively supervised for every second of their lives; where everybody phoned everybody else on a mobile phone, to impart the vital information that they had just walked from the kitchen to the living room, that one person had eaten a slice of bread and the other was wearing a bright blue jumper. None of this had happened that morning, and it seemed inadequate to simply remind herself that Janina was Bulgarian and maybe they did things differently there.
Thea herself would have dearly loved to make some phone calls that would resolve everything, but she could think of no one to call apart from DS Gladwin, and that seemed excessive. She considered taking Nicky with her back to Lucy’s Barn, and might have done if he’d been awake. As it was, it seemed unkind to disturb him, or to transport him while asleep and then let him wake in a strange place with a comparatively strange person. And soon there would be the additional problem of his older brother. School would be finishing in a couple of hours, and there would be another little boy to worry about.
Perhaps she could phone the school. Simon and Tony had been there the day before, discussing how the news of his mother’s death might affect Benjamin. It had left an impression of a sensible caring establishment that might have good advice to offer. And if this was a remotely normal family, there would be a piece of paper somewhere prominent with the phone number on it. She got up and went into the kitchen. There, as hoped, was a small crowded noticeboard above the telephone, boasting a sheet with Northleach Primary School’s letterhead. Without pausing to rehearse what she would say, Thea lifted the receiver.
A friendly sounding woman responded, and Thea found herself unable to form a lucid sentence. ‘Oh, yes, hello,’ she stammered. ‘My name is Thea Osborne, and I’m phoning about a little boy called Benjamin. He’s six. I’m afraid I can’t remember his surname.’ Then her eye caught another piece of paper on the board, addressed to a Mr S Newby. ‘Oh, I think it’s Newby. Yes, yes, Newby. Sorry – I’ve only met them recently.’
‘Ben Newby…yes,’ said the woman carefully. ‘What about him?’
‘Well, you know about his mother being killed, of course.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘Right. Anyway, I’m here at the house with his brother. There’s nobody else here. I need to go soon, actually. It all happened by accident – Nicky’s lift didn’t come to take him to nursery, so he went up to the church, and I found him. I need to contact his father or the au pair.’
The woman was admirably calm, given the stream of irrelevant information she had just been treated to. ‘Janina usually collects Ben. We have no note to say today will be different.’
‘Good. That’s a relief. But I think you might find she doesn’t appear. What would you do then?’
‘Phone Mr Newby, I suppose.’
‘Yes! So do you think you could phone him now, and tell him there’s a problem with Nicky? I’m not sure you can rely on Janina.’
‘All right, Mrs…um…Osborne. Thank you.’ The wariness was palpable, and Thea could hardly blame the woman for it. The murder of the mother of one of her charges had to be considerably outside her comfort zone.
Thea felt little better afterwards. The question of Janina loomed largest in her mind. Had the girl simply bolted at the news of Bunny’s murder? Had the involvement of the police scared her away, for complicated reasons of her own? Perhaps she was working illegally, or in possession of hard drugs, or simply scared of the forces of the law. And yet she had seemed unfazed by the earlier attentions devoted to the death of George, Thea remembered. Hadn’t Janina simply stood by, seemingly quite relaxed? All of which suggested rather insistently that the Bulgarian girl might just have been responsible for the death of her employer.
It was half past one, and she was hungry. Both the dogs under her care would be needing her. She went to the front door and listened. Yes…Hepzie was yapping, up in the car. It was more than Thea could manage to leave her there any longer, and taking great care not to lock herself out, she trotted quickly up to the church parking area and threw open the car door. The spaniel climbed out with dignity, ignoring the cold water underfoot. She went to a patch of grass and relieved herself, as if she’d been confined for twenty hours, not one and a half.
‘Come on,’ said Thea. ‘We have to get back.’ Then she noticed a small blue coat hanging on the gate into the churchyard. It could only be Nicky’s, and she could not imagine how she had failed to see it earlier. With a feeling of having collected another useful piece in a puzzle, she unhooked it, and led her dog back the way she had come.
Before she reached the house again, a car had come up behind her, and was drawing into the space in front of the Newby home. The passenger door opened, and Janina emerged, looking anguished. She slammed the car door impatiently, and ran to the house. Not once had she glanced at Thea or her dog.
Thea followed her determinedly, ushering the spaniel into the house with no ceremony at all. ‘Janina!’ she called. ‘Wait a minute.’
The au pair was on her knees in front of the sleeping Nicky before Thea could catch up with her. No mother could have shown more agonised love, more debilitating relief than this foreign girl was showing to a child she had only known for a few weeks. ‘He’s all right,’ Thea said quietly. ‘He’s fine.’
Only then did Janina acknowledge her presence. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked, with a frown. ‘Did Bernard ask you?’
‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘I found Nicky in the church. He never got to nursery.’ There had been a momentary temptation to shield the forgetful Bernard, but the prospect of introducing lies and evasions at this stage was untenable. ‘He was very cold, but I think he’s OK now. He’ll be hungry, I expect.’
Nicky was stirring, roused by the lavish devotion coming his way. He opened his eyes and smiled. ‘Hello, Janina,’ he said, like a model English schoolboy. His long eyelashes fluttered, and his rosy cheeks glowed. He was a really beautiful child, Thea noted again. The sort that made people go soft and doting.
‘Where have you been?’ Thea asked. ‘What was that car?’
‘Police,’ said Janina shortly. ‘They kept me too long. Simon too.’
‘Oh?’
‘They have kept him still there. Questions about Bunny.’ Too late, she lowered her voice, hoping to avoid Nicky hearing what she said.
‘Mummy?’ he mumbled, still sleepy. ‘Is Mummy coming?’
>
‘No, darling,’ Janina told him. ‘But soon we can go and get Benjamin, and we can have some sandwiches and cake, and watch one of your DVDs.’
‘With Daddy?’
‘Perhaps.’
Thea was profoundly impressed by this scene. Janina’s calm tone seemed to be pitched precisely right, the stress on normal schedules and routines designed to reassure a confused child. She took a step back, feeling her own work was done. ‘I’ll be going, then,’ she said.
Janina did not turn round, but said over her shoulder, ‘Thank you very much. You have been wonderful. I don’t understand about the church, but it doesn’t matter now.’
Without warning, Thea felt her throat constrict, and her eyes grow hot. She was going to cry if she didn’t get away quickly – and that was sure to be the wrong thing to do in front of Nicky. The sadness of it all could not be ignored, but he needed the adults to maintain some equilibrium. ‘Oh, I phoned the school,’ she remembered to say, in a thick voice. ‘They’ll be trying to get hold of Simon. You might call them and say there’s no need to worry.’
‘Yes, I will. Thank you,’ said Janina softly. It was impossible to know what she was thinking, as she gently stroked Nicky’s hand. ‘No need to worry,’ she repeated, in a crooning voice.
Hepzie had been exploring in the kitchen, but reappeared at Thea’s call. They walked back to the car, over increasingly sodden ground, and drove back to Lucy’s Barn, all thought of shopping or exploring quite abandoned. The track down to the barn still had vestigial snow along the sides, but it was not difficult to manoeuvre the car over the wet ground, suddenly soft and yielding where before it had been treacherously icy.
She thought about Janina, and her volatile temper, remembering the savage criticisms of Bunny at their first encounter. Was it too much of a leap to suspect that Bunny’s death had been brought about by the au pair? Given her profound solicitude for Nicky, it seemed very unlikely. Except…perhaps Janina believed herself to be a big improvement on the children’s natural mother. Perhaps she saw herself as a better mate for Simon, too. Bunny had clearly been a part-time mother, but Thea knew better than to draw from that any conclusions concerning Bunny’s relationship with the boys. They probably worshipped her, and treasured every second spent in her company. Images of Princess Diana and her sons intruded, although with no obvious insight. As far as she knew, Diana had been a fairly useless mother, the princes left to nannies and less prominent relatives. But she knew better than to judge such matters. Families were by definition inscrutable. Things were seldom as they seemed. All she could think was that if Janina and Simon had conspired to kill Bunny, and if they were caught and imprisoned, that would be far more desperate news for Nicky and Ben than she cared to imagine. So desperate that she, Thea, wondered whether she might be tempted to conceal any evidence against them, if pushed into a situation where she had to choose. She liked Simon and admired Janina, and found herself wanting everything to go well for them and the two little boys in their care.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
She was hungry. Jimmy would need to go out. She ought to check the roofs and gutters possibly damaged by the weight of snow. There was plenty to do, and with the sudden accessibility opened up by the disappearance of the snow, she could walk the dog as far as she liked. The air had lost its bitter chill and was back to how it had been two weeks earlier – thick enveloping clouds sucking away the light.
She calculated, with a little shock, that it was already 17th January. It seemed impossible that she had passed such a chunk of the month at the barn, with only two weeks and two days still to go. She tried to imagine how she would look back on this record-breaking long stint, with the snow and the sadness of the bodies left to freeze outdoors. Tempting fate, she admonished herself. It was far from over yet, and it was impossible to predict what would happen next. She would remember the magical little church merely as a backdrop to the unhappy discovery of a shivering child seeking his dead friend. She would remember the witless Jimmy as another figure of misery, abandoned by those who should have protected him. But she might also remember the sweet little rabbits, born so surprisingly in the middle of winter. The soft warmth of them in their impossibly cosy nest, demonstrating that it was feasible to remain safe and oblivious, so long as your mother followed the rules that instinct ordained.
Hepzie had been cheated of a decent walk by the events of the morning, and this, combined with the sudden liberation of the weather, sent Thea outside again, as soon as she had given herself some lunch and tended to Jimmy. For a change of scene she turned left, down the incline to Old Kate’s premises, where she vaguely hoped for a chance to download the events of the morning.
The yard gave an impression of hard work and organisation, with a great tumbling stack of root vegetables the first thing she noticed. The objects were more or less spherical in shape, piled into a three-sided compound, from which they were escaping and spreading a few feet onto the concrete yard in front of the stack. ‘Mangel worzels,’ Thea murmured to herself, with a smile. She went to gather one up for closer inspection. It struck her as entirely alien – she had no concept of how it would taste, or any method by which it needed to be processed for consumption. There were ridges and knobs all over it, unlike a turnip or a swede, which she might have recognised. She sniffed at it, but could only detect the smell of damp soil, with all its unsettling associations.
‘Caint eat that, my lovey,’ came a husky male voice from behind her. ‘Not ’less you’m starving, anyhow.’
This had to be Kate’s old father, Thea remembered, as she met the rheumy gaze of a very old man. He wore rubber boots and a tweed jacket that looked too big for him. ‘Hello,’ she said.
‘House-sitter,’ he nodded. ‘And dog.’
‘That’s right. I was hoping to meet you.’
He cocked his head and treated her to a searching gaze through tiny deep-set eyes. ‘Were you, now?’ he said. ‘And why should that be?’
‘I like to meet people when I’m house-sitting. It gets lonely otherwise. And boring.’
‘Hmm.’ She thought she detected a twinkle, a glint of amusement at the follies of people who had not yet reached half his age. Not for the first time, she found herself wondering how it must be to achieve such an accumulation of years. Surely it had to be burdensome to the point of torment? The physical weaknesses and failings, the loss of independence – all the usual clichés swarmed in on her. But this old man looked contented enough, at least at first glance.
‘The snow’s going, then,’ she said foolishly.
‘It’ll be back again yet, though,’ he said. ‘Reminds me of ’47. Lasted till March that year, it did.’
‘So I gather. But the world’s got warmer since then. I must admit I’ve had enough of it for one year.’
‘Doubt it’ll mind what you think, all the same.’
Ouch! ‘That’s true,’ she smiled. ‘Well…I was wondering whether Kate might be around?’
‘Working,’ he said shortly. ‘Busy time. Using the chance of the thaw to get some patching done.’ As he spoke, a loud hammering filled the air, and Thea looked upward towards its source. Kate was kneeling on the roof of a large barn, the far side of the yard. It looked alarmingly high.
‘Gosh!’ she said. ‘Is she safe up there?’
‘Not fallen off yet,’ the careless father observed. ‘Always been a good climber, that girl has.’
All Thea’s instincts were to go and help – to hold a ladder, or pass nails up as required. ‘What’s she doing?’
‘Fixing a hole where the snow broke through. If the hay gets wet it’ll be no use. Wasted.’ He shook his head. ‘Naught worse than wasted hay.’
The banging persisted, and Thea could see the woman wielding the hammer with impressive vigour. Moving closer, she understood that the barn beneath was more than half full of large hay bales, and that if Kate were unlucky enough to fall through, she would have a soft landing. The roof was comprised of sheets of galvanis
ed iron, some of them looking rather rusty around the edges. From where she stood she could not see Kate clearly, but could only assume that she had somehow carried a replacement sheet up a ladder and was using it to patch a hole. Such competence filled her with admiration and she waited for a chance to say so.
With a final flurry of hammering, Kate withdrew, crawling backwards to where there must have been a ladder. She had ignored Thea’s presence throughout, despite it being obvious that she was there. Kate had almost certainly heard the conversation between Thea and her father, as she hoisted her iron patch up a high ladder.
‘I could have helped you,’ Thea said, as Kate finally reappeared on firm ground. ‘I make a rather good assistant.’
‘Best working on my own,’ said the farmer shortly. ‘Quicker, generally.’
Ouch again, thought Thea. ‘Well, I must say I’m very impressed.’
‘Why?’
‘Having such a head for heights,’ said Thea quickly. ‘I’d have been terrified.’
Kate shrugged, and looked towards her father. ‘Dad…you need to get back in the house. I’ll be in for tea soon.’
The old man made a sound like a low growl. Had his daughter just humiliated him by highlighting the reversal of roles between them? For how long had he been confined to domestic duties while Kate wielded hammers and drove tractors and made stacks of alien vegetables? Kate heard the unspoken question, and said, ‘He’s had pneumonia for most of the winter, and isn’t meant to be out. It’s the devil’s own job to find him something to do, mark you. Making a pot of tea is about his limit. Isn’t it, you old pest?’ she added, with an exasperated grin.
So that was all right, Thea concluded. They loved each other, just as a father and daughter should. She thought of her own father, recently deceased, and felt a pang.