by Rebecca Tope
Stephanie burnt her eyes into Thea’s face, saying nothing out loud, but making the point just the same. ‘Oh, all right. Show me that rug, and we’ll see if it’ll go in your room. I did say I’d get you some things for it, didn’t I?’
The grudging tone went a long way towards spoiling the pleasure, but didn’t entirely ruin it. The rug looked even more gorgeous on second viewing. Thea had Timmy’s hand tightly in hers, which was absolutely not necessary, but he looked as if he was almost glad about it. He kept glancing back over his shoulder, and then out through the big windows to the rows and rows of plants in pots outside, and the fruit trees, containers and distant statues. Stephanie whispered to him, ‘We’ll tell Dad all about it when we get back, and he’ll make sure it’s put right. Okay?’
Timmy nodded, half-reassured.
The rug was paid for, and the three of them went back to the car, each carrying a rose in a pot. Thea opened the boot and set the plants upright, carefully packing them with whatever bits and pieces she could find, to stop them from falling over. Hepzie was jumping at the window in a delighted greeting. ‘Steady on,’ said Thea. ‘We’ve only been gone twenty minutes. If that.’
Stephanie had difficulty with the passage of hours and minutes. Dad had spent a number of patient sessions trying to explain how to tell the time from a clock or watch, but she still hadn’t altogether grasped it. Thea had wondered aloud how she could be so dim about it, when the whole business was simplicity itself. That had hurt her feelings, and made it even more difficult to concentrate. How long was twenty minutes, she wondered. Long enough for Timmy to go to the loo, hear a man talking on the phone, follow the man, witness his attack on someone, hide in the tent, get found by his sister, and try to explain to Thea what had happened? It seemed a lot for so few minutes. It seemed impossibly much, in fact. And that meant Timmy had made most of it up. Maybe he’d just gone to the loo, then decided to test out the tent.
Then she remembered that Thea hadn’t put the dog in the car until after Timmy was lost. So maybe there had been another twenty minutes before that, in which Thea had chosen her roses and Stephanie had moved from the gnomes to the rugs.
She sighed. Thea was hassling them to get in and strap themselves into the back seat. Timmy had a booster seat, but she was tall enough to do without. She was four feet ten, which was only three inches less than Thea.
‘I don’t think it’s fair to stop us having a pub lunch,’ she said bravely. ‘We haven’t done anything bad. You’re the bad one, for not listening to Timmy, when he tried to tell you something really important.’
Thea started the engine, but didn’t drive. She seemed to be taking deep breaths, and when Stephanie caught sight of her in the rear-view mirror, she could see that her eyes were shut. ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I should never have left the two of you on your own in the first place. I didn’t think it would hurt. I thought – what can happen in a garden centre, of all places? And here you are, quite all right, except for the fuss and bother of Timmy hiding in a tent. That was quite bad, you know. And that story can’t possibly be true. Think about it. How would anybody ever get away with attacking someone in broad daylight, in a place like this?’
‘He did, though,’ said Timmy, suddenly loud. ‘I saw him. It was just over there, the other side of that fence.’
The fence was only a few feet in front of them. Timmy had always been adept at spatial connections. He always knew which window went with which room, in any house he visited. He remembered the way streets went, in a new town, and could retrace his steps effortlessly. And he was an observant child. Even Thea had to acknowledge that.
‘Well, let’s try to forget all about it now,’ said Thea, absently stroking the top of her spaniel’s head. ‘It’s lunchtime. I suppose we could go to a pub somewhere, if you’re good. One with a garden that Hepzie can go in. I can’t actually think of one at the moment.’ Again she closed her eyes. ‘I know – there’s one just up the road in Stanton. It’d be nice to go there again. It’s got lovely views.’
She put the car in gear and began to reverse out of the parking space. ‘Can I open a window?’ asked Stephanie. ‘It’s hot in here.’
‘Wait a minute.’ Thea turned the car, and then pressed buttons that opened both rear windows an inch or so. The car park was sparsely occupied, but two newcomers were driving in, forcing them to wait where they were for a moment.
‘Listen!’ said Timmy. ‘Somebody’s shouting.’
Stephanie twisted around, trying to both see and hear what might be happening. Nothing looked unusual.
‘They’ve found the man,’ said Timmy with uncanny certainty. ‘Wait. Thea – wait.’ His tone was so urgent that Thea automatically obeyed him. Still keeping an eye on her in the mirror, Stephanie could see uncertainty on her face. ‘It was true, what I told you,’ Timmy pressed on. ‘True as true as true.’
The shouting had stopped, but things did seem to be happening. The short-haired man came to the entrance of the store, with a phone to his ear. He looked sharply from left to right, then straight ahead, like a robot. Stephanie giggled.
‘What’s funny?’ asked Thea, also rather sharp.
‘That man.’
‘He’s their security chap. Catches shoplifters and finds lost children. He’s called Dave. He talked to me when we were searching for Timmy. He does the heavy lifting as well. They employ lots of people, you know.’
‘So what?’ said Stephanie.
‘So I’m starting to think—’ But she got no further, because Dave had spotted them and was flapping a hand at them like a demented traffic cop. ‘Oh, damn it. He wants us to wait. Why didn’t we leave when we had the chance? All that faffing about, and now look.’
‘They’ve found the man,’ repeated Timmy. ‘And now they’re calling the police, and I can tell them who did it.’
‘That must be right,’ said Stephanie. She gave her brother the warmest possible smile. ‘We should have believed you.’
‘Didn’t you believe me?’ He looked at her all wounded and reproachful.
‘Not completely,’ she confessed.
‘It’s probably something to do with my credit card,’ said Thea.
But it wasn’t. Dave came trotting up to the car, his gaze firmly on Timmy. ‘You said you saw it,’ he began breathlessly. ‘You saw what happened. Our machinery man, Eddie, is lying out there with the statues, just as you said he was. I thought I should go and have a look, just in case – and there he was.’ Amazement seemed to be clouding his mind. ‘So you’ll need to tell the police about it. Tell them who did it.’
‘He’s only a child. They can’t use him as a witness,’ Thea protested.
‘Oh yes, they can.’
Timmy was halfway over the front passenger seat, trying to explain to Thea that he was quite able to provide helpful testimony and catch the murderer, his knee digging painfully into Stephanie’s thigh. Hepzie was trying to lick him, under the mistaken impression that the excitement had something to do with her.
‘Stop it, both of you,’ said Thea. ‘Let me get the car out of the way, and we’ll see what they want.’
Dave led them all back into the shop, except for the dog. There was a group of customers standing by the tills, muttering to each other. ‘Come through to the back,’ Dave urged them. ‘We can wait in the office.’
Stephanie found herself with no part to play other than as an observer. She observed Timmy as he focused on the face of the nice manager who had helped her search for him. ‘That’s him!’ he cried, pointing a wavering finger. ‘That’s the killer!’
He had to be wrong, Stephanie thought. Thea went further, and told him not to be ridiculous. But the man simply slumped onto a chair and put his head in his hands.
‘He had it coming,’ he mumbled through his fingers. ‘That Eddie – he had it coming.’
Then the police finally turned up, first going outside to check the body and establish that the man really was dead. None of that was visible or audibl
e from the office. Nothing happened for what seemed like ages, and Stephanie was hungry and worried about Hepzie in the hot car. Then a woman who obviously knew Thea came in, and asked a lot of questions, some of them addressed to Timmy and some to Dave, and then they took the manager away.
‘We can go now,’ said Thea. ‘At last.’
‘But he’s a nice man,’ Stephanie burst out. ‘He can’t be the murderer.’ She had pieced together only part of the story, and was left with this glaring anomaly.
‘He is a nice man,’ Thea agreed. ‘And he killed a very nasty one.’
On the way out, Timmy gave a muted yelp, and pointed to the cafeteria, where a woman was clearing tables. ‘That’s the lady,’ he said. ‘The one who I thought might have seen me.’
‘Never mind that now,’ said Thea firmly. ‘I think the police will do whatever they need to, where she’s concerned.’
Stephanie had caught references to somebody called Angela with a daughter called Ruby, who Eddie had done something bad to. Eddie did bad things to little girls, that much she had understood. And the manager had a little girl of his own. He was only being a good father, then. Perhaps the police would give him credit for that.
Later, when they tried to explain everything to Dad, he pulled her to him, with a shaky hand. ‘What a world!’ he said. ‘Where even a garden centre isn’t safe.’
Thea put an arm around Timmy, and kissed his cheek. ‘My hero!’ she said. ‘I hereby solemnly promise to listen to every single thing you say – always.’
‘Even the Pokémon?’ Stephanie challenged.
‘Even the Pokémon,’ said Thea.
Stephanie and Dad burst out laughing.
‘Good luck with that,’ said Drew.
The Stone Man
The church was at first glance not especially impressive. A church was a church was a church, thought Maggs dispassionately. It had only been suggested as a meeting place because it was easy to find. And easy to park close by in the main street running through the little town of Winchcombe.
Meredith was kicking her heels repetitively against the bar of her buggy, shouting in time to the kicks. She also leant forward and back every now and then, like a child on a swing, urging more progress, faster momentum.
‘Have a heart, kiddo,’ said Maggs. ‘I’m going as fast as I can.’
The child twisted round to glare at her mother. The one-year-old face was a comical mixture of its two parents, an intriguing illustration of genetics at work. Very dark hair framed a high brow and lean cheeks. Brown eyes, set deep and close together, and a wide mouth gave every expression a healthy dose of character.
‘She’s no beauty,’ Maggs had announced, a week or so after giving birth. ‘The top of her face is Den and the bottom is me. She’s a shunt.’
‘Pardon?’ Drew had said. He was holding the baby at the time, blowing out his cheeks and crooning like any besotted grandmother. Drew Slocombe had always been fond of babies.
‘You know – when criminals weld two different cars together to make one they can sell. Merry’s just the same – it’s hilarious.’
As she grew, Meredith became more and more distinctive. ‘We’d certainly know her in a crowd,’ said Den.
Maggs was propelling the buggy along the narrow pavement of Winchcombe’s high street, only a little way from the church. She had agreed to meet two friends there, and possibly Thea, if she wasn’t too busy. Thea Osborne who was now Thea Slocombe. A summer day out had been proposed with a picnic lunch planned in the grounds of Sudeley Castle. The friends both had babies of much the same age as Meredith, which comprised the whole reason for the three-way relationship. They had met in the antenatal class and bonded in the way women do under such circumstances. A bonding that extended to several other new parents, in fact. There had been three reunions of the full group during the year, where infants had been compared obsessively. Maggs had come away with a shaky suspicion that her child was neither genius nor beauty. This picnic in Winchcombe was with the two women who had seemed to be the most uncritical. They both felt sufficiently unsure of themselves, with fractious offspring and absent husbands, for Maggs to feel less threatened by competition. Parenthood had never greatly appealed to her and the experiment had not been a wholesale success. By great good fortune, Meredith seemed to understand and accept this with equanimity.
Maggs had mixed feelings about the Cotswolds since Drew and Thea had moved there, leaving her in charge of the burial ground in Somerset. The existence of Meredith was more than enough reason for her to resent the change of circumstance. ‘How am I supposed to run it on my own, with a one-year-old child?’ she had demanded.
‘You’ll manage,’ said Drew. ‘I did it when Stephanie was a baby and Karen went back to work.’
‘Yes, but …’ grumbled Maggs. The truth was that the workload was quite within her competency, especially with Den such a dedicated father. He and Drew were both very much keener on small infants than she was herself.
The church, on closer inspection, was a surprise. There were quirky embellishments in the form of gargoyles and castle-style battlements all along the top of the wall facing her. Looking up further, she glimpsed a golden bird on top of the tower. When she tried to point all this out to her child, there was little response. ‘Oh, you,’ she said.
But then Meredith surprised her, pointing upwards and piping ‘Man!’ quite beyond any mistake.
It was the fifth word the child had uttered in her life, after ‘Oops!’, ‘nahnah’, ‘Dadda’ and ‘okay’.
‘Still not bothering with me, then,’ Maggs complained, trying to see whether there really was a man on the church roof. It took a minute to realise that the child was indicating one of the gargoyles over the main door. ‘Not much wrong with your eyesight, anyway,’ she said. ‘He is rather splendid, I admit.’ The stone figure was wearing a hat and apparently struggling to free himself from the building. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t a gargoyle at all, she reminded herself, because he served no function as a water spout, which she believed to be the strict definition. He was something stranger and more unsettling. It was easy to accept the idea that he’d once been a real man, trapped by some magic as a punishment for folly or wickedness. He did look a bit of a fool, she decided. Then a shadow fell across his face, or something of the sort, and he seemed for all the world to be moving.
Meredith squealed. ‘Man!’ she repeated.
‘Right,’ said Maggs. ‘Let’s have a look to see if there are any more of them.’ She pushed the buggy over a patch of short grass, to where another grotesque was trying to escape from the stone on the corner of the building. This one had a wide grinning mouth, and was possibly female. Meredith was craning round to look back at her original favourite, rather to Maggs’s irritation. ‘There are lots of them, look,’ she tried. There was a massive arched window round the corner, with figures above it.
But she had no chance to go and inspect them. ‘Hiya!’ came a voice from the church porch. ‘Over here.’
It was Olivia with her little boy Simon. Olivia who had moved to Stroud, in the south of the Cotswolds, and wanted to stay in touch. Olivia who was thirty-eight and an insurance assessor. She had dark-brown hair and very big hands. Her husband, John, was over forty with a previous wife and family. He had attended one class, full of complacency and world-weariness. Maggs and Den had both felt desperate urges to hit him. As far as Maggs could ascertain, he had suddenly increased his working hours when his new son was born, leaving Olivia to handle the whole business pretty much on her own. It had once or twice occurred to Maggs that her own situation, with Den so very attentive and involved, might come over as complacency to her less fortunate sisters. She had given in to the urge to play down the fact that things were going quite significantly well as far as Meredith was concerned. Instead she talked about the uncertainties of their income, and the sense of desertion that came with Drew’s move to Broad Campden.
Now Maggs waved and went to join her friend. ‘Have you
seen Annie?’ she asked. Annie was thirty-one, fair in colouring and generally positive in her approach to life.
‘We’re having four,’ she had announced to the class with a laugh. ‘Preferably within five years. Like a litter of puppies.’ Maggs had warmed to her immediately, while at the same time envying the affluence that made such a prospect viable.
‘Nope,’ said Olivia, in answer to the question. ‘We’ve been inside for a look and she’s not there.’
‘We’d better wait a bit, then. How’s things, anyway?’
Olivia rolled her eyes, which had shadows beneath them. ‘I’ve forgotten what a night’s sleep is like, for a start. And he won’t eat.’ There followed a predictable catalogue of complaints about the trials of life with a small child, ending with, ‘I gather Annie’s Bethany’s perfect,’ with the hint of a sneer. Maggs was reminded yet again that a new mother was expected to find life intolerable and to moan loudly about it at every opportunity. The facts as she saw them, however, were not like that at all. A baby was far more robust and forgiving than she had ever imagined, despite close contact with both Drew’s children from infancy having taught her much about human resilience, both in adults and children. Meredith was perfectly reasonable in her demands and slept well enough provided her days had been sufficiently active and stimulating. The general fuss and self-pity that Maggs witnessed amongst new parents sometimes made her wonder if she came from some quite different species.
Olivia was waiting for a suitable response, she belatedly realised. ‘Last I heard from Annie, Bethany was suffering pretty badly with her teeth.’ She looked at Simon, who was deeply asleep. ‘Looks as if the fresh air has tired him out already,’ she noted. ‘It’ll probably make him hungry as well. Have you tried spicing his food up a bit? Meredith loves curry and anything with onion in it.’
The woman’s large brown eyes grew even larger. ‘Curry?’ she repeated, as if Maggs had said arsenic. ‘But that does such ghastly things to the nappies.’