Blood in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Thea!’ he called, as loudly as he could. ‘Are you awake?’

  Of course she wasn’t awake. It was still the middle of the night to her. But he felt justified on at least two counts in doing his best to rouse her. There were people outside, for heaven’s sake! ‘Thea!’ he yelled.

  The curtains had not been closed the previous evening, and now, in the thinning darkness, he saw a face pressed against the glass. The heavy jowls of the woman he had met when he first arrived made inhuman pink shapes against the glass. ‘Can I come in?’ she called, flapping a hand towards the front door. He tried to remember whether the door had been locked before Thea went to bed. He knew her careless habits, her resistance to keys and burglar alarms, and he could not recall any discussion of the matter.

  ‘If you can get in,’ he said to the face outside. ‘It might be locked.’

  ‘So get up and open it,’ she suggested, eyebrows raised.

  ‘Easier said than done,’ he confessed. ‘And—’ he tried to sit up, but only succeeded in making the flimsy bed wobble alarmingly. ‘What are you doing here? What time do you think it is?’

  ‘Didn’t she tell you? I explained it all to her on Sunday. It’s the Festival of St Yvo today and your lady friend said she’d like to come.’

  ‘Saint Eevo?’ he queried. ‘What’s that?’ He shook his head tetchily on the pillow. ‘Thea!’ he called again.

  ‘Oh, this is ridiculous,’ came another female voice. ‘We’re wasting time. Janey, I don’t know why you have to recruit total strangers all the time. We don’t need any more people.’

  At last, Thea must have stirred. He heard a thud at the top of the stairs and claws clattering on the stone steps. Hepzibah scratched at the closed door of the dining room and whined. At least the dog had finally decided to investigate, Phil thought dourly. Some guard she was. But then who ever selected a cocker spaniel with a view to being guarded?

  Thea’s head appeared around the side of the door, her hair wild and her eyes half shut. ‘What’s the matter?’ she slurred. ‘What time is it?’

  ‘Your friend’s here,’ Phil said. ‘I need the loo, and it’s just after four a.m.’

  ‘Mmm,’ she scratched her head and yawned. ‘I was having a lovely dream. There was a white bird, with fluffy feathers like fur… You shouted,’ she accused. ‘Really loud.’ She reached out and switched on the light, which changed everything.

  Thea looked towards the window, where Janey was no longer visible. Outside had returned to darkness in reaction to the electric light. ‘Friend? What friend?’

  Then there was the sound of a door opening, followed by footsteps, and Janey stood in the doorway of the room. ‘Hiya!’ she trilled. ‘Have you forgotten about St Yvo?’

  ‘How did you get in?’ Phil demanded. ‘This is like a bad dream.’

  ‘Charming,’ chuckled Janey. ‘Listen, I’ve got Fiona with me, and she’s getting impatient. We have to be at the top of the hill by five at the latest. I did tell you all about it,’ she said to Thea. ‘I thought you were genuinely interested.’

  Thea showed signs of dawning recollection, along with the start of a headache. She rubbed the side of her face. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘It’s Tuesday already, is it? That was quick. The trouble is—’ she waved towards Phil, ‘things have changed a bit. I won’t be able to come after all. I’m really sorry, because it sounded so interesting. Come back later and tell us how it went, if you like.’

  ‘Is he ill?’ Janey suddenly seemed to perceive Phil properly, and to take in the fact that he was lying on a temporary bed in the main living room.

  ‘Hurt his back. Not exactly what we had planned.’ Phil wondered whether he had missed a woman-to-woman wink at the end of Thea’s comment. Something in Janey’s strangled response suggested he might have done.

  The other woman, Fiona, was almost obscured from view by the massive Janey, rather to Phil’s relief. Two strange women were effectively in his bedroom, putting him at considerable disadvantage. He watched as a hand was laid on Janey’s bare arm. ‘We ought to go,’ urged Fiona’s voice. She moved into view, looking intently into Janey’s face. ‘I did say…’ She glanced at Thea, ‘…it’s better without new people. You will keep wanting to bring them in.’

  Janey waved a hand in a generalised gesture of apology. ‘I can see it was a bad idea now,’ she said. ‘We’ll go. Fiona’s going to be cross with me otherwise.’

  Phil caught a look of exasperation on Fiona’s face. She was like a collie rounding up an errant bullock which was suddenly diverted by a patch of lush grass. ‘come on, Janey,’ she urged. ‘We’re already late.’

  And they were gone, leaving Phil feeling foolish as he clutched the duvet that was all he’d had to cover himself.

  Phil never fully understood the nature of Janey’s festival, and who St Eevo might be. Hagiography not being his strongest subject, he felt at something of a disadvantage. Thea’s temper had been badly affected by the dawn summons, and once she had organised the shuffling trip to the loo and back, she returned to her bed with an injunction against any further demands until eight at the soonest. Phil was left on his narrow precarious bed to try and get some more sleep, hoping in spite of himself that Thea would be lying equally wakeful upstairs. He had taken two painkillers, which worked well enough for him to shift position without anything more than a dull twinge.

  Tuesday, he reminded himself. Nearly thirty-six hours since he had hurt his back. Jeremy, his best detective inspector, had said all the right things about his unscheduled absence, during a second phone conversation the previous evening. ‘Give it a good rest,’ he’d advised. ‘That way, you’ll be back all the sooner.’ Phil had not troubled himself to report the doctor’s words about being as active as possible once the worst of the pain was over. He knew that by the end of the week he would be itching to catch up with what was happening, and chafing at missing new cases that he ought rightfully to be overseeing. By then, the main panic about the ricin thing would surely have died down and something else would have moved to the top of the heap. The West Midlands was a volatile region these days, with tensions between the three main racial groups keeping the enforcers of the law on their toes. People tended to forget the large population of non-Muslim Asians: the Sikhs and Hindus, who were getting tired of being tarred as potential terrorists by the hopelessly ignorant whites. Sometimes Phil suspected that it wasn’t really ignorance at all, but something much darker. It was as if the whites had been looking for any excuse to release their pent-up bigotry, to attack anybody with a brown skin on the grounds that they looked like Muslims and were therefore fair game. Phil had a neighbour in Cirencester whose parents came from Goa. They were staunch Roman Catholics, but that didn’t protect the family from the same scattergun abuse that every Asian was currently vulnerable to. Why, the feeling went, should anybody go to the trouble of sifting out the different groups, when essentially they were all Pakis?

  But here he was in the sheltered, complacent Cotswolds, where such considerations were completely ignored as if they were a thousand miles away, rather than a mere forty or fifty. Here, the people were more likely to get passionate about long-forgotten saints than about anything as crude as racial tensions. It was restful, he had to admit, but it didn’t strike him as very real.

  With a quick mental jerk, he caught himself up. Reality existed in these villages just as violently as it did anywhere else. He knew from direct experience that people could kill each other for reasons that might seem daft or bizarre to the urban criminals of Birmingham, but they ended up with the same miserable consequences for those involved.

  But not in Temple Guiting, he assured himself. This little cluster of quaintly pretty dwellings, with its trees and gardens and snaking river, was quietly dreaming its summer away, the birds singing and the lawnmowers buzzing. Dawn sounds wafted through the open window, lulling him into a semi-doze that was almost as good as sleep.

  But – surely that couldn’t be a lawnmower? Perhaps i
t was a milking machine, from some early rising dairy farm or was it possible that someone had made a very prompt start on shearing a large flock of sheep? He listened closely for a minute. If he had to identify the source of the sound, he would have said it must be a chainsaw. A chainsaw before six a.m. seemed as unlikely as a lawnmower – it hinted at a crisis of some kind. A tree fallen onto somebody, perhaps. The road blocked. But why would anybody want to get through at this hour? Janey, he supposed, and her fellow festival-goers. Perhaps St Eevo was the patron saint of log-fellers, and they had to cut down a tree as part of the ritual. Entirely possible, he concluded with a wry sigh. Just as it was possible that the whole population of the village was surrounding the events in a large circle, hand-in-hand and singing the national song of Finland as the sun rose from behind the hills.

  As minutes passed and the sound persisted, Phil was increasingly anxious to know what it was. But he could not call for Thea again, for fear of her anger. So he threw back the duvet and edged his legs onto the floor. The painkillers were still in control, and his legs moved with an encouraging ease. With more difficulty he pulled on some clothes, and then he stood up and walked shakily across to the passageway leading to the front door. It was much better than he had expected. Provided he avoided any jarring to his back, it was perfectly possible to walk normally. An upright posture, with no bends or twists, was virtually painless. He inhaled deeply, and that didn’t hurt either.

  Opening the door was harder, because there was a catch at knee-level, for some stupid reason, but he managed it without mishap.

  Outside, morning was definitely well under way. A pinkish light lit the sky and, where the trees caught it, every leaf was outlined sharp and clear. Just the ticket for an atavistic bit of rural festivity, he concluded.

  The chainsaw, if that’s what it was, had ceased the instant he stepped outside, but now he could hear shouts and a motor engine revving. It all fitted with his guesses about fallen trees and trapped vehicles. Harder to work out was the exact location of the calamity. It sounded very close – probably only a few yards from where the drive leading to Hector’s Nook parted company with the road running through the village.

  He walked slowly and steadily, wishing he could simply teleport himself to the place where the noises were coming from. It was akin to the clogged progress in a dream, everything flowing at the wrong pace, the drama unfolding without him, just around the bend. He wished he had a walking stick to help keep himself straight.

  But he got there in the end. The chainsaw started up again, for a few moments, and another motor vehicle arrived. When he finally emerged onto the road, he saw to his left a small group of men, one wearing a hard hat, and a four-wheel-drive emergency services vehicle parked close by.

  It was far from clear what had happened. Trees cast long shadows across the road, but there was no sign of any injury or damage. He tried to increase his speed for the last few yards. ‘Anybody hurt?’ he asked, as soon as he was within speaking distance.

  A man in fire service uniform glanced at him, and seemed to debate with himself whether to reply. ‘Nothing serious, sir,’ he said. ‘We’re nearly done here now – soon get things back to normal.’

  The sir was a courtesy; Phil had no expectation that the man could have known who he was. He was wearing a black T-shirt and green shorts, and must have looked the part of a local villager to everybody’s satisfaction.

  ‘Yes, but what happened?’ he persisted.

  ‘A tree came down, that’s all. A beech – they do that without warning sometimes. A lady reported the road being blocked and urgent traffic needing to get through.’ The man pursed his lips. ‘Turned out to be something of an exaggeration,’ he added. ‘But it’s all finished with now.’

  The man in the hard hat looked mutinous, as he listened to this speech. ‘Who’s going to pay me, that’s what I want to know?’ he growled. ‘Double time for unsocial hours. Three hundred quid, somebody owes me.’

  ‘Whose land is the tree on?’ Phil asked, incautiously.

  ‘Don’t you know, sir? Aren’t you local then?’ the fire officer asked sharply.

  ‘Just staying a few days,’ Phil said. ‘Heard the chainsaw and thought I ought to investigate.’

  The officer narrowed his eyes. ‘You don’t look too well, if I may say so. Best get back home and catch up with some sleep. The excitement’s over for the day.’

  And Phil quite naturally believed him.

  Chapter Four

  Thea hadn’t stirred when he got back to the house, and he slipped indoors unheard. But the temporary bed held no appeal for him, so he sat stiffly at the kitchen table with a mug of tea planning to wait for her to wake. It was still not quite seven, and already the day was well under way. He felt he’d done more than enough thinking already, so he got up and went on an exploration of the house. His back seemed to be coping well with all the exercise, although it lurked like a troll under a footbridge, just waiting its chance to leap out at him and stab him with a renewed agony. In a small back room, where he had not yet been, there were perhaps fifty stacks of magazines, reaching to waist height. Carefully stacked, clean and orderly, it was far from clear just what they were. Unlike books, there were no spines to read, but it soon became apparent that they dated back several decades. Unable to bend or lift, all he could do was browse from one stack to another, examining the top magazine on each one. He grew more excited as it became apparent that this was a seriously valuable collection. Country Life, The Lady, Homes and Gardens, Horse and Hound – the theme being rural life throughout the twentieth century. He found copies of Country Life dating back to 1904 in a corner stack, and assumed they went even further into the past if he could only explore properly.

  There was a desk and chair in the middle of the room, and he took a magazine almost at random and went to sit with it. His back was throbbing and he had difficulty getting comfortable, but soon he was immersed in the property section of a Country Life from 1916. He read every word of every advertisement, the great mansions with a dozen bedrooms or more, offered for sums that wouldn’t buy a beach hut less than a century later. Where were they now, these houses? A few, he supposed, were still gracing the pages of the same magazine, handled by the same agents. Knight, Frank & Rutley, for example, had survived the intervening years seemingly unchanged. Other familiar names jumped out at him. The Cotswolds featured prominently, then as now, as a place for the rich to live, and he was intrigued to see Temple Guiting Manor, looking very much as he’d seen it the day before, available for rent. He read articles about the War, carefully worded to give no hint of despair or even undue anxiety. Life carried on back home, people bought and sold houses – and a lot of renting out went on, as well, he noted. Families reeling from the loss of their sons, perhaps, suddenly finding the big house too much for them, but loath to sell it outright. It made him think, almost for the first time in his life, of some of the forgotten consequences of such a catastrophic loss of life amongst the land-owning classes as well as the workers.

  Thea found him still reading when she came down at eight. ‘Oh, there you are!’ she said, staring round at the room. ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘Did you know all these were here?’

  ‘We’re not supposed to touch them. I thought I told you.’

  ‘But they’re amazing. You should be thrilled – don’t these count as a primary source for historians?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose they do,’ she said carelessly. ‘Do you want some breakfast?’

  Over coffee and toast, Phil told her about the fallen tree and the buzzing chainsaw. ‘Did I dream the bit before that, when the Janey woman turned up?’ he wondered.

  ‘If you did, I had the same dream.’ She frowned. ‘Seems a bit weird, two things happening before anybody else was up.’

  ‘I’m assuming Janey called the fire brigade about the tree, which provides a nice tidy connection,’ he said, in a policeman sort of voice. ‘Although rather a coincidence. It wasn’t the least b
it windy.’

  ‘And you walked all the way up the drive?’ Her tone was accusing. ‘With your back?’

  ‘No, no. I left the back behind on the bed.’

  ‘Ha, ha. Well, if you’re well enough to do that, you can jolly well come exploring with me today. I don’t want to be cooped up here if I don’t have to.’

  ‘Which reminds me – isn’t it today you have to feed that snake?’

  ‘How does that remind you?’

  ‘I don’t know, quite. Something about coops and cages, I guess.’

  ‘So, we’ll go for a little walk, OK?’

  He sighed. ‘If we can go slowly, I might manage half a mile or so,’ he said grudgingly. ‘But I already feel it’s time for a nap. Do you know who St Eevo is? How do you spell it? What did he do? And why?’

  ‘They choose a different British saint every month, and have a little ceremony to remember him or her. I was looking forward to hearing the story of St Yvo. Y-V-O. Janey said it would be better coming to it fresh and learning about him from their ceremony than if she explained in advance. She was really quite excited about it. I got the feeling it’s her main interest in life.’ Phil clicked his tongue derisively, but Thea merely smiled. ‘I think it’s rather sweet,’ she said. ‘I assumed, obviously, that I’d be here on my own and glad of a diversion when she suggested it. I don’t remember her saying it’d be four in the morning, though.’

  ‘She probably said sunrise, and you thought it would be about six.’

  ‘Probably,’ she agreed. ‘Silly me.’

  ‘I wouldn’t mind going back for another look at that tree later on. We could drive to the top of the lane, to give us a start, and then stroll past on the way into the village. A big old beech it is. They have very shallow roots, you know. Doesn’t take much to fell them, once they reach a certain age. The drought will have had something to do with it, loosening the roots’ hold on the soil. I assumed to start with that it must have been dead, but it had quite a lot of leaves. The branches were across the road. Somebody’s going to have a nice stack of firewood.’