Blood in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  Phil was inwardly groaning at the use of words such as bally and tizz. It could only be affectation. The man couldn’t have been born before the mid-Sixties, when such language had already been obsolete for years. Either that, or he had been recently involved in a Noel Coward production and couldn’t get out of character.

  ‘The Manor?’ Thea echoed, with a glance at Phil.

  ‘Big place, on the right as you leave the village centre,’ offered Rupert. ‘It’s let out as a hideaway, self-catering sort of idea. Never know who’s there, of course. Hardly ever see them. Last thing they need is to get involved in a murder hunt. Senseless,’ he concluded with a searching look at Phil.

  Phil felt besieged, as if they both wanted some reassuring words from him. The claim that the police were questioning everybody in Temple Guiting was a clear overstatement. There had been a general plea for information and probably a handful of interviews, but so far there had been no door-to-door enquiries. More interesting was his need to discover the real reason for the man’s visit. He met Temple-Pritchett’s eyes, fancying he caught a flicker of evasion in their dark depths. After all, his mission was fundamentally aggressive, when you thought about it. Aggressive, familiar and futile, Phil added to himself.

  ‘You’re asking Phil to call off the police investigation?’ Thea summarised, her voice full of challenge. ‘Isn’t that rather unreasonable?’

  ‘No, no, I wouldn’t presume to go as far as that,’ said the man. ‘But perhaps if they could just avoid some of the more spectacular nonsenses that always seem to accompany the forces of the law. That’s all we can ask these days, of course. These days of vice and folly and so forth.’ He chuckled briefly. ‘In particular, I might draw your attention to my beloved relative, who I fancy you met at the weekend, as well as subsequently, if my sources are correct.’

  ‘Janey,’ Thea supplied. ‘She’s your sister, I understand.’ The utter unlikelihood of the relationship struck Phil all over again, and he waited to hear it denied.

  ‘Indeed she is. The dear girl. At least in a sort of a way.’

  Phil observed his own prejudices working hard. Obese people were never from the upper classes. They did not have drawling languid brothers displaced from the 1930s. ‘You mean she and you do not share the same two parents?’ he queried.

  Temple-Pritchett drew in his shapely chin, and looked down his perfectly straight nose. ‘Is that an official enquiry?’ he asked.

  Phil forced himself to remain relaxed. ‘You wanted to talk about her,’ he said. ‘To draw our attention to her.’

  ‘I did,’ the man nodded. ‘So let me explain. Janey and I do share a mother.’ He tightened his lips in a grimace that seemed to Phil to include reluctance, resignation, and a foreknowledge of how his tale would be received. Again, thoughts of acting came to him, rehearsed speeches and careful timing. ‘We were, in fact, born on the same day.’

  ‘Twins,’ said Thea, as if making a triumphant discovery.

  ‘Yes and no,’ said Rupert Temple-Pritchett. ‘It turned out we have different fathers.’

  ‘Blimey!’ said Thea, who reserved this expletive for moments of severe surprise. Her mind was obviously computing the scenario with some relish. ‘Blimey O’Reilly.’

  ‘Not good for dear Mummy’s reputation, obviously. Painfully complicated for the whole family. An open secret across the land, thanks to pioneering laboratory involvement. Little surprise that they decamped to sunny Tuscany and have scarcely been seen around here since.’ Bitterness threaded his words, but Phil detected a different emotion in the voice that uttered them. Something closer to sadness, he thought.

  ‘How long have you known?’ asked Phil.

  ‘Five or six years for sure, although it was talked about for much of our lives, how different we were, how closely I resembled a certain individual who was not married to my mother. My darling sister took the biscuit, so to speak, in the gene war.’

  This overturned Phil’s newly fledged assumption completely. Who could have doubted that of the two, only Rupert could be of the blue blood, the rightful heir? ‘But you kept the name?’ he said.

  ‘Of course I kept the name. What would you expect? The case continues, as we speak.’

  ‘Case?’

  ‘The old man has his legal people seeking to eliminate me from the Pritchett bloodline. A bit rich, you might think, when it’s Mamma who carries the true Temple inheritance. But you can see his point, from a husbandly stand. The ghastly truth can only be that she hopped from bed to bed without pausing long enough to give the prime progenitor time to implant his seed and raise the barricades against further incursion. Not that we can ever know which that was. She says she can’t remember the precise sequence of events.’ Again a speech delivered with perfect nuance – the dash of wry humour, the awareness of being at the centre of a very peculiar story.

  Phil scratched his hairline in an effort to imagine the scenario, mild embarrassment hindering him from asking for further details.

  ‘It isn’t quite as bizarre as you think,’ Rupert said. ‘They were all very young and feckless. Too much money, a dash of recreational whatnots, no thought for the morrow. The surprise, when you think about it, is that it doesn’t happen more often.’

  ‘I have heard of it happening,’ said Thea. ‘My brother had a dog – it had three puppies by a Jack Russell and one by a labrador, all in the same litter.’

  ‘My mother was a bit of a dog,’ agreed Rupert with such a straight face that Thea giggled.

  ‘So who was – is – your father?’ Phil asked.

  ‘Off the scene,’ said Rupert shortly. ‘Out of the picture. Gone and forgotten.’ He pinched his own nose tightly, as if to stem an inconvenient emotion, and then brushed at an invisible speck on his immaculate trousers. His mouth appeared to need tight control.

  ‘I bet the lawyers are ecstatic,’ said Phil. ‘There can’t be any precedents for something like this.’

  ‘Seemingly not,’ Rupert nodded.

  ‘And Janey? What does she think about it?’

  The grimace returned, deeper this time. ‘Janey chooses not to think about it at all. She has far greater calls on her attention. You will have noticed her size? There’s a reason for it.’ He met each pair of eyes in turn, with a challenge to avoid flippancy.

  ‘Oh?’ said Thea, with a perfect mix of interest and sympathy.

  ‘She had a tragedy not so very long ago, and resorted to sugar for consolation. She doubled her body weight in six months. And then doubled it again, very nearly, in the next two years. Not a pretty sight, not something her nearest and dearest wished to see. But there was no stopping her.’ He sighed.

  Phil was doing sums in his head. If the woman had been seven stone to start with, the claim was just about possible, but he made allowance for exaggeration. ‘Poor woman,’ he said, realising for the first time that Janey must be nearly ten years older than his original guess. Her twin brother was certainly in his mid-forties at least. ‘She looks younger than you,’ he added.

  ‘That’s her size,’ Rupert agreed. ‘It does that. Keeps the skin smooth, I assume. But the fact is, she’s forty-one, the same as me.’

  Phil had to stop himself from remarking that Temple-Pritchett looked rather more than that. ‘Well, it’s a pity,’ he said feebly.

  ‘It is, but she gets by. She’s everybody’s darling, is Janey, with her societies and good works and so forth. Her attitude to life is exemplary. She works for the beleaguered farmers, filling in those devilish forms for them, hardly taking a penny in return. She’s got a good brain in there. But obviously she isn’t happy,’ he concluded with a regretful little shake of his head. ‘Not happy at all. And an unhappy Janey Holmes has never been anybody’s cup of tea. A lot of humouring and tiptoeing and so forth get called into play. Exhausting, I might tell you.’

  Phil recognised his own reaction as similar to that of the day before, when speaking to Pritchett. Once again, it was as if he was being subtly hypnotised or manip
ulated. ‘I appreciate you telling us all this,’ he said. ‘But—’

  ‘What does this have to do with my asking you to call off your investigators?’ Rupert supplied. ‘Basically, it’s to protect my poor sad Janey. This sort of thing doesn’t do her any good. It’s sure to remind her, you see.’ His gaze drifted over the shrubs, and his arms seemed to clamp to his sides as if to quell a sudden pain. ‘To be honest, it’s reminding all of us.’

  ‘What of?’ asked Thea.

  Rupert sighed. ‘I may as well tell you. Don’t you find, though—’ he looked across the lawn at nothing, diverting swiftly into a parenthetical observation, ‘that in a village there are always a hundred little stories, all woven in and out of the people’s lives, going back centuries, explaining a few current facts, but chiefly providing no more than background noise? Even now, when there are so many newcomers, and the farms are all gone and the second homes brigade have wreaked devastation, there’s still so much we carry on our shoulders. It makes your job impossible, I would think.’

  ‘Just what I keep saying,’ Thea endorsed. ‘There’s so much history.’

  ‘Right.’ He gave her an approving glance.

  ‘Janey’s tragedy,’ Phil prompted.

  ‘Ah, yes.’ Again the pinched nose. ‘The fact is, she had a baby, you see. A lovely little girl, the fairest hair you ever saw, beautiful long fingers. She died one night. Cot death, they said, in the end. After the police and coroner and shrinks had probed every fibre of her mother’s life and shaken her all to pieces. She never got over it. She was never the same person again.’ There was a fierceness in his eyes that Phil interpreted as grief imperfectly concealed.

  ‘Nobody ever does get over it,’ said Thea quietly. ‘Poor Janey. How old was the baby?’

  ‘Five weeks. Funny the way she changed everything in that brief little life. A blink of the eye, but she’d been ours, our little hope and joy. She was called Alethea – lovely name.’

  ‘Alethea?’ Phil looked at his girlfriend. ‘Didn’t Janey react when you told her your name?’

  ‘Not that I noticed. She didn’t make any comment.’

  ‘She thinks you’re here for a reason,’ said Rupert sadly. ‘That it’s meant in some way.’

  Phil and Thea both remained silent. Rupert went on, ‘She isn’t altogether right, you see. That’s why – now do you understand my reasons for coming to talk to you? Janey can’t take pressure or any hint of accusation. She lives in a pink-tinted world where nothing touches her. She has a fragile hold on present-day realities. You can’t always credit what she tells you. Do you see?’ he finished, with a new tone of urgency.

  ‘Yes,’ said Phil gloomily. ‘I see. But there’s no way I can agree to what you ask.’ He remembered the message from Gladwin. ‘By the way, could you let me have your address? Apparently they’ve had some difficulty locating you.’

  ‘Oh dear.’ Rupert sighed theatrically. ‘That’s always a problem. The thing is, I’ve been working away, and gave up my house accordingly. I can give you the place I’m lodging. It’s in Warwick.’ He rattled off a street name and number, which Phil quickly noted down on the pad he kept in his pocket.

  There were more questions in his mind, but he limited himself to finding out how long ago all this had happened. ‘Five years,’ said the man. ‘Our little girl would be five now. Like a princess in a fairytale, with all the godparents gathering to give her their blessings. Instead she’s just one tiny little lost soul.’

  Rupert left as quietly as he’d come, saying his car was parked some distance away. ‘Fancied a little walk,’ he said. They watched him go, saying nothing until he was out of sight.

  ‘Sounds as if that baby meant a lot to him,’ said Thea. ‘What a doting uncle.’

  ‘Must be the twin thing,’ Phil said. ‘Makes for a closer bond. That’s a pretty weird story, though – about the mother.’

  ‘They’re the ones in Italy, aren’t they? I’m losing track.’

  ‘Right,’ he confirmed. ‘Who can blame them for leaving the country? If there’s a case ongoing that centres on her sexual activities, it would be humiliating to know people are talking about it.’

  ‘Yet they’re still together. You’d think it would be enough to break a marriage up.’

  ‘If they only got the official word five years ago, there’s a lot of joint history to hold them together,’ said Phil.

  ‘She sounds a character. Perhaps he loves her, even now.’

  ‘Perhaps he does,’ said Phil, trying to meet her eye or catch hold of her hand and convey that Mr Temple-Pritchett was not the only middle-aged man in love.

  But she missed both hand and eye, getting up to check where her dog had got to, and then going into the house.

  Phil was feeling a distinct benefit from the hour spent in the comfortable garden chair with the cushion placed strategically in the small of his back. He got up and walked gently around the house, testing the muscles for strain, and feeling the damaged spot with tentative fingertips. ‘I really think it’s getting better,’ he told Thea, who had not asked. ‘I might be driving again by the weekend.’

  ‘Desperate to escape from me?’ she asked. It struck him like a slap. She was annoyed about something.

  ‘What’s the matter?’

  Where almost anyone else would have said Nothing, Thea prepared an honest answer. ‘It isn’t really your fault, I know,’ she began. ‘But I don’t like the way we’re seen as the centre of this investigation, even with you out of action and me not being involved at all. That farmer, letting the horses out – if he did. That was infuriating – the more so every time I think of it. And Janey not telling me anything important about herself – just rambling on about her martyrs and saints. And that Stephen man, begging you to find his son for him. I don’t like any of it. I wanted a nice simple holiday,’ she shouted.

  ‘But most of all you’re cross about my back,’ he said softly. ‘And so am I, darling. Believe me, so am I.’ He reached out for her hand, pulling her towards him. She didn’t resist, but knelt on the grass beside him, resting her head on his legs. He stroked her hair. ‘The frustration is excruciating,’ he said. ‘After such high hopes. And yet, you know, we did have a fantastic day on Sunday, didn’t we? That was as good as anything ever gets, and we ought not to let anything else overshadow it. I think I realised, even at the time, that we’d reached some sort of peak.’

  ‘Mmm,’ came her muffled voice. ‘Not much comfort, really.’

  He sighed, sensing a grey shadow creeping towards them, that might never entirely go away. Life was like this most of the time, after all. Even in glorious sunshine, with birds singing and flowers blooming, there were always fears and worries and people intruding with their calamities. ‘At least it’s other people’s problems we’re being bothered with,’ he tried. ‘We’re all right, aren’t we?’

  ‘Apart from your back,’ she reminded him, her face turned away. He had a nasty feeling that she might be silently weeping, that things might be worse than he supposed.

  ‘Thea?’ he said. ‘Look at me.’

  Slowly she obeyed. There were no traces of tears on her cheeks, but her eyes looked blurry. He gripped her shoulders and lifted her face to his. The kiss was slow and rich and deep. It united them completely, sealing them together, erasing annoyances and anxieties. At least, it did for Phil. He could not be sure how it was for her. You could never be sure how it was for the other person.

  As he had known was likely, DS Gladwin put in another appearance just as he and Thea were wondering about an evening meal. ‘I could have phoned,’ she admitted, ‘but somehow I wanted this to be face-to-face.’ She eyed Thea carefully. ‘I hope you’re getting enough peace and quiet to compensate for all this disruption?’

  Thea smiled dryly at this repeat demonstration of empathy. It was beginning to seem more like a device for disarming animosity than something entirely genuine. ‘I am meant to be working,’ she said. ‘I have to remind myself of that every now and
then. It isn’t a holiday for either of us.’

  ‘But it must feel like it, with this amazing weather. If all this hadn’t happened, you’d be off exploring, I’ll bet.’

  ‘Depends what you mean by all this. If it’s the bones, then yes, in theory. But Phil’s back has blighted everything, anyway. What you might call a double whammy, I suppose.’

  ‘If I hadn’t been here on Tuesday, instead of reporting for work, the bones might never have been found,’ Phil summarised.

  ‘They would, though,’ Gladwin argued. ‘Of course they would. Somebody else would have spotted them, probably that same morning. They weren’t hard to see.’

  Phil smiled and shrugged, as if might-have-beens were quite beside the point. He waited for his new colleague to explain her reason for the visit. In the pause, Thea got up and made her excuses. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I’m not going off in a huff. I have to see to a few things in the house.’

  Gladwin watched her go into the house before speaking. ‘The skeleton has almost been assembled now,’ she reported. ‘A couple of ribs and some of the smaller bones missing, that’s all. And the lab people say the hole in the skull was the cause of death. At least, he was alive when it happened.’ She paused, watching his face. ‘We’re really not much further forward than before, to put it in a nutshell. I don’t suppose you’ve gleaned anything that might be useful?’

  Phil thought about the emotionally fragile Janey and wondered whether to say anything. Gladwin noticed the hesitation. ‘What?’ she said.

  ‘We had another visitor earlier today. Rupert Temple-Pritchett. He came to ask me to call your dogs off, because they’re upsetting the locals.’

  ‘Dogs? Oh, I see what you mean. What a bloody cheek.’

  ‘I got the impression he’s quite involved with what’s going on. Did you know his sister had a baby, five years ago? It died and she hasn’t been right since.’