by Rebecca Tope
‘You knew Bligh was Rupert’s father, too?’ It seemed too late to withhold the whole story from Pritchett. Besides, the man had somehow earned the right to be kept informed, even if his son was still under suspicion as a murderer.
The response was frigid. ‘Gossip,’ he said tersely. ‘Idle gossip.’
‘Um—’
‘In any case, what would that have to do with anything? Rupert Temple-Pritchett is a wastrel, always has been. Made his sister’s life a misery. Mocked all her interests, said it was her fault the little one died, tried to break the trust. A real waste of space, that little beast. If he was a cuckoo in the nest, nobody would be surprised.’
‘I think that’s been proven,’ Phil mumbled, trying to reconcile this description with the suave Rupert he knew.
‘Well, that’s not my business. If the dead man is Bligh – and I don’t believe it is – then that lets my Giles off the hook. What possible reason would he have to kill a man he never knew?’
‘But Giles does know something about it,’ Phil insisted. ‘Why else would he be so furious with me?’ The glaring fact that he was speaking to the father of the man who had tried to kill him returned to Phil with some force. ‘And he’s in real trouble as a result.’
Pritchett made a wordless sound. ‘No need to remind me of that,’ he said. ‘But first we’ve got to reconstruct his liver and much of his large intestine. Leave me alone, man. It was a bad day when you ever came to Temple Guiting.’
Phil rang off, feeling there was more than a grain of truth in that.
Outside, the skies continued to be grey, the thick clouds producing a sense of claustrophobia after the previous weeks. Phil worried about Thea, and then drifted into niggling away at the implications of his conversation with Pritchett and mentally revising the jigsaw that Thea had been so sure was complete. His focus was increasingly on Rupert – Rupert who was keeping company with a young woman, without her father’s knowledge, and who was regarded by Robin as a waste of space and by another person as a bastard. Robin and Soraya on his first encounter with them had said they ‘saw him around’ from time to time, presumably when he was visiting Miss Deacon, Soraya keeping silent about her intimacy with him. Nobody liked him, it seemed, and yet he’d come over as decent enough in his chats with Phil and Thea.
Thea believed she had worked it all out during the night. She had switched on the light and made notes, in the small hours. She had checked them again in the morning, adding arrows and more notes, until she thought she had the whole thing clear. She had remembered clues and small remarks that Phil himself had missed. But the real surprise had been her abrupt alteration in mood. All week she had irritably avoided the murder investigation as much as she could. Interested in Janey and Fiona for their Saints and Martyrs club, she had taken much less notice of Rupert or Stephen. She had insisted that she didn’t care who the bones had belonged to or how they’d got where they had. The catastrophe involving Giles, and Phil’s brush with death, had not changed her mind. What had, then?
Seeing Rupert and Soraya together, he realised. Something about that unlikely couple had pressed a button for Thea and, from one moment to the next, she was engaged. Belatedly, inappropriately, passionately engaged.
Damn it.
Passion was where Thea had begun in her unravelling of the mystery. ‘Everybody we’ve met seems to have a great enthusiasm about something,’ she noted. ‘Starting with Janey and Fiona and their saints, of course. But there’s Giles – though with him enthusiasm isn’t quite the word. Rage is more like it, from what you’ve said. Now there’s Rupert and Soraya obviously crazy about each other. And Robin, a passionately over-protective father.’
‘According to Fiona, that’s not over-protectiveness, it’s dependence,’ Phil said.
‘Same thing in the long run.’
‘OK. So what about Stephen Pritchett? He’s not passionate about anything, is he?’
She pushed out her lips thoughtfully. ‘Not really. He seemed almost defeated by Giles going missing and his wife being so useless. Maybe Stephen’s the odd one out, and really not part of the story at all.’
As a result of his telephone conversation, Phil thought Stephen sounded like a man with very little left to lose, and no secrets worth keeping. From the point of view of a police detective, this lack of affect would be a sign of guilt – a man with so much pressure and fear inside him that all he could do was keep the lid down tight and operate on autopilot. But Thea believed the opposite. She assumed that people with obvious passions were capable of murder. ‘It was years ago,’ she reminded him when he’d queried her assumptions. ‘That’s plenty of time to deal with the stress and get back to how you were before.’
‘Is it?’ He had tried to decide whether she was right about that. ‘Doesn’t committing murder change a person forever?’
‘I suppose we’d all like to think so,’ was as far as she would go in reply.
Phil had listened intently to his lover’s analysis of what had happened to Graham Bligh, trying to find flaws in her reasoning, trying to object that she had nothing concrete to base her theories on. She had waved it all aside. ‘You’ll see that I’m right,’ she insisted. ‘Always go for the simplest solution – I’ve learnt that much over the past year.’
He had puffed out his cheeks at this. He and Thea had been involved in a number of killings since they’d met, and, as far as he could see, not one of them had been explained very simply. Motives remained firmly hidden, the guilty covered their tracks and things were often not at all what they seemed. ‘Simple?’ he had echoed. ‘You must be joking.’
‘Not at all. I mean – once you know what everybody really wants, it all falls into place.’
‘I see,’ he lied.
If it hadn’t been for his damaged back, there would never have been any question of letting her go off alone. She had taken shameless advantage of his weakness and he wasn’t sure how long it would take him to forgive her. Even if everything worked out as seamlessly as she predicted, there would still be a nagging resentment at the way she had behaved.
But it wouldn’t work out seamlessly – it stood no chance of doing so. Thea’s hypothesis was that Janey’s devoted friend Fiona had swung a pickaxe at Graham Bligh’s head, in order to put an end to the paternity proceedings, then buried him, perhaps with the help of Giles or even Robin, first having stripped him of all his clothes. She had convinced herself that Janey could not cope with any further family pressure, and that loyalty to her brother only made it worse.
‘They were twins,’ she kept saying. ‘What greater bond can there be than that?’
‘But why Fiona?’ Phil demanded. ‘Why not Rupert himself, or Bernard Temple-Pritchett, or even Janey’s husband? Why on earth are you so sure it was Fiona?’
‘I just am,’ she persisted. ‘And then I think there was a closing of ranks, so anybody who suspected what had happened made a pact not to give her away. And if they did assist in hiding the body they had even more reason to remain silent.’
Phil had grasped handfuls of his own hair in despair. ‘My sweet Thea – normally I would listen to you. You know I would. But this time you’ve gone right off the rails. It absolutely doesn’t hold water. Promise me you won’t confront or accuse anybody. Go and talk to them, if you must. But have a care, because I’m perfectly certain you’ve got it wrong.’
She had at least undertaken not to make any direct accusations. ‘I never intended to anyway,’ she said. ‘I just want to see if I can get her to incriminate herself. Don’t worry – I’ll be perfectly all right.’
Chapter Eighteen
An hour passed, with Phil awkwardly pacing the ground floor of Miss Deacon’s house, Thea’s spaniel at his heels. ‘She should be phoning us any minute now,’ he told the dog. ‘I’m not going to wait much longer. The stupid woman’s going to get herself into all kinds of trouble, I know she is. She thinks she understands much more than she really does.’
Hepzie wagged her long
tail slowly, looking up into his face. She really was a pretty dog, he acknowledged fondly. A good match for her lovely mistress.
The phone remained silent for a further half hour, at which point Phil could restrain himself no longer. He was going to take his car and track Thea down, however much agony it caused him. What kind of a man simply stayed at home waiting for his girlfriend to solve a murder single-handed? It was beneath his dignity. Besides, when the story finally emerged amongst his colleagues, the loss of face would be unbearable. Except, he reminded himself, Thea had it wrong. Every time he went through it, her theory acquired more holes, more false assumptions and dead ends. It even occurred to him that she might have deliberately invented the whole thing as a smokescreen. With a sinking feeling, he eyed the spaniel, and said, ‘Damn it, I’ll have to go and find her.’
Hepzie eyed him back, and wagged her tail slightly faster.
First he ensured that the back door was locked and all windows closed. Then he let himself out of the front, pushing Hepzibah back into the house and telling her to stay. Dejectedly the dog did as she was told and slunk off to the living room. Phil climbed carefully into his car, which smelt terrible. With disgust he soon tracked the smell to a quarter of a pork pie that he had left on the back seat a week ago, intending to fetch it for Hepzie soon after he arrived. In the sweltering heat it had undergone several transformations, until it was a sodden stinking mess that left a greenish mark on the upholstery when he gathered it up and threw it into one of Miss Deacon’s hydrangeas.
He spent two minutes adjusting his seat, trying to find an angle that his back could cope with. There was no comfortable position, but some were slightly less excruciating than others. When he depressed the clutch, a new pain shot up his leg, all the way to his shoulder. ‘I’m falling apart,’ he gasped aloud. ‘This is ridiculous.’
But he refused to give up. The engine started at the first turn of the key, and he reversed across the gravel, before turning up the drive. The act of pulling the steering wheel to the left sent the same pain up and down his entire left side. But once on the straight, with no gear changes, it subsided. Holding himself rigidly upright, he found it became possible. At the top of the drive, he turned right without undue anguish and proceeded sedately into the village centre.
His mind knew no rest, as he struggled with an unwholesome stew of logic, ethics, professional obligations and annoyance with Thea. As he came in sight of the ancient trees that seemed to represent Temple Guiting better than any of its buildings did, he was reminded of his first journey beneath them, almost a week earlier. In some ways too much had happened, and in others too little. He and Thea had not cemented their relationship as he had hoped, they had not been free of outside worries or uninterrupted in their hideaway. He had to force himself to concentrate on the business in hand – the identification and secure incarceration of the person who had murdered Graham Bligh. He was a policeman and it was his duty.
Once more, he ran through what Thea had said over breakfast. Somehow, her certainty had almost persuaded him that she was right. Her theory was riddled with holes, but the way she batted all his arguments away gave him a flickering confidence in her. Thea was not stupid, he reminded himself. She was good at seeing into people’s hearts and minds. While he had been miserably nursing his back on the sunny lawn, she might well have been quietly mulling away at the murder, without letting him know. Certainly, she could not have been anything like as disengaged as she’d pretended.
And she liked Janey Holmes. She had taken to her right away, last Saturday morning, and consistently defended her ever since. Perhaps she understood something about Fiona’s feeling that Phil could not. Perhaps all this Famous Five stuff now had arisen from no more than something she had seen in Fiona’s eyes or heard in Fiona’s voice.
His first stop was the village shop, where Thea had told him she might find Fiona, because she was on the rota for running the shop. Exactly what she planned to do after that had not been clear, even to Thea, but whatever it was must have taken place by this time. ‘If that works out smoothly, the whole thing might be over by coffee time,’ Thea had said. Neither of them had really thought it possible.
It took him a full minute to get out of the car, find his balance and move to the shop door. It was standing open, held by a man Phil had not seen before. ‘We’re ever so sorry to leave. You’ve been so kind – and the weather! Weren’t we lucky?’ He was addressing the woman standing at the shop counter, who nodded and smiled, but seemed anxious to deal with another man waiting to pay for a basket of goods.
‘Well, I’ll be off then,’ said the man in the doorway. ‘Oops! Sorry, mate. Didn’t see you there.’ He had nudged Phil’s shoulder as he backed out, still beaming gratitude and farewell into the shop.
‘That’s OK,’ gritted Phil, who had automatically flinched away, causing grievous consequences for his recalcitrant disc.
‘You local?’ asked the man. ‘Haven’t seen you before.’
Mind your own business, Phil wanted to shout. He gave an ambiguous waggle of his head and moved purposefully into the shop without a backward glance.
It was not Fiona behind the counter. And the man waiting to be served was another strange face. Phil understood how very few of the local residents he had actually encountered during the week. DS Gladwin would have met more of them, in her investigations.
‘Gosh, I’m glad to see the back of that one,’ said the woman. She smiled at Phil, almost as if she knew who he was. ‘He’s one of a group staying at the Manor, and they’ve been in here every day, thinking they’re benefiting the local economy. In fact we’ve had to order in all kinds of nonsense for them, which has been a real pain. How’s your back now?’
Phil blinked and gave her a closer look. No, he was sure he’d never seen her before. ‘It’s a bit better,’ he said. ‘How did you—?’
‘Oh!’ she laughed cheerily. ‘We’ve heard all about you and your bad back. Besides, your lady friend said you might be in about now. She left you a message.’
‘Did she?’
‘She said to tell you she’s gone to Janey’s.’
‘Right. Thank you. Er – did she catch Fiona in here, at all?’
‘Fiona? Oh no. She doesn’t do the shop on a Saturday. She’s got her old dad to see to at the weekends.’ The woman spoke as if Phil should have known this already. The implication was, he supposed, that a senior policeman should know everything about the village and, by and large, this was no bad thing. The sort of woman who would happily vote for a CCTV camera on every corner of every street in the land.
‘Well, thanks,’ he said, turning slowly and contemplating the long walk back to his car, fifteen feet away.
The immediate question now was, did Thea want him to follow her to Janey’s? The obvious answer was yes. Why would she have left the message otherwise? On the other hand, it might simply have been intended to set his mind at rest. No harm would come to her there. In fact, of all his many worries, harm to Thea was not amongst the top three. He trusted her not to provoke anybody into deliberate aggression – and with Giles Pritchett safely trussed up in hospital with imminent liver failure, she was unlikely to be under any real threat.
He drove slowly, resisting as far as he could any necessity for changing gear. Why hadn’t he equipped himself with an automatic car, he wondered in frustration. How much easier life would be if he had. The seat was a fraction too far back for comfort, so he had to stretch his left leg to depress the clutch, and that hurt. With gritted teeth, he followed the tenuous lead his annoying girfriend had given him
Going to Janey’s had not been part of Thea’s original plan. Her quarry had been Fiona, the woman who knew everybody’s business, and who had cast strange glances at Soraya, as well as at Thea herself. Many times that morning he had wished he’d refrained from casting aspersions on the woman’s motives. It turned out that his careless remarks had sparked the train of inexorable logic that had led Thea to her alarming conclusion.
At least, it had if she had been honest with him. With every passing moment he feared she had not. And, unless she could supply a very good reason indeed for her deceit, he was going to find it hard to forgive her.
Her car was parked in the oval sweep of top-quality stone chippings; the house looked unperturbed. No shrill sounds of fighting women, no atmosphere of conflict. Phil stumbled painfully to the front door and rang the bell.
Thea herself opened it, with a smile that felt unpleasantly smug and superior. ‘Perfect timing!’ she said. ‘You can drive then?’
‘Are you all right? I’ve got something to tell you. It changes the whole thing.’
‘Hush!’ she warned him. ‘Not now. Have a bit of sense.’
Why, he demanded of himself, was he in the role of the clumsy tyro and his untrained girlfriend so obviously in charge? He felt like shouting Don’t you know who I am?
‘We’re discussing St Melor,’ Thea said calmly, as she led him through to the conservatory. Under the much greyer skies, it had a more sinister atmosphere. The greenery of the plants dominated everything and the humidity made it difficult to breathe freely.
‘Go on, then,’ he invited. ‘Fill me in on what I’ve missed.’
Janey Holmes was sitting on a cane sofa, her arms resting on the thick cushions, her head back. ‘Hello,’ she said. ‘Excuse me for not getting up. Once I’m down, it seems such an effort.’
‘I know the feeling,’ he said.
‘Of course you do. How is the back now?’
‘It comes and goes,’ he said vaguely. ‘It helps if I can distract myself from thinking about it.’
‘Of course it does,’ she said.
He looked at her more closely. There was something dreamy about her, like someone spaced out on Prozac, not fully connected with the real world. He glanced at Thea for a hint, but all she did was gently raise one eyebrow, which he took to mean Just follow my lead, OK.