by Rebecca Tope
‘Not really. She wouldn’t be able to sign cremation papers, strictly speaking. Where are the parents?’
‘Dubai, watching bird migrations.’
‘There’ll be a way around it, then. And maybe it’ll be a burial,’ he added hopefully. ‘The paperwork’s much easier if that’s the case.’
‘Do you want me to put in a word for a green burial?’ She was half joking, but it wouldn’t be the first time the idea had arisen.
‘No, no. There’s no way at all I could undertake that.’ He chuckled. ‘Pun.’
She was too engaged in thoughts of etymology to laugh back. ‘Aren’t words amazing?’ she said instead. ‘The way they can carry such layers of meaning.’
‘Don’t start,’ he said, still giggling. ‘I must go. Somebody might be trying to get through. Thanks, Thea. You’ve cheered me up enormously.’
‘All part of the service,’ she said lightly. ‘When will I see you, I wonder?’ There had been a number of occasions where he had brought his children for a visit to the Cotswolds during one of her house-sitting jobs. Wistfully, she realised that there was scant chance of that happening this time.
‘When you’ve finished there, I guess. Is there anything else in the pipeline?’
‘I had an email from a man in Farmington, a few weeks ago, but he hasn’t come back to me. It’s nice there.’ She thought of her wintry stay in Hampnett, a year before, and the handsome little town of Northleach. They were close to Farmington. ‘I don’t know a single thing about it,’ she said blithely. ‘There’d be plenty of scope for learning new things.’
‘Sounds good. When would that be?’
‘July, I think. But he might have changed his mind.’
There was a small silence, before Drew said, ‘Well …’
‘Yes, you must go. Me too. I should pay one last visit to the Bagendon house, before the people come back tomorrow.’
‘You work too hard,’ he said with outrageous irony.
‘Go away. I’ll speak to you soon.’
‘Bye, my love,’ he murmured, leaving her warm and frustrated and reassured.
She’d go in the car, at two o’clock, she decided. Walking there and back was too much, after all. Passing the quarry on foot felt risky, for some reason she wasn’t able to pin down. Nobody was likely to hang around hoping for a second victim to kill. It was the last place anyone would select in which to act suspiciously. Except, didn’t they say that murderers always revisited the scene of the crime? Knowing her luck, she was highly likely to coincide with a surreptitious return of the killer and get herself chucked into the quarry, along with her dog.
She was also reluctant to cross the fields and traverse the little woodland just south of the village. It was too redolent of Sophie and Tiffany and the overheard remarks which had begun the whole sorry involvement with them and their group. There were factors she still didn’t understand – badger setts and ancient sheepfolds, which meant more to local people than she could ever properly grasp. In spite of all her defiance, she fully intended to drive directly to the Bagendon house, water its plants and drive straight back again. She would not speak to a single person, nor stop for any reason at all.
Before that, there was lunch. Giving it the label of an actual meal made her feel she was adhering to a proper routine, like a civilised person. In reality, she simply carved a slice of cheese from a block she’d brought with her, added slices of somewhat elderly and utterly tasteless tomato, and wrapped it all in two slices of brown bread. She didn’t bother to sit down to eat it. Afterwards she ate an apple that had come from the other side of the world, and which hardly tasted of anything, either. Food, she reflected, had become even less interesting to her than it had been for much of her life. Being small and not especially active meant she could survive on a very low intake. It saved money, anyway.
She knew people who ate as a way of filling the time – something she could well understand. It would be easy to devote hours every day to planning and preparing meals which would be consumed in solitude. Pointless, unhealthy and sad, perhaps, but all too temptingly easy. No way was she going to fall into that trap.
Such thoughts, if she wasn’t careful, could lead swiftly to self-pity, which could be difficult to shake off. Before that could happen she forced herself to think about house-sitting, money and the coming summer. But then she slipped into images of the Bagendon house, so well secured and yet so vulnerable. As before, she visualised it burnt to the ground by the same arsonist who tried to burn Galanthus House. No house was truly invulnerable. They had windows which could be broken, doors that could be smashed or penetrated via the letter box or cat flap. If sufficient malevolence existed, anything was possible.
Switching to another track, she found herself thirsting for the latest news about Jack Handy’s progress, as well as confirmation that it was the renegade Tanner family that really had set light to the Fosters’ House. She also wondered about Danny Compton’s parents and Nella Davidson’s state of mind. And quite a lot of other things, once she got started.
When the phone vibrated on the kitchen worktop, her mind zipped through the half-dozen or so possible callers before she picked it up.
It was a text from Damien – something she had never expected to receive. She hadn’t thought her brother capable of such a thing. It said:
SCAN THIS MORNING. BABY GIRL. ALL WELL.
At least it’s not twins, thought Thea, with far less enthusiasm than custom demanded. She quickly replied,
CONGRATULATIONS. ALL VERY EXCITING. KEEP ME POSTED.
Texts were the new telegrams, she reflected. Just as emails were the new letters. Length and content were very similar, as any visit to a Victorian archive would reveal. In the 1890s, business people despatched short notes on a single sheet of paper, often no more than two sentences. They arrived the same day in London and other cities. Communications were admittedly much more all-pervading now, but not a great deal faster, for all the technology available. And who was going to go to the bother of keeping and storing all those emails for posterity? If Damien had sent a telegram, she might have retained it as a piece of family history. As it was, the text would evaporate as if it had never been. It seemed rather a shame.
It was also a disappointment that the message had not been from Drew, Jessica, Higgins or the Fosters. In that order, she had hoped for some words from those people before needing anything from Damien. But a new niece was important. Nieces were special. This one was likely to need all the auntly input she could get.
Gwennie was more than happy to remain curled up in her basket while Thea and Hepzie went off for a drive. She didn’t even open an eye as they left. Mindful of the tortoise tank beside the garage door, Thea reversed the car with extreme care, turning in the wide area in front of the house. She really would have to attend to the hibernating pet as soon as she got back – if it escaped the predations of fox or badger, there might be a risk that it would wake up and disappear if she didn’t do something about it. There was no lid on the tank, but she hoped four inches of slippery glass between the soil and the top would deter it from climbing out. It had been folly, really, to move it at all.
Back across the main road by means of the convoluted roundabouts and tunnels, it seemed almost as slow and varied a route as it would have been on foot. After three left turns, she drew up at the house, thinking how different it was to arrive somewhere by car rather than as a pedestrian. Now she was a more significant person, in possession of a car, in no way suspicious. In the light of recent events, she supposed there would be a strong police presence, watching out for unusual movements – in particular anybody walking over the fields with no immediately obvious purpose.
The house was fine. Silent, clean, empty, it waited contentedly for its people. Thea ran a perfunctory duster over a few surfaces, doing her best to quell complex emotions of disapproval, envy and relief. She found a notepad in the hall, and wrote a brief message. Welcome home. All seems to be in order. Thank y
ou for the commission – I gather Mrs Foster will be paying me? Best wishes Thea Osborne. And she added her mobile number for good measure. Another emotion pushed through: a hint of guilt at taking a hundred pounds for so little work.
But it would surely be worth it for the relief the owners would feel when they got back and found everything in such perfect order. That was worth any amount of money, especially with crime raging through the village and no prosecutions yet made. Complacency crept into the mix, as she gave the place a final review, before locking the door.
It was half past two on a Thursday afternoon and the sun still shone invitingly. The Cotswolds were gorgeous in all seasons, but spring came close to the top for perfection. All dead leaves had long been eradicated from gardens – except for Drew’s property in Broad Campden. Everything was pruned and staked and mulched, ready for the coming months of colour and texture, carefully designed. She had occasionally thought of spending a day with a camera, capturing the stone and the landscape and the gardens, but it had never really happened. The few pictures she’d taken were never as she’d hoped. Shadows fell in the wrong place, or vital details got chopped in half. Photography really wasn’t one of her strong points, she had long ago concluded. So instead, she used her eyes, pausing for long looks at a view or an ancient wall. She still remembered them, at least as well as if she’d taken a picture with a camera. Standing on Cleeve Hill overlooking Winchcombe, or examining Painswick from a distant elevation, and deciding the church was ill-fitting – she could still recall almost every detail.
So far on this job, she had found the big houses of Stratton the most appealing; perhaps all the more so because it was hardly a settlement in its own right, dismissed as an offshoot of Cirencester and given short shrift. In fact, she had a feeling the houses could tell some gripping tales of former times, with the traffic along the Gloucester Road to and from the ancient city close by. The Whiteacres’ home was a prime example, with which she had quite fallen in love at first sight.
The Whiteacre family felt very central to the business of the murder, as well as the attack on Farmer Handy, on the basis of very little hard evidence. Sheila showed up at crucial moments, and Tiffany was closely involved with all the people concerned. Then Jessica had heard Ricky virtually confessing to having committed grievous bodily harm. But Thea herself was cast out to the borders of ignorance, with no news updates and no real insights into what had happened or why.
Yet again there were no people to be seen; no feeling that work was going on in the fields, or even in the silent houses. Bedrooms might be converted into studies, with computers and scanners and high-speed connections, but she saw very little evidence of their being much used. These villages were increasingly treated as weekend hideaways, rather than permanent homes for ordinary families. Affluent, retired people bought lovely stone houses and then spent much of their time on cruises or visiting relatives in Australia, as Thea knew from her own experience.
All this, she supposed, was included in the range of things that Sophie and her group found so outrageous. Second homes, pretentious gardens using peat from irreplaceable bogs, enormous greedy vehicles, inessential travel – everything these rich Cotswolds dwellers did must surely fuel the fury of an eco-activist. Thea felt she had glimpsed the makings of something not far from warfare in the glittering eyes of the fanatical Sophie and her sidekick Nella. After all, it did happen. Generations of antagonism could simmer invisibly until something occurred to spark a wholesale conflagration. The police took campaign groups seriously, after all. And now there had been a murder, tensions were quite possibly at breaking point. Hence the attack on Jack Handy. Chances were, then, that it was not going to stop there.
But Drew had not seen it in the same way. He said it was personal. He said people fear those they hurt and there was something inevitable about revenge. But Higgins had implied that investigations into who Danny Compton might have feared were minimal, if they existed at all. Or had he? She tried to recall everything the detective inspector had told her, and came up with only the scrappiest of facts. A new idea floated up – that the murder was not demanding an especially intense degree of focus. Granted there were additional officers drafted in to help prosecute the usual enquiries, there was still nothing of the horror or fervour she had seen on previous occasions. The absence of the victim’s parents made a difference, too. Just a traumatised fiancée, who was apparently being duly helpful with the enquiries. At heart, the police were not going to care too desperately that a semi-criminal protester had died at the hands of a local landowner after unbearable provocation. The landowner quite possibly belonged to the same clubs as the chief of police, anyway. Without the slightest suggestion of corruption, human nature was likely to decree that no special effort need be made this time.
This line of thinking almost persuaded Thea herself that she could simply leave it, as most people said she should. But then her phone rang, just as she was getting back into the car, and everything was sent in quite another direction.
‘Mrs Osborne? This is WPC Gordon. We met the other day? DI Higgins asked me to call, to tell you that Ricky Whiteacre has been arrested. He thought we owed it to you to keep you informed.’
‘Oh! That’s a surprise. How thoughtful. But it isn’t a surprise, really, is it? We knew he was the one who hit Mr Handy.’
‘No, you don’t understand. He’s been arrested for murder.’
Chapter Twenty-One
‘What?’ She struggled to grasp all the implications. ‘You think he killed Danny? But why?’
‘Sorry – I can’t tell you any more. But the DI thought you should know. He says you can just sit back and enjoy the sunshine now.’
‘Oh, did he? Well, thanks for calling. I don’t suppose I’ll see you again.’
She hadn’t much liked the Gordon girl anyway, she remembered. Now she discerned a definite hint of smugness in the voice. It made her miss Gladwin with a sudden passion.
Everything swirled around her head, with nothing approaching a logical pattern. Ricky Whiteacre, the brother of young Tiffany, son of such nice parents, a murderer? So he had bashed Jack Handy because … Handy had seen him kill Danny? Or somehow knew the truth, even if not from directly witnessing it? Or because he was on a list of people Ricky wanted dead? Had there been a struggle between the two men for the role of leader in the group? Or what?
She couldn’t possibly follow Higgins’s advice and return to Daglingworth for a quiet week sitting in the sunshine. How little he knew her if he thought there was any chance of that. She had to know why. She had to discover how Nella had reacted to the news. And poor Tiffany!
What about Steve? He hadn’t shown much liking for Ricky – or his mother, come to that. She had interrupted them, when Steve might have gone on to reveal more about the people involved in what had happened. Had she done that deliberately? Anything now seemed possible. There could be conspiracies on every side. Steve knew about the knife that killed Danny, saying it had been broadcast on Twitter. Was that the evidence that incriminated Ricky, then? And who was the nameless man who had first found Danny’s body?
She made no attempt to start the engine, simply sitting in the driver’s seat, with Hepzie slumped half on her lap as questions flooded through her mind. The big change in her thinking dawned slowly. None of the explanations she could think of involved any sort of revenge. At what point had it seemed clear that this was in fact the motive, anyway? Had it been Drew’s idea? Instead, it was something about the internal politics of the protest group, and therefore of no real cause for concern. There would be quiet chuckles from locals at this evidence that there was trouble in the ranks and every prospect of less harassment and campaigning as a result. Perhaps the whole edifice would collapse. The shelf life of such groups was never very long anyway, as far as she was aware. The sheer level of intensity ensured they would soon burn out, in most cases. People grew up and lost heart, too. Young recruits like Tiffany would recognise the brainwashing they were subj
ected to, and make a bid for freedom.
All of which only further piqued her curiosity. What was Sophie saying now? It was impossible to refrain from such questions, and even more impossible to resist the compulsion to go and find out.
But go where? She definitely would not be welcome at the Whiteacres’ home, and had no idea where Nella, Sophie or Steve lived. That left the Handys’ farm, and she could see no point in going there. Jack was still in hospital and Sandra wouldn’t welcome a visit. Nor was she likely to know anything.
She drove around the loop of Upper End, down past the church and back through the lanes to the big roundabout. Arriving in the middle of Daglingworth, she felt mildly disappointed not to have met anyone interesting, nor witnessed any further violence.
But she didn’t remain disappointed for long. Outside the open entrance to Galanthus House was a man. He was dark-haired, in his forties and appeared to be waiting for something. He simply stood passively, not looking at anything in particular, until he heard her car slowing down and indicating right. Then he transformed into a caricature of alertness, head up, mouth smiling, hand raised. He trotted across to her side of the car, plainly eager to speak to her. She wound down the window.
‘Are you Mrs Osborne? The house-sitter?’
‘That’s right.’
‘I was just about to give up. I need to speak to you, you see. Would that be all right?’
‘I don’t see why not. Who are you?’
‘Jim Tanner. I live in Stratton. Only a mile away. They might have told you about me.’
‘Tanner! The—’ She could hardly say The benefits cheat and even less the arsonist. ‘Um, yes. I think I know who you are. Why do you want to see me?’
‘It wasn’t me, you see. Nor any of my family or friends. It had nothing to do with us. I need you to know that.’