by Rebecca Tope
But Mark Parker was waiting for a response, his eyebrows raised. ‘I think she was worried about her things,’ she said weakly.
‘Oh!’ He swiped splayed fingers through his hair. ‘The things. Of course. Look – why don’t you go out for a little walk and I’ll quickly set fire to the whole damned place?’
His jokes were not improving tastewise, she noted. She didn’t even smile. ‘Wouldn’t that be illegal?’ she said tartly.
‘Sorry,’ he said again. ‘I can’t help it.’
‘You’ve got Tourette’s syndrome?’
‘What? No, of course not. I’m just – oh, I don’t know. Trying to make you like me, I suppose.’
Her unamused gaze conveyed very clearly that he was approaching this goal in quite the wrong way.
‘So they let you stay here – the police, I mean? Isn’t that a bit weird? I mean …’ He turned to look again at the police tape and Thea’s awkwardly positioned car. His own vehicle was further up the road, a splash of red just visible over the hedge. ‘Who was it that got killed? Was it somebody I knew?’
‘I’m not allowed to tell you.’
‘Why the hell not? That’s insane.’
‘I’m just doing what they asked. It helps with their initial investigations, I suppose. But it’ll leak out any time now.’ She changed the subject. ‘You lived here, did you, as a child?’
He nodded. ‘Here until I was twenty-five, actually. They more or less had to throw me out.’
‘How long ago was that?’ He didn’t look much past twenty-five.
‘Five years. Then Dad buggered off, and I suggested coming back to keep Mum company, but she wouldn’t let me.’
‘Right,’ said Thea vaguely.
‘What if the killer comes back? Aren’t you scared?’
She shrugged. Something of his manner must be contagious, she thought. ‘Not unless you’re him,’ she said.
‘Me?’ He threw up his hands. ‘Not likely. I’m the ultimate wimp, anybody can tell you. Our Linny’s always worn the trousers in the Parker family.’
‘She phoned me.’
‘Yes, I know. That’s why I’m here.’
‘Yes. Sorry. I’m not properly awake yet.’
They were standing awkwardly on the threshold, the spaniel restlessly circling them, hoping for the breakfast routine to start, whereby she received a biscuit and a few minutes out of doors. Mark continued speaking, his tone insistent, eager to gain her full attention. ‘You told Linny that Mum had gone to see our disgraced father, and presumably discovered his sordid lifestyle.’
Thea nodded. ‘She seemed a bit surprised.’
‘It’s not the way it looks, actually. He’s between houses, so to speak, but he’s pretty well heeled these days. He’s done some kind of deal with an Indian outfit, very much to his advantage. I have no idea of the details, but it sounds fairly amazing. It’s handy for him, moving in with the new girlfriend, while he decides what comes next.’
It felt entirely irrelevant to Thea’s immediate concerns, and she barely registered what he had said. ‘So?’ she said. ‘None of that explains why you’ve come here at crack of dawn, and then won’t even step inside the house. Your mother’s arrangements are her own business, aren’t they? Does she have to tell you everything she’s doing?’
His expression turned sulky. ‘I told you why I’m here.’
‘You wanted to make sure I hadn’t killed your mother?’
‘Is that what I said? How awful of me. Take no notice.’
‘I’m not. But if you won’t come in, then I’m closing the door and getting myself some breakfast.’
He pushed a hand through his hair again and heaved a sigh. ‘Okay, I’ll come in for a minute, then. I don’t suppose you’re making coffee, are you? That might settle me down. I get a bit crazy these light mornings. It’s all wrong, don’t you think? The sun should never come up before eight. It’s disorienting.’
‘I like them,’ she said. ‘It makes me sad that the days are already getting shorter.’
‘There you go, then,’ he said, meaninglessly. ‘I’m a night owl. A vampire. A creature of the shadows. Shows how bothered I was, coming here so early. The thing is, I have to be at work by nine, seventy miles away. I expect I’ll be late.’
‘You will if you stop for coffee.’
‘I have to have the coffee,’ he said seriously. ‘Taking the wider view, it is definitely necessary. I can’t drive without it.’
She gave him a mug of strong instant, adding plenty of milk to cool it down. ‘I like your dog,’ he said. Until then, she hadn’t thought he had even noticed there was a dog. ‘I always wanted a dog.’
‘Where do you live?’
‘Kington. It’s a remote little Herefordshire town, almost in Wales. Linny’s a couple of miles over the border. We like to think it means we can exist separately, but of course that’s ridiculous.’
‘You’re not twins, are you?’
He snorted. ‘Not even biological siblings, let alone twins. We were adopted, first me, then her. There’s less than a year between us. We always said we’re even closer than most twins. It’s all rather odd, when you stop to think about it.’
‘You don’t seem the slightest bit bothered by what’s happened,’ she reproached him impatiently. All she could think about was the pathetic child’s limp body. Mark Parker could have told her he was a surviving conjoined twin or a foundling left under a moorland gorse bush and she would scarcely have listened to him.
‘Because you won’t tell me anything about it,’ he flashed back. ‘Do you want me to torture the details out of you? I’m sorry, but I happen to be more interested in my parents and whatever unholy mess they’re making of all our lives. I blame Belinda, actually. What does she want to go and get married for, anyway?’
Thea shrugged and pointed to the clock on the wall. ‘You’re going to be seriously late,’ she warned him.
‘Yeah,’ he said without moving. ‘First time in five years. I’ve been at their beck and call all weekend, I might tell you. I guess they’ll cut me some slack, after that.’ He put on a bad American accent, which failed to elicit a smile from Thea, although she did feel a slight thawing towards him. Somehow her defences were collapsing in the face of his banter. She had encountered men like him before, wolves in the guise of placid llamas, amusingly self-deprecating, hiding their real motives. Or perhaps this one was the real article, trained from birth to gain popularity by making people smile, and acquiring the habit as a second skin, with no sinister undertones. Just an element of inadequacy and low self-esteem.
‘What work do you do?’ she asked him.
‘It would take a while to explain, but it involves the welfare of children in hospital. All terribly insecure, the way things are. One of those nice idealistic jobs dreamt up by New Labour when there was plenty of money sloshing about. Now they’re starting to think maybe people’s own families could do it for free. Trouble is, they won’t, half the time.’
He smiled and shrugged helplessly, and she envisaged him dressed as a Pierrot, entertaining sick children and persuading them to eat their hospital food.
She groped in vain for the central significance of his visit. Nothing seemed to justify such a time-consuming effort, risking her non-cooperation by arriving at such an unearthly hour. ‘Do you want to search the house for your mother’s body?’ she asked, forcing a steely note into her voice. ‘Your sister’s going to want to know you did a thorough job.’
‘Oh, she doesn’t know I’ve come. She’d think I was mad. Well, she already thinks that. Let’s just say she wouldn’t be happy about it. But I can act independently every now and then, and I have been worried about Mum for a bit now.’
‘So?’
‘I can see you’re not a murderer,’ he said simply. ‘Besides, nobody would really murder my mum. She’s too … I don’t know. Bland, maybe. People don’t notice her. It was all a stupid panic, when we saw the house on the telly.’
She
wanted to respond with assurances that this was quite understandable, but found herself unable to do so. After he had gone, she felt irritated and bewildered by this strange visitation from a man who had felt untrustworthy. When he’d persuaded himself that nobody had hurt his mother, he had drifted into a relaxed flippancy that seemed callous to Thea.
Mark’s visit was no more than a dreamlike interlude, made more unreal by the fact that she was still in her dressing gown. There had been some sort of near-physical barrier to making any reference to the child, Stevie, well beyond a dutiful obedience to Gladwin’s injunction. The boy had been pushing at the edge of her mind throughout the conversation with Mark Parker, and yet the tone and content of their exchanges prevented her from properly thinking about him.
Yvonne Parker had been given even scantier attention over the past twenty-four hours or so. She had made that reassuring phone call the previous morning and thereby removed herself from Thea’s list of worries. The horror and tragedy of the child’s murder had completely blotted her out. And there was no good reason to readmit her now. She could have had no connection with Stevie’s death, even if she knew him as a persistent nuisance – which was far from certain. Yvonne was a schoolteacher; she probably knew how to deal with annoying children. It was even possible that young Stevie was at her school, she thought, before remembering that the woman taught French and was therefore obviously at a secondary school, which Stevie had not yet reached.
The cats were in the kitchen when she went back downstairs having finally got dressed, impatient for their morning biscuits. Although not entirely reconciled to the interloper, they had apparently decided to make the best of the disappearance of their rightful owner. Eyeing the closed door, beyond which was the untrustworthy spaniel, they delicately crunched the food in unison. ‘You really are very pretty things,’ Thea told them. ‘And absolutely no trouble, thank goodness.’ It was true what Mark had said, she admitted to herself. Anybody could have dropped in twice a day and ensured that the cats got their meals. Yvonne’s motive for employing a house-sitter had to lie beyond the care of these easy creatures.
She felt caught in a strangely paradoxical state: having too much to think about and too little to actually do. There were literally no tasks awaiting her until late afternoon, when again she had to feed the cats. It was all too likely that she was going to end up dusting the sprawling collection of objects and perhaps even mentally cataloguing them according to date, or place of origin, or aesthetic appeal. And she would do the same with the buildings of Snowshill: listing the many gorgeous houses in order of merit or interest.
And all the time she would be thinking about young Stevie and his mother, and Gladwin’s suspicions, and the terrible things people were capable of doing to each other.
Chapter Eight
At eight-thirty, twenty minutes after Mark departed, the police team reappeared wearing white suits and face masks and crawling assiduously over the grass where Stevie had been lying. This might go on for days, Thea realised, with mixed feelings. They cast a pall of tragedy over the whole village, but at least they gave Thea something to watch – and they might even accept refreshments from her if she offered. She had to keep Hepzie firmly indoors, or only let out at the back on a lead. She wondered frustratedly what had become of Gudrun, and how she was coping with the police questions. Had she maintained a stunned and traumatised silence, or had she understood her doubtful position and ranted and raved at her accusers? Had anyone spoken up for her, volunteering to sit with her in her misery? What did police guidelines ordain in a situation like this? As far as Thea could see, there was no hard evidence that Gudrun had murdered her own child, which surely meant she could not be kept in custody. And what did the locals make of it? What would the ghost of Charles Paget Wade think of any suggestion that the most taboo crime of them all might have been committed on his doorstep?
Snowshill was a dauntingly small place. The residents would inevitably all know each other and pass on their opinions of what precisely happened. It had been plain from her meeting with Janice and Ruby, and then with Clara Beauchamp, that Stevie was a universal menace. Gladwin would have to interrogate everyone in the village, accumulating a list of the boy’s misdemeanours. There might even be a guilty satisfaction rippling just below the surface, beneath the genuine horror, at the knowledge that at least he wasn’t going to terrorise their animals or massacre their flowers ever again. And perhaps he did worse than that; perhaps he bullied their small children and damaged their cars as well. But this was a respectable English village, where emotions seldom went beyond an occasional raised voice across a garden fence or an impatiently hooted car horn. It was unimaginable that a child could be slaughtered simply because he was a nuisance.
Thea’s natural curiosity gradually began to assert itself as the morning progressed, sparked by the comments Clara had made and fuelled by further remarks from Blake-next-door. It was annoying that he should take himself off just when she would have liked somebody to talk to. She could hardly expect Gladwin to devote much time to filling her in on what had been discovered, even if Thea was the principal witness to the aftermath of the murder. She had found dead bodies before and had become important to the police investigations as a result. This time she felt a dread she hadn’t previously known; an emotion worse than the fear that had gripped her in Hampnett. She felt a dark malicious spirit lurking close by, embodied fancifully in the hornet that had attacked her when she least expected it and then disappeared from sight. She had thought this spirit resided in the boy Stevie, but with his death it became obvious that it lay elsewhere, and Stevie was just another victim.
Now here she was, cooped up in a house she should have liked for its beautiful proportions and heavy protective walls, but actually found oppressive and even hostile. The atmosphere of malice extended through those thick walls and filled the house itself. A spikiness, perhaps, a suspicion that many of Yvonne’s collectables could be brought into use as weapons if the occasion demanded it. There were heavy stone objects, for a start, and a great deal of glass that could quickly be rendered lethal. Candleholders with sharp metal prongs could stab you, and one or two of the old electric lamps probably had such dodgy wiring they could electrocute you. It felt like the home of someone planning deviously sly means of harming someone, once seen through this kind of lens.
Madness, Thea scolded herself sternly. The woman who owned this house was a timid creature who had quailed at the simple task of finding a house in north London, where maps and signs abounded. She was dependent on her neighbour for almost everything. And yet … she held down a job teaching teenagers a foreign language, which couldn’t be entirely easy. It would be unwise to take her wholly at face value, and it would be very interesting to unravel the complicated history of her marriage to the bewildering Victor. Victor who lived in a small scruffy flat, but had made a lot of money; who had left the marital home for reasons that remained obscure, and had apparently finally been confronted by a wife who had overcome her own reluctance because of the needs of her daughter. On the phone he had sounded impatient, even contemptuous, towards Yvonne. His children appeared to have few illusions about him. The more she thought about him, the more Thea wished she could meet him and draw her own conclusions about his character.
And then, the blessed Gladwin came back at ten, and saved Thea from further plunges into fantastic imaginings.
‘He wasn’t killed out there,’ she said, with minimal preamble. ‘The body was moved.’
It was a bigger relief than Thea could have anticipated. There had been nothing she could have done to prevent it, then, if only she’d been listening hard or watching more closely. ‘How long before? I mean—’
‘About an hour, apparently. Hard to say for sure, but the blood in his veins had pooled significantly on his left side, and you said you found him lying on his face. I’m assuming you didn’t move him.’
‘I’m afraid I did. I turned him over. He was lying on his face when I first
found him. And then his mother picked him right up and cradled him.’
‘Which is why your testimony is going to be absolutely crucial.’
‘Oh dear.’
‘It’s not as bad as it sounds. There’s sure to be a bit of forensic evidence to support you – grass residue on his front, for example. They’d mowed that verge only a couple of days ago and left the trimmings just lying. Very helpful, that.’
‘Gosh.’
‘So now we ask ourselves why he was dumped just there, behind your car. Even someone walking past wouldn’t have seen him. The chances that it would be you, and only you, were very high.’
‘You’re saying somebody deliberately wanted to horrify me, as some sort of attack on me? But I don’t know anybody here.’
‘You met Gudrun and complained to her about her boy.’
‘Yes.’ Thea’s eyes widened in disbelief. ‘But you’re not suggesting she killed him, threw him at my feet, as it were, to say “There! See what you’ve made me do!” That would be completely insane.’
‘Yes – and yet there’s a ghastly logic to it, don’t you think?’
‘There might be if he was a pet rabbit – although even then it’s a horrible thought. Nobody would do that to their own child. They just wouldn’t. I don’t believe it.’ She forced herself to relive the moments when she went to fetch Gudrun, in an instinctive desire to reunite mother and child. ‘No, she didn’t do it. She was much too appalled. Worse than that – annihilated. How is she now?’ she remembered to ask.
‘I haven’t seen her. She’s got a Family Liaison girl with her. According to her, Gudrun’s more or less catatonic.’
‘Poor woman.’
‘Indeed.’
‘Coffee?’ Thea invited. Gladwin accepted, and as she boiled the kettle, Thea said idly, ‘This is the second time this morning I’ve made coffee for somebody, and it’s not even ten-thirty yet.’