by Rebecca Tope
Emotion swamped the delicate features. Defiance, confusion, pride all jostled for dominance. Thea resisted a temptation to like her. ‘But he phoned me and said she never came. He gave up waiting for her.’
‘Was that on Saturday or Sunday?’
‘Saturday.’
With resignation, Thea accepted that she could not prolong this doorstep conversation any further. Either she should send the girl away, or let her into the house. Neither seemed feasible. Once in, she might never leave again. But if she had no transport, where was she supposed to go? Irritation at being placed in such an impossible dilemma made her speak sharply. ‘I still don’t understand why you came here. What are you planning to do for the night? Where will you stay? What did you plan to say to Yvonne, for heaven’s sake?’
‘I see,’ said the girl hopelessly. ‘You will not understand. You are not a relative, you know nothing about the Parker family. I am sorry to have bothered you.’ The delivery was stilted, dignity keeping her chin high. Thea wondered why she had so little pity for the creature’s plight. What harm could it do to let her in and give her a bed for the night? Normally, she liked to think, she would have been very much kinder.
‘It isn’t my house,’ she said. ‘I can’t just invite you in. I don’t know for sure who you might be. And people have died.’
‘People?’
‘Yes. Your … boyfriend wasn’t the first. We’re all having to be careful – do you see?’ Was she simply being xenophobic, suspicious of this person purely because she was foreign? Or was her caution entirely valid? She remembered that Belinda had said she didn’t like her, and wondered whether that was having an influence. On the face of it, here was a pathetic exploited waif, enticed to Britain with all sorts of promises and then expected to devote her life to the service of an ageing businessman with a suspiciously complicated family life. How could it ever be expected to work? How could the girl have been stupid enough to go along with it? Thea had no idea of the economic or social conditions in the Philippines, but she had met one or two exploited girls before and never found a proper answer to these questions.
‘You want me to go away, then?’ Again, the uplifted chin, with little hint of any reduced self-respect. The girl had a sort of class, Thea acknowledged. Perhaps in her own country she was an aristocrat, assuming she had rights wherever she was in the world. She seemed capable and educated. Why, then, not apply for a proper visa in the approved fashion?
‘I’m afraid so,’ she said firmly. After all, this was not really a ‘girl’ at all. She was at least thirty – with fabulous bones and skin that would preserve her youth for decades – and old enough to take care of herself. And it was, after all, just remotely possible that she was a double murderer. She might have her own excellent reasons for wanting both Stevie and Victor dead, for all Thea knew.
‘Is there another bus?’
‘I have no idea, but I doubt it. There are B&B places in the village, though. And perhaps the pub offers accommodation.’ Appalled at her own lack of charity, she silently thought, And it’s a warm summer night. You can lie under a hedge with the cows.
‘B&B? That means a place to sleep?’
‘Bed and breakfast. They probably charge around thirty pounds or so. Of course, it is high season. They might be full.’
‘You don’t care about me, do you? You have no kindness.’
Thea’s mind filled with scenes from films and books – not to mention the countless nativity plays she had seen – where hard-faced women refused entry to obviously needy travellers, out of meanness of spirit or paranoid suspicion or sheer reluctance to put themselves to any trouble. Now she had become one of them, and it stabbed her own sense of who she was. But she held fast to a powerful instinct. ‘It’s not my house,’ she repeated. ‘I have no authority to let total strangers in for the night. And when you think about it, it isn’t very likely that Yvonne would want you under her roof, is it?’
‘If she were here, she would let me in. I am certain of that. Victor always said she was a soft-hearted woman.’
Soft-headed more like, thought Thea, with a small inward grin. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘But you really must go now.’
And miraculously, the woman went. She walked with a firm step, a rucksack over one shoulder, and turned towards the village centre. Somebody would take pity on her, Thea assured herself. The pub, probably. And if she told her story, they would think harshly of the unfriendly house-sitter who would not admit her. Or would they? Much depended on the general view of Victor and Yvonne, and quite how a young Asian mistress would be regarded by the respectable citizens of Snowshill. Dimly, she knew that she ought to call Gladwin and report the appearance of this key witness to whatever had happened to Victor. She was fumbling for her phone when a voice made her forget what she was doing.
‘Who in the world was that?’ Blake stood at his own front door, watching the departing figure.
Thea regretted lingering outside, instead of going back into the house right away. It was Hepzie’s fault – she had pottered off into the vegetation, forcing Thea to wait for her.
‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘Hurry up, Heps. I want to go in.’
‘Come on – don’t give me that. She was talking to you for ages, but you never let her in.’
‘You were watching us?’
‘Of course I was,’ he said brazenly. ‘I was curious.’
‘Well go and ask her, if you want to know. Maybe she’ll persuade you to give her a bed for the night, because she failed miserably with me.’
‘Maybe she will,’ he said, and to Thea’s amazement he trotted down the hill after the vanishing Filipina.
She wanted someone she could trust and speak her mind to. Someone who knew she wasn’t a cruel mean-spirited person, but was just being sensibly careful, and following her gut feelings about the importunate female who had pleaded for hospitality. The look Blake Grossman had cast at her, before setting off on his rescue mission, had been harsh enough to hurt. Accusing, contemptuous, angry – a look she did not ever want to see again.
Questions were making her dizzy, their possible answers even more so. Why had that female turned up as she had? What would she have done if Thea had let her into the house? Was she looking for something? Would Blake really bring her back to stay next door? Was she in fact being pursued by Belinda or Gudrun and cunningly calculated that her best hope was to take the fight to their own home ground? Or had she actually killed Victor, sick of his slobbering attentions? The swirling questions prevented her from taking the obvious course of phoning for DS Gladwin.
What if this foreign girl was perfectly innocent, simply in automatic flight from a scene of horrific violence, bringing her by some unconscious instinct to a place where she thought there might be people who loved Victor as she had done? If so, it had taken her forty-eight hours to cover the ground – and where had she been in the meantime? Where had she slept for the past two nights? How much money did she have on her? How could she possibly hope to exist in Britain without proper papers?
Should she, in short, be feeling sorry for the wretched creature? Would reporting her to the police result in a cruel deportation to some ghastly fate back home?
The living room window was open and she heard voices approaching. As expected, when she went for a look, she saw they came from Blake and the newcomer. He was carrying her rucksack, bending his head towards her in solicitude. As if aware that Thea was watching, he shot a venomous look towards Hyacinth House before escorting the girl through his own front door.
She tried not to mind. He could have no proper idea of her reasons for refusing entry – certainly couldn’t make any accurate assessment of her character on the basis of a single act. He didn’t know that Victor was dead, that this was his girlfriend come in search of succour or sympathy or revenge. Presumably he was shortly to find out.
Eighty-five miles away, Drew was at breaking point. His mother-in-law had forced him to admit his conviction that there wa
s no longer any hope for Karen’s recovery. The resulting reproaches were even worse than Maggs’s had been.
‘But you can’t just give up!’ she protested. ‘What about the children?’
‘I told the children this morning. I think they deserve to know the truth.’
‘But it isn’t the truth, it’s just what you think. You can’t be sure. You have to assume she’ll come through it. She’s my only child!’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’
‘But Drew, it’s desperately important. You’re her next of kin. If you tell the doctors you’ve abandoned hope, they’ll stop treating her. You owe it to her to hang on.’
Karen’s mother was a robust woman in her mid sixties, who had spent the past twenty years with her husband on a farm in Wales, the pair having become belated bohemians when Karen left home to go to college. They had made approving noises about their daughter’s marriage and the arrival of the two children, but kept at a remote distance from the little family. Her mother visited once or twice a year for a single night’s stay, but her father never left his farm. Drew’s mother-in-law was unsure about the funeral business, despite being unsentimental by nature and quite unsqueamish. Her inspection of Peaceful Repose Burial Ground had been cursory.
When Karen had been injured, three years earlier, she had briefly rallied and spent a week helping Drew with the children. Since then her visits and phone calls had increased somewhat, but she could still hardly be counted as an active member of the family. Karen’s father was even worse. He remained at home, claiming to be indispensable and sending stilted messages via his wife.
‘I suppose they do love you?’ Drew had asked his wife, years before. ‘In their own way?’
‘I think they feel they’ve done right by me and now I’m your responsibility. They’ve always been much more to each other than they have to me. I don’t hold it against them at all, although it would have been nicer with a sibling. They’ve just sort of forgotten about me, somehow. I promise I won’t be like that with ours.’
‘Good,’ he’d smiled. ‘Although my parents aren’t very much better. Don’t they call couples like us “babes in the woods”? Orphans of the storm, or something?’
Now, of course, Karen had broken her promise, and as far as he could tell, forgotten her children completely. And his mother-in-law had shown interest at last, when it was just about too late.
‘I suppose Jack and I will have to move down here, then, to help you. He has been talking about selling up and retiring, although I don’t quite believe him. He loves that farm, even if it doesn’t make any money.’
‘Don’t do anything rash,’ said Drew tightly. ‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’
She had rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth and gone off to inflict a totally false jollity on her grandchildren. The sound of her forced laughter, and Timmy’s grimly polite rejoinders, was too much.
‘I’m going for a bit of a drive,’ he called to them. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be.’
Feeling like a cowboy spurring his horse into a wild dash across the prairie, he accelerated the car down the small country lane, turning northwards when he reached the main road.
Barely ten minutes elapsed before there were shouts and screams from Blake’s house. Thea froze, listening helplessly and trying to work out whether murder was going on, and if so who was victim and who the aggressor. Odd words from Blake could be made out, which proved entirely useless for the purpose of interpretation. ‘NO!’ roared at full blast, was the most frequent, and ‘Oh, God!’ scarcely any less stentorian. The female screams resolved themselves into something slightly less disconcerting – more like placatory wordless bleats, like a puppy trying to soothe an enraged lion. There was no suggestion of actual physical harm, Thea decided with relief. Perhaps she needn’t summon the police, after all.
But she could hardly just ignore it. Blake sounded dangerously angry and out of control. Already doubting his trustworthiness, she began to suspect that he had less than pure motives in taking the Filipina into his house. But she had gone willingly, and was quite old enough to know what she was doing. The last thing Thea felt inclined to do was to stage a dramatic rescue, only to have to eat her own words and offer the little nuisance shelter, after all.
Then a vaguely familiar green Peugeot appeared and parked neatly beside Thea’s Fiesta, fitting itself onto the narrow space with effortless ease.
‘Good God!’ said Thea to her spaniel. ‘It’s Yvonne.’
Chapter Twenty-One
If Yvonne was back, then did that mean that Thea would have to leave – perhaps that very evening? Obviously she would no longer be required, and she was at a loss to imagine how they would operate together, allocating dog and cats, breakfast toast and troublesome phone calls. Despite the chaos and the sadness and the noise from next door, she found she was reluctant to just gather herself up and go.
And yet Yvonne deserved a friendly greeting, and a patient ear for whatever the explanation might be for her early return. Perhaps she had argued with her sister, or heard about Victor and come rushing back by some miraculously rapid means of transport to console her fatherless offspring. Perhaps she would be nicer to the Filipina woman than Thea had been.
Her confusion as to her role made her slow to go to the door, and before she was properly into the hall, Yvonne had opened it and come into the house. ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said. ‘Good.’ She seemed almost ludicrously normal, a smile on her face and a plump red bag over her shoulder.
‘Hmm?’ said Thea. ‘Hello. Did something happen?’
Yvonne laughed ruefully. ‘Just a few things, yes. I’ve had quite a time of it. I’m really sorry to come home sooner than I said. Of course, you must stay tonight, and I’ll pay you the full fee. It’s not your fault.’
Thea relaxed and smiled. ‘Shall I make some coffee or something? Everything’s all right here. The cats are fine.’ Then she remembered the dog hairs on the sofa and the bed upstairs, and the crumbs on the kitchen table. ‘It is a bit messy, though. I was going to do a big clean-up tomorrow.’
‘Don’t worry about that.’
‘At least we haven’t broken anything. All your things are just as you left them.’
‘Good,’ said Yvonne again. ‘Coffee would be lovely, actually, if you don’t mind doing it. I’ll just go upstairs for a minute, and come back when it’s ready.’
Only gradually, as the coffee machine gurgled into action, did Yvonne’s manner begin to strike Thea as odd. For a start, she obviously knew nothing of what had happened to her husband. She showed no sign whatsoever of distress or shock. For another thing, the dithery woman from Saturday had mutated into somebody a lot more confident and decisive. Perhaps Thea’s memory had exaggerated the air of incompetence, or perhaps the relief of getting home after such demanding travels had wrought the change.
The next set of thoughts were not so much confusing as alarming. Would she have to break the news about Victor? Should she explain that his lady friend was next door, being yelled at by Blake? Should she try to recount all the events that had taken place since she discovered little Stevie on Sunday afternoon? Would Yvonne want to know about Belinda’s visit and Gudrun’s arrest? If she, Thea, didn’t tell her, then who would? And what on earth had happened to send the darn woman home more than a week sooner than planned?
Take it a step at a time, she advised herself. Make the coffee, tidy the living room, and wait to see what happens next. It was only about half past six – there was a long evening ahead, and the calmer it could be kept, the better. In London, the police would be collecting evidence as to who killed Victor Parker, with Belinda presumably still there. But … the woman next door with Blake was at least a witness to the essential events of his death, even if she insisted she neither saw nor heard what was going on in the next room, while she spent two minutes on the loo. She should be speaking to the police, not hiding away in a Cotswold village, even if it was the one where the fo
rmer wife of the victim lived. That, she supposed, must be why Blake was making such a fuss. He was reproaching her for dereliction of duty.
This made the girlfriend seem considerably more vulnerable to Thea than she had at first. In the surprise and bewilderment of her sudden appearance, the real extent of her importance had not been immediately clear. Now, perhaps because of the shouting, Thea started to worry. Blake was too closely connected to the Parkers for comfort. Perhaps his loyalty to Yvonne explained his rage at her replacement. Pouring out the coffee, the fear blossomed and burgeoned until Thea was physically shaking. Because it would be her fault. She had virtually handed the wretched creature over to the untrustworthy man next door. By being so stupidly suspicious and unkind, she might have caused real harm to the girl.
‘Coffee’s ready!’ she called up the stairs. A door opened and closed, and Yvonne replied to say she was coming. Thea watched her walking steadily down the stairs and wondered how to begin to explain her fears for the woman in jeopardy next door.
‘Yvonne – would you say that Blake is a reliable person?’ she began clumsily. ‘He hasn’t been here much, so I’ve hardly spoken to him. I just thought … well, he does seem a bit … um, moody. Volatile. He seemed nice at first, but then …’
Yvonne seemed to give this some serious thought, as she slowly took the coffee and went into the living room with it. ‘He’s always been all right with me,’ she said. ‘Why should you worry? You won’t ever have to see him again.’
‘Well, I might. You see—’
Yvonne waved an impatient hand at her. ‘Let’s not talk for a bit, all right? I’m exhausted. I need to settle down quietly. If that’s awkward for you, I can go upstairs.’
‘Gosh, don’t be silly! If I’m in the way, then it’s for me to go upstairs, or into the kitchen. But, honestly, I do think I should tell you—’