by Rebecca Tope
‘Yes. I mean, no. Of course. I’m sorry.’ Thea felt as if she had been caught deliberately stirring up trouble, blunderingly making insinuations that couldn’t help but be offensive. Except, when she thought back, she couldn’t find anything she’d said that could actually be interpreted in that way. Thyrza Hastings was being impossibly oversensitive, for some reason.
‘Apology accepted,’ said Thyrza curtly. ‘Just be aware that it doesn’t always work to your credit when you barge in with your amateur sleuthing.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Thea slowly. ‘You’ve heard about my other involvements.’
Perhaps impressed by this piece of quick thinking, Thyrza softened and smiled. ‘How clever of you! I am acquainted with a person by the name of Fiona who lives in Temple Guiting. I gather that you were there a year ago, with your senior-policeman boyfriend.’
‘Fiona – Janey’s friend? How are they now? I liked them both very much.’ She paused. ‘What did they tell you about me?’
‘That you weren’t as soft and sweet as you look,’ said Thyrza with a painful directness. ‘That you’re not afraid of anything and won’t rest until you’ve dug into people’s private lives, merely to satisfy your own curiosity.’
‘Gosh! I suppose most of that’s true, more or less. Although you make me sound so interfering, when I truly don’t believe that’s fair. More than that, I’m not nearly as fearless as Fiona thinks. I was very scared six months ago, when I did a long sit in Hampnett, in the snow. There were moments when I was quite terrified.’
‘I’m pleased to hear it. A person who doesn’t know fear is a dangerous creature.’
‘And quite annoying,’ added Thea, with a smile she hoped was disarming. Her self-image was being battered repeatedly during her time in Cranham, and she badly needed to earn some approval from this woman, to compensate.
‘Indeed,’ said Thyrza, in a tone that was much too neutral for Thea’s liking. ‘Anyway, the news of Janey is good. She’s putting the past behind her, at last, and has lost a lot of weight.’
Thea was thinking about the many people she had encountered over the past two years, her intimate entanglements with their lives, witnessing extreme emotion at times, and then leaving for another commission somewhere else, seldom if ever seeing them again. She had hardly ever wondered what they thought of her, when the dust finally settled.
‘I should go and visit her,’ she said. ‘I’d love to catch up with her news.’
Thyrza’s head tilted sceptically. ‘Would that fit with your Flying Dutchman image, I wonder? Stay five minutes, wreak havoc, and move on without a backward glance – that’s how it looks to me. And to others, I might add.’
‘I don’t wreak havoc. If anything, I do the exact opposite,’ she protested hotly. ‘None of the awful things that happen can be laid at my door. In Temple Guiting, especially, I was hardly involved at all. It was Phil – and he is a policeman. It’s his job to solve crimes.’
‘Calm down, dear,’ said Thyrza in conscious parody of a famous television ad. ‘It doesn’t matter what I think, after all. Besides, there’s nothing here in Cranham for you to get involved in. My sister’s friend killed himself, as he had repeatedly warned that he would. His daughter refused to listen to him or take him seriously, which is for her to come to terms with. The man was always needing attention, overstating the case, broadcasting his troubles. Edwina understood him and did her best for him, but she couldn’t be there for him every single moment of the day. As soon as she went to lend a hand with her own grandchildren, the wretched man gave in to his own self-pity and committed suicide. And now Edwina’s under suspicion for having put the bag over his head. No wonder I’m angry,’ she finished breathlessly. ‘Anybody would be. It’s a messy, selfish, unnecessary thing to have done – and all too typical of the silly old fool.’
‘You didn’t like him,’ summarised Thea. ‘But oddly enough, I did. And I didn’t see the slightest hint of the man you’ve just described.’ The image of Philippe swam before her mind’s eye, and the things he had said about Donny on their first meeting in the woods. His mother’s assessment chimed closely with his own, it seemed.
‘I venture to suggest that I knew him very much better than you did,’ said the older woman severely.
‘Of course you did. But the fact remains that I thought he had a lot of energy and a capacity to enjoy life. That’s what I saw, and I make a point of trusting my own judgement in this sort of thing.’
Thyrza rolled her eyes impatiently. ‘I don’t think there’s any more to be said, then. Except – perhaps you’d be best advised to sit quietly up at the Manor for the rest of your stay and avoid the temptation to stir up any more trouble.’
‘I’d love to,’ said Thea tartly. ‘I’ll leave you alone if you leave me alone.’ Even as she said it, she knew it wasn’t going to happen. The police might well contact her again, for one thing – or the coroner’s officer. She would inevitably bump into Philippe or Edwina or Jemima over the coming days, unless she cowered in the house the entire time – which she most definitely was not going to do. Thyrza Hastings was a touch too controlling for Thea’s liking. Issuing something close to an order was guaranteed to provoke her into rebellion. But beneath that, her insides were spasming with anxiety. Finding herself the object of dislike and suspicion was an unfamiliar experience, and she hated it. The clear implication that it was the result of her own outspoken manner only made it worse. And yet she could not see how she might begin to remedy it.
‘Well, then,’ said the older woman. ‘That’s settled.’ Thea thought she detected a hint of remorse at the open hostility she’d shown. Remorse or anxiety, she couldn’t be sure which, but she seized on it as some small consolation. If she had been inquisitive, Thyrza had been almost rude, and that was a lapse of good manners, at the very least. Thea suspected that Thyrza and Edwina had been brought up to value manners above all else.
They parted with polite unsmiling nods and Thea meandered back to the Manor wishing herself a week forward in time, when she could leave Cranham and forget all about Donny Davis.
Chapter Twelve
She was in the kitchen scrambling eggs when she heard a car draw up. ‘Bother!’ she muttered, unable to leave her cooking at such a delicate point. ‘Who can that be?’
She turned off the heat, gave a vigorous stir to the eggs and trotted out to the hall to see. She had left the front door standing open, letting the sun stream in. It was a quirk she had, a dislike of closed doors. Whenever possible, she left them open – a habit that had annoyed Phil Hollis, who had a policeman’s opinion that an open door invited felonies of all kinds.
Drew Slocombe was getting out of his familiar car. The unexpected sight of his friendly face gave her a surge of pleasure. ‘Come in!’ she called. ‘I’m doing something critical in the kitchen – just to prove to myself that I can cook when I try.’
Unhurriedly he followed her, sniffing the fresh coffee and warm toast appreciatively. ‘I don’t think there’s enough for you as well,’ she said regretfully. ‘I only used two eggs, and I’m quite hungry. You can have a piece of toast if you like.’
‘It smells like breakfast,’ he said, glancing at his watch. It was one-fifteen.
‘Well, it’s not. I had breakfast about five hours ago and it’s been a busy morning. What are you doing here on a Friday afternoon, and so soon after the last time?’
He flourished a hard-backed book. ‘I thought you’d want to see this.’
‘And you drove sixty-odd miles to show it to me?’
‘Sort of. I’ve got to see the planning man in Stow as well. There’s been a dramatic new development at Broad Campden, and everything’s started to move. The burial ground seems to be taking off, just when I thought it was never going to work. I appear to have an ally on the council after all, and they’ve scheduled the application for Monday’s meeting. I might have it all up and running in a few weeks, at this rate. I hardly know whether I’m coming or going.’
‘Seeing the land belongs to me and there’s a grave in it already, I can’t really back out if they tell me I can proceed. I could probably even bury your Donny chap there if that’s what was really wanted. He’d have to hang around a while, but the family just might think it was worth waiting for.’
‘Good God. I thought we’d completely abandoned that idea.’
‘I expect we have. It was just a thought.’ He casually made himself a mug of coffee while she tended to her cooking, then sat across the table from her as she piled her eggs onto toast, sat down and picked up the book. ‘It’s selling well, you say?’
‘Apparently, yes. You can see why. It blows the whistle on the outrageous profits undertakers make, and talks you through how to do it all for yourself. She makes a few mistakes, but most of it’s quite sound. Maggs thinks it’s fantastic. She says it’ll change everybody’s mind, and we’ll be snowed under with customers. And she does make a very passionate case for legalising assisted suicide.’
‘Hm. Maggs agrees with that, does she?’
‘Oh yes. Maggs is young and very straightforward.’
‘And you?’
He tilted his head ambiguously, with a coy smile. ‘I can’t see how it could work legally. But it’s no bad thing to argue the case. It’s quite a brave thing to do, if you think about it. She’ll have made a lot of enemies. Not just about that, but she’s going to have an awful lot of undertakers gunning for her the way she’s going.’
‘Really? I can’t believe people as dignified as undertakers would launch vendettas or engage a hitman. They probably don’t know where she lives, anyway.’
‘It’s easy enough to find people. But I didn’t mean they’d come and blow the house up. They’ll stage a counter-movement, stressing the importance of tradition and pressurising people not to skimp on something so meaningful.’
‘That doesn’t sound too terrible.’
‘No, and I definitely think she’s right to expose it all. It’s the other stuff that feels more relevant to what happened to Donny.’ He took the book out of her hands and riffled through the pages. ‘Listen to this: “It is a natural human wish to be able to control the timing and manner of our own dying. The uncertainty surrounding the final stages makes the arrangement of the funeral considerably more problematic than if everything were predictable and prearranged. Changes to the law in a few places around the world have led to emotionally richer and more considered funerals as a direct result. Many people are now campaigning for similar new laws in the UK.”’
Thea frowned slightly as she digested this, along with her eggs. ‘You think she does mean assisted suicide? Or some sort of legal euthanasia?’
‘Either. Both. Probably the suicide thing is more what she means, because they’re more likely to be still compos mentis and able to organise their own funeral.’
‘Dodgy,’ she agreed, with a nod. ‘Almost like a piece of promotion for new laws.’
‘The trouble is, she’s right. It is what people want.’
‘Of course it is. The same as they want sunshine every day, and painless childbirth. They want it but they can’t have it. It’s against the natural order. It’s basically just a matter of luck when it comes right down to it.’
Drew puffed a small explosive laugh. ‘You’re speaking my lines,’ he said. ‘I used to give talks about the natural order.’
‘Used to? Why did you stop?’
‘I didn’t deliberately. I suppose I got too busy, or thought everybody had heard it, or something. I’m not sure I’d be able to do it now. Some of the passion seems to have dried up.’
‘I’m sure it’ll come back,’ she said carelessly.
‘Mmm,’ he said, his eyes fixed firmly on the book in his hands. ‘So … do we have here some sort of clue as to what happened to your Donny?’
‘Ah! I see. Of course.’ She chewed a toast crust and pondered. ‘I hadn’t realised that was what you were thinking.’
‘Well?’
‘Give me time. Let’s sort this out. Firstly, Harriet isn’t here, so she couldn’t have been a direct influence on the night he died.’
‘Unless she phoned him.’
‘No. She made a point of not taking a phone. She’s gone to Lindisfarne.’
‘Very New Age,’ he said dryly. ‘But I assume they have phones there. She could call from a landline, or borrow a mobile.’
‘True. But it’s a bit contrived. What would be the point? Do you think she wanted him to kill himself?’
‘No, no. At least … it feels so odd to me. The way you described him is so unlike a man on the verge of suicide. Something must have happened to tip him over the edge. Did he seem at all frightened to you, that afternoon?’
She thought back. ‘No, I don’t think so. Frightened of what?’
‘Death,’ said Drew flatly. ‘If he already intended to do it when he did, he’d have been extremely afraid. And maybe he was a bit frightened of Harriet as well, if she was pushing this at him.’
‘Really?’ She drank some coffee and then rubbed a finger across her forehead. ‘Is it always true that suicides are scared?’
‘Perhaps not always, but he didn’t sound to be seriously mentally ill, or facing some immediate danger or humiliation – anything even more frightening than dying. It’s the timing, you see. The timing is all wrong.’
‘I know it is. You’re right. So Edwina must have done it, after all. Except everybody says she couldn’t possibly have had the nerve to actually participate in his dying. She’s quite a feeble old thing.’
‘She didn’t look feeble to me, apart from the limp.’
‘You should see her sister, Thyrza. I met her this morning. She’s much tougher. And she got cross with me. I suppose everybody’s on edge, under the circumstances. It was her son I met on my first day here, with his poodle.’
She was scattering random remarks, still trying to fathom Harriet’s place in the story, and why nobody had said anything about her book. ‘There are no copies around the house,’ she said aloud.
‘Pardon?’
‘The book. Wouldn’t you think she’d have it on display, or boxes of them to give to friends?’
‘Are you sure she hasn’t? Have you searched?’
She laughed. ‘Pretty well, yes. There are two or three spare bedrooms on the top floor that I haven’t been into.’
‘Well, I’ll bet you there are stacks of books up there.’
‘Why? Doesn’t the publisher keep them in a warehouse or something?’
He gave her a look and turned to the first page of the book. ‘Harriet is the publisher. Look.’ He indicated the name of the imprint. ‘Hollywell Press, Cranham. That’s here. She self-published it.’
Thea blinked. ‘And you say it’s been selling well?’
‘Fabulously well. She must be very good at publicity and all that stuff. She could probably teach me a few tricks.’
‘Let’s go and look, then,’ said Thea, standing up. ‘Come on.’
He followed her up the stairs and along a gallery that looked down into the living room, with a big stained glass window above. Four doors opened off it. ‘That’s her bedroom. Then there’s mine, and the bathroom,’ she pointed out. ‘And another bedroom. And at the end, there’s a little staircase to another floor, with two more rooms, I think. I haven’t been up there.’
‘How could you resist? It’s like a fairy tale. Have you read The Princess and the Goblin? Where the fairy godmother sits spinning in a far-off room at the top of the castle? It’s one of Stephanie’s favourites.’
‘Nope. Sorry. Never heard of it. I usually do explore the houses I’m in charge of, but somehow I just never got around to it here.’ She was standing in the middle of the gallery, which was furnished with antiques, mostly oak, and panelled with the same design as the downstairs rooms. A row of oil paintings decorated the wall between the bedroom doors. ‘There’s enough to keep
me occupied right here,’ she pointed out. ‘I love these, don’t you? I think they’re the four seasons. It looks as if they’re by one of the Pre-Raphaelites, or some minor hanger-on, more likely.’
‘Original?’
‘I think so, although I’m no expert.’
‘Amazing! Did they come with the house?’
‘I’ve no idea. I can’t read the signature, although I haven’t tried very hard.’
Drew peered at the bottom corner of the summer painting. ‘Me neither,’ he said. ‘There might be an E and an M.’
‘Come on, then. Let’s explore,’ she urged. He followed her to the foot of the narrow flight of stairs. ‘This must have been the servants’ quarters,’ she said.
They emerged onto a small landing, with doors to the right and left. ‘You go that way, I’ll go this,’ she ordered, her hand already on the knob of the door to the left. ‘Quick before I lose my nerve. I feel like a burglar.’
‘She’ll have locked the doors if she doesn’t want you to look,’ he said.
‘No keyholes, look. She couldn’t if she wanted to.’
She pushed the door open and looked inside. The room was empty except for a small single bed, piled high with blankets and other bedding. The window sill was thick with dust, and on the floor a dingy rug could do with a thorough vacuuming. ‘Nothing in here,’ she reported.
‘You got the short straw,’ he replied, his voice muted by distance. ‘Come and look in here.’
His room was slightly larger, and very full. A metal filing cabinet, a Victorian roll-top bureau, several large cardboard boxes and an office chair were ranged around two walls. There was also a laptop computer and a printer on a square table. Everything was clean and free of dust. ‘Wow!’ breathed Thea. ‘Just as you thought. But why stash it all away up here?’
‘Efficiency,’ he said. ‘She can take orders, print the invoice, package up the books and take them to the post.’ He lifted a flap on one of the boxes. ‘Padded envelopes,’ he said. ‘All perfectly businesslike.’