by Rebecca Tope
‘And…?’ he prompted.
‘Well, I argued with him. I thought he was being unduly bureaucratic and unreasonable.’
‘Did you threaten him?’
‘Of course not. What possible threat could I make against him?’
‘How was the matter left?’
‘Inconclusive. I assumed I would receive a letter from the council, and we would have to take it from there. I had some idea of checking ownership of the land, and the possibility that Mrs Simmonds had squatters’ rights over it. It’s a major exercise to move a grave, as you probably know.’
He then requested me to recount every detail of my movements in the thirty or forty minutes between leaving Thea and the others at the cottage, and rejoining them for our walk to the pub. Realising its importance, I put all my concentration into giving a full and frank report, with timings as precise as I could manage. I wished I’d been more familiar with the layout of the village, so as to be able to put names to the various locations. ‘I really need to show you on the ground,’ I sighed, as I tried to describe everything I’d done. ‘I walked across a field, roughly parallel to the Blockley road, then veered left out through a gateway – which was where the body was found – turned left up the road, and then stupidly turned right at the top, instead of left again.’
Basildon tapped his teeth with a pen. ‘But the cottage is actually visible from that junction,’ he protested. ‘We checked it this morning.’
‘I expect it is,’ I agreed. ‘But I hadn’t seen it from that angle. I just blindly followed Jessica’s car, having no idea where we were going to finish up. And when I went out again on foot, I crossed the main street to the footpath, which was what confused me. Coming out a different way, I somehow just assumed it was to my right. Everything looked new to me, and I wasn’t concentrating.’ I sighed. ‘I know it sounds stupid – but why would I lie to you about it?’
He raised both eyebrows at this, as if to say, Why do you think?
‘Anyway, it can only have added about five minutes to my total time away. I realised quite quickly what I’d done.’
‘Mr Slocombe, sir, you walked a total of seven hundred and fifty metres, at a generous estimate. How did that take more than half an hour?’
‘I was on the phone. I was admiring the view. I took a wrong turn.’
‘Does that happen to you a lot?’ asked the detective blandly. ‘Taking a wrong turn, I mean.’
‘Not really. But I was thinking about my wife and things at home. I wasn’t paying proper attention.’ I still failed to grasp how I was coming across, in this naïve display of incompetence. I was under the impression that the simple truth was all that was required, so I doggedly repeated myself, in the hope that he would believe me.
Basildon raised a decisive hand. ‘Thank you, Mr Slocombe. Before we go any further, we’ll need to increase the formalities somewhat. I’m going to caution you, and offer you the option of having legal representation. I will need to take a number of samples from you. We will relocate to the police station at Cirencester, and a statement will be prepared for you to sign.’
Good God, what had I said? I wondered. ‘What? Now?’ I stuttered.
‘That’s right. We can take you in a car, and bring you back here afterwards. It won’t take more than an hour or so.’
‘So you’re arresting me.’
‘Technically, yes. In the sense that you don’t have any choice in the matter. But we won’t need to keep you in custody, so long as you undertake to keep us informed of your movements.’
‘Do you honestly think I killed the wretched man?’
He smiled wearily, as if everybody asked the same question. ‘That is not the point,’ he said. ‘We need to understand everything that took place in the hours before he died. You are clearly going to be very helpful in the investigation.’
‘OK – I’m already being helpful. Why do you need to arrest me? Doesn’t that run the risk of making me hostile? Wouldn’t it be better just to let me talk as we are?’
‘We need to be able to use whatever you might say as evidence,’ he said, and then went straight into the words of the police caution, which I had never expected to hear directed at myself.
Far from feeling hostile, I was bewildered and scared. Crazily, I thought of my expired road tax and bald tyres. I was already on the wrong side of the law, suspected by Jessica Osborne of being feckless and unreliable. What guilty secrets would this man unearth in the course of his questioning? The petty misdemeanours I had committed throughout my life loomed large in my mind. I had fudged my tax returns, plucking figures out of the air with no documentary proof. I had lied to relatives of the dead, in the interests of a quiet funeral. I had kept my children off school, saying they were ill, when we fancied a day out at Lyme Regis or Weston-super-Mare.
But I had not coshed Mr Maynard on the head with a large stone.
Chapter Eight
In the event, the formalities in Cirencester proceeded fairly gently. I was given an oral swab, which was mildly unpleasant physically and much more humiliating than anticipated. My fingerprints were taken, and my shoes whisked off into another room, exposing a small hole in the heel of my sock. My jumper and trousers were bagged up and labelled, and a new clean tracksuit provided in their place. ‘We’d like it back at some point,’ said DI Basildon. Mercifully, my shoes came back after ten minutes or so. The results of my interview in Blockley were typed up and produced for my signature. I read them through carefully first, and then signed that they were accurate ‘As far as they go,’ I said to the inspector. ‘I want to write in big red capitals – I did not kill Mr Maynard.’
‘We are well aware that you have not made a confession,’ he said stiffly.
‘I would have to be a psychopath to murder him,’ I continued. ‘I was annoyed with him, and worried about what would happen next, but it’s barmy to think that would make me kill him.’
‘I can’t comment, sir.’
‘You can check that I made the phone calls to my wife and colleague.’
‘Indeed,’ he nodded. ‘But you haven’t claimed that you spent the entire time speaking on the phone.’
‘I’ve told you the exact truth of what happened.’
‘So you were completely startled at the discovery of the body?’
‘Of course.’
‘We have a suggestion that you seemed quite unsurprised.’
‘What? Jessica, I suppose. She didn’t even look at me. Her mother and I stayed back, letting her do her job. Thea realised what was happening before I did.’
‘You had no idea what was going on?’
‘Of course not. How could I?’ I tried to recall my feelings, what I’d been thinking at the time, in vain. I fell silent, helpless to influence the way this man regarded me.
Then I was kept hanging about waiting for a car to take me back to Blockley, feeling increasingly like a wriggling bug on a pin, scrutinised through the implacable lens of the law. Everything I said seemed to increase my guilt in their eyes. My heart rate had sped to a painful level, everything inside me thundering with anxiety. Even my bowels were turbulent. It was all well beyond my control, and this was before I had even begun to consider the implications for my family and business.
‘Sorry to keep you waiting,’ said a man behind me. He was in uniform, and I had not seen him before. ‘We can go now, if you’re ready.’
‘So I’m no longer under arrest?’
He blinked. ‘Haven’t they told you that?’
‘Not really.’
‘You’re still under suspicion, as I understand it. That means you’re bailed to attend any further interviews or proceedings. You are not at liberty to leave the country.’
‘I won’t leave the country,’ I promised him.
They took me back to my car. Only then did I remember that I was meant to be meeting Mrs Talbot for more questions and probable anger. I was sorely tempted to just leave it, and drive home as quickly as I could. But I had to
ld Thea I’d be there, and I was only ten minutes late, surprisingly. The morning already felt as if it had lasted a couple of days.
She must have been watching for me, and came out of the house as soon as I turned off my engine. ‘How did it go?’ she asked, as if I’d been sitting an exam. She eyed the tracksuit critically, but didn’t laugh.
‘It was annihilating,’ I said dramatically, having found the word during the drive. ‘Completely annihilating.’
‘Oh dear. Come and have some coffee. The sister will be here any time. She’s even later than you. I’ve been playing with Mrs Simmonds’ coffee machine, so there’s plenty, and the power is still on, mercifully. The tracksuit is rather fetching, by the way. Much better than going home naked.’
‘I need the loo first,’ I said unceremoniously. Nothing in my gut was behaving normally, and there was a certain urgency to my need.
We waited for Judith Talbot in near silence. I could tell that Thea was curious about my experience as an interviewee, but she was deterred from asking by my bemused condition. Also, perhaps, she understood that I had had enough of answering questions for a while.
Before we had time to get restless, the visitors were upon us. They arrived in full force: not only the sister, but her older son and her husband as well. I focused on Charles, thinking he looked different from when he’d come to my Somerset office, a week earlier. A week which felt like a month or more. I looked at him, wondering what he was going to say to me. More than his parents, he looked hostile and accusatory.
‘You remember Charles, I suppose,’ his mother said, having registered my presence with a flicker of surprise. ‘And my husband, Oliver.’ The introductions struck me as superfluous, but she made them deliberately, as if it was important. I realised how little I knew about Judith Talbot – what she did for a living, whether she was older or younger than her dead sister, why her two sons were so vastly separated in age. Her hair was dyed a coppery colour and her figure was firmly in control. She seemed fairly intelligent, and more concerned than angry, for which I was duly grateful. Charles was a few years older than me, I guessed, a colourless chap who manifested very little in the way of thought or emotion on our first encounter. It had been Thea who mentioned the nasty divorce he was undergoing.
‘Of course. I’m pleased to see you again, although I very much regret the circumstances.’ I was automatically slipping into undertaker mode. I hoped I wasn’t unctuous or oily – rather, approachable and reassuring. Reliable and friendly. The undertaker’s role is to persuade people that although death is a really bad thing to happen, it isn’t the end of the world. There are routines and formulas for getting through it, which we ignore at our peril. Even when the burial is in a cardboard coffin in unconsecrated ground, there are still correct procedures to be followed, to ensure due dignity.
‘We need to know that the grave won’t be disturbed,’ she asserted, wasting no time. ‘The very idea is horrifying.’
‘I agree,’ I said. Forcing myself to concentrate, I went on, ‘How did you hear there was a problem?’
‘Susan Watchett phoned me on Friday evening. She said she’d been thinking it over, and got more and more uneasy about it all. She took her time to admit it, but after a bit she told me she’d reported it to the council. She just caught them, apparently, before they closed for the weekend.’
Thea gave a strangled gasp at this, which made us all look at her. Her eyes were wide with surprise. ‘But she liked it. She approved of it. She came here last week with her husband and talked glowingly about the whole natural burial thing.’
‘She can be like that – changes her mind from one second to the next. I learnt about fifty years ago that you can’t rely on Susan.’
‘You’ve know her that long?’ I queried.
‘We went to school together, in Chipping Campden. Susan, me, Greta, Helena. We always kept in touch.’ A dreamy look crossed her face. ‘Sometimes it feels as if you can’t escape your childhood – those friendships you make so carelessly when you’re eleven stick with you for life. All it takes is a Christmas card every year and the odd letter, and you’re in it for the duration.’
‘That’s nice, though, isn’t it?’ said Thea.
Oliver Talbot made a sound, suggesting scepticism. ‘Susan’s brought us a fair bit of trouble over the years,’ he said, in a voice I had scarcely heard thus far. He was a Scot, I noted.
‘Who’s Helena?’ asked Thea. I began to feel she was taking curiosity slightly too far. The conversation could go on for hours at this rate, and yet again I felt the demands of my family urging me to hurry it up and get back home.
‘Helena Maynard, she is now,’ said Judith easily. ‘Married to a chap on the council.’
She didn’t know. She had not watched local TV news or heard any gossip. It was twenty-four hours since the murder, very nearly, and still there were people who didn’t know.
Either that, or she was the best actor on the face of the earth. Stupidly, I kept my gaze on her face, not looking at her son or husband – who might perhaps have been less relaxed at this reference to the new widow. I missed any chance of catching a hint or clue to any knowledge they might have had. Thea, too, lost the opportunity.
‘But he’s dead,’ she said, recklessly. ‘He was murdered yesterday.’
Judith froze, then threw bewildered glances at her menfolk. ‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘Who do you mean? Nobody said anything about a murder.’
I squared my shoulders and took a deep breath, hoping that Thea would recognise that I needed her to remain silent. It worked. ‘I met him at the grave yesterday morning,’ I said. ‘About an hour later, he was killed. I’ve just got back from being questioned by the police about it. Obviously, given the situation, they regard me as being involved.’
The Talbots absorbed this information in three different ways. Charles rubbed his cheeks and chin with a chubby hand, swallowing hard and frowning in apparent confusion. His father coughed and sniffed as if a noxious gas had been squirted at him. As if information so stark and terrible was a physical substance capable of injuring him. And Judith uttered a high hysterical little laugh, her face turning pink and shiny.
‘I can’t believe it,’ she said. ‘I really can’t believe it.’
After that, there was a period of shocked questions and assertions that followed no logical thread. Charles said nothing, his eyes turned on some urgent inner musings which rendered him deaf to what the rest of us were saying. Gradually, Judith pulled herself back to the original reason for their visit.
‘But the grave,’ she said. ‘What about the grave?’
‘We’ll have to wait and see,’ I replied. ‘Nothing has been decided.’
‘But it was Helena’s husband who complained to you about it – is that right? You met him to talk it over. What did he say, exactly?’
‘He said your sister never owned the field, but rented it from the council. She couldn’t possibly have believed it was her property, or that she had any right to use it for her burial. He hinted that there might be some financial agreement we could make—’
‘Buy it from the council, you mean,’ interrupted Oliver Talbot. ‘Cheeky wee devil.’
‘Oliver!’ his wife rebuked him. ‘The man’s dead. Mind what you say.’
‘The village will have a field day over this,’ continued her husband, gloomily. ‘Our name will be all over the papers. Old Bill Kettles is going to be in seventh heaven, silly old sod. You’d think a body would have told us, all the same. Where’s yon Susan when she’s needed?’
Susan, I thought, had already done enough damage, by alerting the Talbots to the trouble over the grave. Although they’d have had to know eventually, of course.
‘Who’s Bill Kettles?’ asked Thea.
‘He was a friend of our mother’s. Makes mischief every chance he gets. Greta always liked him, but I couldn’t stand the old goat.’ Judith was almost back to normal, I noted, marvelling at the resilience of the human spirit.
Judith smiled smugly. ‘Because we didn’t tell him when it was going to be. Or where. I made Susan promise not to tell him, and Miriam Ingram likewise.’
I had forgotten the Ingrams. ‘Do they live here as well?’ I asked. ‘The Ingrams, I mean.’
She nodded. ‘Practically next door to the Maynards, as it happens.’
‘And were you at school with her, too?’
She gave me a narrow look, as if suspecting me of flippancy. ‘No, I wasn’t. She doesn’t come from round here. Graham does, of course – but that’s got nothing to do with anything.’
Thea laughed. ‘Gosh, I do love the way these connections work, especially in villages like this. Everybody knows everybody, all their secrets, all the old feuds and resentments. So many stories hidden just below the surface.’
Judith was visibly offended. ‘Stories?’ she repeated. ‘These are people’s lives. They might sound like funny stories to you, but to some of us they’re deadly serious.’
Despite her attack on Thea, I was warming a little to Judith Talbot, as she got into her reminiscences. At least she wasn’t attacking me for sloppiness over her sister’s grave.
‘You’re quite right,’ said Thea apologetically. ‘I didn’t mean it the way it sounded. And you must be feeling awful about your friend Helena. You’ll be wanting to go and see her, won’t you?’
Judith Talbot turned pink, all over again. ‘Oh!’ she gulped. ‘Well, not today. No, no. She must be overwhelmed with it all, if it only happened yesterday. She won’t want us crowding in on her. I’ll send her a card.’
I’d seen it many a time, the instinctive recoil from sudden grief and pain. Most people did it, afraid of saying the wrong thing, of being sobbed on, of entering a realm where naked emotion ruled and normal procedures were abandoned. I didn’t blame them – it was genuinely alarming if you weren’t used to it.
I definitely needed to take my leave. I told them so. ‘But we need to clarify the question of the grave,’ I added. ‘Why did your family rent the field in the first place, when it’s nowhere near the house? How far back does that go?’