by Rebecca Tope
The gate to Brook View was open, and a police car sat reproachfully on the gravel forecourt. ‘Oops,’ Thea muttered.
The same two policemen she’d spoken to earlier emerged from the vehicle. ‘Sorry to trouble you again, madam,’ said the talkative one. ‘Just a few more questions, if that’s all right.’
His diffident manner calmed her anxieties. ‘Of course,’ she smiled. ‘Come in. I’m sorry I wasn’t here.’
‘We thought you’d just gone for a walk, seeing your motor’s still here,’ he said.
‘That’s right.’ She led them into the house, dodging the labradors, who came bounding out much more friskily than usual. They had been shut in rather a long time, she supposed. Maybe they weren’t quite as lethargic as she’d first thought.
The policemen wasted no more time. They repeated to her the statement she’d made to them earlier, and then went on, ‘Can you give us a definite assurance that the body was not in the pool yesterday afternoon?’
Thea blinked. ‘Absolutely,’ she said. ‘But surely you can gauge the time of death, and settle that once and for all?’
‘Probably.’ He looked away from her, tapping his teeth with his pencil. ‘You see, we need to decide now whether or not Mr and Mrs Reynolds should be brought home.’
‘So, if Joel was alive when they got on their plane, they can carry on with their cruise?’ Thea impressed both herself and the police officers with her rapid grasp of the essentials.
‘Well, yes. We’d still want to ask them some questions, and three weeks is a long time, but if we can be satisfied they’re not pertinent witnesses, we can maybe speak to them on the phone.’
‘Have they left port yet?’ Thea couldn’t work out the time frame, allowing for the flight and the several intervening time zones.
‘There’s another hour or two,’ said the policeman. ‘After that, it would get rather complicated.’
‘Well, you can let them have their holiday,’ she said, wondering whether they would really decide the matter on the basis of what she told them. ‘If the scream I heard was Joel, then they must have been somewhere over the Atlantic at the time.’
‘Now – that scream,’ prompted the quieter man. ‘Would you say it was a cry of pain? Or something else?’
Thea sighed. ‘I was asleep, you see, when it came. I only heard a sort of echo. You know – the memory of it, after I woke up. And that makes it really difficult to describe.’
‘Try,’ he urged her.
‘Well, I would say it was a cry of fear more than pain. But then you have to wonder whether somebody would shout out with fear, don’t you? Imagine it – you’re out in the dark at three in the morning. In somebody else’s field. You know there’s only a woman in the house, so you’re not too worried about being confronted. Then some other person hits you, or pushes you or waves a torch in your face. Well, you wouldn’t shout, would you? You’d talk more or less normally, or call out in words. You wouldn’t howl.’ She looked from one to the other, hoping they’d understand what she was trying to explain. ‘Do you see?’
They exchanged glances, and said nothing for a moment. Then, ‘Well, p’raps it’ll be easier to understand when we’ve got the post-mortem results,’ said the spokesman.
‘That’s right,’ said the other.
‘Oh!’ Thea remembered. ‘And the security lights didn’t come on. That’s another reason I didn’t go out to investigate. It made it more likely I’d just heard a bird or a rabbit or something.’
The first policeman wrote this down on his notepad. ‘That’s very useful,’ he said. ‘Assuming we can be sure the lights are working? And that they illuminate the part of the house with your bedroom window?’
Thea thought about it. ‘That’s a point,’ she admitted. ‘We’ll have to check it after dark, I suppose.’
On the doorstep, she asked one final question: ‘So what do you think will happen about the Reynoldses?’
‘Not for us to say, madam,’ said Chatterbox.
There was a lot for Thea to think about that evening, not much more than twenty-four hours after her arrival. The atmosphere had changed completely, though oddly enough not altogether for the worse. The dogs seemed to have recovered from whatever malaise had been keeping them so passive, and were positively manic when it came to their feeding time. ‘I know what it was!’ she told them, feeling foolish. ‘You’re missing your mum and dad, after all. And there was me thinking you couldn’t give a damn.’
If the theory was correct, then the pain of separation had been short lived. But that was dogs for you. Whatever the explanation, Bonzo and Georgie were much better company that evening. She took them outside and threw two tennis balls for them, which she’d found in a box in the back pantry, with other items that appeared to be dog-related. Hepzibah looked on coolly. She did not chase balls herself, and was not at all sure she approved of her mistress spending time with these big yellow morons.
Out in the garden, the game over, Thea paused to listen. There was scarcely a sound that could be attributed to mankind. A cow bawled in the distance, an evening bird sang its farewell to the day and a breeze swished lightly in the bushes. It was idyllic. Thea’s own cottage at home was almost adjacent to the A40, with traffic noise a steady background. Noticing its absence for the first time since coming to Brook View, she acknowledged what an improvement it made. And all the better, she thought smugly, for having turned off the annoying water feature in the corner of the garden.
It was curious, being a stranger to the area. Two murders committed within two months had to be earth-shattering for the inhabitants. She did, undoubtedly, feel sorry about Joel Jennison, who had taken the trouble to call on her so quickly and been so pleasant in his manners. It was hard to believe he’d turned into that sodden mass in the sheep’s watering hole, only about twelve hours later.
But Thea was hardened to sudden death. She knew, down to her bone marrow, that it happened; that you could never take life for granted, however secure and safe you might believe yourself to be. Her Carl had been vivid with life – loud, solid, even smelly in a nice way – and he had been snuffed out by a juggernaut. After that, anything was possible.
She went to bed early, taking a resentful care over the locking-up procedures. She wasn’t afraid, she insisted to herself; it was merely that the world outside would expect her to be thorough, and just at the moment it was politic to placate the world outside.
The dog was warm on the duvet again. The one pure uncomplicated element in a life that never stayed serene for long, was her affection for the dog. The softest, most forgiving, most beautiful dog imaginable. Sometimes Thea felt it was her only route to salvation, this feeling she had for the animal.
She slept dreamlessly, and awoke at seven thirty to rain dashing against the window. Wet and windy, she noted. What a nuisance. Did she really have to take the dogs out and count the sheep and open the gate and all the other needless outside tasks she’d been set? Surely nothing could have happened to the sheep during the night – they’d be huddled in the lee of a hedge, five minutes’ walk away through the blustering weather. She’d leave them until later in the morning, when conditions might have improved.
Wishing she’d gone to the trouble the previous night of organising teamaking equipment in the room, she pushed back the duvet with Hepzibah rolled up in it. At that moment, the phone rang.
This time, she went straight to the instrument in the kitchen, where a notepad and pencil were within easy reach.
The line was poor, which led her to assume the caller was on a mobile. ‘Mrs Osborne?’ came a man’s voice. ‘Is that you?’
‘Yes,’ she shouted.
‘This is Clive Reynolds. I’m calling from my ship. They tell me there’s been some trouble.’
‘Well, yes…’ Surely, she thought, he’d been told hours ago? Why had he left it so long to call her?
The line suddenly improved, as if someone had flipped a switch that ought to have been flipped from the out
set. Perhaps that’s what actually happened.
‘Look. I’ve told the police they’ll have to force us to come back – we’re not going to volunteer. We’ve waited a long time for this holiday, and there’s a lot riding on it. The man’s dead – nothing anybody can do about that. I’m just sorry you’ve been landed with such a fiasco. That’s all I’m calling to say.’
Thea’s mind slowly caught up. ‘What time is it there?’ she asked. ‘It must be four in the morning.’
‘Something like that. Not according to my body clock, of course. They never sleep on a ship, you know.’
‘So you want me to carry on as planned?’
‘If you don’t mind.’ His tone was brisk, giving her little option in her reply.
‘I don’t mind,’ she said. ‘Not really.’
‘Thank you. That’s a big relief to us both.’
She wanted to say something about Joel Jennison, and Helen Winstanley and the silent villagers – but she didn’t. ‘Bye, then,’ she said, replacing the receiver with the sense of a die cast.
CHAPTER FIVE
The rain stopped at ten thirty, and to make up for her slackness, Thea took the three dogs into the garden, and offered to play with them. She had half expected the police to tape it all off and tell her not to go into it, but evidently they’d examined it to their satisfaction, and given the all clear. The dogs did not seem to be in the mood for much romping, so she gave up, taking instead a slow tour around the beds and shrubs. The garden had a strong appeal, with winding paths leading to an open area shielded by laurels and rhododendrons. She had intended to give the water lily an inspection, but was distracted by the overnight appearance of new shoots in one of the flowerbeds. Too early for a definite identification, nonetheless she was happy to see them. Looking at the whole garden more closely, she found signs of the police search that had lasted most of Sunday. Nothing too destructive, but clearly they had rummaged in borders and beds, breaking off some early flower spikes. They would recover, she knew. Some would even be better for the damage. Plants could teach people a thing or two in that department.
A lot rested on this coming summer, the second of her widowhood. If she was to get through the second half of her life free from misery and guilt, she suspected it would have to be with the assistance of the natural world and its never ending optimistic progress.
In her mid-thirties, Thea had picked up an incomplete degree course, and acquired a BA in History. Very much by accident she found herself specialising in industrial history of the early eighteenth century, developing an interest in transport particularly. Canals and railways caught her interest, and much to her family’s amusement she became fascinated by both.
Having graduated, there were no obvious employment opportunities for such a qualification, other than teaching. Thea Osborne was no teacher. ‘I’m far too lazy for all that paperwork,’ she would say. ‘And I’m never going to get the little beasts to behave themselves while I drone on about Brunel and Stevenson.’
The studies were therefore set aside, and Thea got a part-time post in the Bodleian, mostly associated with cataloguing documents. It was dry, undemanding and not very well paid. She stuck with it because it did not significantly interfere with her duties as wife and mother, friend and sister.
When Carl was killed, she had abruptly abandoned the job and never gone back. As the months had passed, it became increasingly unimaginable to return, for reasons that seemed to proliferate. Carl’s life had been insured, thanks to a cousin who happened to sell policies and would not be dissuaded. Carl and Thea had been sheepish about it, not seeing themselves as the sort of people who insured themselves. But the eventual payout had provided a safety net that made even part-time work an unnecessary exertion.
Abandoning the water lily to its fate, partly out of guilt at having turned off its splashy water feature, she remembered the Cotswolds, still uncounted. When she went to the yard gate, to make her belated inspection of the sheep, the labradors as well as Hepzibah expressed a desire to go with her. ‘Oh, what the hell,’ she muttered. ‘What harm can it do?’ Then caution prevailed, as she remembered Clive’s anxieties over sheep worrying.
‘Sorry chaps,’ she corrected herself, squeezing through the gate without them. ‘Better not come with me, after all. For all I know, you’re covert sheep murderers.’
Bonzo and Georgie looked at her, tails wagging slowly in unison. Nothing seemed to upset them. Big silly unambitious things – not so different from sheep themselves. She permitted herself the knowledge that she didn’t really like them very much.
The day continued to feel aimless and fragmented. It was a Monday, the start of a new week, and there were twenty more days to get through before she could go home again and…and what? Nothing really beckoned from Witney, any more than it did from Cirencester or Gloucester or Duntisbourne bloody Abbots.
‘Don’t get depressed, don’t get depressed,’ she instructed herself fiercely. ‘Think of the new plants growing, the sunny days ahead.’ She knew the danger signs – nothing tangible to look forward to, everything feeling futile, grey weather and complete absence of human company. She recalled her flicker of interested anticipation at the sudden appearance of Joel Jennison at the door. A young man, just across the road, inviting her to drop by. It had seemed such an auspicious start. He might have been badly dressed and impeccably spoken, a walking contradiction, but he’d been friendly, and that was the main thing. His death the next morning now felt like a personal slight.
There was Helen, of course. She’d been nice, especially about the finger. But Thea had recognised the underlying neediness of Helen Winstanley. A lost and lonely girl hid just below the skin of the affluent confident woman. And Thea wasn’t very good with the lost and lonely.
From hard experience, she knew there was only one remedy when she felt like this. Get busy. Fill your mind with something from outside yourself. Make lists. Meet people. It was what middle-aged Englishwomen had always done when left alone. They bustled, organised, cooked; they rambled and knitted and gossiped. They gave up hope of losing themselves in any sort of intimacy with a man. If he wasn’t dead or off with a floozie, he’d be in the pub or watching football on the telly. Admittedly there were the favoured few who seemed to find the perfect bloke, but Thea felt herself to be beyond that sort of compatibility now. She’d forgotten how to do it, how to signal properly, how to submit and flatter.
So – to action! The urge from the previous afternoon to turn down the track to Barrow Hill Farm came back even more strongly. Right, then, she decided. That’s what she would do. She would go to the farm where an old man grieved for his two dead sons.
If she had any expectations, the reality only partly met them. Joel Jennison had called on her in the most agricultural of attire. He had been muddy and unkempt. By extrapolation, it stood to reason that his farm would be something the same, and in most ways it was. There was certainly mud.
The buildings occupied a hollow, at the end of a short rutted drive. The house, greyly unassuming, had farm buildings on two sides and a yard in front. The yard was occupied by a large number of multi-coloured cattle. Thea could see no way of approaching the house other than through the thronging animals. There was the sound of a tractor engine coming from one of the large barns.
She was not wearing waterproof boots, which she realised now was a serious mistake. Underfoot was an unwholesome mixture of muck and mud, to a depth of at least two inches. Her shoes, stout as they might be, were no match for this. She nearly turned back, but that was not her nature. There had to be a way around the muck, and she set about finding it.
Stone walls divided the yard from the house, the house from a field behind it, and the track from the land on either side. The walls were about three feet high in every case. Thea hopped over the one on her right, thinking to circle round and approach the house from the back. Lateral thinking, she told herself smugly.
She was now in a field containing a flourishing crop of yo
ung thistles. They snatched at her ankles as she walked through them, but her socks provided protection. This was not a well-kept farm, she concluded. Self-respecting farmers didn’t let thistles grow where lush spring grass or newly sprouting corn should be.
There was a gate into the field behind the house, and she climbed over it, enjoying the process. It never failed to remind her of childhood summers spent at her grandparents’ home in Wiltshire, where she and her siblings had been taken on lengthy country walks designed to tire them out.
Now there was just another wall between herself and her goal. This field boasted a better crop of grass, wet from the morning’s rain. Her shoes were soaked by the time she climbed over the second barrier, beginning to feel that this was enough climbing, and – damn it – she was probably going to have to do the whole thing again in reverse, in order to get back to Brook View.
The house stood uninvitingly before her. There was something stern about it, the windows like the eyes of an offended schoolmaster. There was no door at the back, just a weedy patch of garden and the rusting remains of some sort of farm implement.
The tractor engine had been running constantly since she arrived, but now it was switched off. She headed around the house, hoping to encounter whoever had been working in the shed. Mucking out, perhaps.
The cattle milling about in the yard did not seem surprised to find her popping up on the other side from where she had first appeared. She looked at them, and they looked at her. These were not milking cows, she realised. Most were male, and they were not full-grown. They were penned into the yard, with a large circular contraption full of silage to eat. Their expressions epitomised boredom on an epic scale.
She was now in the walled-off front garden, leaning over the half-sized gate, her back to the house, wondering what to do next. Knocking on the door was the obvious course of action, but she was assuming from what Joel had said that the only person living here was his father. Which meant the person driving the tractor must be the old man. Which meant there wouldn’t be anybody in the house. Still, this was all supposition, and a knock might bring some unforeseen result.