A Cotswold Killing

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Thank you,’ said DS Hollis, switching off the machine. ‘That’s what I hoped you’d say.’

  Everyone seemed to exhale at once. The air quality changed, and Hollis came close to smiling. ‘Thank you,’ he said again.

  ‘How does it help?’ Thea felt drained, as if she’d been there for hours under intensive grilling.

  ‘It confirms that Mr Jennison was attacked within earshot of your bedroom. With the window open, and a still night, that could have been in the field, or even the road at the front of the house. It’s still a wide area, but not as wide as it might have been.’

  ‘But it’s not the whole story?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘At least you don’t think I killed him,’ she quipped. ‘Or do you?’

  ‘You could have done.’ He gave her another direct look, his eyes locking onto hers. ‘You’re just about the best placed person, after all.’

  ‘True. I could have planned it all in advance. Got the job as house-sitter deliberately to be close to the Jennisons. I can’t prove I never knew them until Saturday afternoon. And if I did do it, you’re hoping I’ll give myself away by saying something about how he died.’

  The man smiled coldly and said nothing.

  ‘I have no idea precisely what killed him,’ she went on, with a sense of increasing recklessness. She could even envisage Hollis reaching out and slapping her, or pushing her off the chair. There was a tightness about him, a lidded violence that might blow at any moment. ‘I mean – a knife, or razor or piece of broken glass.’ She faltered, beginning to feel foolish and much too talkative.

  ‘There’s no proof that he came to visit you on Saturday afternoon. His father finds the idea astonishing.’

  ‘So did his sister-in-law,’ Thea agreed. ‘But it did happen.’

  ‘You didn’t recognise him when you found his body.’

  ‘He was face down in mud, wedged under some brambles. How would I?’

  ‘You were unusually calm when you dialled 999 and when our people arrived.’

  ‘I was widowed suddenly a year ago. I’m unshockable now. And I didn’t feel personally involved with that body. I felt rather sick, and useless, and sad, but I didn’t panic. There wasn’t any point. He was dead.’

  ‘Hmm,’ Hollis said.

  And that appeared to be that. Perhaps mindful of all the things awaiting him in another room, he switched off his scream machine and jerked his chin at Constable Herring.

  ‘Well, thank you for coming,’ he said to Thea. ‘We’ll probably be in touch again soon. Somebody will drive you home now.’

  The Ocean Pie had gone very dry in the slowly cooling oven, and the half-baked potato was unappetisingly wrinkled. Intending to throw them away, Thea nevertheless dipped a fork into the crust of the pie to test whether it had gone quite cold. The taste on her exploring tongue was good enough for her to dip again, and soon she had eaten most of it, standing in the kitchen, wondering how to spend the rest of the evening.

  Joel Jennison’s face came and went in her mind’s eye. The outlandish costume, the quick wit floated back, and she struggled to identify any hint of fear or anxiety in his manner, any hidden message, any appeal for help. There had been nothing of that sort. He’d been confident, friendly, informative. But there must have been something in his timing, his sudden absence from the Barrow Hill milking parlour where he should have been.

  She sat down in the living room, close to the window and looked out onto the front garden, trying to think. She needed to jump the rails, approach from a different angle, put herself in different shoes. What if Joel had wanted to check her out? What if he thought she might be somebody he knew? Somebody planted by the Reynoldses? What if he needed to satisfy himself that she wouldn’t get in the way of some sort of covert activity he had planned for the weeks of Clive and Jennifer’s absence? Perhaps he even needed to be sure her dog wasn’t going to tear his throat out if he ventured into Brook View property at night.

  She mentally laid out all the information gleaned thus far: Joel’s brother had been shot with his own gun in the field behind this house, and his killer has escaped undetected. Joel’s mother, Muriel, lived close by, a survivor of two marriages, sister to a remarkable man who had apparently lived all his life in the area. Joel’s father was a wounded lion, a curmudgeon hitting out in blind agony, driving away anyone who offered sympathy. Joel’s sister-in-law, June, was disconcertingly composed, in the circumstances, although Thea understood only too well how that could work. Hadn’t DS Hollis just accused her of the very same thing?

  The whole story screamed family, whichever way she looked at it. Only James, a distant, world-weary senior police officer, seemed to think there was a wider picture. Something to do with drugs or farm subsidies or pornography or illegal cash crops – every time she tried to guess, the list got longer. And less relevant. If there were something like that under investigation in Duntisbourne Abbots, somebody would surely have hinted at it by now. Helen or Harry, informed by local gossip, would have directed their disclosures that way, instead of focusing on relationships and lost loves and old jealousies.

  It was both a handicap and a help not to have had any close encounters with most of the character list. Thea had no great faith in her own judgment of human nature. She was no better at detecting a lie than anyone else. What she was reasonably good at was noticing patterns, making logical deductions and hearing underlying messages.

  Harry Richmond wanted her help, as did June Jennison. Joel Jennison had wanted something from her, too, even if only reassurance that she was harmless. Helen Winstanley was a loose cannon, involved in something with the unknown Staceys, as well, perhaps, as the estranged Susanna. Helen Winstanley was damaged goods, sitting on a compost heap of secrets, and with uncomfortably little to lose. The old man had already lost everything. He, if anyone, was the ongoing victim in the story.

  A horrible idea began to sprout; an idea that seemed to answer quite a few of the most immediate questions.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  She went back to see Harry Richmond on Saturday morning, after a ten-minute dog-exercising duty, plant-watering and rapid head count of sheep. She didn’t phone Harry first, and she didn’t take Hepzibah with her.

  He showed no surprise when he opened the door seconds after she’d knocked. She was almost disappointed not to have more time to savour the lilac and the profusion of the flowerbeds, which seemed to have come on noticeably in two days.

  ‘I’d really like to meet Muriel,’ she said, very early in the conversation. ‘Would that be possible? I know I’ve got no good reason to intrude like that…’

  ‘But I’ve already pulled you in,’ he said. ‘You’re involved now. We can go and see her right away, if you like.’

  It was ten o’clock. Thea had a silly notion of a Jane Austen-type encounter, calling on the woman in bonnet and gloves, in the knowledge that morning tea would be standing by, ready for just such an eventuality. There would be calling cards and polite smiles, and smartly upholstered dining chairs.

  ‘Why not?’ she said, unable to shake off the impression that she’d just fulfilled an expectation on Harry Richmond’s part.

  Mrs Muriel Isbister, widow, bereaved mother and runaway wife, was in reality not a million miles from a Jane Austen character; a discovery that Thea found unnerving. Small, restless, twittery, Muriel was completely unlike her brother, who laid a calming hand on her elbow and tried to make her listen to who Thea was. ‘You know Clive Reynolds? And Jennifer? In Brook View…?’

  ‘Of course I remember Brook View,’ Muriel interrupted him. ‘How could I forget dear old Mrs Whimslow, she was always so kind to me. She sent me a note, you know, when I left Lionel. But she must have died ages ago…?’

  ‘Listen,’ Harry ordered his sister, with a very effective thread of authority in his voice. ‘This is Mrs Osborne – Thea – who’s looking after Brook View while Clive and Jennifer are away.’

  Muriel reared back as if s
uddenly confronted by a snake. ‘Uh!’ she gasped. ‘Then you must be…it was you who…’

  ‘Found Joel in that pool – yes,’ Harry filled in. Thea was relieved that the woman had evidently been given the whole story, though irritated with herself for thinking it could have been any other way. She was, after all, Joel’s mother.

  ‘The police never came to tell me, you know,’ she said, jittering around the room on shoes with high slender heels. She wore a neat two-piece outfit in dark blue, as if dressed for a funeral. Her white hair was tidy, her face carefully made-up. ‘I had to hear it from June.’ She looked accusingly at Harry. ‘Why didn’t you come to tell me?’

  He shook his head, and pulled an exaggerated expression of regret. ‘I can’t really answer that,’ he said. ‘Not without hurting your feelings.’

  Her eyes flashed and Thea could sense echoes of age-old sibling spats. ‘You mean I didn’t come top of the list. You had to go off and pander to that girl before me. Or play your part as grand old man of the village, interfering in everybody’s lives, playing your stupid games.’

  Harry cast an anxious glance at Thea, evidently concerned for his image. Too late – she was already revising her impression of him, fitting the accusations with what she’d already experienced. The ‘girl’ was presumably Lindy – though that was an unusual way of referring to one’s grand-daughter.

  ‘And why have you brought this woman here?’ Muriel went on. ‘What are you hoping to achieve? She’s got nothing to do with me, or you, or any of us. She’s not working for the police, is she?’

  Thea felt it was high time she spoke up for herself. ‘I wanted to meet you,’ she said. ‘I do feel involved, mainly because Joel came to see me the afternoon before he died, and I can’t just pretend it’s got nothing to do with me. Especially since it was me who found him on Sunday. Try to put yourself in my shoes – visits from the police, worries that there might have been something I could have done to save him. I need to understand what happened, and why, as much as you do.’

  Muriel laughed bitterly. ‘Oh, I understand what happened, well enough. Somebody’s doing it to get back at me. They’re punishing me for running off and leaving the boys the way I did. First Paul, and now Joel. What else am I supposed to think?’

  ‘But who?’ Harry Richmond spoke impatiently, as if to a very obtuse child.

  Muriel’s eyes narrowed. ‘I’m not such a fool as to name names,’ she muttered. ‘But I would have thought it was obvious.’

  Thea felt shaky at this veiled accusation, wondering whether there was another large piece of the picture she had not yet grasped. She hoped, in a way, that there was, because otherwise Muriel Isbister’s words had just uncomfortably echoed the direction her own thoughts had been tending.

  If two brothers were killed, without any obvious motive, the conclusion that somebody wanted to hurt those who most loved them seemed inescapable. Or if not hurt, then to damage financially.

  Harry Richmond interrupted her thoughts. ‘It’s no good casting aspersions like that on Lionel,’ he said. ‘He’s lost everything in this. You think he’s gone on hating you all these years, but you’re quite wrong. He’s a wrecked man, now. He’d never have laid a hand on either of the boys, and you’re a damned idiot for thinking he would.’

  ‘No, Harry – you’re the damned idiot,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t talking about Lionel, of course I wasn’t.’

  Harry’s composure slipped. Thea could see him reproaching himself for saying too much, and her view of him shifted yet again. ‘Well, then,’ he blustered. ‘I don’t know…’

  Muriel turned to Thea, deliberately ignoring her brother. ‘So you feel involved, do you?’ she said, with strong sarcasm. ‘Have you no family of your own with dirty secrets and vendettas? How long are you here for, anyway?’

  ‘Another two weeks.’

  ‘And then you can just float back to where you came from and never give us another thought. Meanwhile, you want to be some sort of Miss Marple or fairy godmother and put everything straight for us sad little village people? Is that the way it works?’

  Thea almost enjoyed the attack. ‘I hadn’t thought of it in that way at all,’ she said.

  ‘Well, maybe you should.’ Muriel continued to flutter about the room, but now with angry twitches, pulling at the shoulders of her jacket, stamping her heels down hard on the slightly shabby rug. Thea couldn’t imagine her at rest, let alone asleep. There was an energy inside her that seemed relentless.

  ‘If you think you know who killed the boys, have you said anything to the police?’

  ‘They wouldn’t believe me. They asked a string of fatuous questions about Paul’s political activities, years ago, and whether I’d seen Susanna lately…’

  Politics! Thea’s heart sank at this possible link to James’s hints at wider matters. How dull. And what an unlikely motive for murder. All the same, she felt duty-bound to pursue it.

  ‘Political activities?’ she echoed.

  Muriel tossed her head violently. Thea half expected to see it go spinning off her shoulders. ‘Oh, he was in the Socialist Workers’ Party when he was young, that’s all. The police had a file on him, because of it.’

  Thea was impressed by the easy way this unexceptional little woman uttered the words Socialist Workers’ Party. At least she hadn’t said SWP, which Thea was certain she would not have understood. Was it possible that the murders could have had the remotest connection with something that sounded like a normal phase in Paul’s development?

  But how did that sit with Helen’s description of the Jennisons as upstanding churchgoers wearing suits and judgmental faces? Socialist workers wore long hair and ragged T-shirts. The only common factor was a tendency to extremes, and perhaps to a certain sort of misanthropy.

  ‘Was he still a member when he died?’ she asked, deliberately not evading the word. Passed away was a phrase that made her want to scream.

  ‘Of course not. He dropped all that before he was twenty-five. He went the other way after that, under the influence of his father. I’m just trying to explain to you what fools the police are.’

  ‘Um…’ said Harry, from a position at some distance from the two women. They both looked at him.

  ‘Mrs Osborne’s brother-in-law is in the police,’ he elaborated.

  ‘I don’t care if he’s the Home Secretary,’ Muriel flashed back. ‘They’re quite evidently fools. I have more than enough proof of that.’

  ‘Perhaps because people like you don’t give them the assistance they need,’ said Thea. ‘After all, everything they do has to be based on information from the public. Without that, they’re pretty well helpless.’

  ‘They don’t listen,’ whined Muriel. ‘They just stick with what they think they know. If somebody’s got a criminal record, they think that says everything about the person.’

  ‘Paul had a criminal record?’

  ‘Yes. I said so, didn’t I?’

  Thea didn’t argue the difference between a file and a record. She found herself wishing that Harry would take a more active role in the encounter, and wondering why she’d walked into this muddle in the first place. She also noticed that no tea or coffee had been forthcoming, which rendered Muriel Isbister rather less of a Jane Austen figure than had first seemed to be the case.

  ‘I don’t understand why you’ve come,’ shrilled Muriel, taking a series of short sharp glances out of the front window. Her house was in the main street of the village of Bisley and people passed regularly along the pavement outside. Opposite was a high wall with a garden on a bank above it, with the obligatory clematis and lilac spilling over the top.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t explain it any better than I have already,’ Thea said. ‘Call it common human decency. I know what it’s like to lose somebody. In my personal experience, there’s some comfort in the sense of being in a community, where good and bad things happen to everybody, and we can offer a helping hand here and there.’

  ‘Community? You’re
not a bloody nun, are you?’

  Amusement came as a relief. Thea smiled widely. ‘No, I’m not a nun. I didn’t mean it like that. It’s a jargon word these days, isn’t it. I didn’t even mean the people where I live – just random people stopping for a minute to tell me they cared about what had happened. You can never get enough caring, I find.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that.’ Muriel sniffed, and Thea was reminded of the woman’s first husband, Lionel Jennison, rejecting sympathetic advances in much the same way. He and Muriel must have been quite a well-matched couple, at least in that respect. She devoted a few moments to trying to imagine the early days of the Jennison family, the abrupt swings of fortune, as the mother abandoned them and the farm slid into penury. Paul’s extreme public manifestations could perhaps be explained in terms of his domestic experiences, if only the chronology could be sorted out.

  ‘Come off it,’ scolded Harry, sounding much less indignant than the words themselves suggested. ‘I care about you, you silly thing. And so does Daisy. And you know Susanna’s been a lot of help, ever since Fred died.’

  Daisy? Thea had to think hard before she remembered the daughter, twenty-one, offspring of Muriel’s fertiliser salesman – who was presumably Fred. Susanna she knew to be the erstwhile girlfriend of Joel Jennison, and a subject of rapidly growing interest. Mentally, she placed Susanna at the top of the list of people she still very much wanted to get to know better. The list continued with the Staceys, along with the mysterious Monique and perhaps Virginia-and-Penny-from-the-village.

  Muriel was still fluttering and pecking when they left, her agitation distressing to witness; her sharp momentary attacks disconcerting. ‘Is she always like that?’ Thea asked.

  ‘She’s a bit more nervous than usual, but she never has been exactly serene,’ Harry said. ‘We used to call her Birdy when she was small, and it fits just as well now.’

  ‘You’re not a bit alike.’

  ‘Siblings seldom are, in my experience. Don’t you find that they deliberately choose to be different, right from the start?’