by Rebecca Tope
The path to the church was knotted with people, none of whom Thea recognised. It was also bordered with ancient headstones, removed from graves that were presumably destined for reuse. Feeling self-conscious, she devoted a few moments to an inspection of these stones and wished she’d had the sense not to come. She was wearing black trousers and a green shirt. Packing for a funeral had not been part of the process when she’d set out. It was a sheer fluke that she had any dark clothes at all, and the lack of a skirt was just too bad. She spotted two other women in trousers, which reassured her.
The church door stood open and Thea followed a small group inside. Most of the pews were already occupied. People whispered in the dim light, and Thea slid into a half-empty row, almost at the back, alongside two men, who looked at her briefly, and then ignored her.
In front of her a woman wearing a dark blue hat with net covering it was saying to her neighbour, ‘You never know, do you, whether you’re meant to go in first, or follow the coffin in a procession.’ The other woman inclined her head but said nothing.
The church was three pews wide, and Thea could see almost everybody present. The front pew was empty, suggesting that the immediate family were going to follow behind the coffin when it entered the church. She remembered Carl’s cremation with a terrible vividness: the four of them walking behind him into the sterile beige building, with its sterile inoffensive music and the heavy blue curtains drawn back so the coffin could be placed on a kind of stage, the focal point of the whole procedure. When those curtains had slowly ceremonially closed, shutting him away forever, she had felt giddy with abandonment.
Who would feel like that about Joel Jennison? No wife or child, a mother who had deserted him decades ago, a girlfriend who showed no sign of feeling. The answer to the question was obvious, even before the procession came through the door at the back of the church. Old Lionel, grieving father of two lost sons, was the locus of suffering. The truism that no loss could be as desperate as the loss of a child must surely apply here. She had permitted herself to glimpse the man’s agony a few times over the past fortnight, and flinched away again in horror. How could he carry on with such a gaping wound? Who could even come close to assuaging the pain? Who could willingly inflict it upon him, surely knowing just what they were doing?
Detective Hollis’s words came back, ‘This case is all about pain.’ It meant more to her now, was more specifically true than she had acknowledged when he said it. She had even come to the same conclusion, over a week before, and then let it go again. Was it not indeed probable that the person or persons who murdered the brothers actually had the primary motive of inflicting suffering on Lionel?
When the coffin and its followers finally arrived, the reality of the Jennison family group sprang into relief for Thea. She had not previously seen them together, and the connections between them had been shadowy and lopsided in her mind. Now, in three dimensions, a lot was clarified.
Lionel, a shambling bowed figure, was supported by June, his daughter-in-law. Her concern and affection for him seemed absolute. She held her arm in a gentlemanly crook, and Lionel clung to it. The impression was of dignity and a combined strength. Behind them came a threesome – the girl Lindy flanked by her grandmother and great-uncle. She was holding tightly to Harry’s hand, but not touching Muriel. Muriel, who ought by rights have been in front, arm-in-arm with the father of her dead sons, gave every sign of being there on sufferance. She held her head high, eyes darting agitatedly, feet almost dancing in her impatience to get to the front and sit down. Muriel, who Thea understood was really not quite right in the head, made a jarring note. She could not be trusted to behave. Her feelings were impossible to guess. She had quite evidently forfeited her natural right to be present at all, let alone in the family procession. Thea witnessed an impatient glance from June, thrown over her shoulder at this woman who was officially her mother-in-law. Another missing piece fell into the jigsaw – the relationship between these two women was not a warm one.
The bearers laid the coffin on the velvet-covered trestles, and edged invisibly away. Lionel, June, Harry and Lindy pressed into the front pew on the right-hand side of the church. There was no room for Muriel, who stood in horror at her exclusion. Deftly, a hand reached out from the row behind, and guided her into an empty space. Thea could see a bright red head, uncovered by hat or scarf, and realised Susanna, one-time girlfriend of the deceased, had come to the rescue.
The vicar was clearly very familiar with Joel and his family. He made a competent job of the eulogy, alluding fleetingly to the murky details of how the man had died. Death was death, he seemed to be saying, and how you got there was secondary to the eventual reality. Thea thought about this with some intensity. There were of course a million different ways to die. Silent, noisy, painful, easy, violent, disgusting, lonely, public, accidental, self-inflicted – she calmed herself by making a mental list that seemed to go on and on. It was surprisingly soothing to follow such thoughts, and to accept that death was indeed death, and the dead don’t care how it happened in their particular case.
The vicar made no hint at the general appetite for retribution that must surely exist amongst those who knew Joel. No Biblical quotations about eyes for eyes or turning cheeks. Understandable, Thea judged. What in the world could he say on that subject, anyway? Knowing there was every chance that the killer was sitting there in front of him, it would be hard to start down that particular path.
It was not so unlike the traditional gathering in the library for the final climactic unmasking. Thea scanned the rows, trying to pick out the few familiar faces who had featured in the Jennison story as she understood it. Helen and James Winstanley were sitting in a pew all on their own. Martin and Isabel Stacey were with a woman Thea hadn’t seen before. Virginia and Penny, the women who had been at Brook View’s gate on the Sunday that Joel’s body had been found, sat close together halfway down the church. A man she had noticed every morning and evening, driving past the gate in a silver Mondeo – dark hair, old-fashioned black moustache, pale skin. Helplessly, she realised the murderer could be any of these people she’d never met, or someone far away and overlooked, never to be caught and punished.
She had been no kind of detective, after all. Just a bewildered bystander, caught up in events that made no sense, even now. All that had happened was that she’d been forced to think about death, when that had been the last thing on her agenda for the house-sitting interlude. She had been scrutinised and understood by Helen; hugged and kissed by Harry; shouted at by Isabel Stacey; comforted by her husband Martin; confided in by June and Lindy: all far richer and deeper than anything she had anticipated.
She thought about Harry Richmond, wondering what she really felt about him. Would she deliberately let him go when she left? Forget him, put him down as a small step towards recovery and nothing more? It would be too much of a fairytale for anything else to happen between them, surely? Would she even see him again after today? There were only four days left of her sojourn, and they would be busy. She had a sense of him waiting for her to make the decision, ready to abide by whatever she said.
Suddenly it was all over. She had stood and sat and pretended to sing the hymns, and listened to the vicar, and that was it. The bearers rematerialised and carried the coffin outside to the waiting hole in the ground. Thea hung back, along with four or five people who apparently also considered themselves too distantly connected for participation in this final phase. People were strung out along the route from church to grave, looking awkward, saying nothing.
The Staceys, who Thea hoped to avoid, were side by side, very much the united couple, in contrast to the Winstanleys who had separated by some margin. Helen was close behind Susanna, who had followed watchfully behind Muriel. James hovered uncomfortably, leaning one hand on the top of a gravestone, seeming to need the support. As Thea watched, he shifted his weight and she saw that one leg was hurting him. And yet he had seemed so upright and powerful when she’d seen
him in the pub garden at Oakridge Lynch. Was it just cramp from the hard wooden pew? His gaze was directed intently on the interment going on, a harsh frown on his face, the hand on the stone clenched tight.
Had James Winstanley murdered Joel, Thea wondered with a growing anxiety. Was that what Helen had been trying to say on Saturday? That she strongly suspected it was so, but didn’t dare look too closely? Helen clearly had a habit of making friendships amongst the neighbouring farmers, if Martin Stacey was anything to go by. Had she grown so friendly with Joel that James had taken umbrage? If Thea put it to her, would she confirm or deny or merely laugh?
There was a flurry at the graveside as Lionel was assisted in throwing the ritual handful of soil onto the coffin. A choking cry rose up, shocking everyone into paralysis. ‘No-o-o-o!’ he called, sending his voice out like the harsh cawing of a crow, addressing the cosmos, the cruel universe that had brought him to this. Thea felt tears flood her eyes.
When she looked again, there had been a regrouping. A striking tableau caught her gaze: three women standing together, an inward-looking arrangement where each could look the others in the face. A triangle of female emotion. Thea could see two of them clearly – Isabel Stacey and Helen. The third was Susanna.
Thea knew about female threesomes, being in possession of two sisters. There was always one on the outer edge, excluded from a special intimacy between the other two. But the alliances constantly shifted, in order to sustain the basic group. This was where the magic lay. Nothing in human society was as powerful as a trio of women; they very often frightened even themselves.
In this case, Susanna was the misfit. Isabel and Helen were both looking at her with a complexity of emotions that Thea could only glimpse. Anger, pity, collusion all seemed to be there. It was also a surprising grouping. She would have expected June to be involved, and she was oddly aware of the absent Jennifer Reynolds. She could have formed another trio – former pupils of Cheltenham Ladies’ College – with June and Susanna.
But none of this supplied any half-credible explanation for the deaths of the Jennison brothers. Complicated scenarios involving jealous rivalry for the men’s affections came and went. Had something momentous happened the previous year, when June and Paul moved to Cirencester, and Susanna split up with Joel, initiating a chain of events culminating in two murders? Trying to recall all the snippets and snatches of history she’d heard, Thea felt she might have hit on something there.
And there’d been something else. She rummaged for the memory, and finally found it. Jennifer and Clive Reynolds had had their big falling out at that same time. Their marriage had almost collapsed, and this cruise was by way of celebration or confirmation that they’d come through the crisis and were still together.
The obvious explanation for this was that Clive had been carrying on with June, and not the nameless woman in Helen’s account. June and Paul had moved away, to give both couples a chance to recover, and to distance the errant lovers from each other.
It fitted so neatly that Thea instantly believed it to be fact. Further than that, it suggested that Clive and Paul would have been in a state of mutual animosity, perhaps to the point where Clive shot the farmer one night, having seen him lurking in the field behind his house.
She shook herself. People were leaving, and she was standing alone in a rather too prominent spot. It was time to go home.
The house was definitely dusty. The cushions looked tired and crumpled, the corners of the kitchen silted up with dog hair and fluff. Thea had not been a very good housewife during the past two weeks. This didn’t bother her. The labradors and the plants were all alive and healthy. The sheep appeared to be contented. The garden was not within her brief, but the few new weeds wouldn’t take long to eradicate. There had been no burglaries, fires, breakages or floods. Only a little murder, in the garden pond, to disturb the peace; plus, of course, a tragically devastated water lily, which was, in the circumstances, not too great a price to have paid.
Several cars passed the gate throughout the afternoon, coming and going to Barrow Hill, she supposed. She remembered from a year ago the sudden drop in tension when everybody finally departed, the funeral concluded, the new circumstance confirmed. Thea and Jessica had looked at each other warily, conscious that they had no choice but to reconstruct their lives without the keystone that was Carl. Carl had balanced his wife and daughter, according each of them his attention, but in different ways. He had skilfully avoided giving either cause for jealousy or insecurity. He had smiled tolerantly whenever they ganged up against him, as they often did. Without him, they simply toppled over, like two playing cards kept upright only by the third one placed at just the right angle.
But it wasn’t like that for the Jennisons. Their house of cards had been a more complicated one. Lionel would have been as much the keystone as the one in need of support. June had already suffered her own cataclysmic loss when Paul had died. Losing Joel couldn’t possibly be of equal significance. Lindy, likewise, was left isolated, a great hole knocked through the generation above her, and nobody of her own age to cling to. The pattern was of a single representative surviving in each age group, calling in reinforcements in the shape of Harry, Susanna and the very odd Muriel.
The afternoon passed restlessly. Something was coming to a head. Some observation made at the funeral was surely the key to the mystery of Joel’s death. There was something about hatred and female revenge that niggled at her. A sense that most of the women she’d met did in fact dislike each other. She herself disliked Isabel Stacey, after her rudeness, but she liked Helen and June, in spite of an acknowledgement that either of them might just have been the killer. Either or both, given the new discovery that Joel’s body must have been lifted and carried some distance.
It was an exercise not dissimilar to juggling the seven letters of a Scrabble game. The permutations initially seemed to fall into only three or four different patterns, but the chance adjustment of a single element could introduce completely unexpected possibilities. Thea was tempted to put her musings into hard copy – give each individual a letter and start juggling them. Harry, Martin, Susanna, Lionel, June, Lindy and Helen. That was a lot of suspects, and it ignored Muriel, James Winstanley and the host of neighbouring villagers who hadn’t made themselves known to Thea. And including Lionel seemed unjustified. Even rather cruel, she felt, on reflection. Who could ever believe that the poor old man would murder his own sons?
But before she started cutting out paper squares and laying them out in various formations, the will went out of her. Suddenly it all seemed foolish. She wasn’t going to catch a murderer like that. There wasn’t enough objective evidence to make one scenario more plausible than any other. Anyone watching her would laugh at the futility of what she was planning to do.
The abrupt plummet into the dark hole of futility was familiar enough for her not to panic. Instead she went into the kitchen and rummaged in the freezer for a carton of chocolate chip ice cream, which she had previously noted, but not so far sampled. She took a bowl of it outside, and sat on the lawn, trying not to think. Hepzie sat beside her, contented to play the faithful hound, while Bonzo and Georgie loped and sniffed about the borders and beds.
How much, in the end, did it matter to her who killed Joel Jennison, she asked herself. Just as it hadn’t seriously mattered who had been driving the truck that slaughtered Carl. The knowledge wouldn’t change anything; retribution was undoubtedly over-rated and justice a very abstract concept. Could she, though, just leave at the end of the week with the whole business still unresolved? Could she somehow act to hasten the denouement? Was it in her power to identify and expose the murderer? It was impossible to answer such questions, but the slow procession of them through her mind, as the sweet ice cream slipped down her throat, returned her to a sense of proportion. There were things she could reasonably do: well-intentioned and responsible things. She had time and brains to assist her, and a detached standpoint from which to observe the partic
ipants.
And, above all, she had almost nothing to lose.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Aware of the rapid passage of time, Thea devoted Monday evening to hatching a workable course of action. Making a number of dubious assumptions, she devised a plan containing several alternatives, depending on the outcome at each stage. The sense of taking charge and precipitating events was intoxicating. There was no return of the moments of bleak futility as she gained confidence in what she was about to do.
The basics were simple enough, time-honoured and fairly obvious. Bluff and counter-bluff, setting the players against each other and sowing mistrust. It took nerve, and would scarcely have been possible if she had been one of the community, intending to continue to live amongst the people concerned. Many of them would never be able to forgive her for her treachery. James Osborne would be appalled and DS Hollis outraged. Perhaps, in the morning she would again change her mind, and pretend the whole idea had been a foolish fantasy. But she hoped not. In the course of her preparations, she had come to certain tentative conclusions, considering as she had the persons under scrutiny, assessing the probabilities of each one as murderer. Given the gaps in her knowledge, she could not be sure. But she did think she had a workable hypothesis. And the whole thing about hypotheses was that you had to put them to the test.
On Tuesday she got up at seven thirty, and vigorously exercised all three dogs on the lawn, before taking Hepzie around the field to count the sheep. The sun rose delicately, mistily through the trees at the edge of the field, reminding Thea of the bolthole through which Lindy had burrowed. It was on the western boundary of the field, and Thea found herself looking directly at it without being able to see anything unusual. It was one of many details in her careful construction of a plan of action.