Crisis in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  She drove slowly away from Broadway, cogitating all the possible directions she might take. So many places in the area were associated with violent death and terrible behaviour. The list was oppressively long, tainting a lot of the beautiful villages. Knowledge of what the inhabitants were capable of added a dimension that no casual visitor could possibly even guess at. The nature of the Cotswolds region itself was still not quite defined in Thea’s mind. There had been so many incarnations over the past thousand years and more. First, dense forest, mostly destroyed by the Saxons and their contemporaries. Then, the grassy uplands providing rich fodder for sheep, and rich wool profits for their owners. Huge churches, far too big for their communities, had been erected on this money. Railways had crossed the area, bringing tourists to admire the old stone buildings and increasingly ostentatious gardens. And still, to this day, money was evident in all its manifestations in almost every town and village. Big cars, hi-tech security systems, upmarket emporia and expensive pedigree dogs were inescapable. Not to mention horses, private planes and strange eccentric collections.

  All of them potential motives for crime, of course. People valued their possessions above other people’s lives, once in a while. They valued their own status and reputation every bit as highly. They exacted revenge, silenced those who knew too much, or simply lashed out when a particular psychological or emotional button was pushed. Which looked like the probable reason for Juliet Wilson’s death.

  Once more, she ran through the very short list of people who might lose their self-control badly enough to strike poor Juliet. The list comprised only two soft, nice, friendly men. Anthony Spiller and Adam Rogers were both impossible to imagine as killers. Nancy Spiller had not known Juliet – but then, she realised, that wasn’t an essential qualification. If it was a simple act of sudden rage, anything might have sparked it off. Juliet could have seen something, heard something, made a noise just when a rare migrating bird came into sight, or have been mistaken for a threat of some sort. Perhaps she had loomed out of the early morning mist, terrifying some nervous birdwatcher, who blindly waved a stick in her face, thereby killing her. But wouldn’t such a person immediately call ambulance and police and admit the whole tragic story? That’s what anyone normal would do. And Anthony Spiller was apparently more or less normal. As normal as anybody could claim to be, anyway, she thought. A better word would be conventional or conformist, she supposed. Someone who abided by the rules of society without questioning them.

  But then there was that same old fear of losing face. Of forever being known as the man who – even if by accident – had killed a beloved local figure. Even a conventional, conformist, normal person might quail at that prospect and run away from the scene of his own violence, lying and obfuscating his way out of the whole thing.

  It could have been anyone, on that basis, she decided gloomily. Gladwin would never find him (or possibly her) because there would be no linkage, no fertile seams of investigation. No witnesses, motives or incriminating evidence.

  Really, there was nowhere she wanted to drive to in the mood that gripped her. She might just as well go home and find something domestic to do. Or sit out in the watery sunshine and read a book.

  The car was already heading towards Broad Campden. She took the smaller road, that went through Blockley, out of habit and a vague preference. It passed the burial ground before reaching her home village, and she liked to slow down and give it a quick inspection. Drew was sometimes there, in which case she might stop for a chat.

  Instead, she was astonished to see a big white camper van parked inside the field. She braked hard, then reversed a little way for a better look. Trespassers! A whole new problem, which they had never considered, and which was sure to be awkward to deal with, or prevent in the future. The field had to be open for families to visit the graves, with one corner kept free for parking.

  She stopped on the verge and got out. Full of righteous indignation, she marched towards the interlopers, wondering how long they’d been there. Had Drew or Andrew not seen them? She did not keep close track of their movements; they might not have gone to the field that day. ‘Hey!’ she shouted, when still twenty yards away. ‘Hello?’

  Nothing happened, but when she got closer, she could see movement through one of the windows. Then a door in the side opened, and a ramp dropped down, where there would normally be steps. She trotted up to it, and peered in. A man in a wheelchair was being delicately manoeuvred towards her by another man. The chair came down the ramp, with a brief rush at the end. Thea stepped back out of the way, and tried to understand what she was seeing.

  ‘Mrs Slocombe,’ said the man holding the handles of the wheelchair. ‘We meet again.’

  ‘Clovis Biddulph,’ she squeaked. ‘What on earth—?’

  ‘I told you we’d camp out until my father’s funeral took place. Well, here we are – all three of us. This is my brother Luc.’

  She swallowed, her eyes glued to his face. It was just as lovely as before. Her bones went just as rubbery and her heart swelled and flipped idiotically. ‘You can’t,’ she said. ‘You really can’t.’

  ‘Sorry, but as you see, we absolutely can. We’ll go as soon as the burial’s done. We thought it might be today, but that seems to have been optimistic. There hasn’t been a new grave dug, so now we’re wondering if it’s not even tomorrow, either.’

  The brother was watching her. He had the same dark eyes and thick hair, but he was much less attractive than Clovis. His face was longer and thinner. A groove between his eyes made him look angry, and his lips were thin and tight. ‘Three of you?’ said Thea.

  ‘That’s right,’ came a female voice from inside the camper. ‘I’m the first Mrs Biddulph. Come to make trouble for the second one.’ She laughed, as if at a very merry little joke. When she came into full view, Thea saw a slim, straight-backed woman of roughly seventy years old. She wore a dark-blue cotton shirt, open at a neck that was stringy and wrinkled with old tired skin. There were moles around her collarbones. Her tight jeans were grey, stopping short of slender ankles and bare feet. ‘No, but seriously,’ she went on, ‘we do think it’s time to stop all this nonsense about keeping us a secret. It’s just so ridiculous. What are they afraid of, anyway? We’re just people, the same as them.’

  ‘Her, Ma. Not them. The son doesn’t know about us, remember. It’s him she’s protecting. When he finds out we exist, it’s going to sully his image of his dear old dad. How demeaning is that? It’s disgracefully rude, when you think about it.’ It was Luc who spoke, in a voice indistinguishable from that of his brother. He looked up at Thea. ‘You probably can’t even imagine it. He made it very clear to us, many years ago now, that he never wanted to see us or hear from us again.’

  ‘And we did as he wanted,’ added Clovis. ‘We let his new son have him, and never did anything to rock the boat for them. I don’t know what Linda’s told you about us, but it won’t have a word of truth in it. We behaved well and respected his wishes. But now …’ He paused and looked at the other two. ‘Now, we’ve had enough. We want to be here for his funeral, and I don’t think anybody would regard that as unreasonable.’

  ‘We’ve talked it all over, and we came to the conclusion that your very respectable husband is not going to do anything to have us removed, because it would make for very bad publicity, and serve no useful purpose whatever.’ Again Luc was doing the talking. He smiled to soften the implied threat behind his words. ‘Besides, by the time he could take out an injunction, we’d be gone anyway. We’re not out to cause him any trouble. We’re going to behave with absolute decorum. Your real problem is Linda. She’s the unreasonable one in all this.’

  Thea found nothing to say in disagreement. It fitted with her own observations – which she had voiced right at the very start, when Drew first told her the story. Except that then she had been sorry for Lawrence, and now she had almost forgotten he existed.

  ‘It’s a very nice place to be buried,’ said the woman. ‘P
oor old Stephen! He really wouldn’t want us to be here, you know. He did his best to wipe us out of his life. We hadn’t heard a whisper from him for at least twenty years.’ She gave a rueful shrug. ‘So we reckoned this was our last chance to get anything close to our rights. I think we do have rights, don’t you?’

  ‘It’s a lot more than twenty years, Ma,’ said Clovis. ‘That was when he told us we should leave him alone, for Lawrence’s sake. I think I was about eighteen the last time any of us spoke to him – and then I had to pretend to be his insurance company before he’d come to the phone.’

  ‘How did you know which company he used?’ asked Thea, slowly returning to detective mode.

  ‘I didn’t. I just said I was calling to check his no claims bonus. It usually works.’ He grinned shamelessly, and her heart wobbled again.

  ‘Stop it, Clo,’ said his mother. ‘You’re making yourself sound like a petty criminal.’

  Blood rushed to Thea’s head. ‘You do know there was a murder here, only three days ago?’ she blurted. ‘Don’t you?’

  ‘Not here exactly – was it?’ asked Luc, looking at the grass and the tracks across it. ‘Must have been through there, judging by all those ruts.’

  ‘And we don’t know anything about what happened, who died, what the police think about it. Nothing whatsoever to do with us,’ said the woman.

  ‘Maybe not, but the police are very likely to come back, and want to know what you’re doing here.’

  All three shrugged at the same time. ‘So what?’ said Clovis. ‘We’re not scared of the police.’

  ‘We could start a trend,’ added Luc. ‘People could stay here overnight before their relation’s funeral. You could charge them. It might be a nice little earner for you.’

  Thea could not repress a smile. The man had wit, then. Perhaps he wasn’t as bitter and twisted as she’d assumed. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said.

  ‘So, why don’t we cut to the chase, and you tell us the exact time and date of our father’s burial?’ said Clovis. ‘What do you have to lose, since we’re here now? We had to do quite a bit of detective work to get this far.’

  ‘Did you?’ Thea was intrigued. ‘I suppose it couldn’t really have been so difficult.’ A lateral thought entered her head. ‘Did you know his child is called Modestine?’

  Three faces expressed a range of humour, recognition, superiority. ‘Keeping up the French connection, then,’ said the mother. ‘Stephen’s old mum must have had a hand in it – again. She can’t still be alive, can she?’

  ‘She didn’t keep in touch with you, then?’ asked Thea.

  ‘She did for ages. Last I heard was eight or nine years ago. She must have been well over ninety then. Funny old bird she was. Came from the primitive south, in the mountains, and never really learnt how to be civilised.’

  Thea was irresistibly drawn in. ‘How did Stephen’s dad meet her?’

  ‘It was in the war. He was doing something clandestine with the Resistance, and she was the daughter of the house where he was hiding out. A bit of a cliché, I suppose. I always thought it was a bit cruel to transplant her over here. She never did adapt. Had to have her potager, and kept goats in a garden that was too small for them. They used to eat the clothes off the washing line.’

  The first Mrs Biddulph had gone misty with her memories – something that Thea had learnt was quite common after a death. Nostalgic reminiscences were a natural part of the mourning process. ‘How bizarre, to get murdered beside a cemetery,’ she murmured. ‘It can’t have been a coincidence.’

  ‘I did hear a few seconds on the news about it,’ said Clovis. ‘Didn’t sound as if they have much idea as to who did it.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said Thea. ‘Everybody loved her. It doesn’t make any sense.’

  ‘What was her name?’ Clovis had wrinkled his brow. ‘Something Shakespearean.’

  ‘Juliet.’

  ‘Nice,’ said the woman. ‘Unusual.’

  ‘I know a Juliet,’ said Luc, carelessly. ‘It’d better not be her. She’s a volunteer at the Paxford Centre, and we’re all very fond of her. She likes to wheel me down to watch the ducks on the lake they’ve got there. It brightens everybody’s day when she shows up.’

  Chapter Twenty

  Thea didn’t have time to answer, partly because her breath had seized up at the implication that at least one Biddulph had known Juliet Wilson all along. She was still processing the significance of this when she heard Drew calling from the gateway into the road.

  ‘Uh-oh,’ said Clovis. ‘Here comes the boss man.’

  Drew came trotting across the field, looking from face to face in an effort to understand. Why was his wife so seemingly friendly with these trespassers? How had the wheelchair got there? What was he going to have to do about it?

  ‘The Biddulph family,’ said Thea in a rather airy introduction. ‘Here for tomorrow’s funeral.’

  ‘Aha!’ pounced Clovis. ‘Tomorrow it is, then!’

  ‘Oops,’ said Thea, trying with some difficulty to take it seriously. Somewhere just below the surface there was an inescapable hilarity to these people – except perhaps for Luc, and even he was capable of cracking a joke. They were making a party of their father’s funeral – and why not, she wondered. They were probably glad, if anything, that he was dead. He had done them no good for decades, treating them as a shameful secret. Why wouldn’t they show up to celebrate?

  ‘I should introduce myself properly,’ said the woman. ‘My name now is Kate Dalrymple. I was married to Stephen Biddulph, as you’ll have realised. My present husband and I are living apart – otherwise he might have come along as well, just for the experience. He did know Stephen, briefly.’

  Like the Spillers, thought Thea, wondering whether any marriages survived for long these days. Then she thought – everybody knows each other, apparently. She wanted some quiet, to process the startling discovery that Luc Biddulph had known Juliet Wilson – because it surely had to be the same Juliet. Did it mean anything important concerning the murder? So far, she could see no way in which it could. All it did was endorse the general feeling that there was nobody in the world who even mildly disliked Juliet, let alone hated her enough to kill her.

  ‘You can’t stay here overnight,’ said Drew.

  ‘I’m afraid we’re going to,’ said Clovis, with an awful courtesy. ‘We’re not doing you any harm, I promise. Nobody’s even going to notice us.’

  ‘Andrew’s coming in a minute to dig the grave.’ One of Drew’s abiding taboos, inherited from working for a conventional undertaker, was that families should not witness the gravedigger at work.

  ‘So?’ Clovis cocked his head enquiringly.

  Thea took Drew’s arm. ‘Why does that matter?’ she asked.

  ‘It just does,’ he said, trying to smile. ‘It’s not … right.’

  ‘We really don’t mind. Does he use a digger?’ asked Kate Dalrymple.

  Drew flinched and nodded. Even that detail apparently had uncomfortable implications. There were mysteries surrounding the disposal of dead bodies that persisted even now. And the use of a mechanical digger somehow lacked dignity, needing to be kept away from general awareness. Thea had characterised this as stupid, sometime previously.

  ‘Please don’t worry about it,’ begged Kate. ‘I know we’re breaking a whole lot of the usual protocols – but isn’t that what you do here, anyway? No church service, no processions or eulogies or po-faced bearers. Who are the bearers, by the way?’

  ‘We’ll be using the trolley, and then Andrew and I will lower him,’ said Drew.

  ‘Doesn’t that require four people?’ Luc asked.

  ‘Not the way we do it,’ said Drew shortly.

  ‘Hm.’ said the man in the wheelchair.

  Thea was still holding Drew by the arm. ‘We can’t very well force them to move,’ she said. ‘That would cause much worse disruption and trouble than letting them stay. Nobody can blame you for it, if you just leave them alone.
You didn’t tell them when the burial’s going to be.’

  ‘No. That was you,’ he said crossly. ‘Assuming it wasn’t already on Facebook.’

  ‘Not the actual day,’ confirmed Clovis. ‘Which is why we’re here now – for fear of missing it.’

  ‘Okay. All right. Have it your way.’ His irritation clearly extended to his wife. ‘But if there’s any trouble tomorrow, don’t expect me to take your side. My client is Linda Biddulph. I’m perfectly clear about that.’

  The sound of Andrew arriving with the digger on a trailer behind his old Land Rover silenced them all. The digger did not belong to the business, but was hired on a special basis from a local garage, which had sidelines, including plant hire. It was their oldest piece of equipment, and Drew was regularly urged to just buy it outright. But they would not take less than a thousand pounds for it, and there was no obvious place to keep it, so things continued as they were. The garage got eighty pounds every time it was used – a cost added to the price of the funeral – and Andrew undertook to collect and return it after every grave was dug. Both he and Drew hated the thing, but it reduced the time required to prepare a grave by a factor of four or five, at least.

  ‘I should go,’ said Drew.

  ‘And me. Not long till the kids get home,’ said Thea. She wanted to add I’ll race you, but she didn’t think Drew was in that sort of mood. He was right, of course. The sight of the local undertaker and his wife sprinting through the quiet little village might arouse the sort of comment they really didn’t need.

  So, instead, they walked decorously home, side by side but not touching. ‘I’ll have to call Linda and tell her,’ he said worriedly. ‘I can’t let her walk into the middle of that lot.’

  ‘I suppose not. She’ll be furious, won’t she?’