Crisis in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  She went downstairs feeling weirdly buoyant. You were not supposed to celebrate the day on which your husband died, and she was doing no such thing. Simply taking a larger step than usual into the future with Drew. ‘Morning, all,’ she trilled, looking round the kitchen with a smile.

  ‘It’s raining,’ said Stephanie. ‘I need my coat with a hood, and I can’t find it.’

  ‘There’s a giant puddle just down the lane,’ said Timmy. ‘I saw it out of my window upstairs.’

  ‘That grave’s going to be half-full by now,’ said Drew.

  ‘It won’t last much longer,’ Thea promised them. ‘You know the saying “Rain before seven, fine by eleven.” It always works.’

  ‘Yes, but it’s only twenty to eight,’ complained Stephanie. ‘And it’s raining hard.’

  ‘The coat’s in your cupboard. It’ll be much too warm for this time of year. What about your anorak?’

  Fifteen minutes later, they were all three huddled under an umbrella, waiting for the school bus. Timmy’s puddle was indeed prodigious, and threatening to overflow into the front garden of the house next door. The movement of the water seemed unusual, causing Thea to wonder where it was all coming from. Looking round, she concluded that the slight downward slope from the church to their house was enough to start a spontaneous waterway during a prolonged downpour, which was augmented by small rivulets emerging from one or two gateways along its route.

  The bus arrived five minutes late and, once the children were safely aboard, Thea grasped the umbrella firmly and set off down the Blockley road for a look at the burial field. She had offered to do so, telling Drew, ‘I’ll be wet anyway, so I might as well go now. You can stay in the dry, then.’

  ‘That’s very noble,’ Drew had said. ‘Just see whether that camper van’s still there, and peep into the grave while you’re at it. Andrew will have covered it up, but water is bound to have got in.’

  A car slowed down beside her before she’d gone thirty yards, and a man leant across to speak to her, looking far from friendly. ‘Hello? Mrs Slocombe? I’m Tony Spiller. Remember me?’

  ‘Oh! Mr Spiller. What are you doing here?’ Too late, she heard the rudeness in her words. This was Anthony Spiller, who she had wanted to see the previous morning. Who was staying with a friend in Chipping Campden, having left his nice wife Nancy in Broadway. ‘Sorry,’ she amended.

  ‘I was coming to see you, actually. I gather you visited my wife yesterday. I wanted to find out why you did that. I can’t begin to understand what you thought you were doing.’

  She had stepped closer to the car, bending down to talk to him through the open passenger window. Her jaw dropped, and she could think of nothing to say. She could not even remember what story she’d told Nancy, now.

  ‘How did you find my address?’ he pressed on. ‘There’s no way your husband would have it. Did the police give it to you? If so, I’m going to issue a formal complaint.’

  Her feet were getting wet, standing in a muddy rivulet, where water was flowing along the main village street. There was water everywhere, even in Anthony Spiller’s car, where rain was getting in through the open window.

  ‘Where are you going, anyway?’ he asked her.

  ‘Down to the field.’

  ‘Get in and I’ll drive you.’

  She saw no reason to refuse, even if he was cross with her. People were often cross with her, after all, and none of them had ever done her physical harm. ‘Okay,’ she said, pulling down the umbrella with an effort. ‘But I’ll make everything horribly wet.’

  He tossed this away with a twitch of his head.

  ‘I hope this isn’t silly of me,’ she said as she got in. ‘So many grim stories begin with an innocent female getting into a car with a strange man.’

  ‘Am I strange? You’ve got a phone with you, haven’t you? And somebody has probably seen us.’

  ‘Yes to the phone,’ she lied, patting her jacket pocket. ‘And no, nobody’s seen us.’ There were no houses close to that stretch of road, and certainly no people strolling past in the rain. ‘And I’m not sure whether you’re strange or not. You seem to be in rather a bad mood.’

  ‘I should be back at work today. I suppose I’ll go in this afternoon, pleading emotional distress or something.’

  ‘What do you do?’ Before he could reply, she was mentally listing possibilities. Social worker. Vet. Insurance assessor. University tutor.

  ‘Computers. Software design.’

  Thea remembered the booklined snug in the Broadway house, and tried to reconcile that with a man who spent all day at a keyboard. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Boring, right? It’s not, actually. And it’s remarkably lucrative, even now.’

  They were already at the field, and Thea could see the Biddulph camper van still in place. A sudden reluctance to confront the family yet again made her shrink down in her seat. ‘Why are you coming here, anyway?’ Anthony asked her.

  ‘Oh, I told Drew I would have a look,’ she said vaguely.

  ‘Is that camper supposed to be there? Seems rather peculiar.’

  ‘It’s not, really. But I think they’re leaving today. it’s all a bit complicated.’

  He turned and gave her a searching look. It felt like being in a private enclosed box, with rain streaming down the windows, and condensation rapidly fogging up the inside. He was a nice-looking man, in his mid-forties, mildly overweight and pale. ‘Why did you go to Broadway, exactly?’ he asked her again.

  ‘I thought you might want to talk about finding Juliet. You were obviously upset, and we didn’t really listen to you properly, did we? I was worried about you.’ She thought back. ‘You hadn’t told Nancy about it, had you? She had no idea what had been going on here.’

  ‘That’s right. It didn’t concern her. That’s the whole point,’ he said obscurely.

  ‘Sorry? What is?’

  ‘I need to see if I can live on my own, without her doing everything for me. I can’t be a proper adult when she’s around. She means well, and I know it isn’t that simple. I just … felt suffocated.’

  This account did not sit entirely consistently with Nancy’s version of their separation, which Thea supposed was not very surprising. ‘You haven’t got children?’

  ‘No. She never wanted any. We would have made very inadequate parents, so she’s probably right.’

  ‘It’s a lovely house.’

  ‘It is. We bought it ten years ago. I was on a contract that paid silly money and she was bringing in quite a lot at the time. We felt very grand, I remember.’

  ‘Oh. Well, I should go. I’m sorry if I annoyed you. This business with poor Juliet has got everybody behaving strangely. And there’s a whole lot else going on as well.’ She peered through the murky windscreen at the camper van, with a sigh. ‘Just one damned thing after another, in fact.’

  He laughed at that. ‘Life goes that way, don’t you find? My trouble is that I can’t take anything seriously for long. Even finding that body – I mean, it was dreadful, and I was in a real panic for a bit, but now it seems unreal. Just a wild dream that can’t properly concern me. Or Nancy. She didn’t know Juliet any more than I did.’

  ‘Well, she might have done, you know. They both went to that centre at Paxford, as it turns out. Nancy said she’d never come across a Juliet, but that was before I knew they called her Big J. It’s starting to seem as if everybody knew everybody. Even the man in that camper van goes there sometimes. He probably knows Nancy.’ All of a sudden, her head began to hurt with all these connections and suspicions. Something inside it was squeezing painfully. ‘It’s alarming,’ she finished faintly.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘Well – if they all knew Juliet, they might all have had some reason to kill her. Some hidden grudge or dirty secret that made them want her out of the way.’

  ‘Such drama!’ he scoffed. ‘That’s not how it works in the real world, surely?’

  ‘I’m afraid it is – sometimes, anyway. People do te
rrible things, you know. If you can imagine it, somebody somewhere’s doing it. That’s the truth of it.’

  ‘Lucky for me I’ve got no imagination, then. I just tap the keyboard and work out algorithms. I can’t even begin to grasp why anybody would want another person to be dead.’

  ‘Not even if you had a rich aunt who was leaving you all her money, and was taking too long to die?’

  ‘Definitely not. I love my aunts. And uncles. When Dicky died, I was consumed with sorrow. Don’t you love that word – sorrow?’ He diverged into savouring the sound. ‘He was such a perfect man – he should have lived for ever.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Thea, lost for something to say.

  ‘So – who’s the main suspect, then? The police must have some sort of idea by now.’

  ‘And you think they’d tell me, do you?’

  ‘I think they might. You obviously got my address from them, which must mean you’re working with them somehow. I might be unimaginative, but I’m not stupid,’ he added.

  She was having trouble keeping up with his erratic thinking. Was this the sort of logic required for a computer programmer? She very much doubted it. There was an inconsistency at the core of this man, more apparent with every passing moment. ‘You didn’t go to the Paxford Centre as well, did you?’ she asked.

  ‘No, I never did. Nancy went for her depression, that’s all. She’s better now.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘Why? Do you think she’s not?’

  ‘I can’t say. Why were you here, really, on Saturday? You don’t seem the sort of person to be interested in songbirds.’

  Her own erratic processes were prompted by a sudden sense of urgency. Gladwin had given up on her. Drew was wallowing in indecision. Clovis was a chimera. Juliet was dead. All that remained was this Anthony Spiller and his perplexing place in the whole business.

  ‘Is there such a “sort of person”? I came to visit Uncle Dicky. It seemed mean to just leave him here all by himself. I wanted to be sure there was some life here – birds, or wild animals, or something. And then I found a dead person. It felt like a cruel joke.’

  ‘I’ll have to go,’ she said again. ‘The rain might be stopping – do you think?’

  ‘Hard to say. But somebody over there seems to think so.’ He indicated the camper van, where Kate Dalrymple was standing in the open doorway. ‘You know her, I gather?’

  ‘Not exactly. I know who she is, but I only met her yesterday.’

  ‘Well, she looks nice enough. Off you go, then,’ he said unchivalrously. ‘I can’t think of any more we might have to say to each other.’

  Moments later she was standing by herself just inside the field, her umbrella open again and the rain still falling. Then, before she could start walking, a great brown wave sloshed against her legs, as a car braked violently in the puddle between Thea and the edge of the lane. ‘Hey!’ she shouted.

  A woman pushed herself out of the driver’s door, her gaze on the camper van. ‘Is that them?’ she demanded loudly. ‘Still here, I see. Just let me talk to them.’ She didn’t even glance at Thea, who assumed the words were only peripherally aimed at her. She watched as Linda Biddulph marched across the grass in thin shoes and a hoodless jacket. Clearly, weather was of no concern to her at all.

  It was sixty or seventy yards to the van, which was too far to hear normal conversation. So Thea automatically followed Linda as she yelled at the woman who had preceded her as wife to Stephen Biddulph. ‘How dare you? What do you think you’re doing? What did I ever do to you? Have you no hearts, any of you? Have you any idea of what you’ve done already?’

  It was not entirely coherent, and the decibels rose as Kate simply watched, saying nothing. Then she shifted sideways to allow Clovis to emerge. He, it seemed, was much less dumbfounded than his mother. ‘I take it you’re my father’s wife,’ he said pleasantly.

  Thea, now only fifteen yards distant, savoured his melodious voice, as he adopted the deceptively courteous tone. Why hadn’t he talked to her like that? He’d been brusque, then businesslike, and finally faintly friendly. But he hadn’t crooned or cajoled, as she expected him to do now.

  ‘Couldn’t you wait?’ Linda snarled. ‘What harm would that have done you? All I asked was a few more days, for Lawrence to say a dignified goodbye to his father. After that, I was going to tell him the whole story, and take whatever consequences there might be for myself.’ She was calming down quickly in the face of the handsome man and his nice-looking mother. ‘Couldn’t you at least have done that?’ she repeated.

  ‘What about our need to say goodbye?’ said Clovis. ‘Did that never occur to you? We really can’t see why we should respect your wishes, after all these years of pretending we didn’t exist. Can you imagine what that feels like? Remember that time when our mother tried to visit you, twenty years ago now? He and I were waiting in the car, hoping you’d ask us in. You slammed the door in her face, and shut yourself in a back room, as if we were axe murderers. And all we wanted was to see our father and meet our little brother.’

  ‘Stephen slammed the door, not me,’ said Linda, suddenly on the defensive. ‘It was Stephen who insisted we keep you away from Lawrence. It was his fear of the truth, not mine, that kept things as they were for so long.’

  ‘Fear of the truth? Why? What did he think we were going to do?’

  ‘Dilute his love for Lawrence,’ she said. ‘Shake the boy’s faith in him as a father. Topple him from his pedestal. And it would have done. It still will. And I don’t want that to happen yet. Can’t you understand?’ She was actually pleading. Kate and Thea exchanged glances, sharing their astonishment at this rapid change of balance.

  ‘I don’t understand what difference it makes whether or not he’s been buried before Lawrence hears about us.’ Clovis stood with folded arms, his features growing harder. ‘You’re going to have to accept that there’s no good outcome here. Whatever happens, somebody’s going to lose out.’

  ‘Lawrence has already lost out,’ said Kate quietly. ‘You’ve kept him tied to your apron, protecting him against something that wasn’t even any threat to him. I don’t believe it was all Stephen’s doing. He wasn’t like that. You kept him away from my sons, because you didn’t like the idea of being a second wife. Or a stepmother. It’s you that this is all about, so stop pretending anything else.’

  Linda wiped a hand down her face, sweeping away the rain. ‘You don’t understand. You’ve got no idea what it was like, when Lawrence was little. He was such a difficult child, with eczema and asthma, hopelessly faddy about food and frightened of everything. Stephen got him through it. He took him for long walks, told him stories, fed him a tiny bit at a time. He was the most dedicated parent in the world. You’ve got it all absolutely wrong if you think I tied him to me. I was the one on the outside. The real relationship was Stephen and Lawrence. All I could do was try to keep things as normal as I could.’

  ‘But Lawrence has got a wife and child now,’ Thea burst in, no longer able to remain on the sidelines. ‘He’s a fully grown man.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. And it was all thanks to Stephen. He nurtured that boy through a thousand crisis points. Exams, girls, sport, teachers, jobs – everything was a huge challenge to him, but Stephen took him through them all, step by step. It was heroic. And all he asked in return was respect. And rightly or wrongly, he didn’t think he’d get that if Lawrence knew he’d been married before and had two other sons.’

  ‘The shame belongs to you both,’ said Kate. ‘You and Stephen equally. You stole my husband away like a woman in a trashy television sitcom. And he went willingly, I know that. But there are consequences, my dear, that keep on going through decades. My mother, for instance. She adored Stephen, and was utterly bereft when he went. It made her sad for the rest of her life. I actually think it killed her, years before she should have died. And much worse than that was my own loss. I lost the daughter I so desperately wanted.’

  ‘What?’ Linda’s voice w
as strangled.

  ‘I aborted her. I was seventeen weeks pregnant, so they knew it was a girl. How could I go through with a third child, when my husband had told me so emphatically that the marriage was dead and buried? I was thirty-eight, so I had no illusions about further chances with a new man. You did that, Linda. You killed my mother and my daughter. I hope you don’t sleep easily at night, with so much on your conscience.’

  ‘Hey, Mum, stop it,’ Clovis cajoled. ‘I never knew I might have had a little sister. How old was I?’

  ‘You were ten and Luc was seven. You know that already. It was only a little while after your father left us.’

  Thea understood that he had asked the question as a device to bring his mother back to earth, making her aware of her surroundings. But she herself was still sharing the anguish that Kate had just revealed. Loss was the unavoidable theme. The violence of a broken marriage had ripped the fabric of a wide circle of people. And Lawrence, product of the guilty couple, had perhaps never had much prospect of a normal life. Secrets, evasions, constant fear of exposure had gnawed away at the three of them, manifesting in the little boy’s allergies and phobias that required such dedication from his father as atonement. ‘Poor Lawrence,’ she said softly.

  Clovis looked at her. ‘Poor everybody. Even Linda deserves some sympathy. She fell for a man who ought not to have been available. An old, old story.’

  ‘A story that never ends happily,’ came another voice from inside the van. ‘You forget what I lost.’ Kate and Clovis automatically stepped down onto the grass, leaving the way clear for Luc. He was not in his chair, but propped on crutches, his legs crumpled uselessly beneath him. ‘You forget that we’re here now because of me.’