by Rebecca Tope
‘Go on,’ I invited, guessing what was coming from the flush on her cheek.
Thea looked away from me. ‘You and Phil knew each other quite well, didn’t you? When he was married?’
‘Before that. He lived near us and was best friend to my oldest brother for a bit. They moved down here from Stoke when he was twelve – he never entirely lost the accent, did he? He was always nice to me. Our paths seem to have crossed on and off ever since.’
‘What’s Caroline like?’ She gave a furtive glance towards the door, as if afraid Phil would come in and catch her asking. I felt a surge of warmth towards her, forgetting for a moment the grim events of the morning.
I hesitated, wondering how best to reply to that. How was it possible, anyway, to sum up a whole person in a few selective remarks? And how could I leave out my own feelings towards the woman? Whenever I thought of Caroline, I felt a cold wriggle of guilt, one of the worms escaping from its can. ‘She was lovely in the early days,’ I said. ‘She and I were chums when she first had the children. I used to go and play with them when they were very small, and Caroline would sit there with some book or other, half reading, half talking to me.’ I trailed off, seeing again the typical scene on those afternoons. Twenty years ago, and more – it was hard to recapture any detail. But Caroline had always been relaxed around me, telling me what she was thinking and planning. I’d always felt oddly flattered by her friendship, wondering what was in it for her.
‘And?’ Thea prompted. ‘Aren’t you chums any more?’
I shook my head, forcing myself to speak steadily. ‘I hardly ever see her now. She changed a lot. We drifted apart, as people do,’ I added, trying to rationalise it into being true. ‘She always wanted too much, somehow. From everybody. Phil, me, the kids. Nothing was ever enough for her.’
‘Hard for Phil,’ Thea murmured.
‘Right. He could never really cope with it. She couldn’t accept that his job needed him to work at strange times, even though she was thrilled every time he got a promotion. She still wanted him at home where she could see him and where he could take his share with the kids. Mind you, I took her side a lot of the time. His mind never seemed to be properly on her and what she was saying. It was obvious that she found it desperately annoying.’
‘Typical husband,’ Thea smiled.
‘Really? That’s your experience, is it?’ I had assumed from the start that she was divorced and would therefore have plenty to moan about where husbands were concerned, just as Caroline did.
‘Actually, no. Or only occasionally. I’ll tell you about that another time. Let’s stick to Phil and Caroline.’
‘Well, there was other stuff. A lot of other stuff.’
She nodded knowingly. ‘He told me about when he resigned from the Freemasons.’ She made it sound as if he’d walked out of a job. Then she added, ‘But he must have loved her.’
It sounded so naïve, put like that. I shook my head helplessly. ‘To begin with, he did, absolutely. Anyone could see it. And she loved him. She was utterly happy to begin with. It was ever so sad when it changed. Most people thought it must be his fault that she got so sour-tempered. He thought so himself and stuck with it when anyone else might have given up. She was so inconsistent, that was a lot of the trouble. She wanted him to climb the ladder and earn a lot of money, but she resented the time he was out of the house.’
‘And did he understand that it was because she loved him?’
‘Depended on him, more like,’ I corrected her. ‘She’s never had much life of her own, I suppose. Never really had what she wanted. I don’t think she makes friends easily, now or then. And then she and I fell out over the whole idiotic business of the Masons, and we were both the poorer for it.’ I stopped, worrying that I was saying too much.
‘You stuck up for Phil when he left the Lodge?’
‘That’s right,’ I agreed, not feeling up to an account of those days. It sounded stupid, anyway, so long after the event. The way people got so bothered about it was hard to credit, all these years later.
‘Didn’t she go out to work?’ Thea continued her cross-examination. She obviously wanted me to cram as much information as possible into the time available.
‘Not properly. A few little jobs in offices, which never seemed to last.’ I looked her full in the face, and took the plunge. ‘But then it all got much worse, when – you know what happened, of course. After that, I think he switched himself off entirely.’
‘Mmm,’ she murmured, with a sideways flicker of her eyes that made me wonder just how much of Phil Hollis’s story she did actually know.
‘Some men never reveal themselves to anybody, of course,’ I added, hoping she wouldn’t notice my fishing.
‘My husband did,’ she said. ‘But then, he didn’t lose a daughter.’
Ah! So she did know at least the basics.
‘It was what finally split them up – him and Caroline,’ I elaborated. ‘He would never talk about it. Not to her, anyway. And then somehow I got pulled over to his side, and that was the final straw. Caroline saw me as a double traitor, I think. She gave me some very dark looks whenever I bumped into her after the separation.’
‘But that was ages after the Freemasonry thing.’ She was obviously keeping up well, I noted.
‘I suppose so,’ I mumbled, trying to reckon the years. ‘But time’s a funny thing, isn’t it? We’re all still here, remembering everything that’s happened. It feels as if it’s all part of one continuous picture, if that makes any sense.’
‘I’m not sure it does,’ said Thea. ‘I tend to date everything before or after Carl died, as if there are two very different pictures.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘So he died, did he?’ Thea was a widow. ‘Well, maybe I’ve got it wrong then. But my point, I suppose, is that I’ve never really managed to be close to Caroline and Phil at the same time. I’ve always had to choose one or the other.’
‘Or neither,’ she said, a bit sharply.
‘Don’t worry,’ I assured her. ‘I’m happy enough now for it to be neither of them. My friend now, for the record, is a woman called Stella.’
‘Sorry.’ She turned on the charm. ‘Just me being insecure.’
‘There’s no need,’ I insisted. ‘I’ve never been a threat to anyone, believe me.’
She nodded, and left a tactful pause, before returning to the death of Phil’s daughter. ‘It’s not four years ago yet,’ Thea said. ‘It must be pretty raw for them, still.’
‘Probably,’ I said, vaguely, remembering Gaynor again like a sudden nausea. My mind did its best to dodge the facts, to smooth over the horror, but could find no escape. Helplessly, I confessed to Thea. ‘I was thinking about death,’ I said, looking at the floor. ‘When I found her. Thinking I understood it, somehow.’ I snorted at my own folly. ‘We can never understand it, can we?’
She said nothing until I met her eye. Then, ‘I think probably that’s where we go wrong,’ she said softly. ‘Trying to understand it, I mean. Isn’t it actually blindingly simple? Literally blindingly. Life stops. Permanently, totally. That’s it.’ She stretched her arms out from her sides in an odd gesture, and let them drop heavily. ‘No more to be said.’
I tried to give this some thought, catching scraps of insight and losing them again, as she watched me.
‘Take us,’ she said. ‘You, me and Phil. He’s lost a daughter, I’ve lost a husband – and now your friend’s dead. It seems unusual, doesn’t it? As if we’re somehow coincidentally suffering from some rare disease. But it isn’t at all rare. It’s universal. It’s what always happens.’
I frowned at her, absorbing the revelation about her husband, while wanting to keep to the central point. ‘No it isn’t,’ I objected. ‘Those people all died far too young. That’s what’s unusual. They should have had decades of life to go.’
‘Maybe,’ she almost shrugged. ‘I wonder sometimes whether that makes any difference.’
‘It does,’ I shouted at h
er. ‘Of course it does.’
And then Phil Hollis came in through my front door without knocking.
CHAPTER SEVEN
He was different: taller, more serious, slightly alarming. ‘All right?’ he asked Thea.
‘Yes, thanks,’ she said, with a note in her voice that seemed to be warning him that he was striking the wrong tone.
He looked at me, square on. ‘You’ll have to be interviewed formally at the station, I’m afraid,’ he said. ‘There’s a car outside.’
My heart began to thump uncomfortably. I’d walked into some weird realm where anything might happen and nothing could be trusted. Even Phil had turned into some heartless professional who showed no sign of caring how I might be feeling.
‘Can’t you do it here?’ I whined.
‘It won’t be me.’ He was so curt, almost angry, making me feel accused. That was when I began to shake. Perhaps I would be accused. Perhaps they thought I had killed Gaynor. I stared at Phil’s face trying to find reassurance.
‘Why?’ I said, finding it hard to speak, choked with fear and bewilderment. ‘Why are you so cross?’
Thea put a warm arm around my shoulders. ‘He’s not cross with you,’ she said. ‘It’s just – well, we were meant to be on holiday.’ Her suppressed sigh tightened the arm. ‘It makes us feel jinxed. Now, come on. It’ll soon be over and done with.’
That part wasn’t true at all, of course. I knew that even as she spoke.
Phil put me in the back of a police car, while two uniformed officers occupied the front seats. Before we drove off, he asked me if I was warm enough and whether I’d had anything to eat. It occurred to me that I should be asking him questions – where was Gaynor? What was going to happen? – but it didn’t seem important to know such details. Very little seemed important at that stage.
I was interviewed by a man who said he was Detective Inspector Baldwin, with a young woman beside him, who was Detective Sergeant Latimer. I gave them my attention and memorised their names – Baldwin was going bald, which helped, and Latimer had a sort of Latin look about her. I’d taught myself the technique years ago as a sort of game and it had quickly become a habit.
There was a lot of stuff about confidentiality and voluntary assistance that I carelessly agreed to, before they got down to the real business. ‘How long have you known Miss Lewis?’ ‘What was your relationship to her?’ ‘When did you last see her?’ ‘What sort of mental and emotional state would you say she was in?’
It gradually became harder to answer simply. I remembered Gaynor’s remarks about Oliver, and had to make a rapid decision as to whether to tell them about that. Nothing could have prepared me for the great wave of self-disgust that washed over me as I described our conversation over Saturday lunch. I was betraying Oliver by giving his name to the police, just as I had betrayed Gaynor when I told the pagan group about her attraction to the accountant. I rushed to minimise the damage.
‘But he won’t have had anything to do with this. He’s a really nice person,’ I babbled, hoping desperately that Oliver had a solid alibi that would quickly render him beyond suspicion. ‘I mean – it was all fantasy on Gaynor’s part. He wasn’t in any sort of relationship with her. You asked about her mood, and she was a bit agitated, that’s all.’ I forced myself to remember Gaynor pacing the room, staring across the street at Greenhaven, talking about challenges. ‘Actually, she was really quite agitated,’ I said. ‘More than I’ve ever seen her.’
‘And you think that was about this Mr Grover?’
I thought hard. ‘No,’ I said. ‘It seemed to be about the house across the street, if anything. Where your Superintendent’s aunt used to live, as it happens. Gaynor was surprised to see somebody staying there. But I don’t think it was just that, either. She was saying odd things about her own life.’ I wished I had paid more attention. I might have found out much more if I’d asked Gaynor what she meant. I looked at DI Baldwin helplessly. ‘I don’t know,’ I whimpered. ‘I can’t believe she’s gone and I can’t just ask her.’
They seemed to find the subject of Gaynor’s mental state the first interesting thing in the interview, and I understood something of the frustration and helplessness felt by uncomprehending police detectives trying to understand the subtleties of human interactions in the context of a murder.
‘Right then,’ said Baldwin. ‘Miss Lewis was behaving strangely yesterday lunchtime. Restless, worried, confessing to a secret attraction to a local man. Is that right?’
‘Yes,’ I said with a strong feeling of reluctance. They made a delicate half-observed atmosphere into some clumping bit of police suspicion. ‘Sort of,’ I added uselessly.
‘Could you give us Mr Grover’s address please?’ said Latimer, pencil poised.
I obliged readily enough. They could have found him without my help. But I continued to regret having mentioned him. ‘It can’t have been him,’ I pleaded. ‘There wouldn’t have been time for anything like that.’
Baldwin frowned. ‘Anything like what?’
‘Well, for Gaynor to speak to Oliver, or for him to get angry – or anything.’
They cocked their heads in unison. ‘No?’ said Baldwin. ‘You said she left you around three-thirty yesterday afternoon and we know she was killed very early this morning. That leaves a lot of time unaccounted for.’
I wrestled with the clash between mundane temporal matters and the all-consuming starkness of death. Gothic images of Oliver Grover stalking Gaynor with a knitting needle were foolish fancies that occupied police minds, but they scarcely mattered to me – or to Gaynor now.
But I had implicated Oliver and there was no taking it back. I was a blabbermouth and deserved to suffer for it. But why, I asked myself, why in the world had I mentioned him? Something to do with being a good citizen, a good witness. Having something to produce for these eager interviewers would earn me their approval. I wanted them to regard me as completely cooperative. Surely they could understand that?
‘Who else did Gaynor know?’
I widened my eyes at this. ‘Well,’ I attempted, ‘lots of people, I suppose. But she didn’t have many real friends. She was basically rather lonely.’
Latimer asked the crucial question, then. ‘Who else knew how she felt about Mr Grover?’
It was almost telepathic and I stared at her. ‘Um – well, actually, I had a group of friends at my house last night. I mentioned it to them.’ I congratulated myself on remembering to withhold the word ‘pagan’. They would discover it soon enough, of course. Meanwhile it would only distract and alarm them. The general population of rural Gloucestershire might be comfortable and relaxed with our practices – the British police were liable to be quite another matter.
They wrote down the names and addresses of everyone who had heard me reveal Gaynor’s romantic aspirations, details that I gave with a sense of naming fellow travellers at a McCarthy investigation. All these people would be visited by police officers and they would all blame me for it.
‘They all knew her, then, did they?’ Baldwin checked.
I nodded minimally. ‘Not very well, in most cases. But they’d seen her at my place a few times. They knew who she was and what she did.’
‘Knitting,’ said Latimer. The way she said it brought the murderous 2.5mm needle vividly to mind.
‘But you can’t think of any reason why anybody – in particular any of these six people – should want to kill her?’
I shook my head, feeling the nausea return. ‘No, of course not,’ I muttered. ‘None at all.’
Suddenly he smacked the table, not so much in anger as impatience. ‘Come on, Miss Fletcher – Ariadne – we need help here. We’ve never met your friend. We don’t know her habits or interests or the company she kept. We have to start from a clean sheet, building up a picture, tracing her movements. We can’t do any of that without the help of people like you.’
‘But…’ I met his small blue eyes. ‘How do you know it wasn’t just some random sens
eless killing? Somebody with mental problems thinking she was somebody else.’
‘You don’t believe that,’ he accused flatly.
I sagged back into my original posture. ‘No,’ I admitted, as I remembered the careful, almost ceremonial, way Gaynor had been positioned at the Barrow. ‘I suppose that hardly ever happens.’
‘It happens,’ he disagreed, ‘but when it does, you don’t get – well, let’s just say it doesn’t look particularly random to us.’ He paused. ‘Why do you think she was at the Barrow in the first place?’
It was the question I had hoped he wouldn’t ask; the one I’d been dreading. I paused as long as I dared, his eyes on my face, Latimer likewise, her head cocked slightly, keen with interest.
‘I – this sounds bizarre, I know – I think she was just – sort of – searching for some special atmosphere,’ I said.
Their expressions did not change. Two frozen faces stared at me blankly.
‘Could you say a bit more about that?’ Baldwin asked at last. So I spent several minutes trying my best not to explain about Samhain and the thinning fabric between the living and the dead, the winter preparations that involved slaughter and trickery and some latterday Christian muddle to do with saints. I fought to keep my language vague – the early morning mists, planning for Hallowe’en, local folk tales. I still ducked the word ‘pagan’ completely. When I’d finished, the expression on the faces of both detectives were sceptical and confused.
‘But what did she expect to see?’ asked Baldwin.
‘Nothing in particular,’ I told him. ‘I don’t even know if I’m right. She didn’t tell me she was going there. I could have got it completely wrong. I think I’ve said too much. I’ve probably led you up the wrong path. Entirely the wrong path.’ I was talking at random, babbling a lot of stupid suppositions that couldn’t possibly help them in finding Gaynor’s killer. ‘Sorry,’ I added.
‘You said something about the early morning,’ Baldwin backtracked. ‘What time would that be, do you think?’