Death in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  She shrugged. ‘A year ago, or a bit more.’

  It was impossible. Gaynor riding around with Oliver, going with him on professional visits and never saying a word about it to me. In fact, leading me to believe such a thing was out of the question. What had all that divination stuff been about, then? I reran my encounter with Oliver that morning, searching for hidden clues and ill-kept secrets.

  ‘Did they seem to be good friends? Gaynor and Oliver, I mean?’

  Caroline waved a vague hand. ‘Oh, I don’t know. She never talked about him after that, so I suppose not. Isn’t he meant to be gay or something?’

  ‘So I believe.’

  ‘Did you hear about the brick somebody lobbed through her window?’ The change of subject was obviously deliberate, but cleverly chosen for all that.

  ‘Just now,’ I nodded. ‘My mother said something about it.’

  ‘Gaynor didn’t tell you?’

  I shook my head. ‘Must have been kids playing in the street.’

  ‘She was upset. Xavier went and fixed it for her. He’s useful like that – turns his hand to anything.’ Again the direct look, the sense that she was waiting for me to stumble, or reveal myself, when all the time I wanted her to do the same.

  I refrained from remarking that any fool could replace a broken window. Much more important was the revelation that Gaynor had kept something from me. I tried to make sense of these disclosures, all of them leading to the increasingly familiar conclusion that I knew much less about my friend than I’d thought I did. Why had she never told me she was so much closer to Oliver than I thought?

  ‘She kept it a secret from me,’ I blurted. ‘Have you any idea why?’

  She gave me a gentle look, full of sympathy and sensitivity that was also quite calculated. She was going to tell me something nasty about myself. ‘I think she must have been nervous of how you’d react. You can be a bit…brusque, you know.’

  It could have been worse. With our history, there were a hundred vicious things she might have accused me of. ‘Although she did ask me to do a divination about her and him,’ I said defensively.

  The reaction was gratifying. ‘What? She did what?’

  I explained, suddenly unsure of just what Gaynor had been asking me to do. The idea dawned that she had in fact not cared tuppence for the ritual itself. It had been her way of confiding to me that there was something between her and Oliver. I tried to say some of this to Caroline.

  ‘Well, yes,’ she nodded. ‘That makes more sense. I’m quite sure she would never have actually believed you could make any difference, with that pagan nonsense.’

  I tolerated the slur. I knew Caroline had always scorned paganism and made no secret of the fact. We had aired the subject between us many times – not least on the last occasion we’d met.

  She glanced again at my front window. All was darkness outside. I hadn’t heard Phil’s car come back, so I assumed Thea and the dogs were huddled in a back room waiting for him.

  ‘What’s she like?’ The question fell very casually, but at least it betrayed a modicum of natural curiosity. I felt a flicker of power at being the pivot between Phil’s two women. Hadn’t Thea asked me just the same question about Caroline?

  ‘Quite nice, actually. A widow.’

  ‘Good God! How old is she?’

  ‘About forty, I should think.’

  ‘So they’ve got death in common,’ she noted, astutely. ‘Let’s hope she’s better at it than I was.’ She paused, and I couldn’t think of anything to say. ‘I wish he hadn’t left the Masons,’ she added, softly. ‘They’d have given him something I couldn’t.’

  I gritted my teeth. At last we had reached the subject that Caroline and I had so passionately disagreed on, and which had driven such a massive wedge through our friendship. It felt wrong of her to bring it up now and I would not be drawn. ‘I think Thea’s quite good for him – from the little bit I’ve seen so far,’ I said. ‘She’s been very nice to me, as well. Sympathetic.’

  ‘And she’s got a dog,’ Caroline forced a laugh. ‘Dogs and death. Heady stuff!’ Her laugh grated on my ears. Something was definitely wrong. She definitely wasn’t as happy or relaxed as she so valiantly pretended. It occurred to me, finally, that she was grieving for Gaynor, but couldn’t bring herself to admit it. Rather than let it leak out, she was doing her best to focus on the couple over the road. ‘Will she break his heart, do you think?’

  ‘It’s possible.’

  Caroline sighed. ‘Well, he doesn’t deserve that. I can’t really wish him ill, can I? He never did anything to me.’

  Except give up on you, I thought, but said nothing. Phil and I had both rejected her in our different ways, after all.

  ‘I was a real bitch to him. I can hardly bear to think of the things I said, in those first weeks and months after Emily.’ Then she gave herself a little shake. ‘But we’re not here to talk about me. You and I ought to keep in touch. We could talk about Gaynor.’ Again the words were loaded with meaning, and again she watched me closely. I said nothing in reply, just murmured a little hum of non-commitment.

  She got up to leave. ‘Funny to think Phil’s new woman is just over there…’ she said. ‘He’s brave, I’ll say that. She might be a right cow, deep down inside. And she’ll have worked out that you and Phil go back forever. I bet she’s jealous of you.’

  Dangerous ground, I wanted to warn her. Ariadne’s feelings for Phil were not, and never had been, for open discussion. Particularly as that had been Mary, my past self, buried now under a completely remade person.

  ‘I doubt it,’ I mumbled. I wanted her to leave, so I could straighten out all the new information she’d dropped on my head. I concluded that the curiosity about Thea was obviously the reason she had come in the first place – to check up on her ex and his new woman. I’d seen enough of broken marriages to understand that even when they married again the old wounds never fully healed. And jealousy was entirely devoid of reason.

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I really must go. Thanks for the update on Phil and his new female.’

  I had not forgotten my evening class, the bag already packed and waiting, with some unusual dyeing materials and a lot of raw fleece. Not that we actually did any dyeing during the class – the small college where the classes took place couldn’t quite run to the right facilities for that. But I doled out wool for people to take home and play with, and used it for spinning practice during the class.

  Ten minutes before I was due to leave, there was a knock at the door. I was not surprised to see Thea standing there, looking like a lost child.

  ‘Tell me if this is out of order,’ she said. ‘But do you think I could come with you to your class? Phil’s going to be out all evening, and I don’t know what I’m going to do with myself otherwise.’

  ‘You just caught me,’ I said. ‘Come on, then.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  In the car I couldn’t refrain from telling Thea about Caroline’s visit. ‘She knew Gaynor,’ I said, two or three times. ‘I had no idea.’

  ‘I wish I’d seen her,’ said Thea. ‘It sounds as if I might like her.’

  ‘She’s different. There was something odd about her.’

  ‘Shock, probably. It makes people odd sometimes.’

  ‘Maybe.’ I thought about it, the way Caroline had paled at Gaynor’s name. ‘Yes, that might be right.’ I thought about it a bit more. ‘And Gaynor went out with Oliver. In his car.’ This was like a bruise, a painful spot I had to keep touching. ‘And she never told me.’

  ‘Some people keep all their friendships separate.’

  I was growing impatient with Thea’s efforts at soothing me. She was missing the point – deliberately, it seemed. ‘I’m beginning to think I hardly knew her at all,’ I complained. ‘It makes me feel a fool, thinking I was her only friend, when all the time she was swanning around with practically everybody.’

  Thea began to speak, and I cut her off. ‘And don’t tell me that’s
normal and natural and I needn’t get upset about it. I am upset, and that’s all there is to it.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said lightly. ‘I won’t say anything of the kind. Is this where your class is?’

  We’d driven into the parking area, behind the ramshackle building that was a neglected annex to the main college.

  ‘This is it,’ I said.

  I had seven students that evening, which was five short of the maximum class size permitted, but enough to ensure viability. I did not count Thea, of course. She was there against all the rules, but there was very little risk of trouble as a result. I had been teaching for three years by then and knew the routines. Despite the decline of evening classes from the glorious days reported by my grandmother thirty years earlier, they did still exist, and the payment I received was a useful slice of my income.

  The routine had become hedged around with paperwork and injunctions about safety and awareness – whatever that meant – but I’d managed to dodge a lot of that nonsense. Leaving Thea outside the main entrance, I ran into the office and grabbed my register, without speaking to anybody. Then I led the way through the maze of corridors to the Art Room, which I shared with the class on pencil drawing. The other teacher and I were not on good terms, each of us shepherding our pupils to opposite ends of the large room. The college had refused us permission to store spinning wheels and raw fleece anywhere on the premises, so the class valiantly carted their equipment back and forth every week. Those with Ashford wheels had quite a struggle, getting the awkward things in and out of their cars.

  But I’d got everybody well rehearsed by this time, and most of them were waiting for me already.

  I introduced Thea as an ‘interested observer’ who would also act as an assistant if necessary. One or two of the women asked her if she was a spinner, and she said shyly that she was thinking of taking it up.

  Leading a class like that was mostly a doddle. They brought the results of their efforts during the intervening week, and I explained where they’d gone wrong, or suggested how they might progress. With spinning, almost everybody naturally inclines either to very fine yarn or very thick. I generally took it upon myself to transpose the two, in the interests of versatility, making the thick ones do thin and vice versa. On this, the fifth in the course of ten classes, I introduced the technique of slub, which was wildly ambitious, testing my own skills to the utmost.

  Essentially, slubbing involves spinning very badly – making the mistakes you’ve spent months trying to eradicate. It works best with short staple wool that feeds onto the spool in fits and starts, making lumps and uneven thickness. I had no very high expectations of anybody producing a respectable result, but it’s usually quite good fun trying.

  Thea settled down with Agnes, an eighty-year-old who remembered her mother spinning, and had always wanted to give it a try. Slubbing was beyond Agnes, to be honest, but she gave it a try anyway. Thea encouraged her, once she’d grasped the idea and with some merriment they tackled the task together.

  Inevitably, I spent more time with Pamela, given the events of the day before. She had watched me carefully at first, to see whether I was in any mood to talk. We both realised we couldn’t openly discuss the murder of a mutual acquaintance in front of everybody, but there were muttered exchanges.

  ‘Are you all right?’ she said first. ‘You look pretty shell-shocked.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you be?’

  ‘Yeah,’ she agreed. ‘Course I would. Why’ve you brought her with you?’ She tilted her chin at Thea.

  ‘She wanted to come,’ I said shortly.

  ‘Scared to be left on her own?’ I wondered whether Pamela knew exactly who Thea was.

  ‘Why d’you say that?’

  Pamela rummaged in her basket of assorted bits of fleece, saying nothing. I looked more closely at her, noticing for the first time that her eyes were puffy and the edges of her nostrils very red. Either she’d developed a cold or she’d been crying.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked, softly.

  She shook her head. ‘Not here,’ she said.

  I moved to Glenda, the youngest in the group, who had already done a previous course of my classes, and was heading for techniques way in advance of what I could teach her. Already she had half a spool of gorgeous slub, in two shades of blue. ‘That’s perfect,’ I said. ‘You don’t need these classes now, you know.’

  ‘I do,’ she assured me. ‘I’d get bored just doing it on my own. Besides, it’s lovely to get out of the house for a change.’

  The coffee break arrived in no time, and we trooped off to the gloomy canteen, where disaffected women slung tepid drinks in plastic cups at us. The coffee was profoundly revolting, as somebody pointed out every single week.

  It took some jockeying to get a seat next to Pamela, but I badly wanted to know what she was upset about. If it was the death of Gaynor, I wondered why. As far as I knew, they had scarcely even spoken to each other.

  ‘So?’ I prompted, turning my back on the rest of the class, as far as possible. The tables had seats bolted to the floor and everybody had to sit squashed together, pretending to be students.

  ‘I can’t tell you now,’ Pamela said, peering out from under her fringe like a wild deer in a forest. She glanced sideways at Glenda, who obviously wanted to speak to me.

  ‘Give me a hint,’ I insisted. Thea, apparently picking up on what was going on, started talking to Glenda, making some joke that had the whole group focused on her. Within seconds she’d diverted all attention away from me and Pamela. It was a very neat trick and it earned her my respectful gratitude.

  ‘It’s between me and Kenneth,’ she said in a whisper. ‘I’ve just found something out about him.’

  My first thought was My stars – Kenneth’s the murderer! But that seemed too wild to be possible. More likely, of course, that he was seeing another woman.

  ‘Oh?’ I encouraged.

  ‘Ari, I can’t say any more. It would be disloyal. But it’s not what you’re thinking.’

  I forced a grin. ‘Not sex or murder then?’ I said.

  She didn’t grin back. The single ‘No’ was uttered in a flat tone.

  I remembered what she’d said at the meeting on Saturday. ‘Money, then?’ I guessed.

  Her face flooded with colour, and her eyes went shiny. She nodded quickly, and took a gulp of the dreadful coffee.

  On the way back to Cold Aston, I filled Thea in on what Pamela had said. ‘What’s he like, this Kenneth chap?’ she asked.

  ‘Ordinary, even a bit dull. He’s got some sort of bone disorder, which makes him move carefully. I’d have thought he was too cautious to get into debt.’

  ‘Did she say he was in debt?’

  ‘Not quite, but I think that’s what she meant. She seemed almost scared.’

  ‘Poor thing. It is scary when the lenders start getting nasty. Do they own their house?’

  ‘Yes they do, with a big mortgage. We did a special ritual when they moved in.’

  ‘A house-warming ritual?’

  ‘Right. It’s a lovely pagan ceremony, as it happens. Going from room to room with scented herbs, introducing the new people to the spirit of the building. It was all wonderfully happy.’

  Thea sighed in complete sympathy with what I was saying. ‘What a wonderful idea!’ she said. ‘Why doesn’t everybody do it?’

  ‘Well, to be fair, most of them do. That’s what the ordinary house-warming party is all about. It’s just that we make it all more overt. I sometimes think that’s the whole basis for paganism. We’re mostly stating the obvious, but it’s things that people have somehow forgotten, or overlaid with a load of commercial garbage.’

  ‘But things have gone sour for Pamela and her Ken.’

  ‘Apparently. They were a bit tense on Saturday, I realise now, although she was making an effort to be cheerful.’

  ‘Did she say anything about Gaynor this evening?’ I was beginning to get used to Thea’s abrupt switches of subject.r />
  ‘No, not really. She just asked me if I was okay.’

  ‘How well did she and Ken know her?’

  ‘Kenneth. He doesn’t like to be called Ken. They didn’t know her very well at all, to my knowledge. They live in Moreton-in-Marsh, which is a bit out of our orbit.’

  ‘Why did she enrol for the evening class? I didn’t get the impression she was very committed to spinning.’

  That brought me up short. I had never paused to assess the degree of commitment any of the class had to what I was trying to teach them. It was enough that most of them showed up week after week and kept the whole thing just about viable. Pamela made the trek from Moreton, with her Ashford crammed onto the back seat of her old Volvo, and did her best, as far as I could tell, to produce some usable yarn each week.

  ‘What makes you say that?’ I could hear the tetchiness in my own voice.

  ‘I don’t know exactly. The way she handles the wool, perhaps. As if she found it repellent. The others all rolled it around, and some even sniffed it once or twice. They played with it. Pamela tried to restrict contact with it, using her fingertips, and rubbing her hands on her trousers every few minutes.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, seeing the truth that had been under my nose for five weeks. ‘So she does.’

  ‘Which means she wants to keep in with you, or somebody else in the class. Or she wants to get out of the house on Mondays. Or she’s made some sort of promise about learning to spin, however distasteful it might be.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said again.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So I have no idea,’ I admitted. I felt tired and sad and uncertain. The ground had become unstable beneath my feet, and Thea was only making it worse. Thirty-six hours earlier everything had been perfectly all right. My jumpers and jackets were selling well, I had my health and plenty to keep me occupied. Finding the dead body of my friend had brought everything crashing down. ‘I think she just likes the idea of making her own clothes,’ I said, rather inattentively.