Shadows in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘We’re at the Plaisterers Arms, in the town square. In the garden at the back, having lunch.’

  ‘Right. Well, come back here afterwards, will you? We’re not finished.’

  ‘No – I was just saying.’

  ‘Half an hour, okay?’

  ‘All right.’ She felt more than a little like a schoolgirl summoned by a fairly friendly head teacher who nonetheless carried all the authority and might yet turn out to be unpredictable.

  ‘It’s plasterer not playsterer,’ came a voice from the table behind them. It took a moment to understand that it was addressing her. She turned to look. A man somewhat younger than herself was grinning at her, one eyebrow raised disarmingly. ‘Sorry – but I thought you’d want to know.’

  ‘Thanks.’ Her first thought was that he was a journalist, already onto the fact of a murder and cunningly tracking down the main witness. ‘I’ll remember that.’

  ‘I know you,’ he said, not to her, but to Fraser. ‘You were here a month or so ago, staying at Thistledown. You drive a big Renault. You had a dog with you.’

  ‘Oh?’ Fraser showed no inclination to respond any further.

  ‘And I think my wife met you yesterday, in the park,’ he went on, to Thea. ‘She was the one with the young retriever.’

  It felt like several months ago to Thea. She forced herself to remember. ‘How do you know that was me?’

  ‘Spaniel, pretty, friendly. Actually, it’s the spaniel, mainly.’ Hepzie took no notice of him from her spot under the table. Thea tried to assess the credibility of his claim. Had his wife described such a brief encounter in sufficiently fine detail for him to recognise her and her dog from it? There had been a dozen or more people strolling in Sudeley Park, many of them with dogs.

  She cocked her head sceptically. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.

  He laughed. ‘How wise you are, Thea Osborne.’ He got up and moved to sit next to her on the wooden bench. ‘I assure you it’s true. But there’s more to it than that, of course. Your reputation precedes you, you know.’

  She had been made aware in Cranham, a few months previously, that she had a certain fame throughout the Cotswolds. She had featured in newspaper reports and had made many acquaintances in a sparsely populated area where people were connected by extended family ties in a fashion that had been common a century or so ago.

  ‘Oh?’ she said, feeling a chilly hand stirring her insides.

  ‘Temple Guiting,’ he said shortly. ‘We never met, but I know all about what happened while you were there.’

  Temple Guiting had been over a year ago, but it was barely five miles from Winchcombe. Blockley and Snowshill were similarly within walking distance – if you could walk ten or fifteen miles. People did. The entire area was crisscrossed with well-used footpaths. It was not so much a revival of Victorian times as of medieval practices. News would travel from one settlement to another, exchanged in the taverns and marketplaces. As in Cranham, she found it a sinister notion. She did not want to be discussed and observed behind her back. It felt threatening, like being followed from in front, people anticipating her next move and lying in wait for her.

  ‘Who is this, Thea?’ came her mother’s voice, endearingly protective. Like Hepzie should have been. She nudged the dog with a foot, most unfairly.

  ‘My name is Reuben Hardy and my wife is Jenny. We’re quite harmless, I promise you. But we are good friends of people in Temple Guiting, as I say, and we actually saw Thea in the shop there, last year, just before all the trouble came to a head. You’re not easy to forget, you know.’

  It was impossible to ascertain whether or not the man knew there had been a murder close by, only hours earlier. If he did know, he was making an excellent job of concealing the fact – and why would anybody do that? Perhaps if he had come directly to the pub from a house on the other side of town, he could have missed all the activity down in Vineyard Street.

  She had forgotten that he had claimed to know Fraser as well. The old man reminded her.

  ‘You say you saw me, too?’ Fraser rumbled. ‘Strikes me you do a lot of it, watching people instead of minding your own business.’

  Right! Thea silently applauded.

  Reuben Hardy merely smiled. ‘I have a good memory for faces, that’s all.’

  ‘And names,’ Thea accused.

  ‘True. And I have good ears, as well. I gather the police are wanting to speak to Mr Oliver Meadows. Well, we all know where he is, don’t we? I imagine they’ll have to await their turn.’

  ‘Please be quiet,’ said Fraser, with heavy pomposity. ‘My brother’s whereabouts are of no concern to you or anybody else.’ His glance flicked from Thea to Reuben Hardy and back again. ‘Perhaps we could finish our lunch in peace now?’ He returned doggedly to his cottage pie. Thea and her mother tried to do the same, but neither of them found eating to be possible. The question of Oliver’s location was apparently not so much of a mystery after all. If this man knew about it, Thea felt decidedly aggrieved at being kept in the dark.

  ‘Oh … sorry,’ said Reuben Hardy, obsequiously. ‘I understand. Say no more.’ He tapped the side of his nose in a parody of the Monty Python sketch.

  All three turned their backs on him then, and for five minutes they maintained their position. Then Thea glanced at him again. His facile grin had faded, and he was chewing a lip while keying something onto an iPhone. One foot was tapping a leg of the table. She thought over what he had said to them, trying to understand his motives in making contact as he had.

  ‘What did you want from us?’ she burst out, her instinctive curiosity getting the better of her. ‘Why did you speak to us at all?’

  ‘Want?’ he repeated, with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Nothing at all. I was just trying to be friendly. My wife said you seemed nice. I can see Oliver’s bird hide from the window of my flat, so I feel a sort of fellowship, if you like.’

  ‘In that case, you’ll know there’s been some trouble there today, won’t you?’ She was hoping to shock him into revealing how much he knew about the murder, if anything.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘There’s been a lot of coming and going all morning,’ she prompted.

  ‘You know – I don’t think I’ve looked out of the window all day. It’s been rather a rush, one way and another. Why – what happened?’

  She scrutinised his face for a long moment. His colour was definitely different and he was finding it impossible to meet her eye. But it seemed to her that he was betraying little more than a natural worry that his equilibrium might be disturbed by whatever she might tell him. ‘I can’t say, I’m afraid. It’ll all come out later today, but for the moment it’s better not to spread gossip. I’m sure you’ll understand.’

  His iPhone warbled at him, and he looked down at the screen.

  Thea didn’t wait for further conversation with him. ‘We’d better go,’ she said, noticing that Fraser had finally put down his fork. The old man hesitated fractionally, as if resistant to being given instructions by a woman. Thea stood up impatiently, yanking at her placid dog, and marching determinedly back through the pub. She had no reason to rush, nothing enticing was beckoning, but her patience had run thin. She felt irritated with her mother for taking up with these Meadows people in the first place. Seen from that angle, everything was her fault. She turned back, tempted to say something to this effect.

  She caught a complicated look passing between the elderly pair. Some kind of warning was being given by him, received with a pleading expression by her mother – an expression that made Thea angry. But there was also an intimacy, an indication that there was something shared, something understood, that softened the apparent aggression. As if he might be saying Just be careful, you know how important this is. And she was replying Yes, I know, dear, but I really don’t like it. Thea felt no need to defend her mother – rather her anger spread to them both. She was being excluded, even possibly used. They had engineered her into this house-sitting commission,
without telling her why or forewarning her of the hazards. She felt isolated and exploited and childishly rebellious.

  Gladwin was in the road talking to a stout woman wearing leather riding boots and a corduroy jacket when they got back to Thistledown. There seemed to be some animosity in the air. ‘But I always go through here on a Sunday,’ the woman was saying, as if for the third or fourth time. ‘It’s a regular routine.’

  ‘I’m sorry, madam, but today you won’t be able to. This is a crime scene now. The entire woodland is cordoned off.’ She caught Thea’s eye and made a silent God-help-me face.

  ‘Well, I think it’s a disgrace. It was hard enough to persuade the Meadows man to keep the path open, without this. He’s been impossibly obstructive, over the years.’

  ‘You’re telling me there’s a public right of way through this property?’ Gladwin appeared to register this somewhat belatedly.

  ‘Precisely! That’s what I’ve been telling you for the past five minutes.’

  ‘And do people use it?’

  ‘Almost never. We agreed that it should be limited to locals. There hasn’t been a signpost up for ten years or more, so he doesn’t get stray ramblers scaring his precious birds. The path isn’t obvious at all. It leads through to my field, do you see? Where my horse is. If I have to go around the road, it’ll take me three times as long.’

  ‘Well, I’m very sorry, but I really can’t allow it,’ Gladwin insisted, albeit with less force than before. Her mind appeared to be making some sort of calculation. ‘Although … perhaps if you could show me where the path goes, that might be rather helpful.’

  The triumph was plain in the woman’s eyes. ‘Come on, then,’ she said, impatiently. ‘We’ve wasted enough time already.’

  ‘Can I come?’ Thea whispered to Gladwin, having swallowed back a thoughtless assertion that she already knew where the path led. She was slowly learning that it was generally best to remain silent in the company of the police and potential witnesses.

  Gladwin shrugged and said, ‘Why not? But leave your relations behind, okay? And the dog.’

  Quickly Thea asked her mother and Fraser to take Hepzie into the house. Gladwin reinforced the request by adding, ‘There’s a detective inspector waiting to talk to you, Mr Meadows. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll send him in right away.’

  With impressive skill, the superintendent arranged the interview with three short words. ‘Jeremy! Meadows. House.’ DI Jeremy Higgins, already known to Thea, peeled away from where he was scrutinising the screen of a Smartphone, and obediently made for Thistledown.

  Passing the much emptier clearing in front of the bird hide, the stout woman led the way at a sharp angle to the right, between tall willow trees, in a direction that seemed quite wrong for the centre of Winchcombe. Before Thea could raise a query, another sharp turn, this time to the left, corrected their trajectory, and within two minutes they were skirting the grassy area that Oliver had shown Thea the previous day. There was a stile in the corner of the property, with a narrow but obvious path beyond it. The buildings of the lower edge of Winchcombe were only a few yards away, jumbled on rising ground, a mixture of periods and styles that would keep a historian happy for weeks.

  ‘That way to Silk Mill Lane, and this way to my horse,’ explained the woman. ‘Can I go now, please?’

  ‘Just leave me your name and address,’ Gladwin said. ‘I might need confirmation that this was an established path, known to several local people.’

  ‘Priscilla Heap,’ came the ready reply. ‘Anything I can do to help, just ask.’ She added her address, which Gladwin noted carefully, along with a phone number. ‘My house is just over there, behind that tree,’ she elaborated.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Gladwin. ‘I’m sorry to have delayed you.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. There’s obviously been something ghastly going on – but I’d prefer not to know any details. I’ve seen enough mayhem in my time. All I care about these days is my horse.’

  She had trotted off before Gladwin could say anything further. ‘Well,’ she turned to Thea. ‘It takes all sorts, I suppose.’

  ‘I’ve come across quite a few of her type over the past couple of years,’ said Thea. ‘Most of them turn out to be almost incredibly decent.’ She thought of a particular instance in Blockley, and gave a small reminiscent smile. Then she thought of other places and her smile faded. ‘Although some of them aren’t,’ she added.

  ‘I wouldn’t rely too much on this one,’ warned the detective.

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘If she lives here in Castle Street, and her horse is just down there, why does she have to use the path she just showed us? Why does she have to go via Vineyard Street, when all she has to do is walk straight down her own road?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Thea.

  Chapter Eight

  Drew Slocombe was in a dark place into which very few flickers of light penetrated. He endured great gulfs of shame, greater than the sadness and worry. Shame, because he had never for a moment appreciated the true extent of the suffering that many of his customers were enduring. He had buried their parents, spouses, siblings, offspring, friends, with brisk sympathy and hardly a shred of empathy. Shame, because he had comprehensively lost his nerve and buried his wife in another company’s cemetery. Maggs had been appalled, accusing him of insanity, treachery, cowardice, stupidity. Timmy had stared at him in absolute horror. ‘But – you said she’d always be here with us,’ he accused. ‘You said.’

  ‘I know I did, Tim. I was wrong. She won’t be. At least – she will, as we remember her. We want to think of her alive and warm, don’t we? Not dead and …’ Rotting, he had wanted to say. But you couldn’t say that to a little boy of five. ‘I’m really, really sorry, sweetheart, but that’s how it is. We’ll have a grave to visit, but it won’t be here at Peaceful Repose. I think you’ll understand it better when you’ve grown up a bit.’

  ‘I won’t,’ sobbed the child. ‘I want Mummy here.’

  It had been Stephanie who gave him the resolve to make the change, only hours before the burial was due to take place. She had crawled into bed with him at five that morning, shaking and whimpering. ‘Daddy, I had a dream. I saw Mummy’s head, coming out of the ground. It was all horrible, with worms and bugs on it. Daddy, do we have to bury her here, just outside? It makes me feel scared.’

  He had suffered a similar dream himself, the synchronicity just another piece of evidence of his closeness to his daughter. ‘It’s all arranged,’ he said. ‘Eleven o’clock this morning.’

  ‘I think you can unarrange it,’ she said confidently.

  He had cringed at the prospect. Karen’s parents, friends, neighbours, were all on their way. Maggs had organised it all, with everyone urged to bring flowers and memories of Karen as she had been at her best. Maggs had been a rock, knowing exactly what to say and do, perfect with the children, letting them laugh without guilt, showing them that there was a way through their misery, that life was far from over. Maggs was young and hearty and straightforward.

  ‘I don’t think I can,’ he said.

  But already he had known that he must. The dreams were too stark a signal to ignore. It would be too terrible to have his cheerful good-hearted wife decomposing just beyond their windows. People did it, of course. He had arranged a handful of back-garden funerals, without reservation. He had gone along with them in the belief that it was a perfectly wholesome thing to do. Now he suspected that it was not. It would be like chaining yourself to the past, like having the dead albatross dragging at your ankles. Perhaps it made sense for an old person, after sixty years of marriage, to retain the partner you’d known your whole life. It was almost normal for people to stand their spouse’s ashes on the mantelpiece for year after year. But Drew was not yet forty. Even in his very darkest moments, he knew he had another forty years ahead. He knew he would regret, one day, having his wife’s grave forever in his view.

  Stephanie’s reasons were different
, and if anything, more powerful. As he had tried to say to Timmy, the children needed to carry their mother within them, her hugs and homilies and habits part of their DNA, the memories untainted by the knowledge of her corpse right outside. Not so much an albatross in their case, as an ogre, a bogey, distracting them from the happy memories. Stephanie had a wisdom and a confidence that came from being unconditionally adored by her father from her first moments. Stephanie knew instinctively what was best, and trusted him to agree with her.

  Timmy was different. To his private horror, Drew had not managed to love his son as much as he loved his daughter. Timmy had been cheated in a number of ways. He had been a toddler when his mother was shot and fatally damaged. For the past three years he had received diminished parenting from her, the attention sporadic and incomplete. He had been bossed by his sister, failed by his mother, and bewildered by his father. Drew knew that Timmy knew there was something missing. It broke his heart in the places where there was still space for pain. Guilt made him boisterous, joking with the boy, refusing to confront the truth. He steadfastly included him in every treat, giving him good toys, lavish approval, bedtime stories. But the secret relief when Tim curled up with a DVD or trashy children’s television was impossible to ignore. Drew had no desire to listen to the flights of fancy about Thomas the Tank Engine or the Mr Men, which Timmy could indulge in for hours, given half an audience.

  And Timmy was betrayed again by Drew’s last-minute decision. He phoned Maggs at half past six, his hands shaking, his voice broken.

  ‘I can’t do it,’ he croaked. ‘I just can’t.’

  ‘Can’t do what?’ Already there was a shard of suspicion in her voice, a flash of impatience.

  ‘I can’t have her grave here. We had a dream, me and Stephanie. The same dream. It’s not right, Maggs. It’s romantic nonsense. We’ll have to change it.’

  ‘Dreams are romantic nonsense, Drew,’ she said sternly. ‘Of course you’ll bury Karen in your own cemetery. You don’t have any choice. It goes without saying.’