Shadows in the Cotswolds

by Rebecca Tope

  Reuben seemed to sigh, and Thea wondered whether the animal might have replaced him in Jenny’s affections. It wouldn’t be very surprising, if so, she concluded wryly.

  Could it be true that the couple really did have their welfare at heart? Were she and her mother being outrageously churlish in their reactions? She looked back into the house for Fraser. As the closest person to the owner of the house, he had a right to be heard. But he was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘It’s kind of you to come,’ she told Reuben. ‘But honestly, we’ll be perfectly all right.’

  ‘Let me give you our numbers,’ he said. ‘I’ve written them down, look.’ He proffered a piece of paper with three telephone numbers on it. ‘Landline, and both our mobiles,’ he explained.

  Thea took them automatically.

  ‘I expect we seem a bit pushy to you,’ said Jenny. ‘The thing is, we’ve recently taken over the Neighbourhood Watch – chair and secretary – and we want it to have some bite. If we can’t take a serious role when there’s been a murder, what use are we? That’s all it is. Obviously, we’ve never been faced with a situation like this before and we’re probably doing it very badly. But we honestly do feel worried about you.’

  It was a seductive speech and Thea for one was seduced. ‘Oh, gosh,’ she breathed. ‘Now I understand. I’m sorry we were so frosty.’

  ‘Think nothing of it. You must be terribly shocked and confused. I mean – just who was the woman who got herself killed? That’s what everybody’s asking.’

  ‘I’m sure they are. Now if you’ll excuse us …’ Thea’s mother took control and began to close the door. The Hardys stepped back uncertainly, and Thea called a final ‘Goodbye and thank you’ and they disappeared from view.

  ‘Mother! Weren’t you rather hard on them?’ she hissed.

  ‘Hard on the Hardys? Possibly. But I don’t trust them – do you? They wanted something, and I don’t see why we should give it to them. As far as I can see, they’re just ghouls, wanting to hear all the dirty details. That Neighbourhood Watch nonsense was just a fabrication, I bet you.’

  ‘It did come as a bit of an afterthought,’ Thea said slowly, disliking the implication that her mother was a substantially better judge of character than she was herself. ‘He was pretty obnoxious at the pub, wasn’t he?’

  ‘Exactly. You seemed to forget that.’

  ‘I did,’ Thea admitted. ‘But I liked her yesterday in the park. She was perfectly friendly. And that was before there was any hint of a murder.’

  ‘Oh well, they’ve gone now. Where’s Fraser? What’s he doing?’

  Fraser was in the back room, looking confused. ‘Why does it seem so empty?’ he asked Thea. ‘There was more in here.’

  ‘The murdered girl’s boxes,’ she said readily. ‘The police have taken them all. There’s a good chance they’ll find something to identify her. I shouldn’t wonder if they know just who she is by now.’

  ‘Was,’ he corrected huskily. ‘Poor girl.’

  ‘Right. Plus they probably have the whole attack captured on film, so they’ll know at least what her killer looks like. And then they’ll find her car, which will tell them a lot more about her.’

  ‘Let’s hope so.’ The old man sighed and drifted back into the main living room. ‘What a dreadful day it’s been.’

  ‘I suppose Reuben’s right there, at least. We are all suffering from delayed shock, I expect. We should go to bed early and see if everything’s better in the morning.’

  ‘Bed?’ He looked at his watch. ‘It’s only seven o’clock!’

  ‘I didn’t mean now. We have to have some supper first. I can make something with the bits and pieces there are here. We could open a tin of soup or beans and add some eggs and potatoes. But I suggest we disconnect the phone and see if we can get a decent sleep.’

  ‘Thea!’ gasped her horrified mother. ‘We can’t do that! What if something important happens? You can’t just disable the phone.’

  ‘We’ve got mobiles. You can leave yours by the bed, if you like.’

  Bed! They still hadn’t settled where everyone was to sleep. Thea felt weak at the prospect of reorganising all the rooms. ‘Um …’ she began. ‘Fraser – I don’t think that bed in the third room is going to be useable, is it?’

  ‘What?’ He frowned at her in bewilderment.

  ‘Sleeping arrangements,’ she said. ‘How are we going to work it? Who’s having Oliver’s room?’

  ‘Maureen is. The sofa turns into a bed. I’ll have that. I’ll get up early and put it all back before either of you are up.’

  ‘Oh. Right.’ She felt foolish for worrying when there was such a simple solution. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Mo’s coming in the morning,’ he reminded her. ‘I’m not sure that’s anything to look forward to. She can be rather hard work, I warn you.’

  ‘Not to mention Jason,’ Thea laughed. ‘I know it’s awful of me, but I can’t help visualising a truck driver or bricklayer, with a name like that.’

  ‘You’re not far wrong. He runs a caravan park in the Chilterns. He’s decent enough, from what I can make out. I’ve only met him a few times. But he’s what they call a rough diamond, all the same. All those faceless people coming and going, up to God knows what – it’s a strange way to make a living.’

  ‘And things are a bit turbulent in the Chilterns these days,’ Thea remembered. ‘With that stupid new railway going through.’

  ‘Stupid? Is that what you think?’

  ‘Of course. Don’t get me started. I haven’t heard a single credible argument in its favour.’

  Fraser put up his hands. ‘Let’s not squabble over that,’ he begged. ‘Although I’m not sure Jason would share your views.’

  ‘I suppose he thinks he can provide accommodation for the navvies who build the thing,’ she said sourly. ‘Short-term profit and long-term devastation.’

  ‘Something like that,’ agreed Fraser mildly. He glanced again at the empty room with a little frown. ‘It’s what they’ve been saying about the Pilbara for a while now. I must admit, they have made a pretty fine mess of it.’

  His work in Australia, she remembered, thinking how very far away and irrelevant it must seem to him now.

  Thoughts of supper were the next preoccupation, and Thea constructed an acceptable meal from available provisions. Fraser went out to his car and returned with a bottle of red wine. ‘The police are out there again,’ he reported. ‘Checking the cars, I imagine.’

  ‘And door-to-door enquiries,’ said Thea knowingly. ‘Now that people are back from their days out.’

  Her mother shivered. ‘It’s very horrible, isn’t it? All that police business going on out there, without us knowing about it.’

  ‘That isn’t what’s horrible,’ Thea disagreed. ‘What’s horrible is that somebody is dead when they shouldn’t be. Although when you think about it, there are all kinds of ordinary little killings happening all the time.’

  ‘Ordinary killings?’ Fraser repeated. ‘What do you mean by that?’

  ‘Oh – don’t you ever think about all those animals out there, getting on with their lives regardless of us? Foxes, birds, rats, even cats – all busily fighting and breeding and hunting, while we remain completely ignorant of what’s happening.’

  ‘You sound like my brother,’ he said.

  ‘You mean with his birds? That’s why he sets the camera going. So he can know something of what they do when there’s nobody watching. I can well understand how fascinating that must be.’

  ‘His fascination starts and ends with the birds. My brother prides himself on his ignorance. He has no desire to involve himself in anything beyond his four walls – apart from the birds. The birds are safe, you see. And I suppose everybody has to take an interest in something.’

  Thea concentrated on the food for a few moments, trying not to think about anything else. But when the silence became too much, she burst out, ‘Safe? Your brother needs to feel safe, does he?’
/>   Fraser shrugged. ‘Doesn’t everybody?’

  ‘Not the way you seemed to mean it, just then. As if he’s usually frightened.’ She thought about the man she had met so briefly. Had he seemed timid or nervous? She found it impossible to judge. ‘And why won’t you tell us where he is?’ she demanded again. ‘What’s all the mystery?’

  ‘He asked me not to. Besides, I honestly don’t know where he is at this precise moment. I do know where he’ll be tomorrow, and I told the police where that is. If you don’t mind my saying so, I think that’s all I’m required to do.’

  ‘He’s right, Thea. You shouldn’t be so curious. It isn’t your business,’ said her mother, not especially gently.

  Thea took it graciously. ‘You’re right, of course. I’m just a nosy cow. Everybody says so,’ she laughed. But there were two burningly inescapable questions at the forefront of her mind:

  Who was waiting for Melissa in the pub, the previous evening? And what was on that memory stick?

  Chapter Twelve

  When the doorbell rang at eight-forty on Monday morning, Thea’s first thought was that Mo and Jason were disgracefully early. Fortunately she had been up and dressed for over an hour, worrying about Oliver’s birds and a number of other things. Fraser had been as good as his word, and risen at seven, restoring the sofa to its original state. When Thea went into the kitchen, it was because she’d been enticed by the smell of coffee that had filtered up to her room at seven-thirty.

  She pulled the front door open with every intention of being less than welcoming.

  ‘Not too early for you, am I?’ breezed Gladwin. ‘I didn’t think I would be.’

  The senior police detective stood there like a waif, thin and tired, her clothes rumpled and an angry pimple on her chin. Thea knew she had two boys at home, who saw far too little of her, and a husband who seemed to be some sort of ghostly saint. Thea had never seen him, but was aware that he provided the energy and support that made everything possible.

  ‘You take too much for granted,’ Thea told her. ‘I might have been in my dressing gown.’

  ‘Come for a little walk with me,’ Gladwin instructed. ‘We have things to discuss.’

  ‘Can I bring the dog?’

  ‘If you must.’

  It was cloudy outside, but reasonably warm. The detective led the way out into Vineyard Street and turned right. ‘We’re going into town?’ Thea asked. ‘Is that wise?’

  ‘I want to show you something. It’ll take us twenty minutes or so.’

  Thea had a sense of being generously included in an investigation that she had no official claim to be involved in. She was simply the person who had found the body; traditionally, such a role was given very little status. But Thea’s connections with the police did not adhere to tradition. From the start, she had been privy to more than the general public ever were. Her husband’s brother was a senior police officer; her daughter was a police probationer. And she had found herself in the midst of a number of violent deaths over the past two years. ‘Must be important if you can spare so much time for it,’ she said.

  ‘I’m engaging you as an expert witness,’ Gladwin said, semi-seriously. ‘Another eye on the matter. Keep that dog close to you – I don’t want it causing any distractions.’

  That dog was a bit wounding. Gladwin was good with animals, Thea had discovered, but had never entirely warmed to Hepzibah. Such a failing was inexplicable.

  They turned right at the junction and walked along the section of the main street known as Abbey Terrace, with Thea making a few remarks about the long-demolished abbey that had dominated the town. Gladwin hardly replied, but kept up a brisk pace in an easterly direction. Before long, the shops had finished and small terraced houses took their place. ‘It does have a certain symmetry,’ Thea remarked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Winchcombe. We walked along the street, the other way, yesterday. Cheltenham Road. All the houses are different. And it’s the same this way. Have you noticed? It must have been deliberate. It’s almost against nature, when you think about it. It would have been far easier to just build a terrace of identical two-up-two-down like most places. Think of the Welsh valleys, with those rows and rows of miners’ cottages, all exactly the same.’

  ‘Mm,’ said Gladwin.

  ‘Come on,’ Thea urged her. ‘It’s …’

  ‘Gorgeous. Yes. It’s history right here in front of us. That’s a Tudor house, and two doors down there’s a Georgian one. Yes, Thea, it’s amazing. It makes you wonder who built them all, and how it was decided and planned.’

  ‘Yes.’ Thea was admiring the black and white house that Gladwin had identified as Tudor. It had an overhanging upper floor, with three handsome windows, making it one of the biggest houses in the street. An incongruous-looking bay window protruded at one end of the ground floor. ‘I bet it’s fabulous inside.’

  ‘That’s the first satellite dish I’ve seen,’ Thea pointed a bit further down the street. ‘I thought they must have been banned.’

  ‘They’ll all be at the back,’ said Gladwin. ‘Where nobody can see them.’

  ‘I must be getting old,’ Thea sighed. ‘Because I actually think that’s rather a good idea.’

  ‘Come on, we haven’t got time for this. It’s along here somewhere,’ Gladwin urged.

  ‘What is?’

  ‘There’s an alleyway, apparently. It leads down to Silk Mill Lane, and from there you can get onto the path that goes down to the woods where you found the dead girl.’

  ‘And why are we interested?’ Thea was panting slightly, with the effort of keeping pace with Gladwin’s long legs.

  ‘No real reason. It’s just … a hunch, I guess. Aha! Here it is.’

  The alleyway’s entrance was a closed-in tunnel between two houses, the path itself sloping quite steeply downwards. ‘Murder Alley,’ said Gladwin.

  ‘What?’

  ‘I’m told there was a murder here a century ago. More than a century, actually. Rather a good spot on a dark night. Jack the Ripper territory.’

  Thea tried to imagine it. The alley did feel deserted, with no windows overlooking it, high blank walls on both sides. Possibly nobody would hear you scream. ‘So?’ she asked, in puzzlement.

  ‘Nothing specific. It’s a short cut, from the town to the river. It’s marked on the map in the main street. We’ve found some evidence that whoever killed that girl headed this way afterwards. It’s a bit dubious, now we know that horse woman uses the path regularly, but it makes sense. If you turn right here, you get back to the high street and that big White Hart Inn on the corner. I’m wondering if the person waiting at the pub might have been in there, rather than the Plaisterers Arms.’

  ‘Which might explain why she headed through the woods and not back up Vineyard Street.’

  ‘Right. And then she’d come out into this road, look.’ Gladwin pointed to the end of Silk Mill Lane, where it met Castle Street. ‘There’s even a way down to the river just here, so you could creep through the undergrowth and hop up here with virtually no risk of being seen. It’s all completely speculative, of course. But it does explain one or two puzzles.’

  ‘Small ones,’ Thea was bold enough to remark with some scepticism. ‘I don’t really see how this is helpful. What about the camera in the hide? The memory stick? The contents of those boxes? Haven’t they helped at all?’

  ‘The camera ran out of battery at six twenty-seven on Saturday afternoon. By that time nothing interesting had happened. The memory stick has disappeared, and the boxes only contain clothes and jewellery. There’s a teenage diary, which is full of references to people called Tony and Sally and Jax, but no mention of the school they went to, or any surnames.’

  ‘Did you find her car? It must be here somewhere, surely?’

  ‘Seems not. Every single one has been accounted for, in an area of half a mile. It was an interesting exercise, actually. Took three constables twelve hours to track them all down, even with it all on comp
uter, but they did it. One or two people took exception to being phoned at midnight to be asked if they owned a blue Suburu parked ten miles from where they lived. But they all had good explanations.’

  ‘So she and the person in the pub must have come here together, and he drove away again. Which implies that it was him that killed her. That’s most likely, isn’t it?’

  ‘On the face of it, yes. Nobody in either of the pubs can come up with a credible individual, sitting alone at about seven o’clock on Saturday.’

  ‘So she made it up? She lied to me?’

  ‘We know that already. She wasn’t Fraser Meadows’ daughter, for a start.’

  ‘Mm.’ Thea’s thoughts were circling unproductively. ‘What did you think of him? Fraser, I mean.’

  ‘Slightly too good to be true, maybe. Presented as very eager to help, but was depressingly short of facts. He didn’t seem to know anything about his brother’s life these days. They almost never see each other.’

  ‘And he doesn’t know why a young woman should leave her possessions at his brother’s house?’

  ‘He did go a bit thoughtful about that, but said he really had no information to offer.’

  ‘He told me he knows where Oliver is, but he’s not allowed to say. Did you ask him that?’

  ‘He asked to be excused from that particular question. We didn’t press it, for now.’

  ‘You think he was holding something back?’

  ‘It’s possible.’ Gladwin shrugged. ‘It can take two or three attempts to persuade people that we really do want to hear the whole story. And I’m not sure I entirely get what’s going on with him and your mum. They knew each other – what? – fifty years ago? Seems a bit of a stretch to think they’d get along after all this time.’

  ‘It’s extremely weird,’ Thea burst out, only then realising that this was her primary anxiety, and had been for nearly a week. ‘I’m not sure she entirely believes it’s really him.’