by Rebecca Tope
Later, a new generation slowly emerged. Fraser’s exotic daughter Maureen, and Cedric’s late-begotten boy. Oliver had played with Maureen now and then, before his brother took himself and his family off to the other end of the world.
The rediscovery of Fraser’s one-time girlfriend meant little to Oliver. He had no recollection of her, had not been aware of the relationship at the time. He had been eighteen or so, living with his parents in the gloomy premises that had been rocked and cracked by wartime bombs, but somehow survived unchanged.
His stomach reminded him that the day was passing. He should eat. And the morning coffee had filtered down to his bladder, which was now uncomfortable. Physical needs that he found faintly irritating sent him out of the park and through Trafalgar Square. Charing Cross Station would answer his needs. He could sit there and watch passengers, almost as distracting as birds, and not entirely dissimilar, until it was time for his reappearance at the court. The big central court, where all the most notorious and sensational criminals were tried and judged and sentenced, and the press gave such great prominence to the stories that unfolded there.
It was the press that Oliver gave most heed to; it was the press, in the end, that decided him to stand up and speak – they would be his mouthpiece to the wider world, which should know precisely what had been done to him.
Chapter Eighteen
Gladwin sent Thea away, making a great effort to be pleasant, when it was obvious that she was deeply troubled by events of the past thirty hours. Two deaths in so short a time threw a glaring searchlight on her and her colleagues. If they had been simultaneous, that might have made more sense. But the chilling implications of a calculating killer picking off victims a day at a time were inescapably terrifying. ‘If the Jason chap turns up, hold onto him, will you?’ Gladwin asked, having elicited an account of Thea’s movements since they had parted earlier. The possibility that he had hurtled down to Silk Mill Lane, slaughtered Reuben and laid him out in the alley for the others to find, was remote, but initially the only half-baked idea they had. ‘It’s too soon, of course, for this sort of thinking,’ Gladwin admitted. ‘But we obviously have to speak to him.’
Fraser and Mo were in Oliver’s house, and they stood in a traumatised circle with Thea and her mother, all more or less stunned. There was no sign of Jason. ‘Something is going on,’ Thea challenged them. ‘This whole thing is aimed at one of us, somehow.’
They all looked at her. Mo laughed harshly. Her mother put a hand flat to her chest. ‘Not me, Thea. It can’t possibly have anything to do with me.’
Thea was inclined to agree with her, before she caught Fraser’s eye. There was profound doubt as to his actual connection to her mother, whether he really was who he said he was. Gladwin herself had registered this, promising to investigate the authenticity of his claims. Was it possible that Fraser was somehow orchestrating the murders in order to terrify Maureen into his welcoming arms? It seemed insanely melodramatic to imagine such a thing. But he could have done something of the sort. He could be using Jason as his hitman.
And Thea herself had been dragooned into the house-sitting by the Meadows brothers, with her mother liaising between them. She had been manipulated into it, not so very subtly. She had been put in position, given sight of the mysterious Melissa, and then somehow manoeuvred into finding the body in the alley. But how had that been done? Was it not her own idea to go that way? Nobody had steered her, and certainly her mother had no knowledge of the lower streets of Winchcombe.
Except nothing was certain. Her mother knew the alleys of Tewkesbury, after all. Perhaps she had explored Winchcombe, too, without mentioning the fact. Perhaps her first loyalties now lay with Fraser, and whatever he demanded was blindly acceded to. It felt deeply improbable, but not entirely out of the question.
Mo was capable of anything, if Thea was any judge. There was a strong sense of lawlessness about her, a flouting of any regulation that struck her as irrelevant. The sort of woman who would smoke in a public building and refuse to wear a seat belt. You had to respect a person like that, with such a solid sense of individual worth and natural human entitlement. Thea had moments when she was not too dissimilar herself; when the law cried out for contempt rather than obedience.
Jason was impossible to assess, but he appeared to have a good heart and an easy charm. In wartime he would have been a spiv, a cheerful chappie selling nylon stockings on the black market and stashing away a lot of cash into the bargain. Jason, too, might be capable of anything.
All these impressions were flooding her mind as she fondled her dog and tried to obliterate the image of the dead Reuben. It was not so difficult to do – she had already done it with the dead Melissa of the previous day. Any hauntings that the dead might perpetrate were rarely visual ones. They were obligations and anxieties, perpetual demands for attention and the righting of wrongs. Carl, dead for three years now, was a faceless presence somewhere in her bones, a black cloud where her future should have been. Any guilt accrued directly and solely to the driver of the vehicle that had killed him, and Thea had never found it easy to reproach him. She had driven every bit as badly in her time, as had Carl, and she was convinced that everybody had. The courts understood that, and gave leniency to dangerous drivers, which Thea saw no reason to challenge.
But murder was altogether different. Until the killer was tracked down and punished, there was no possibility of order and trust. Suspicion ran like wildfire through every relationship in the victim’s life. Rage and retribution blossomed and turned inwards, without an external object on which to vent it. You absolutely had to do everything in your power to assist the course of justice. It was unavoidable, as Thea knew already, and confirmed to herself again now.
Her mother might be expected to feel something the same, although they had never really talked in such terms. The events of the previous year in Lower Slaughter, involving Thea’s sister Emily, had strained their mother’s endurance almost to breaking point. She had been permitted to avoid direct confrontation with the truth, and only slowly, over the ensuing months, did she acquire the courage to accept what had happened in all its shame and sadness.
‘That poor young man!’ her mother sighed, as if to validate some of Thea’s chaotic thoughts. ‘I can’t stop thinking about him. It’s all the more dreadful because I can’t say I liked him, from the little I saw of him yesterday.’
‘I know what you mean,’ agreed Thea, in some surprise. She had forgotten until then that she, too, had taken a mild dislike to Reuben Hardy. It added a layer of queasy self-reproach to the other emotions, she realised. When someone you regarded with aversion was cruelly killed, it was all too horribly easy to wonder if somehow you’d brought about his death. As if you might have accidentally uttered a magic spell, and the powers of darkness had misunderstood the degree of your animosity.
Fraser spoke from the armchair, where he had sat bowed and silent for several minutes. ‘I imagine it was me the killer had in mind, if your thesis is correct. After all, that girl told you she was my daughter. It seems I am intended as a target of some sort.’ He raised haggard eyes to Thea. ‘At least that’s how it feels. The way the bodies were both laid out, as if in their coffins – that is plainly no coincidence. And equally plainly, it was aimed at me.’
Thea frowned at him. ‘What do you mean?’
Mo made a startled little cry as an idea struck her. ‘Dad! That doesn’t make any sense. You’ve never worked in the business. And it’s not as if—’ She stopped herself, with an awkward cough. ‘I mean … somebody would have to be insane to kill two people just because …’
‘You know nothing about it,’ he said hollowly. ‘You were never interested, never understood the implications.’
Thea looked at her mother, and raised her eyebrows in an urgent question. Maureen Johnstone shrugged. ‘I suppose they’re talking about the undertaker business,’ she said. ‘I told you that’s what the Meadows family did.’
The connect
ion hardly registered with Thea as significant. For her, the only association she could find with undertaking was Drew Slocombe and his natural burials.
Fraser spoke again, more quickly than before. ‘Where’s Jason? He’ll be wondering what’s become of us by now. Mo – can’t you phone him?’
Mo laughed, a donkey-like bray that caught Thea’s attention. ‘Jason doesn’t do mobile phones. It drives everybody mad. He says it would turn him into a caricature, whatever that might mean.’
Fraser echoed the laugh, a single nasal honk that contained no vestige of mirth. Again Thea was alerted. ‘The murdered girl!’ she remembered. ‘She laughed like you two.’ She stared hard at the old man. ‘And she knew so much about you. She knew about my mother, and Mo and how this house was laid out. I’d forgotten that part of our conversation until now. She was so relaxed and open about your family, calling your brother Uncle Ollie. She knew where to find that memory stick. She went straight to it.’ At least she had told Gladwin that part of the encounter, she consoled herself. But after Fraser’s insistence that the body was not that of anyone he knew, she had not returned to the detective with her own contrary evidence. ‘I ought to find Sonia and tell her,’ she added recklessly.
‘Shut up,’ snarled Mo, her colour heightening. ‘You’ve been duped, you silly thing. Oldest trick in the book – easier than ever these days. Just find out a few basic facts, and drop them in, and people are always convinced. She was conning you. Do you think I wouldn’t know if I had a young sister?’
‘I think that’s quite possible, actually. She called you “Mo”. How would she find that out? You must be officially Maureen.’
‘I’ve got my own Facebook page, with family background, where I put my name as Mo. Uncle Ollie gets a mention, because he’s quite a well-known photographer. There was a big book out last year, Birds of Britain, that he illustrated. I drop his name all the time. I joke that, as he’s childless, I might inherit some of the dosh.’
‘Mo!’ Fraser reproached. ‘I hope you don’t do that. That would be …’ He grimaced, lost for the right word.
‘Tactless. Yes, Dad, I know. But that’s me, isn’t it?’
‘They’re all on Facebook,’ confirmed Thea’s mother. ‘That’s how Fraser and I found each other again. It’s happening all over the place. It’s a sign of the times. So that girl, whoever she was, could easily have fooled you. Mo’s right about that.’
Thea was confronted by three emphatic faces, all apparently eager to persuade her. It came close to working. ‘But the laugh,’ she persisted. ‘And she did look like you,’ she addressed Fraser. ‘Tall, fair, small ears. Even the walk was similar.’
‘Again, it’s easy to see similarities if you’re looking for them,’ said Fraser. ‘If this has been some elaborate plot against my family, then just such a girl would be chosen for the job, wouldn’t she?’ He spoke slowly, his gaze on a corner of the carpet. Thea suspected that something else was going through his mind, as he spoke.
‘And then murdered,’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘Employed as a spy, on the first day I was going to be here, sent to fetch that memory stick and then killed before she’d gone three hundred yards. So who? Who masterminded this ghastly scheme – and why kill Reuben the very next day? What did he have to do with it?’
‘What’s this memory stick you keep on about?’ asked Mo. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’
Thea clamped her lips together. It was probably very foolish of her to have mentioned it. The police routinely trusted her to keep such salient details to herself, and sometimes their trust was misplaced, she noted with chagrin. ‘I probably shouldn’t have said anything about that,’ she explained. ‘It makes things more difficult for the police if people know stuff like that.’
‘You’re a spy yourself, aren’t you?’ Mo accused. ‘You’re so buddy-buddy with that detective woman, telling her your stupid ideas about our family. Reporting every word we’ve said to you, I shouldn’t be surprised. Poor Uncle Ollie won’t know what he’s let himself in for.’
‘Be quiet, Mo,’ ordered her father. ‘Don’t bring Oliver into this, for God’s sake. He’s got enough to worry about as it is.’
There was a key to all this, Thea told herself. Some crucial connection or motivation that would explain everything. A code had to be broken, so that the incomprehensibly garbled impressions and facts could be deciphered. It was almost within her grasp, she believed. But she was completely confused as things stood. How much did her mother understand about what had happened? How important was the absent Oliver to the story? And who was the woman who called herself Melissa?
Chapter Nineteen
Gladwin would be comprehensively tied up with the aftermath of the second murder, as well as the intensive efforts to identify the dead woman of the previous day. But Thea felt obliged to see her again and complete her account of everything Melissa had said to her on Saturday. The scraps she had conveyed thus far were looking more and more insubstantial, as new exchanges came back to her. Remembering everything a person had said, without prompting, was no simple task, even a day or two after the event. There had been no indication at the time that the conversation would have to be recalled. Much of it had been casual chat, routine explanations and comments that may or may not have been carefully rehearsed as part of an elaborate deception. Much of the trick of it, in that case, would be to keep it light and easy, throwing out reassurances and telling details as part of the smokescreen.
But I did challenge her, Thea remembered. I insisted she convince me, before I let her into the house. And she had readily been convinced. The notion that Melissa had been prepared for just such a challenge now seemed all too credible. But if that were so, then the blithe young woman had not understood how dangerous her associates were. Whoever had instructed her in the facts of the Meadows family had given her no hint that she would be slaughtered when the task was accomplished. And the task, it seemed obvious now, was the acquisition of the memory stick.
But even that made little sense. Why not just burgle the house? It was obvious that ‘they’ – the shadowy mind behind the entire structure – knew precisely where it was, because they had told Melissa how to find it. Why go to such lengths to construct a fake daughter and niece and fool the hapless house-sitter with elaborate acting?
Had Oliver somehow arranged it himself? He would know the exact timings, and the location of the boxes in his house. He could easily have organised an alibi for himself, wherever he was, and maintain a steadfast innocence of all that had happened. And he struck Thea as a deeply improbable murderer. He was too fragile, surely? One kick to his shin, and he would topple. And Fraser was scarcely more robust. Fraser, if guilty of anything, was likely to be the perpetrator of a far more subtle crime – a crime against her own mother.
And there was that laugh. Were laughs hereditary? Would you laugh the same as your father, even if you had never met him? Thea was sceptical of the claims of separated twins to have led identical lives, in which they choose the same colour schemes for their bathrooms and both marry men called Steve and go to a remote Cornish village for their holidays every year. Thea suspected that any two people, chosen at random, would find as many points in common, once they started to search for them.
But laughing was a peculiar thing. Her father and Damien both cackled in exactly the same way – but then Damien had grown up hearing it, and could easily have imitated it from his first months. Nobody else in Thea’s family did it – and here were three people all braying in the same weird way: Mo, Fraser and Melissa.
She tried to guess where Gladwin might be and what she might be doing, so soon after discovering a second body. It was close to two o’clock and nobody had yet had any lunch. Any social requirement to escort her mother and the others to a local hostelry seemed to have evaporated. There was an aimless hanging about that was getting increasingly on her nerves. She remembered Fraser and her mother saying they planned to stay another night, and wondered whether the events of th
e morning had changed their minds. They would probably opt to stay, assuming that Thea could not be left; that at least one person must remain on guard, staying overnight again. Her mind suggested that this was in fact not a bad idea, but her feelings rebelled. She preferred to be alone. She was thoroughly accustomed to her own company, whether in Witney or one of the house-sits. She understood her own rhythms and quirks, and found another person jangling. Two other people comprised a crowd.
‘Listen,’ she began, ‘we can’t just mess about here, with nothing to do. I think you should all go and look for Jason, and then go home. I’ll be fine. Sonia will probably want to see me before long, anyway.’
‘We’re in the way,’ summarised Mo, with a forgiving smile. ‘And I for one am hungry.’
‘And where is Jason?’ asked Thea’s mother. ‘Will he still be waiting for us in that pub? It’s an hour and a half later than we said.’