A Cotswold Ordeal

by Rebecca Tope

  Surely, she thought, it must be midnight. She was stiff and cold and smelly. The moon had moved across the sky and no light filtered through the entrance to the tunnel. Robert was shifting restlessly, now and then humming mindlessly to himself until Desmond told him to stop.

  And then the voices came. And a bright light, flickering across the entrance but not directly into it. There were people on the canal towpath, just outside the tunnel. It was so unexpected that Thea took it for a dream and made no move. A woman spoke, clear in the silence of the night.

  ‘I’m going to jump down there and have a proper look.’ A dull splash followed, and the torchbeam was suddenly pointing directly at them. ‘Robert!’ came the voice. ‘Are you in there?’

  Robert did not answer, and Thea wondered whether the beam was reaching far enough to make them visible. ‘There’s something in there,’ the woman called to her companions.

  ‘Is it him?’ It was the younger voice of Frannie Craven. Thea almost laughed. Beside her Desmond gave a hiss, like a cornered rat.

  ‘I can’t see. Wait a minute. Robert!’

  ‘It’s my mother,’ Robert muttered, barely audible.

  Thea never quite knew where the strength came from, but thought it had to do with the realisation that there were now more women on the scene than men. That altered the balance and changed everything. ‘He’s here,’ she called. At the same time, she roused herself and jumped off the platform, expecting to be grabbed back by one of the men.

  But she wasn’t. Wading through the mud, slipping and staggering, she approached the woman. ‘Hello!’ she called. ‘Can you see me?’ The torchlight seemed to be dimming, the tunnel mouth further away than she’d thought.

  ‘Who’s this?’ came the older woman’s voice. ‘Where’s Robert?’

  ‘Go on,’ muttered Desmond. ‘Leave me, and don’t say I’m here. I can still do some damage if I want to.’

  Thea and Robert obeyed like frightened children. ‘Ma – we’re coming,’ Robert called. ‘Get out of the mud, will you.’

  They pushed aside the flimsy barrier across the tunnel entrance and a confusion of hands reached down for them, and helped them onto the towpath. Voices and lights came and went. Thea took some time to register that there was a second familiar accent. ‘Cecilia?’ she queried. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Never mind that now,’ came a tone of brisk authority. ‘Let’s just get you warm.’

  They had to half carry her back to the Daneway pub. Questions went unanswered, the voices lowering as they approached the pub and neighbouring houses. Except for Robert’s mother, who repeated, ‘I knew where you’d be, my lad. Always did come to this daft tunnel when things got a bit rough. Thought I’d forgotten, I suppose. But a mother never forgets. When Frannie phoned me to ask if I knew where you’d got to, it only took me a minute to think.’

  It made little sense to Thea and she didn’t care. All she wanted was her dog, and Hollis and a nice safe bed.

  She tried to make her priorities clear, appealing to Robert for an assistance that he seemed deeply reluctant to provide.

  ‘We have to rescue Hepzie,’ she repeated. ‘She’s in Superintendent Hollis’s car, in Sapperton.’

  Mysteriously nobody seemed to hear her. Cecilia drove her own silver vehicle in a direction that Thea was sure did not lead to Sapperton. Frannie and Robert were with her in the back, one on either side.

  ‘Please!’ she tried again. ‘Robert, tell them. Where are we going? I must get my dog.’

  Again, nobody responded. Thea drew breath for a scream, wondering as she did so whether she had been right, and this was actually just a dream all along.

  Then Cecilia spoke. ‘Thea, please calm down. Robert will go and get the dog for you. Everything’s under control.’ Thea heard exasperation and impatience in the voice, along with a reassuring strength of purpose.

  But the absence of explanations began to strike Thea with a deep foreboding. Had she escaped from Desmond only to fall into a new kind of captivity? Did Frannie know what was going on, or had she been told to keep her questions for later?

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked again. ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘You’re quite safe.’ Cecilia threw the words over her shoulder. ‘I told you, it’s all under control.’

  Control. The word fixed itself in Thea’s head. Cecilia Clifton was in control. Frannie was under her command, and Robert’s mother, whatever her name was, was a friend. They were Night Riders, vigilantes, righters of wrongs, in the silence of a Cotswold night. Everything was indeed under their control.

  ‘What about Valerie?’ she asked, aware of a missing figure. Nobody gave an answer, and Thea went back to worrying about Hepzibah. Only then did she remember that Desmond Phillips had the key to Hollis’s car. He had click-locked it and pocketed the key. Robert would have to break into it to retrieve the dog. And Robert was unlikely to want to do this. Alarm filled her as she realised that Desmond was liable to return to the car and use it to make his escape. Before driving off, he would eject the animal, or – if in a certain mood – strangle her to rid himself of the nuisance.

  ‘I want my dog,’ she wailed. ‘Let me go and fetch my dog.’

  Cecilia heaved a loud sigh. ‘Thea, dear, do be quiet. We’re on delicate ground here, and we certainly don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. Now poor Frannie has been dying to know just what you and her husband were doing in that tunnel, but she’s got the good sense to wait until Robert can explain it all to her at home.’

  Thea made a sound of outrage at being given such a low priority.

  ‘I’m joking,’ laughed Cecilia. ‘We know what a loose cannon you’ve been, right from your first few hours here. The fly in the ointment and that’s a huge understatement. You know,’ and she turned round quickly to emphasise the point, ‘you almost scuppered everything. If we’d had any idea that you’d seen Nick at the barn, it would all have been different.’

  ‘Hold on,’ begged Thea, convinced that she would never catch up with these complexities. ‘You make it sound as if you were all in the murder together. Some awful great conspiracy, the minute Juniper Court was empty. Except—’ She had been on the brink of adding something about Desmond, before remembering that he was the real wild card in the matter. Even if she didn’t betray him directly – and she was already wondering why in the world she shouldn’t – there might be a more effective moment to do it.

  ‘Nothing of the sort,’ snapped Cecilia. ‘The Innes brothers killed him. Some drastic falling-out in the cell led to it. I can see now that it was coming on for some time, but I never dreamed – well, too late for that now. Justice is being done, thanks to the magnificent Superintendent Hollis. Given how influential and noisy their father is, I had my doubts.’ She sighed again. ‘And of course I had hoped they might escape detection. They’re my boys in a lot of ways, and I grieve for them.’

  Thea leaned back in the car, overwhelmed with frustration. ‘They didn’t kill him,’ she breathed, half expecting to be ignored as before. ‘And I want my dog.’

  ‘Of course they killed him,’ Cecilia shot back. ‘And you have yourself to thank for their arrest.’

  Thea almost didn’t take this up, tempted just to lay her head back and close her eyes. But nobody liked to be blamed for something they felt innocent of.

  ‘How on earth can it be my fault?’

  Cecilia sighed gustily. ‘It you hadn’t directed the police to the Inneses’ barn, there’d have been no evidence against the boys. The fact of the body hanging in the pony shed would have caused hopeless confusion, with no leads or clues.’

  Thea tried to match the two accounts she had heard that evening, and make sense of them. She tried to see Robert’s face, but it was too dark. He knew the truth, and must be quaking with the dread that she would disclose it.

  ‘So why do you think Robert was hiding in the tunnel?’ she asked, feeling that she had at last found something intelligent to say.

&nbs
p; ‘Loss of nerve, I assume,’ said Cecilia. ‘Keeping himself out of harm’s way.’

  Robert’s wife and mother each made sounds, but spoke no actual words. Robert himself muttered

  ‘Hey, steady on,’ in a feeble protest.

  ‘Sorry, Rob,’ Cecilia threw over her shoulder. ‘I’m sure you had your reasons.’ She turned the car abruptly to the right, announcing, ‘We’re here now, look. We’ll go inside and have a milky drink, and find Thea a bed for the night. It’s all going to be fine, dear. Believe me.’

  Thea barely glanced at the house as she was bundled in through the front door. It was old, with subtle lighting and small rooms. She was settled into a soft old sofa facing a fireplace that looked as if it was well used in winter.

  Seeking an ally, she focused on Robert’s mother, a wiry little woman in her mid sixties, whose eyes followed her son constantly. When Frannie came into view, the eyes would harden briefly and the lips tighten. In calmer circumstances, Thea would have found the trio fascinating. As it was, they were merely obstacles to her urgent quest, unacknowledged captors side-stepping her concerns. It seemed the only one willing to speak to her at all was Cecilia.

  It was barely thirty minutes since they’d left the tunnel. Desmond could well still be lying low there, waiting until he was sure everybody had gone. But he wouldn’t wait forever. He was liable to work out for himself that Thea’s silence would be fragile. Then he would run along the path to Sapperton, retrieve Hollis’s car, and do unspeakable things to Thea’s dog. She sat on the sofa, rerunning this scenario in a fever of foreboding, until she had gathered the energy to act.

  The others were in the kitchen, muttering amongst themselves. Their confidence that she wouldn’t jump up and run outside screaming for help was annoyingly patronising. She almost opted for that very course, before pausing to think.

  The crucial nugget in the story was undoubtedly the universal insistence that Dominic and Jeremy had murdered Nick. Cecilia had sounded as if she genuinely believed it to be true. Examining this from all sides, Thea reached a decision.

  She went to the kitchen doorway and stood waiting for them to notice her. She felt Robert’s eyes on her and knew she had to act swiftly, before he understood what she was about to do.

  ‘Cecilia,’ she said. ‘You’re quite wrong about who killed Nick. It was Desmond Phillips. He was with me and Robert just now in the tunnel, and he locked my dog in DS Hollis’s car. It’s at Sapperton. It’s unjust for the boys to be charged with the murder. And I do not want Desmond to get away with it. He was threatening to kill me.’ She paused, fighting down the hysteria that made her want to say it all again, only louder.

  Cecilia stared at her, mouth working as she repeated the words silently to herself. ‘Desmond?’ she echoed. ‘Don’t be so stupid.’

  ‘It’s true. Ask Robert.’

  ‘It can’t be. For heaven’s sake, why would I go to all that trouble to save bloody Desmond Phillips’ skin? I did it for Jemmy and Dom.’

  Thea finally grasped who it had been who removed Nick’s body from the barn and restrangled it in the pony shed at Juniper Court. Robert Craven, evidently, had just reached the same conclusion.

  ‘Damn it to hell!’ he shouted. ‘You hanged him in the stable.’ His eyes bulged as he confronted Cecilia.

  The woman was not intimidated. Her head twitched to one side as if tossing away an irritating strand of hair. ‘Of course it was me,’ she agreed. ‘Who else?’

  ‘We thought… I mean…’ he floundered.

  ‘You can’t have done it alone,’ Thea said. ‘You’d never have got him into the stable by yourself.’

  Cecilia pressed her lips together, apparently dumbfounded by the sudden turn of events. Five people snatched alarmed glimpses of each other before finding a neutral point in the room on which to rest their gaze. Even Thea felt afraid of what she might observe on the other faces. Confessions were working their way to the surface like erupting boils, full of malignant contagion. To Thea it felt like a miasma of potential betrayal, one person’s words casting another into disgrace and shame, wrecking lives forever.

  It was abruptly much easier to think. The events of the previous weekend were laid out before her with crystal clarity. And another rapid glance around the room revealed to her that this put her in a unique position. With the possible exception of Frannie Craven, who looked weirdly relaxed and unconcerned, the others were still grappling with new ideas. They were slowly setting aside assumptions, and replacing them with Thea’s accusations, testing for validity and assessing implications. Thea watched the process, with a dawning apprehension. It might well occur to Cecilia that Thea’s version was unacceptable; that the bearer of such stories was best kept out of sight and sound. Having escaped the clutches of the actual murderer, she was now in those of someone almost as ruthless.

  But Cecilia’s rage had already found a different object. ‘Desmond?’ she repeated breathily. She looked to Robert, who had his own gaze firmly on the carpet. ‘Desmond. My God. Have you known this all along?’ Shock turned to fury, and Robert cringed. ‘You’ve been hiding him, have you? Helping him.’ She stood up, looming over the seated man flanked by his wife and mother. ‘I’ll kill you, Robert Craven. You weak stupid treacherous little bastard.’

  ‘Hold on Ciss.’ Mrs Craven senior came up fighting. ‘That’s enough of that. Give the boy a chance.’ She got to her feet and faced Cecilia at a distance of a few inches. ‘It doesn’t have to be so bad.’

  ‘If I’d known,’ screeched Cecilia. ‘If only I’d known—’ She quivered with passion, eyes flashing. ‘Why didn’t you tell us? What did you want to shield him for?’

  Robert shrugged at the impossibility of explaining. Cecilia’s eyes narrowed. ‘Were you there when it happened? Did you help him? Are you a murderer as well? I wouldn’t put it past you.’

  He shook his head. ‘No I wasn’t. I never even saw Nick afterwards. Desmond called me and made me meet him and find him fresh clothes. He ran over the cat,’ he added as if this fitted vitally into the story.

  Frannie squawked at this. ‘Milo? Desmond killed Milo?’ Thea flinched, remembering Cecilia’s dismissal of Frannie as not worthy of consideration. It was far from true: Frannie Craven was a force to be reckoned with. ‘Tell us everything, Robert,’ she said.

  Thea was calculating days and times. ‘How could he have done it?’ she demanded. ‘The ferry didn’t dock in Cork till Sunday morning, which is when the cat was killed.’

  ‘He flew back in a private plane. He left Julia and the kids the minute the ferry landed, and was back here by nine.’

  ‘And Julia didn’t object?’

  ‘It was part of the plan. He’d invented a story about a fishing trip, with an early start on Sunday. If Flora hadn’t mucked everything up, he’d have gone back days ago and finished the holiday with them.’

  ‘So what was he driving?’ said Frannie.

  ‘What?’

  ‘When he ran over Milo. His car’s in Ireland, and don’t tell me he used the Lamborghini.’

  ‘He hired one. I was waiting for him at our gate, while you had your Sunday lie-in. I saw the whole thing. It ran in front of the car and he steered right at it. He was in that sort of mood.’ Robert shrugged, as if knowing he was describing something that no woman would understand. ‘He never liked Milo,’ he added.

  ‘Never mind the cat,’ Cecilia snapped. ‘It’s Desmond I’m interested in. He planned the whole thing – is that what you’re telling us?’ She focused intently on Robert. ‘Where was he all day Sunday?’

  ‘In the tunnel,’ said Robert, as if this was obvious.

  ‘And it was all planned – killing Nick at the barn, and giving himself a cast-iron alibi.’

  ‘Right,’ Robert nodded almost eagerly. ‘He spent weeks setting it all up. Paid a bloke to impersonate him, sitting for hours fishing on a riverbank. Made sure three or four witnesses would swear it was him. Desmond’s clever. And he always gets what he wants.’
r />   ‘But why, Robbie?’ his mother demanded, taking his hand. ‘You’re going to be in terrible trouble for hiding him as you did.’

  ‘Why what, Ma?’

  ‘Why did he kill the Franklyn boy?’

  ‘Because of his fishing lake,’ asserted Cecilia. ‘He thought the Warriors would put a stop to his plans and wanted to break them up. He knew we’d all blame the Innes boys.’

  Robert shook his head. ‘No, that’s not it. It was Flora. He thought Flora and Nick were – you know. And she’s only fourteen.’

  The silence lasted an unbearable time. Thea tried to speak, but could not find words.

  ‘But that wasn’t true, was it?’ Cecilia whispered. ‘None of them touched Flora. I told them not to, and they laughed and said I didn’t need to worry.’

  ‘It might have been true,’ Frannie offered. ‘Flora was an awful little flirt.’

  Thea was watching Robert, and the flush suffusing his face. A grim suspicion overtook her. ‘Yes, she’s only fourteen,’ she said. ‘And she was worried enough to come back here to try to stop her father. She knew what he meant to do. And when she got here, all she could think to do was hide away in the car and hope she wasn’t too late. With me and my sister in the way, she couldn’t really protect anybody. It wasn’t until we found her that she knew she’d got there too late. Poor little thing.’

  ‘Poor little thing!’ Frannie protested. ‘She’s a devious little menace. One of those girls who make men mad.’ She too looked penetratingly at Robert and a chill descended. ‘You told Desmond she was sleeping with Nick, didn’t you?’ she accused. ‘It can’t have been anybody else. And why would you do that?’ All trace of the ditzy young wife so subservient to her husband, which had been Thea’s initial impression of her, was long since discarded. The truth only made her stronger. ‘To throw him off the track. Robert. Oh, Robert.’ The last words were uttered in a voice full of knowledge and despair and a kind of resignation. Everyone knew – even Thea had somehow understood it from the first – that Robert Craven liked young girls.