Trouble in the Cotswolds (The Cotswold Mysteries) (12 page)

Dog! What had she done with poor Blondie? It was Hepzie pressed close against her on the sofa, not the big
white animal. Had she put it in the kitchen and shut the door? Wasn’t that awfully unkind? But what else could she do? Swop them over? That would be more just, in the circumstances. Hepzie had done a very bad thing, after all. But it would require more effort than she could summon up. ‘At least we’re all alive,’ she muttered, genuinely grateful for this basic fact.

People had come to her aid throughout the day, so there was no need to panic. If she really needed help, rescue would be available from somebody somewhere.
Yes
–
but who?
asked her inner voice. Somebody, that’s who. Just beyond her door were unknown Samaritans who would feed the dogs and water the plants and boil a kettle for another Lemsip, and generally keep things going for another day or two. Just because Jessica was impossible and Drew unthinkable did not mean she was entirely abandoned. There was Gladwin and that vet, and Cheryl and even the Wilson mother and daughter – they were all quite liable to manifest themselves before she could even call them.

But the person who did manifest herself was not on that list at all, and was almost the last one Thea would ever have expected.

The effort of answering the door was prodigious and she almost gave it up. The knocker sounded again as she dragged herself down the hallway. There was no glass in the door, so she had no clue as to who might be on the other side. ‘I’m coming,’ she croaked. Even her lungs seemed to be involved in the overall weakness that was afflicting her.

A familiar woman stood there, minus hat and glasses, but with the same coat as before. ‘Mrs Callendar,’ said Thea. ‘Again.’

She had lost track of events from the past twelve hours. It felt as if Marian Callendar had been on the same spot only a short time ago – until she remembered the dog fight and the trip to the vet which had taken place since.

‘Let me in,’ ordered the woman, and began to push
into the house without invitation. Thea clung to the door for support. ‘I need your help,’ the new widow added.

There was a reason why she ought not to comply. Something about immunity, or the lack of it. The Ralph person had told her something. Her muddled head strove sluggishly to recapture the information. Leukaemia! That was it, or so she had concluded. His mother had leukaemia or something very like it and should stay away from infection. ‘I’ve got flu,’ she said. ‘Quite badly.’

‘So what?’

‘You … you might catch it.’

‘I won’t. I’ve been vaccinated. Listen, dear – just let me in and get out of the way, all right? I’ll be in and out before you can shake a horsewhip.’

Thea searched the woman’s hands in vain for such an item. Just a turn of phrase, then. ‘No,’ she protested. ‘Not without an explanation. I’m responsible for this house. What are you going to do?’ Recollection of Marian Callendar’s erratic behaviour earlier in the day gave rise to a delirious jumble of fears. She might set fire to the house, or break a window, or upset poor Blondie.

‘I’m going to go out of your back door for five minutes, then come in again. That’s all. Nothing for you to worry about.’

Even with flu, Thea had no difficulty in understanding the implications. ‘You can’t,’ she said flatly. ‘They’ll have locked it all up.’

‘They won’t know where the spare key to the back is. They won’t have expected anybody to slip in that way. Why would they? And I only want to collect one or two things.’

‘CDs,’ nodded Thea.

‘That’s right.’ The patronising little smile told Thea that the CD story was spurious; a convenient cover for something more sinister. And she imagined the police would certainly have anticipated the risk of someone breaking in through the back. Quite what they might do about it was a different question.

‘Did you kill her?’ she asked, point-blank. ‘You must be the chief suspect.’

‘Of course I didn’t. Tash was an old friend. I’m going to miss her desperately. And what’s more, that house now technically belongs to me. Douglas bought it for Natasha, fifteen years ago, but it was never in her name. I get to inherit it now they’re both gone.’

She should know the law, Thea supposed, being a magistrate. All the same, it didn’t sound altogether right to her. ‘Did she pay rent for it?’ she asked. Her brain was clearing as she plunged into her habitual analysis of the story. She felt a little spasm of excitement at finally being included in the heart of this Stanton mystery.

‘Enough to cover the maintenance costs, that’s all.’

‘All the same, I doubt if the police would regard that as justification for breaking in. Doesn’t your son know you’ve come back here?’

‘Edwin? He just dumped me back at the manor and
rushed off somewhere. I’m all on my own in that bloody great barn – except for the horses, of course.’

Again, Thea’s lurking delirium painted a picture of Marian Callendar snuggled up in a barn against the flank of a great shire horse. She smiled to herself. At this rate, she was going to come to rather enjoy being so feverish.

‘Do you have any idea who did kill Natasha?’ she asked boldly.

‘Why in the world would I tell you, even if I did?’

‘Good question,’ mumbled Thea. They had progressed awkwardly down the hall and into the kitchen, where the back door seemed to glow as a point of conflict. If the older woman chose to exert even the slightest force, there was no way Thea could prevent her from doing what she liked. ‘It’s probably somebody I haven’t met, anyway. Probably I’ll never even know when they’re finally caught. I’ll be onto another job and won’t even see the news when it comes.’

Marian ignored her and made for the back door. Blondie was in her basket in a corner of the kitchen, head resting on the padded edge, sharp nose overhanging. ‘Mind the dog,’ said Thea. ‘She’s not very well.’

‘Don’t tell me she’s got your flu.’ The accompanying laugh was not pleasant. ‘That dog has always been a pain in the posterior.’

‘Why? She’s a lovely animal. As soft as anything. Why don’t people like her?’

‘She barks too much. She runs off and chases sheep.
She’s come within a whisker of getting herself shot, more than once.’ She squinted down at Blondie. ‘What happened to her?’

Thea flushed. ‘My spaniel tore her ear.’

‘Who stitched it up?’

‘The vet in Stow.’

‘Toby Harris? Son of our good friend Barbara?’

‘Probably. Young, fair. He didn’t tell me his name. But he said his mother knew Natasha.’

‘That’s him. God knows why he took up vet work, when he’s so useless with horses. At least he ought to have gone to some city where it’s all cats and hamsters. Half the work here is equine.’

‘You’ve got horses, have you?’

‘Just a few.’ The irony suggested a large herd of the beasts. ‘Though I imagine I’ll have to downsize now, without Natasha. She ran the business side, you see.’

Thea did not see at all. But at least she had managed to delay the woman’s illegal entry into the house next door. The urgency of this task had acquired a whole extra dimension, fuelled by Edwin Callendar’s obvious efforts to prevent it earlier on. Although Mrs Callendar was now much less volatile than before, much quieter and more reasonable, her central purpose remained as irrational and unthinkable as it had been from the start. It was increasingly obvious that she wanted to remove evidence, pervert the course of justice, cover up the identity of a murderer. This was not a good thing to do. Even in the depths of her fluey fever, Thea knew this.

‘You must know I’m friendly with the police. I’ve known Sonia Gladwin since she first moved down here. And DI Higgins. And—’

‘Detective Superintendent Phil Hollis,’ Marian supplied. ‘Yes, I know. So what? I’m friendly with the police myself.’

‘Don’t you think I’ll tell them that you broke into the scene of a crime and removed something important?’

‘I think that by the time you do that, it won’t matter any more. Besides, I’m just collecting some things that are mine anyway. I won’t touch anything else. I didn’t kill anybody. It’s a small detail in the larger picture. Nobody’s going to lose any sleep over it.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Just a few bits that I need. I told you – CDs, mainly.’

Thea hovered between anger at the vagueness and a weary resignation. ‘Well …’ she began.

‘Look – it’s none of your business. All you have to do is go back to your sickbed and leave me to do what I have to. You won’t get into trouble. You’re not aiding and abetting a murderer. I’ve got an alibi for Saturday that completely clears me – as if that was necessary. Stop being so prissy about it,’ she finished in exasperation. ‘I should have been on my way home again by now. Just get out of the way, will you?’

The loss of patience was unnerving. Blondie lifted her head and whined at the raised voice. Thea shared her pain, putting a hand to her own head in sympathy. ‘You’re upsetting the dog,’ she said. ‘Stop shouting.’

‘I wasn’t shouting. But I’m not going to be thwarted again, so have some sense. Stop asking questions, will you. The less you know, the better. It’s sensitive business data, that’s all.’

‘Don’t you think the police will already have found it, in that case? They’ll have copied everything from Natasha’s computer by now.’

‘Maybe,’ shrugged Marian, in an unconvincing show of unconcern. ‘But I want to see for myself.’

In spite of everything, Thea felt a dawning sympathy for the woman. Police investigations frequently unearthed evidence of dealings and doings that had no direct link to the murder, but which led to other lines of enquiry and unwelcome revelations. Not until it was too late did they accept that their discoveries had been mere red herrings in the murder enquiry. Too late to cover them up again and let sleeping dogs lie.

‘Do you promise it has nothing to do with her murder?’ she asked.

‘Since I really don’t know who killed her or why, that’s not easy to do. Life’s not that simple, is it? Things connect. People conceal their real motives. Natasha was involved in things I knew nothing about. She might have hurt or offended someone years ago, and they’re only now taking revenge. Or they might be worried about something she was going to do, and had to stop her.’

Thea’s head was pounding. She sank into a kitchen chair and leant forward over the table as if her spine had
turned to soft rubber. New suspicions were gathering cloudily – the middle Callendar son was surely in the mix somewhere, for one thing. Convicted of fraud, someone had said. Had Natasha known something that might further incriminate him? ‘I can’t stop you,’ she moaned. ‘Even though I know it’s wrong, what you’re doing.’

‘It’s not wrong.’ Marian spoke sharply. ‘It’s for the greater good. It’s a small misdemeanour that will save a far greater injury. And that’s all I intend to tell you.’ She was through the kitchen door in a flash, leaving it open for cold air to get in. There was a wall between the two gardens, three or four feet high, made of Cotswold stone. No doubt Natasha had a shed where she kept a key to the back door, or an upturned flowerpot – some obvious hiding place that Marian had always known about. The woman’s competence was daunting. Even her earlier loss of control and humiliating removal by her son had not entirely concealed the solid core of confidence and determination.

She came back within ten minutes – a spell that had felt extremely long to Thea. She closed the door, nodded without a word and was away through the front before Thea could properly focus on her.

But she had seen what the woman was holding.

Marian Callendar had promised her that the object she wanted from Natasha’s house had no bearing on the woman’s murder. But then she would say that, wouldn’t she? She would hope that Thea simply left it all alone and looked the other way – a foolish hope, given that Thea had already told her how intimate she was with senior members of the police force. Except, of course, that Marian herself was also likely to be intimate with the same people, given that she was a magistrate. She would carry professional clout and have no difficulty in persuading them that all her actions were entirely justified. And Marian was right if she thought Thea was too ill and achey to care much anyway.

Even so, the question of Marian’s motivation niggled at Thea. Natasha Ainsworth had worked for Callendar Logistics. She was friendly with a veterinary researcher
and a family who owned a substantial number of horses. Douglas Callendar and his Callendar Logistics had sponsored some sort of medical research that involved animals, according to the young vet from Stow. It all seemed to fit together, as well as being a very obvious activity for people living in the Cotswolds. There were racing stables and stud farms scattered all over the area. Stanton itself had a riding school on its northern edge. Horses were an inescapable side effect of the affluence and social climbing that characterised much of the region. Thea had no problem with horses, other than a low-level irritation she shared with almost every other car driver. She could imagine it was a delight to ride all day across the tops of the wolds, the views and the easy rhythm a balm in a busy business life. With history her main interest, the fact of horses and their central place in human activity through the ages could not be ignored. Their decline into useless appendages fit only for expensive leisure pursuits or exploitative gambling was a melancholy evolution. The moment people could no longer afford to ride or place bets at the races, horses would be destroyed in their thousands and perhaps never be part of the landscape again. One more unforeseen consequence of economic catastrophe, in a long list. Unless, of course, the opposite happened, and horses were once again employed for transport and haulage when the oil ran out.

Not normally inclined to fantasies about Armageddon, Thea’s flu seemed to be pushing her in
that direction. It was said to be depressing, she recalled, and this evening of the day before Christmas Eve seemed to offer plenty to feel gloomy about. People were dying, it was going to rain, Drew was being run ragged by all the demands on him, her car was in some nameless garage and Hepzibah had torn Blondie’s ear. The last in itself would be enough to bring worry and trouble down on her. If she had been well, she would certainly have tracked down her car by this time and made efforts to retrieve it.

Out in the village there would be celebrations and excitement. Nobody, as far as she could tell, was especially prostrated by the killing of Natasha Ainsworth. On the discovery of her body there had been shock, even horror, but nobody she had seen looked to be personally affected. And yet many of them had been at her house the day before she died. Some people had chosen to toast the passing of Douglas Callendar with his mistress, his paramour, rather than with his wife. There had to have been more significance to this than mere geographical convenience. There had been twenty people or more – a substantial proportion of the population of Stanton – accepting Natasha’s sandwiches and sherry and tacitly condoning her relationship with the deceased. Had one of them crept back next day and stabbed the wretched woman to death?

Despite the physical violence, Thea found herself visualising the killer as female in her overactive imaginings. Dennis Ireland was the predominant man
on her list of possible candidates, and he had struck her as lacking the necessary rage or resentment for the deed. As did Ralph and Edwin Callendar. In contrast, she had met a number of angry, unusual, unpredictable women. Rosa Wilson, Cheryl Bagshawe, Marian Callendar, Juliet Wilson, the vet’s mother and the Callendar sons’ wives all crowded into her mind clutching sharp knives and raging at the faceless Natasha. And if Natasha Ainsworth had been capable of seducing one woman’s husband, she might well do so again. There could be Stanton wives working themselves up into such frenzies of suspicious jealousy that the only recourse had been to kill the woman before she could snatch their own Rupert or Henry, Justin or Adam.

As she tried to shake her head free from such unwholesome meditations, Thea experienced a small revelation. It came in a flash, and seemed both blindingly obvious and completely new. House-sitting was boring. Sitting in somebody’s house while they enjoyed exotic holidays or fulfilled complicated obligations elsewhere was almost the dullest occupation there could be. All you could do was explore the neighbourhood and interfere in the lives of the surrounding people. She had done this time and again – although there had also been occasions when the neighbours had forced themselves onto her attention. Her reputation as a harbinger of calamity was only justified by a long series of contingencies that all turned out to have logical explanations. It was her persistent habit of getting involved that marked
her out as special. And that had effectively been due to her relationship with the police. Having found a body during her very first commission, she did not, as most would have done, settle back into the house and keep her head down. She roamed the village talking to people. She befriended them and made deductions about them. Her dead husband’s brother was a senior police officer – a fact that had shown her that the police were human beings, approachable, fallible, and very often extremely grateful for her assistance. It had somehow enabled her to unreservedly enter into a relationship with Detective Superintendent Phil Hollis, and treat him as she would any other man. Here her conscience gave her its familiar stab, at the memory of how badly she had actually treated Phil. She had developed a habit of rationalisation that took over every time she thought of him. She had been punishing him for not being Carl. She had felt constrained to show him her darkest side. She had been in the grip of turbulent hormones, so common in a woman’s forties. She had panicked at the increasing intimacy and instinctively acted to repel any further closeness. Or all of the above, she thought glumly.

The thing about having a fever and a headache and heavy clumsy limbs was that your thoughts ran away with you. The suffering brain created pictures out of nothing, enhancing and illuminating the thoughts with fantastic illustrations. There was no stopping them, if you couldn’t jump up and take the dogs for a long winter
walk. If you didn’t trust yourself to let the frustrated rats out for a run, because you weren’t sure you could catch them again. You saw the world through a mist, with the usual clear boundaries between yourself and everything else oddly blurred. You might reach out for a rat and discover you were clutching your own other hand.

‘I’m worse!’ she realised, speaking out loud. She looked around the room, unaware of the time and only dimly mindful of the place. She was stiff and cold. There was a noise outside. She listened carefully to it, and finally concluded that it was rain. Somebody had told her it would rain for Christmas. How horrible! She couldn’t recall a Christmas Day where it had rained. Rain was for Good Friday and Royal Occasions. And Wimbledon.

‘Stop it!’ she muttered. There was movement against her legs and she reached down to encounter long soft hair. Her spaniel was stirring, at the sound of her voice. Her wicked treacherous spaniel who had done a very terrible thing and was unpleasantly tainted as a result. ‘Oh, Hepzie,’ she sighed. ‘We are in trouble, aren’t we.’

The dog slowly wagged its tail and turned its big soulful eyes onto her face. In the kitchen there was a lonely abandoned Alsatian with a painful ear. It ought to be the other way around. Poor Blondie was hormonal and pining for her people. She would have been better off in kennels, or left in the house by herself with somebody dropping in to feed and walk her twice a day.

Other troubles began to crowd in on her. She had allowed Marian Callendar to use the house as a way into next door. She had almost killed her car. She had distracted Gladwin from her rightful work. She sank weakly into the cushions of the sofa and wondered whether anything would ever be right again.

She managed to get up to bed, having laboriously checked that everything was off in the kitchen and fed the rats. Blondie refused to go out into the wet garden and Thea lacked the strength to drag her. If she peed on the floor in the night, so be it. Who could blame her? Hepzie followed her up the stairs and onto the bed, as always.

‘It’s only flu, not the Black Death,’ Thea said. ‘And it’s always worse in the evening. I’m not going to die.’ But she could not avoid an impression that dying might be rather like this. A jumbled forgetting of reality, a sinking into self-pitying befuddlement. An inability to separate the important from the trivial. And above all, a stark loneliness, so that in reaching out you encountered nothing more substantial than a small spaniel or your own cold hand.

The night seemed an eternity, fuelled with anxious dreams about Jessica and Jocelyn and the nameless student who had been outside the house next door when the murder victim was found. He sailed around like a cartoon ghost, expanding and contracting and weeping red tears. There was something urgent about him, some imperative task that Thea was supposed to perform. A
voice shouted a list of names from somewhere invisible. She knew, through much of this, that it was all a dream, and yet she believed it was real and relevant at the same time. When she struggled awake at intervals, she could not be sure whether this was a real awakening, or merely another level of dream-ridden sleep. Outside it was raining loudly enough to penetrate the single glazing and Thea’s fever and add a sinister background music to the apparitions conjured by her fevered mind.

At last it was morning. The sky outside was grey and thick-looking, but at least there was light. A new sound reached her, but it was minutes before she identified it as Blondie howling down in the kitchen.

‘Oh, no!’ she groaned, and forced herself out of bed and down the stairs to investigate.

There was blood on the dog’s bedding and a large puddle of urine on the floor. The injured ear was bleeding and ragged-looking. ‘Oh God, you stupid animal – you’ve pulled some of the stitches out.’ The self-reproach flowed through her in a bitter tide. She should have attached the plastic collar, as instructed. How would she ever face the vet again and admit her omission? How could she even get Blondie back to Stow for his attentions? The dog lay miserably in its bed and avoided her gaze. Feeling guilty about the puddle, Thea supposed, as well as suffering from a painful ear.

Her own illness forgotten, she knelt down to inspect the wound more closely. The vet had shaved away some of the hair, leaving a swollen-looking area at the base
of the ear, marked with ugly black stitches. There was dry blood scabbing over, making it hard to see exactly what had happened. ‘I’ll have to bathe it,’ she said. ‘Stay there.’

She found Dettol under the sink, and added it to warm water. A small hand towel would do for swabbing. The dog squealed once, when she touched the bruising, but lay still after that. Miraculously, it appeared that all the stitches were still intact. The blood came from the one closest to Blondie’s head, where the lips of the gash had separated. ‘Another stitch ought to have been put in there,’ she muttered critically, while at the same time enormously relieved to find the damage less than first thought. ‘Now, my girl – you’re having that collar, like it or not.’

Attaching the clumsy thing was no easy task. It had to be threaded around the dog’s own collar, and adjusted to fit, leaving no space for a scratching paw. The lovely Alsatian looked like a clown, and clearly felt ridiculous. ‘Now I’ll have to mop up that puddle,’ she told herself. The fact of having something to do made her feel considerably more human than she had expected to. She was doing the work she was paid to do, acting responsibly and functioning more or less normally. She had let Hepzie out into the garden, holding onto her as they traversed the kitchen, and closing the door on her. She was now scratching to come back in. ‘Wait a minute,’ Thea shouted.

The mopping finished, she relented and readmitted
the spaniel, who came in looking as if she’d been for a long underwater swim. ‘Blimey, Heps – it’s not that bad, is it? I thought the rain had stopped.’

She peered out at the back garden, and saw that she’d been quite wrong. Water was dripping from all the bare branches and accumulating in any depressions in the ground. It splashed off the stone wall surrounding the Shepherds’ ground, and filled the containers that were scattered around. A metal bucket was already brimming over. The water butt that had been cleverly attached to a downpipe from the house roof must have reached capacity hours ago.

Thea firmly closed the door and went to see how things were at the front. Without a proper pavement, with associated gutter, it occurred to her that there were no real barriers to prevent water running off the road and under the front doors, all along the street. Some sort of defence must have been devised, she supposed, over the years, but the position of the village at the foot of an escarpment must make it vulnerable to run-off. Water would cascade down the hill, and quickly find itself in the village street with nowhere to go.

Peering out of the window, she could not immediately see any cause for concern. A car passed by, making a swishing sound on the wet tarmac, but nothing worse than that. There must be drains and gullies usefully positioned to deal with whatever the heavens threw down. Gloucestershire had suffered badly a few years earlier, when rivers overflowed their banks – but Stanton
was not on a river, and this was only one night of rain, after all. Annoying and isolating it might be, but there was no need for panic. Ever since Lower Slaughter, and the indirect consequences of a rainy evening, she had associated such weather with disaster.