A Cotswold Ordeal (7 page)

Hollis jotted again, and then got up to go. In the hallway, Jocelyn joined them, coming slowly down the stairs. The policeman addressed them both. ‘I’m not going to tell you there’s any direct danger to you,’ he intoned. ‘But I’m not going to tell you you’re perfectly safe, either. Until we know a lot more about this business, all I can do is advise you to be extremely careful.’

‘The police always say that, don’t they?’ said Jocelyn, still strung up, speaking too loudly. ‘Like the threat of bombs and everything – they tell people to be vigilant and careful, but we all know there’s no real safeguard. Except,’ she added wildly, aware of the absence of logic in her thought processes, ‘it’s not like that here. Thea can just leave. She can go home where nobody’s going to murder her.’

‘I’m not leaving,’ Thea stated firmly.

Hollis departed quickly, having issued stern instructions about staying clear of the pony shed because there might be more forensic examinations. He told Thea to keep the doors of the house firmly locked at night, and he admonished Hepzibah to be a good guard dog. He also gave a partially reassuring promise that there would be a police patrol car passing regularly throughout the night. Then he gave one last wave before turning out of the gate. Thea had walked after the car across the yard as if linked to it by a string. When he was out of sight, something hurt in the area of her navel. ‘Good God,’ she murmured. ‘I don’t believe this.’

The sheer intrusive rudeness of committing a murder in a building only a few yards from the house hit Thea repeatedly, as she tried to carry on more or less normally. The assumption that the evil deed had been deliberately timed for the Phillipses’ absence really got under her skin. It implied that she was unimportant, a fleeting nuisance that could be worked around with a bit of extra care. The whole thing must have been staged and executed with cold-blooded forethought – the rope had looked new, for a start. She hadn’t seen it in the shed, and could almost swear it had not been hanging where an impulsive killer could handily reach it. Even if the police were wrong, and the death was really suicide, as she supposed it was meant to appear, then that too had been premeditated.

‘So who goes first in the explaining session?’ Jocelyn demanded, from the front doorstep, where she had watched the parting between Thea and Hollis with interest.

‘Neither of us, for a bit longer,’ Thea said. ‘I’ve got to go and look at the pony, and collect eggs and feed Hepzie.’

‘I’ll get my bag out of the car, then.’

Thea approached the pony’s new domicile with her mind in overdrive. There were too many questions for comfort, a sense of a journey only just embarked on, stretching ahead, passing through dark woods and choppy waters before it even started to think of arriving at a restful destination. She didn’t understand about the murder-by-hanging, but it would certainly entail more questions about what she had seen and done since her arrival at Juniper Court.

And there was her sister, waiting not-so-patiently for her listening ear. The woman had walked out on a husband and five children, a few days before the school holidays were due to start. She looked terrible and sounded desperate. It was unnatural and unkind to delay the moment of revelation any longer.

After a quick look at Pallo, and a visit to the hens’ nestboxes, she went back to the house. Jocelyn’s handbag was sitting in the hall and her sister was running water in the kitchen. ‘I’m making
tea,’ she said, defiantly, when Thea joined her. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

‘Of course. I’m sorry – everything happened at once.’

‘Quite a day for you, by the sound of it.’ There was no sympathy discernible in her tone.

‘It is, rather. But nothing’s going to stop me from hearing what your problem is. If the phone rings I’ll ignore it.’

‘What if somebody comes to the door?’

‘They won’t,’ said Thea, remembering in that instant the man in the rain who’d been looking for Daneway. And then driven past wearing goggles, like somebody from the 1930s, only a short time after a murder had been committed. ‘And if they do, the geese’ll warn us.’

‘Sit down then,’ insisted Jocelyn. ‘And don’t change the subject.’

Thea obeyed, expecting a silence until the tea was made and set before them on the kitchen table.

‘He’s been hitting me.’ The words flew around the room, conjuring images, gender politics, horror and confusion.

‘Alex?’ Thea frowned and shook her head to clear the conflict between how you were supposed to react and what her actual feelings were. ‘What – hard?’

‘Hard enough to scare me. And make me absolutely furious. And wear me to a frazzle,
trying to decide what to do about it.’

‘I’m amazed.’ She knew she wasn’t supposed to ask what her sister had done to provoke him, what the matter was with Alex, why such a tragic air over something that was, really, rather ordinary. They were taboo questions, suggestive of complicity or even provocation on the woman’s part. But Thea wanted to ask them, just the same.

‘Are you? Men do hit women, you know. Quite a lot, apparently. And yes, I know what you’re thinking. I’d have been the same myself, probably. You’re thinking it’s all got entangled with political correctness and feminist stridency and every man’s entitled to lose his rag once in a while. But, Thee, it’s different when it actually happens. It shakes your whole world.’

‘But
Alex
.’ Thea was wrestling hard to get the picture straight.

‘Precisely.’

‘And you’ve left him in charge of the kids.’

‘He won’t hurt
them
. It’s me he’s got it in for.’

‘But—’ Thea’s head was slowly clearing. Men hit their wives because they had a deep need to be in control, and were afraid this was slipping. They were insecure, inarticulate, frustrated. They saw their wives as deviating from the script they thought had been agreed between them. The question burst out before she could stop it. ‘What have you
done
to him?’

She expected rage at this tactless question, or ice-cold withdrawal. At the very least an earnest womanly reproach.

‘That’s the terrible thing – I honestly don’t know,’ said Jocelyn quietly. ‘I feel exactly like Desdemona must have felt. I remember thinking at school what an impossible position she was in. You just can’t fight that sort of thing. Alex won’t say what he thinks I’ve done, what my crime is, what he thinks he’s discovered about me. It’s an insane situation.’

Thea puffed her cheeks out, finally accepting the severity of the story. ‘Wow,’ she breathed. ‘You poor thing.’

‘Don’t say that! I don’t want to be
a poor thing
. I want to be me – without having to be scared of what I say to him, or how I look at him, or who I talk to on the phone. It’s a stupid way to live.’

‘How long has it been happening?’

‘Nearly four months. It was Easter, the first time.’

‘That’s a long time.’ Thea kept her tone neutral.

‘Time to have worked out that I’ve got to do something about it. I’ve been through a whole load of stages since then. Trying to see it from his point of view, mainly. But now I’ve given up trying to explain it. I don’t care any more what deep-seated psychological trouble he might be having. I just want to stay away from him. Permanently.’

‘But the
kids,
’ Thea wailed. ‘What about the kids?’

‘He can have them,’ Jocelyn said, staring out of the kitchen window. ‘He’s welcome to them.’

Thea felt a giggle trying to erupt, impossibly wrong for the moment. She aborted it with a struggle. But the tension had broken, all the same. Jocelyn was going to be all right, thanks perhaps to her robustly secure upbringing, or the central core of self-preservation she’d learned from her position in the family – and the prospect of her sister’s company while she was at Juniper Court was an increasingly engaging one.

‘Tea,’ she said. ‘You’ve forgotten to make the tea.’

The evening was mild and dry, suggesting a welcome change in the weather, and the sisters sat outside facing each other across a garden table on a small fenced-off lawn at the back of the house. Thea had fed and watered two guinea pigs and two rabbits, ranged in a collection of cages along one wall of the shed nearest the house.

‘This place is a funny mixture, isn’t it,’ observed Jocelyn. ‘Big old house, and all these outbuildings that look as if they’ve been thrown up at random over the years.’

‘You didn’t always need planning permission before you could do anything more than introduce a chicken coop,’ said Thea. ‘Everything must have been put here for a reason.’

‘I don’t doubt that. And I think it’s all very pretty and everything. But it’s awfully old-fashioned, isn’t it. They’re not farmers, are they? What do they do with that great barn, for a start?’

‘I bet if you had a barn like that, you’d fill it to the rafters in about a week.’

‘I’d be scared to go in it, in case there were rats.’

Thea chuckled indulgently. ‘I forgot how daft you are about rats. Remember that one at Grandad’s – when Damien chased you with it.’

Jocelyn shuddered. ‘That’s about the only thing I do remember about Grandad’s place. I don’t think I’ve ever got over it.’

‘You were such a wimp.’

‘I was only about five. Damien was twelve.’

‘You didn’t like going there like the rest of us did.’

‘I liked the baby things – those yellow chicks, and piglets.’

‘Joss – you’re not serious about abandoning your kids, are you? Roly’s only five, for heaven’s sake. And Abby – she’s devoted to you. It’d break her heart.’

‘I’m not talking about abandoning them. Just letting them stay with Alex in the house they’ve always lived in. He’s very good with them – better than me in a lot of ways.’

‘He’s got to work, though. What time does he get home? What about homework and clothes and
bedtime stories and monitoring their internet access and keeping up with who their friends are?’

‘So you think I could do all that on my own, do you? I work as well, you know. Your idea of our lives is way offbeam, anyway. It might have been like that for you, with only one kid and no proper job. We just muddle along, thinking we’ve done well if everybody’s had enough of the right sort of food by the end of the day.’

Thea stuck to the main point, ignoring the reference to her own situation. ‘I just can’t imagine Alex coping with it all. That’s what I’m saying.’

Jocelyn shook her head impatiently. ‘People cope when they have to. Never mind all that now. I’ve said all I want to for the time being. It sounds to me as if you’ve got just as urgent stuff going on here. That police person wanted you to pack up and leave, didn’t he? He thinks it’s dangerous for you.’

‘I might just have done it, too, if you hadn’t shown up. There were already a few nasty moments before I found that boy in Pallo’s shed.’

‘Thea, it isn’t natural, the way you go on. A dead man in a shed – murdered, if I’ve got it right – and you’re as calm as a cucumber.’

‘Cool. Cucumbers are cool.’

‘Same thing. Anyway – what nasty moments?’

‘The cat was run over. A lovely Siamese called Milo. It’s terribly sad. It made me scared for Hepzie. I can’t be sure she won’t go on the road – and she’s
not very sensible about cars. I can’t seem to teach her that they’re dangerous.’

‘Where is it? The cat, I mean?’

‘In the spare freezer. In the garage.’

‘With the people food?’

‘I put him in a bag, in the fast-freeze section, which was empty. I couldn’t think what else to do. They’ll probably want some sort of ceremony. You know what people are like about their animals.’

Jocelyn let this go. ‘And what else? Besides the minor detail of the body in the pony shed, I mean.’

‘Well, there was a man. He came to the door, asking the way somewhere. And I saw him again this morning. He spooked me for some reason. He’s probably perfectly innocuous.’

‘Have you met any of the neighbours?’

‘A daft woman called Frannie, down the road, and her husband Robert. And a local history buff who found Milo and came to tell me, and then we got friendly and she told me lots about the place. And just this afternoon a dreadful person called Valerie Innes stopped me in the road and asked what was going on.’

Jocelyn’s thoughts were evidently wandering. ‘Why do you do this stuff? Coming to a strange house where you’ve no idea what the background is? At best, it’s bound to be lonely and boring. At worst, you get involved in all sorts of trouble. It’s not worth it, surely?’

‘It seemed like a good idea at the time,’ Thea said weakly. ‘And even if nothing at all happened, it wouldn’t be boring. I like this area. It’s genuinely fascinating. There was loads of industry here, you know. Wool, mainly, and cloth. That means mills, and workers’ cottages and transportation. There’s a wonderful old canal just about to be restored. Fascinating stuff.’

‘I don’t know how you can think about any of that sort of thing when somebody’s just
died
right outside your door. Not just died, but been
murdered.
Aren’t you at all frightened?’

Thea did her best to explain. ‘I am a bit wobbly,’ she admitted. ‘And if I’d had to spend the night here by myself I might have had trouble getting to sleep. But having Hepzie does help. She’d know if there was a man hiding under the bed, for example. And she would probably wake me up if she heard anybody coming up the stairs at three in the morning.’

‘That policeman wouldn’t have let you stay.’

‘What would he have done about the animals? The Phillipses wouldn’t have been very happy about that.’

‘I think the police are usually rather callous about animals,’ Jocelyn said. ‘Like when they evacuate an area because of a bomb scare or something. Don’t they just leave all the dogs and cats and guinea pigs behind?’

‘Do they? I never thought to wonder. That’s terrible.’

‘A lot of things are terrible,’ said Jocelyn.

‘So – are you going to stay and protect me? Hollis seemed to think the two of us would be okay.’

‘Do I have to sleep in the same bed as you?’

Thea laughed. ‘Definitely not. You can stay in the horse room. I’m sticking with the dragons.’