Fear in the Cotswolds (15 page)

‘Come on,’ said Thea. ‘We have to get back.’ Then she noticed a small blue coat hanging on the gate into the churchyard. It could only be Nicky’s, and she could not imagine how she had failed to see it earlier. With a feeling of having collected
another useful piece in a puzzle, she unhooked it, and led her dog back the way she had come.

Before she reached the house again, a car had come up behind her, and was drawing into the space in front of the Newby home. The passenger door opened, and Janina emerged, looking anguished. She slammed the car door impatiently, and ran to the house. Not once had she glanced at Thea or her dog.

Thea followed her determinedly, ushering the spaniel into the house with no ceremony at all. ‘Janina!’ she called. ‘Wait a minute.’

The au pair was on her knees in front of the sleeping Nicky before Thea could catch up with her. No mother could have shown more agonised love, more debilitating relief than this foreign girl was showing to a child she had only known for a few weeks. ‘He’s all right,’ Thea said quietly. ‘He’s fine.’

Only then did Janina acknowledge her presence. ‘Why are you here?’ she asked, with a frown. ‘Did Bernard ask you?’

‘Not exactly,’ she said. ‘I found Nicky in the church. He never got to nursery.’ There had been a momentary temptation to shield the forgetful Bernard, but the prospect of introducing lies and evasions at this stage was untenable. ‘He was very cold, but I think he’s OK now. He’ll be hungry, I expect.’

Nicky was stirring, roused by the lavish devotion
coming his way. He opened his eyes and smiled. ‘Hello, Janina,’ he said, like a model English schoolboy. His long eyelashes fluttered, and his rosy cheeks glowed. He was a really beautiful child, Thea noted again. The sort that made people go soft and doting.

‘Where have
you
been?’ Thea asked. ‘What was that car?’

‘Police,’ said Janina shortly. ‘They kept me too long. Simon too.’

‘Oh?’

‘They have kept him still there. Questions about Bunny.’ Too late, she lowered her voice, hoping to avoid Nicky hearing what she said.

‘Mummy?’ he mumbled, still sleepy. ‘Is Mummy coming?’

‘No, darling,’ Janina told him. ‘But soon we can go and get Benjamin, and we can have some sandwiches and cake, and watch one of your DVDs.’

‘With Daddy?’

‘Perhaps.’

Thea was profoundly impressed by this scene. Janina’s calm tone seemed to be pitched precisely right, the stress on normal schedules and routines designed to reassure a confused child. She took a step back, feeling her own work was done. ‘I’ll be going, then,’ she said.

Janina did not turn round, but said over her shoulder, ‘Thank you very much. You have been
wonderful. I don’t understand about the church, but it doesn’t matter now.’

Without warning, Thea felt her throat constrict, and her eyes grow hot. She was going to cry if she didn’t get away quickly – and that was sure to be the wrong thing to do in front of Nicky. The sadness of it all could not be ignored, but he needed the adults to maintain some equilibrium. ‘Oh, I phoned the school,’ she remembered to say, in a thick voice. ‘They’ll be trying to get hold of Simon. You might call them and say there’s no need to worry.’

‘Yes, I will. Thank you,’ said Janina softly. It was impossible to know what she was thinking, as she gently stroked Nicky’s hand. ‘No need to worry,’ she repeated, in a crooning voice.

Hepzie had been exploring in the kitchen, but reappeared at Thea’s call. They walked back to the car, over increasingly sodden ground, and drove back to Lucy’s Barn, all thought of shopping or exploring quite abandoned. The track down to the barn still had vestigial snow along the sides, but it was not difficult to manoeuvre the car over the wet ground, suddenly soft and yielding where before it had been treacherously icy.

She thought about Janina, and her volatile temper, remembering the savage criticisms of Bunny at their first encounter. Was it too much of a leap to suspect that Bunny’s death had been
brought about by the au pair? Given her profound solicitude for Nicky, it seemed very unlikely. Except…perhaps Janina believed herself to be a big improvement on the children’s natural mother. Perhaps she saw herself as a better mate for Simon, too. Bunny had clearly been a part-time mother, but Thea knew better than to draw from that any conclusions concerning Bunny’s relationship with the boys. They probably worshipped her, and treasured every second spent in her company. Images of Princess Diana and her sons intruded, although with no obvious insight. As far as she knew, Diana had been a fairly useless mother, the princes left to nannies and less prominent relatives. But she knew better than to judge such matters. Families were by definition inscrutable. Things were seldom as they seemed. All she could think was that if Janina and Simon had conspired to kill Bunny, and if they were caught and imprisoned, that would be far more desperate news for Nicky and Ben than she cared to imagine. So desperate that she, Thea, wondered whether she might be tempted to conceal any evidence against them, if pushed into a situation where she had to choose. She liked Simon and admired Janina, and found herself wanting everything to go well for them and the two little boys in their care.

She was hungry. Jimmy would need to go out. She ought to check the roofs and gutters possibly damaged by the weight of snow. There was plenty to do, and with the sudden accessibility opened up by the disappearance of the snow, she could walk the dog as far as she liked. The air had lost its bitter chill and was back to how it had been two weeks earlier – thick enveloping clouds sucking away the light.

She calculated, with a little shock, that it was already 17
^th
January. It seemed impossible that she had passed such a chunk of the month at the barn, with only two weeks and two days still to go. She tried to imagine how she would look
back on this record-breaking long stint, with the snow and the sadness of the bodies left to freeze outdoors. Tempting fate, she admonished herself. It was far from over yet, and it was impossible to predict what would happen next. She would remember the magical little church merely as a backdrop to the unhappy discovery of a shivering child seeking his dead friend. She would remember the witless Jimmy as another figure of misery, abandoned by those who should have protected him. But she might also remember the sweet little rabbits, born so surprisingly in the middle of winter. The soft warmth of them in their impossibly cosy nest, demonstrating that it was feasible to remain safe and oblivious, so long as your mother followed the rules that instinct ordained.

Hepzie had been cheated of a decent walk by the events of the morning, and this, combined with the sudden liberation of the weather, sent Thea outside again, as soon as she had given herself some lunch and tended to Jimmy. For a change of scene she turned left, down the incline to Old Kate’s premises, where she vaguely hoped for a chance to download the events of the morning.

The yard gave an impression of hard work and organisation, with a great tumbling stack of
root vegetables the first thing she noticed. The objects were more or less spherical in shape, piled into a three-sided compound, from which they were escaping and spreading a few feet onto the concrete yard in front of the stack. ‘Mangel worzels,’ Thea murmured to herself, with a smile. She went to gather one up for closer inspection. It struck her as entirely alien – she had no concept of how it would taste, or any method by which it needed to be processed for consumption. There were ridges and knobs all over it, unlike a turnip or a swede, which she might have recognised. She sniffed at it, but could only detect the smell of damp soil, with all its unsettling associations.

‘Caint eat that, my lovey,’ came a husky male voice from behind her. ‘Not ’less you’m starving, anyhow.’

This had to be Kate’s old father, Thea remembered, as she met the rheumy gaze of a very old man. He wore rubber boots and a tweed jacket that looked too big for him. ‘Hello,’ she said.

‘House-sitter,’ he nodded. ‘And dog.’

‘That’s right. I was hoping to meet you.’

He cocked his head and treated her to a searching gaze through tiny deep-set eyes. ‘Were you, now?’ he said. ‘And why should that be?’

‘I like to meet people when I’m house-sitting.
It gets lonely otherwise. And boring.’

‘Hmm.’ She thought she detected a twinkle, a glint of amusement at the follies of people who had not yet reached half his age. Not for the first time, she found herself wondering how it must be to achieve such an accumulation of years. Surely it had to be burdensome to the point of torment? The physical weaknesses and failings, the loss of independence – all the usual clichés swarmed in on her. But this old man looked contented enough, at least at first glance.

‘The snow’s going, then,’ she said foolishly.

‘It’ll be back again yet, though,’ he said. ‘Reminds me of ’47. Lasted till March that year, it did.’

‘So I gather. But the world’s got warmer since then. I must admit I’ve had enough of it for one year.’

‘Doubt it’ll mind what you think, all the same.’

Ouch! ‘That’s true,’ she smiled. ‘Well…I was wondering whether Kate might be around?’

‘Working,’ he said shortly. ‘Busy time. Using the chance of the thaw to get some patching done.’ As he spoke, a loud hammering filled the air, and Thea looked upward towards its source. Kate was kneeling on the roof of a large barn, the far side of the yard. It looked alarmingly high.

‘Gosh!’ she said. ‘Is she safe up there?’

‘Not fallen off yet,’ the careless father observed. ‘Always been a good climber, that girl has.’

All Thea’s instincts were to go and help – to hold a ladder, or pass nails up as required. ‘What’s she doing?’

‘Fixing a hole where the snow broke through. If the hay gets wet it’ll be no use. Wasted.’ He shook his head. ‘Naught worse than wasted hay.’

The banging persisted, and Thea could see the woman wielding the hammer with impressive vigour. Moving closer, she understood that the barn beneath was more than half full of large hay bales, and that if Kate were unlucky enough to fall through, she would have a soft landing. The roof was comprised of sheets of galvanised iron, some of them looking rather rusty around the edges. From where she stood she could not see Kate clearly, but could only assume that she had somehow carried a replacement sheet up a ladder and was using it to patch a hole. Such competence filled her with admiration and she waited for a chance to say so.

With a final flurry of hammering, Kate withdrew, crawling backwards to where there must have been a ladder. She had ignored Thea’s presence throughout, despite it being obvious that she was there. Kate had almost certainly heard the conversation between Thea and her
father, as she hoisted her iron patch up a high ladder.

‘I could have helped you,’ Thea said, as Kate finally reappeared on firm ground. ‘I make a rather good assistant.’

‘Best working on my own,’ said the farmer shortly. ‘Quicker, generally.’

Ouch again, thought Thea. ‘Well, I must say I’m very impressed.’

‘Why?’

‘Having such a head for heights,’ said Thea quickly. ‘I’d have been terrified.’

Kate shrugged, and looked towards her father. ‘Dad…you need to get back in the house. I’ll be in for tea soon.’

The old man made a sound like a low growl. Had his daughter just humiliated him by highlighting the reversal of roles between them? For how long had he been confined to domestic duties while Kate wielded hammers and drove tractors and made stacks of alien vegetables? Kate heard the unspoken question, and said, ‘He’s had pneumonia for most of the winter, and isn’t meant to be out. It’s the devil’s own job to find him something to do, mark you. Making a pot of tea is about his limit. Isn’t it, you old pest?’ she added, with an exasperated grin.

So that was all right, Thea concluded. They loved each other, just as a father and daughter
should. She thought of her own father, recently deceased, and felt a pang.

Then she thought of Bunny Newby, who would never know the love of a grown-up son, and a complicated grief seized her.

‘Did you hear about Bunny, the mother of those two little boys?’ she said. ‘I suppose you must have known her.’

Kate grabbed her arm and shook it violently. ‘Be quiet!’ she hissed. ‘Mind what you say.’

But it was too late. The old man had heard and was visibly crumpling. ‘Is it true?’ he croaked. ‘Kate, you told me it wouldn’t be her. You
promised
me.’

Kate rolled her eyes skywards, and shook Thea again. ‘See what you’ve done,’ she snarled. ‘Bloody hell.’

‘But… But he would have found out eventually,’ she defended. Then she turned towards the old man, reaching out a hand to him. ‘But I’m terribly sorry if I said the wrong thing – I mean, who was she to you?’

‘My wife’s daughter,’ said the old man softly. ‘Beatrice was my stepdaughter.’

Thea struggled to grasp the chronology – Bunny surely had to be ten or fifteen years junior to Kate. So Kate’s mother must have taken chronological precedence over Bunny’s in the old man’s life. Confused alternative scenarios
flickered through her mind, whereby Bunny was born to another man whilst her mother was married to the one standing here in the yard – but the primary thought was that her image of Bunny failed utterly to cohere with life on this farm, in any shape or form.

‘I knew, anyway,’ continued the old man. ‘I knew when you said the telly was playing up, and when you made such noise in the news on the wireless. Dropping that pan,’ he stared accusingly at Kate. ‘Think I’m daft, don’t you?’

‘Did they give her name out, then?’ Thea asked. ‘When did they do that?’

Kate shook her head irritably. ‘No, they didn’t. But I didn’t want him worrying.’

‘So how did you know who it was?’

‘And just who might you be, to ask so many questions? What business is it of yours?’

‘I’m sorry.’ Thea could hardly deny the justice of the question. She must seem outrageously nosy and intrusive. ‘But I have met the family, and I’m dreadfully upset about those poor little boys.’

‘Hm. Me too,’ muttered Kate, still eyeing her father with concern. ‘Dad? Come indoors and we’ll talk about it.’

‘She was
killed
. Isn’t that what they said? A woman killed at the weekend, in the snow. Poor little fool. She might have been stupid, but nobody deserves that.’

Thea’s eyebrows rose and she threw Kate a look of wordless enquiry. Kate shook her head impatiently. ‘It’s not like it sounds. He’s no blood relative of hers. Hadn’t even seen the woman for a year or more.’ She gave her father a fierce look. ‘Don’t you go all soft on me, you hear? She was nothing to you – not really.’

‘But the boys,’ Thea persisted. ‘Wouldn’t they have loved to come here, and get to know their… stepgrandad? I mean, they live barely a mile away, for heaven’s sake.’

‘They came,’ muttered the old man. ‘George brought them.’

George?
Thea’s insides began to churn. This was beginning to sound alarming. If George had secretly brought Nicky and Ben to the farm, without the knowledge of their parents, then something wasn’t right. Besides…how did you ensure that a four-year-old kept it quiet? Nicky was too young to understand about secrets and things you shouldn’t say. Unless the au pair was part of the conspiracy, and somehow an alternative story had been created, to make Bunny think the child was describing something else.

Her mind raced through all this, as she looked from father to daughter and back again. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said feebly. ‘I shouldn’t interfere.’

‘Bit late for that,’ said Kate.

Thea knew when she’d outstayed her welcome, and calling her dog from where it was nosing after rodents in the heap of beets, she turned back towards Lucy’s Barn.

As had happened before, Thea found herself wondering whether she was ahead of the police investigation, or behind it, or simply running along a parallel track. The clear fact was that there had been no police visit to Kate and her father, which suggested that their relationship to the murder victim had not yet emerged. And until it did, there was little likelihood of the police discovering that the connection was closer than might first appear.

Carefully, she rehearsed a possible conversation with DS Gladwin in which she passed on the information she had just gleaned. Who, if anyone, would she be betraying? Janina emerged as the most probable name, and that depended on a lot of unfounded supposition on Thea’s part. It was perfectly likely that Simon had known about the visits to the farm, but kept it from Bunny, due to some long-founded animosity between her and her stepfather. So…would it make any difference what she did? If ancient feuds between the old farmer’s two wives emerged into the light, so what?

So perhaps Kate herself would be put under
the spotlight. If the stepsisters had not been speaking, and yet the children had been visiting the farm, did that not suggest a possible motive for killing Bunny? Kate herself showed no sign of having any offspring of her own – perhaps these were the only grandchildren and therefore in line to inherit the farm. Plainly there had been some kind of conspiracy going on behind Bunny’s back, if only a very small and innocent one.

And what about Simon? He was becoming increasingly enigmatic. His brother had been called on for support in the initial shock of losing Bunny; Janina was his stalwart deputy where the children were concerned, while he worked all kinds of unsocial hours at his smart hotel. Did Bunny work because she thought it preferable to being at home with young children, or because she earned irresistibly good money? What did she and Simon actually want out of life? Thea had found it helpful at times to ask this question, when tracing out the past histories of the people she encountered in these villages. Sometimes it was easier to answer about somebody she had only just met – their goals and obsessions were often nakedly apparent. But with Simon Newby, she was stumped.

The afternoon tasks were upon her, and she sloshed across the donkey’s paddock, melted snow creating squelchy indentations with every
step. There was water everywhere, on surfaces both horizontal and vertical. It dripped from the trees and trickled down fence posts. The donkey came out to greet her, his ears pricked forward, his eyes bright. ‘Good afternoon, Donk,’ Thea trilled at him, reaching out to stroke the soft nose. ‘This weather more to your liking, then?’

She examined the abrasion on his chest, which seemed to be healing nicely. She resigned herself to never knowing exactly what had caused it. It was possible that he had slipped over in the snow and caught himself on barbed wire or a sharp stick, although such an accident was difficult to envisage. It was more of a denial of the real probability than a genuine hypothesis, since George had crossed this paddock during Friday night, and had died just over the fence. Had the donkey witnessed this final trek through the snow? Had the man’s last act been to pause and fondle this velvet nose, just as she was doing now? If the donkey had brayed, would Thea have heard him, and got up and discovered the man in time to avert his suicide?

If…if…never a useful word, and one she consciously fought to avoid as much as possible. ‘If’ could lead to defensive living on a grand scale.
If I let my daughter go out with that
boy and he has a drink, he could smash up the
car and kill her. If I don’t put away a hundred
pounds a month in high-performance shares, I
won’t have anything to live on when I’m old.
In Thea’s experience, the effort of trying to predict and thus avoid the worst-case scenario led nowhere. Things happened that you could never have foreseen. Your precious savings evaporated under severe mismanagement by the banks. Your daughter ran away from home because you were impossibly repressive. Better by far to expect the best, and let the
ifs
look after themselves.