Fear in the Cotswolds (16 page)

It was an outlook you devised in early infancy, she had concluded. Her brother Damien regarded her as almost criminally feckless in her refusal to worry about the future. He had, it seemed, listened to his mother’s worries and resistance to risk from his earliest days and accepted her world view as right for him. Thea, on the other hand, had adopted her father’s trusting approach. The other two siblings, Emily and Jocelyn, had constructed their own variations on the theme. And once established, it was never going to change. That, Thea sometimes thought, was the true tragedy of the human condition.

Gladwin was turning out to be something of a mind-reader. Her car splashed down the track at half past three that afternoon, just as Thea was kicking off her boots and thinking about a large mug of strong tea.

‘Brilliant timing!’ she applauded. ‘On your own?’

The detective nodded. ‘Not too early for tea, I hope?’

Thea laughed, finding herself unreservedly glad of the visit. ‘Follow me,’ she said.

The two women settled down in the kitchen, the spaniel under the table at their feet. ‘George,’ said DS Gladwin firmly. ‘I want to talk about George.’

‘Me too,’ Thea nodded. ‘Very much so.’

The post-mortem had failed to find any suspicious cause of death, apart from the confirmation that the body had been moved some hours after he’d died. Calculations had been made on the basis of low temperatures, the effects of alcohol, and George’s low proportion of body fat. ‘Skinny as a rake,’ said Gladwin, with a pitying sigh. But there had been no wild guesses as to the exact time of death. ‘If you hadn’t found him, we’d never even have managed to pin it down to a given day,’ said Gladwin.

‘Does it matter?’

The other woman shrugged. ‘Everything matters,’ she said. ‘And it would be extremely useful to know whether he died before or after Mrs Newby.’

‘Oh?’ Thea frowned. ‘But surely she was
ages
later?’ She tried to remember the sequence of events. ‘She wasn’t found until Sunday, was she?’

‘Right. The operative word being
found
. We think she was there for two days or more. She was well covered with snow.’

‘When was she last seen alive?’

‘Thursday morning.’

‘My God! Hadn’t she phoned her family since then? Weren’t they
worried
about her?’ Then she remembered. ‘But she did send a text. That
was Saturday morning, I think. Benjamin said something about it. She sent a text to say she couldn’t be there, and Ben was sarcastic because Nicky couldn’t read it.’

‘Anybody can send a text,’ said Gladwin, with an air of having uttered something significant.

‘Would they know if it was from her phone?’

‘Probably. Most people have caller ID come up automatically.’

‘Then someone took her phone, after she was dead?’

Gladwin exhaled with exaggerated patience. ‘If she was dead by the time the text was sent, and if it was sent from her phone, then yes.’

‘Sorry,’ said Thea. ‘I’m being obvious, aren’t I?’

‘Not really. It helps to talk it through.’

‘But could Bunny still have been alive on Saturday? Could she have sent the text herself?’

‘It seems not.’

‘Can you tell me exactly how she died?’ She knew she was pushing the limits of Gladwin’s easy goodwill and comradeship. She had already heard a lot more than she expected.

‘Blows to the head with something heavy. It’s not entirely clear-cut, which is nothing new.’ She sighed. ‘Unless someone’s shot point-blank through the back of the head, there’s generally scope for alternative explanations.’

Thea sighed in sympathy. ‘Tell me about it,’ she said feelingly, thinking of a recent experience of her own. ‘But can you tell whether she died in the place where she was found?’

‘Near enough. The pooling of the blood shows she didn’t lie anywhere else for any length of time. All the snow under her had melted, so she would have been warm when put there.’

‘Have you been interviewing loads of people?’

‘We only got a definite ID for her yesterday. Give us a chance. But yes, a few. They’re ongoing as we speak. I’ve seen a handful of the interview reports.’

‘And…?’

‘She was a law unto herself, off around the country on her campaigns, meeting clients, selling ideas. Whatever it is that advertising people do. She worked her socks off – everyone agrees about that. Made good money, which is amazing in itself, these days.’

‘Did people
like
her?’ Thea wondered.

‘Admired. Envied. Were intimidated by. One or two disapproved.’

‘Like Janina,’ said Thea without thinking.

‘Oh? You think she disapproved of her employer?’

‘Well, yes. I don’t know how deep it went, but she didn’t seem to have much regard for her. I met her two Sundays ago, outside the church,
and she was full of how stupid Bunny had been to pursue such a useless career when she could be looking after her own kids. Something like that, anyway.’

‘She told us that she had great respect for both her employers. That it was a model family, fully functional and happy in every way.’

‘Hmm,’ said Thea. ‘And she had a best friend – Philippa something. Have you spoken to her?’

‘Lives in Stow with a bloke twelve years younger. Children taken on by a stepmother.’

‘I’m impressed,’ said Thea.

‘Don’t be,’ said Gladwin. ‘She approached us. She has theories. Which brings us back to George Jewell,’ said Gladwin.

‘Does it?’

‘A lot of quite unsavoury unfounded ideas about him, in fact.’

‘Surely not.’ Thea was shocked. ‘Those little boys were very fond of him – they went looking for him. People saw him with them. He took them for walks.’

‘Oh?’

Thea chose that moment to tell her about the visits to Kate and the step-grandfather of the boys, without Bunny’s knowledge or consent. Then, for good measure, she described her encounter with Nicky in the church. ‘So what?’ she added when she’d finished. ‘I think it sounds
rather nice that George took such an interest in them.’

‘You would,’ said Gladwin with a shrewd look. ‘You’re living out of your time, Thea Osborne – you do realise that, I hope?’

‘No I’m not.’ She felt surprisingly annoyed at the accusation. ‘It isn’t old-fashioned to trust people and believe the best of them. It’s you police people who’ve put everybody against each other and sown suspicion on all sides. All this talk of crime and security and the need for everybody to be surveilled – or whatever the word is – every minute of the day. It’s all rubbish. People are the same as they’ve always been, and you need to just let them get on with their lives in their own ways.’

‘Phew!’ Gladwin rocked back in her chair, exaggeratedly. ‘Where did that come from?’

Thea took a deep breath. ‘It’s something I feel strongly about,’ she muttered. ‘The only thing wrong with this country is the spineless way we’ve let it turn into a police state.’

‘Steady on.’ Gladwin’s eyes were wider, her thin nose sharper. ‘No way is this a police state. That really is rubbish.’

‘It isn’t far off. Anyway, what were you going to say about George?’

‘I wasn’t going to say anything. We have no reason to think he was doing anything wrong. As you say, the kids loved him. They’d never have
felt like that if there’d been any funny business.’

‘Right,’ said Thea, feeling as if she’d somehow tilted at the wrong windmill. ‘Good.’

‘But it’s not that simple. He has a police record – vagrancy, disturbing the peace, getting on the wrong side of neighbours. Treated with suspicion everywhere he goes.’

Thea frowned. ‘A scapegoat,’ she summarised.

Gladwin met her eyes. ‘In the old-fashioned sense of the word, yes. The outsider, shouldering all the guilt and shame of the community. Unfortunately, there are members of my team who see this sort of thing differently.
No smoke without fire
, they say.
A lone man like that, maybe not quite right in
the head, stands to reason he’s got something
to hide.
’ She put on a growly voice to quote her colleagues’ remarks.

‘So you think he killed himself because people were being horrid to him?’

‘It’s a thought. If you’d heard that Philippa woman, you’d understand.’

There was a short silence, during which Thea wondered about the cruelty of village life, and the undercurrents she was having difficulty in ignoring.

Gladwin spoke first. ‘How much contact have you had with Janina? How frank do you feel she’s been with you?’

Thea had to think about it. ‘I’ve seen her four or five times in total. First time was outside the church. Then I met her in the road and went to Nicky’s party. Then she came here at the same time as Kate, and they talked to each other, mostly, while I was outside. She was there when I found George in his house. Then yesterday, when I found Nicky and took him home. She always seems quite open and friendly. I didn’t get any impression that she was hiding anything or worried. She was cross, the first time, and there’s a kind of cynicism about her – an air of knowing better than other people. She is very highly educated, isn’t she? She must feel a bit demeaned, doing what she does. I don’t expect she gets the recognition she deserves.’

‘Except by you,’ said Gladwin, still in shrewd mode.

Thea brushed this aside. ‘And I think she liked George,’ she added, remembering the fresh news of that morning. ‘She must have done, to go along with him taking the boys to the farm.’

‘Yes, I want to come back to that. Who are these people?’

‘She’s called Kate. I don’t know the surname. Her father is Bunny’s stepfather. Second wife must have already got her when she married him. Doesn’t sound as if she and Kate had any time for each other.’

‘And they live just down the track from here?’

‘Right. This used to be their barn.’

‘Bloody hell,’ Gladwin groaned. ‘How are we meant to keep track of these convoluted families? There isn’t even a proper computer program for it. We’ve got names for both her parents, of course, but not how they connect to everybody in the area.’

Thea was reminded of an earlier murder inquiry, in Temple Guiting, where the complications of families formed a background that confused everybody. Gladwin had sorted that one out ahead of everyone else. ‘You could go and see him – he’s quite a character.’

‘Sounds as if I should, if there’s a George connection. Well done, you,’ she smiled. ‘Never miss a trick, do you?’

It was a barbed accolade, which Thea did not much like. ‘I just get bored all on my own, and go out to find people to chat with, that’s all.’

‘OK, OK.’ Gladwin held up her hands in surrender. ‘I’m not knocking it. I don’t know where we’d be without you. Is that better?’

Thea drained her tepid mug of tea and rubbed her shoeless foot against the soft side of her dog. ‘So why did he kill himself?’ she asked. ‘What made him so desperate that he did that?’

‘Precisely,’ nodded Gladwin. ‘That’s what I have to find out.’

Thea half expected that to be an end of it, the detective’s valuable time consumed, along with the tea. Instead there was a portentous pause, which threatened to take them into far deeper waters.

‘Do you have any idea what it’s like to freeze to death?’ asked Gladwin.

‘I suppose I assumed it must be fairly pleasant, as methods of suicide go. You just fall asleep and never wake up.’

‘Oh yes…that’s the easy part. But you don’t just sit down in the snow and fall asleep. You get very, very cold first. It makes the marrow in your bones scream with pain. It always finds some part of you to attack – the long thigh bones are a favourite. Or the feet. Your body begins to suspect what it is you’re planning to do, and it resists. It fights and pleads and
hurts
. You’ve got to really mean it, to force yourself to stay there and let the cold win the fight. It helps to take sleeping pills or something of that sort. Alcohol might dull the agony a bit, for a while, but not as much as people think. You know…it makes me furious, the way people pretend that there are painless ways to kill yourself. Suicide is, by definition, an expression of immense suffering.’

This time it was Thea who rocked back. ‘Good God,’ she murmured. ‘You really know about this stuff, don’t you.’

‘I grew up in Cumbria. I know about cold,’ was the brief reply.

‘And about suicide,’ said Thea, insightfully.

‘Right. My sister lay down in front of the Kendal to Carlisle express. That was probably painless, too, once the train arrived. But can you even begin to imagine those endless minutes beforehand?’

Thea shuddered. ‘I’m not going to try,’ she said.

‘No. But sometimes I find I have no choice. And when there’s a suicide involved in my caseload, I need to stop and think about it a bit more than some others on my team. I try to find out just what it was that was so unbearable in that person’s life, and why they’ve chosen this particular moment.’

‘In George’s case, maybe he was just waiting for the right weather. Maybe he’d planned it ages ago and needed a freezing cold night to put it into action.’

Again Gladwin surprised her. Instead of the anticipated disdainful snort, she inclined her head in agreement. ‘That’s entirely possible,’ she said. ‘And if it wasn’t for the other death, I might have accepted it as the most likely answer. As it is…well, let’s say that nobody in the police really believes in coincidence.’

The silence that followed was filled with the same sort of melancholy acceptance of the darker
side of life that Thea had experienced with Lucy, as they’d contemplated the fate of the pitiful Jimmy. Life could go so
wrong
: for no reason, people would opt for the callous act, creating ripples of damage that spread further than anyone might have predicted. She wondered why Gladwin’s sister had reached such a desperate point; why Jimmy’s people had abandoned him; why George Jewell should have been so alone and dispossessed.

‘But somebody moved the body,’ she remembered, with a leap of logic born of her incorrigible optimism. ‘Somebody couldn’t bear for him to be left out in the snow like that.’

Gladwin gave her a look from under her brows, sceptical, questioning. ‘Or they were trying to hide the evidence,’ she suggested.

‘What evidence? If it was a suicide, why would anybody be looking for any evidence? And why would they leave such obvious tracks in the snow, if they wanted it all to be hidden?’

‘You think it was a caring act, then?’ It seemed that this interpretation had not occurred to the senior detective. ‘Something essentially innocent?’

‘Well, I suppose I did, until now. Are you thinking it might be the same person who killed Bunny?’

‘I try not to theorise,’ said Gladwin primly. ‘We’re still at the stage of assembling facts.’