Fear in the Cotswolds (5 page)

Doggedly she accepted that she ought to investigate. She ought to go to Old Kate’s and make sure she was all right. After all, it would be good to share the difficulties, and talk to another person, even one with a formidable temper, according to Lucy. And so she set out cautiously to follow the footprints and see where they led.

It took ten minutes to traverse the paddock beyond the donkey shed. When she reached the wire mesh fence, she found no way through. The unknown walker must have climbed over, which a close examination of the prints confirmed. ‘Must have longer legs than mine,’ she muttered, before throwing one leg over the wire and finding herself uncomfortably straddling the fence, with no alternative but to pitch herself over, landing on her hands. Thankful for the woolly gloves, she picked herself up and pressed on.

The field tilted downhill, the tracks following the fence down to a shallow bowl, typical of the Cotswolds where the ground undulated crazily like a rumpled duvet on an untidy bed. In the same field, but at some distance, she could see a small group of Hereford cattle, their red coats shaggy against the white snow. They were
standing up to their knees in snow, and Thea paused a moment to worry about how they could find anything to eat. They had trodden down the snow for a wide area from the fence almost to a patch of trees at the other side of the field.

But they had not followed the human track closely enough to obscure it. Thea spied it snaking away to the right and down a sudden slope. As she began on the same course, she could see something dark in the snow, huddled in the hollow, close to the point where the new fence turned at a right angle to form the northern boundary of the donkey paddock.

Rapid movement was impossible, every step a heave and a plunge, the snow almost reaching the top of her boots at times. As she got closer, the dark patch resembled a heap of abandoned clothes, with a smaller item close by. A scatter of snow formed odd patches on the heap, which remained stubbornly shapeless and impossible to identify.

But Thea had little doubt as to what she was going to find, from a distance of thirty yards. She approached steadily, her head thumping, her teeth clenched tightly together. As she came closer, she focused on the incongruity of a glass bottle standing upright in the snow, only the neck and shoulders visible. She barely glanced at it, only taking the time to recognise it as having held
alcohol of some kind. Infinitely more significant was the person who had drunk its contents, and then removed his coat and waited for the painless oblivion of death by hypothermia. He was lying on his side, his back to her, his bare head half buried in the snow.

It took an impossibly long time to flounder back to the house, call 999, and try to explain that it would be a major operation to get any sort of vehicle to the spot in question. ‘Even a tractor would have difficulty,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what you’re going to do.’ As if to add emphasis, snow had begun to fall again – fat, fluffy flakes that settled comfortably on top of their fellows. The gentle soundless stuff made everything seem less urgent, as if rush and trouble were examples of human folly and nothing more.

The girl at the end of the phone was clearly unfamiliar with rural realities. ‘I’m sure they’ll cope,’ she said dismissively. ‘What’s the postcode?’

Thea opened her mouth to reply with her own home address, before remembering where she was. ‘I have no idea,’ she said. ‘It’s called Lucy’s Barn, to the south-west of Hampnett. It’s not very easy to find.’

‘Could you stand somewhere they can see you, then, and wave when they arrive?’

‘Not really. It’s at least a quarter of a mile from here to the road, in snow a foot deep. I can’t even see where the track runs. I don’t think you’re quite getting the picture. Even if I did struggle up there, it isn’t possible for anything to drive back to the Barn – and even less feasible to get to where the body is.’

‘Oh.’ The thread of panic in the girl’s voice found an answer in Thea’s insides. She was trapped here until the snow cleared. Nobody could get in or out, without an industrial-scale snowplough. There was a dead man two fields away and nothing anybody could do about it.

‘You
are
sure he’s dead, aren’t you?’ the girl asked, having exchanged some muttering with another person.

‘I think so,’ said Thea, suddenly not sure at all. ‘He was very cold and stiff. I tried to shake him, but he didn’t respond at all. Oh yes, he must be dead. It looks as if he committed suicide.’

‘Helicopter,’ said the girl. ‘Is there somewhere we could land an air ambulance?’

‘I doubt it. Can they manage snow? The field isn’t very level.’

A defeated silence rebounded between the two women. It appeared that there was no script for such a situation, as all the modern means of transport were found wanting. Thea found herself wanting to say, ‘A horse could manage it,’ but bit it back. You’d need two horses and a cart, at least. Or a team of huskies and a nice big sledge. Or a couple of woolly yaks, accustomed to slogging up and down snowy slopes dragging dead meat and heaps of felt and wood which would transform into a cosy ger.

‘I’ll pass you to my superior,’ said the girl wearily. ‘I’m sure she’ll think of something.’

In the end, a group of well-clad police personnel arrived on foot, an hour and a half after the phone call. Four of them came clumping down the track, in single file, one of them with a phone clamped to his ear, with which Thea had directed them to the Barn. They introduced themselves as a sergeant, a constable, the police doctor and a photographer. The last two carried bags containing their equipment, the photographer looking breathless and rumpled. The snow had stopped and the sky had cleared, the sun shining coldly on the sparkling snow,
having no thawing effect on it at all. In fact the temperature had fallen, if anything.

‘Can you lead us to it?’ the sergeant asked her, scanning the surrounding landscape apprehensively.

‘I suppose so,’ Thea sighed, with considerable reluctance. She had become increasingly agitated as she waited for them to arrive, checking her phone repeatedly, and then clearing pathways around the yard, from rabbit shed to barn and linking the garage to the house. She stayed at the back of the house deliberately, trying to close her mind to the wretched scene she had witnessed. At one point she heard the donkey braying, and Hepzie yapping in response, but she remained where she was, persuading herself that the clearance work took priority.

It was hard work, the shovel cutting sheer cliffs in the snow. She checked her car to see whether it might be possible to move it, but was daunted by the prospect of having to dig tracks for it for a substantial distance. She was already exhausted by her exertions when the rescue party finally arrived. The fresh snowfall continued relentlessly, threatening to obliterate the work she’d accomplished.

‘You took your time,’ she accused, when the men finally arrived, just as the sky cleared. ‘Where did you have to come from?’

‘Cirencester,’ said the sergeant. ‘But that’s not the reason we were delayed. Never mind, we’re here now. Could you just show us what you found, do you think?’

Wearily she escorted the police across the donkey’s paddock as far as the shed and then pointed out that she had climbed over the fence away to the left, when they might prefer to go through the gate at the bottom, and walk along the fence to the spot where the body lay. The donkey tracks could be seen going down to the gate, and coming back again, the snow sufficiently broken up to comprise a relatively inviting pathway. The men agreed to the suggestion with no hesitation, their heads hunched into hoods and their knees getting wet from melting snow, which had clung to their legs as they sank into the deeper parts, and was then turned to liquid by the heat from their bodies. The doctor looked especially damp, and the photographer sniffed. Looking at him more closely, Thea noted that his nose was red, and his eyes bleary. ‘Have you got a cold?’ she asked him.

‘Probably,’ he said thickly.

It all took an unreasonable length of time. A biting wind had sprung up. Every step took effort, and Thea’s legs were aching. Few words were exchanged, everyone silenced by the unusual conditions. For most English people,
snow recalled carefree childhood memories, with the schools closed and dads extracting half-forgotten toboggans from the back of the garage. It represented a sudden holiday, something to relish for its beauty and strangeness.

‘How much further is it?’ asked the young constable.

‘Just at the end of this fence, in a dip down there,’ Thea told him. ‘And then you’re going to have to carry him all the way back to the road – aren’t you?’

‘Eventually,’ said the sergeant, who was the nominal leader of the group. ‘First the doctor has to certify life extinct, and a close examination of the scene undergone.’

‘Yes,’ said Thea, fully aware of the procedures. ‘And he has to be identified. And I don’t have any idea who he is.’ As she spoke, she suddenly remembered the tall grey man she’d glimpsed on the first day.

‘Plenty of time for that,’ said the sergeant. ‘Once we’ve seen what sort of a state he’s in.’

Finally the corner of the fence was visible. ‘There,’ Thea pointed, knowing the men would be able to see it before she did, walking ahead of her as they were. The photographer was in the lead, raising his camera to look at the display screen, swinging it round as if making an amateur video.

‘Where?’ said the sergeant, his head following in a slower arc than that of the photographer.

Thea surged ahead, impatiently. ‘That last lot of snow must have covered him up,’ she panted.

She was in the corner, with fences stretching in two directions, her arms outstretched in a gesture of bafflement. ‘He’s gone,’ she said unnecessarily.

Opinion instantly divided as to whether Thea was mad, bad or simply incompetent. ‘Must be the wrong field,’ said the constable.

‘If this is a hoax…’ began the doctor, who was middle-aged and overweight and had grown increasingly breathless during the walk.

‘Are you absolutely sure he was ever here?’ said the sergeant.

‘Look,’ Thea ordered them. ‘You can see there was something here.’ The snow was indeed compressed and disturbed in the place they were all staring at. ‘He must have got up.’ She pointed towards a clump of trees less than a hundred yards away, and a muddled track of prints leading to it. ‘Something’s been over there,’ she added.

‘Those cows, look,’ said the photographer. Sure enough the Herefords had moved to the lee of the trees, and were standing in a ragged group, heads down.

‘If it was your dead man, he’ll be home by this time,’ said the sergeant.

The photographer snorted as if at a joke.

‘We ought to follow that track and see,’ Thea urged. ‘He might have managed to crawl that far, and
then
died. But he
was
dead. I know he was. He was cold. The snow was settling on him. And there was a bottle,’ she remembered. ‘He wouldn’t have bothered to take the bottle.’

All four men looked at her. The doctor was the only one to manifest anger. The photographer examined her with his head tilted as if assessing her potential as a model. The two police officers simply looked tired, as if this sort of thing happened just that bit too often.

‘I don’t think so,’ said the constable. ‘The cows made those tracks, if you ask me. They don’t look human.’

‘And before long they’ll all be covered up anyway,’ said the photographer. It seemed to Thea that this only added urgency to their quest for the dead or dying man, but none of the others appeared to share this view.

She had never felt so stupid. Had she mistaken a sleeping drunk for a dead man, and caused all this bother for nothing? She remembered the apparently empty bottle as a much more significant detail than she had previously acknowledged. She stammered out a confused theory, which the four men heard in silence, whereby an alcohol-induced stupor had been
mistaken for death. ‘But he was so
cold
,’ she repeated, ‘and
stiff
. He really did seem dead. The snow hadn’t melted on him.’

The enormity of the situation seemed to engulf them all. The snow stretched obstructively on all sides, making any decisions about a search utterly daunting. Gradually Thea regained her self-possession. ‘He
was
here,’ she insisted. ‘You have to believe me. Even if he did get up and stagger away, he’ll be ill and freezing somewhere. We ought to search for him. It’s barely two hours ago, after all.’ She looked at her watch. ‘Well, nearly three now,’ she amended. ‘You took such a long time to come.’

‘We do believe you,’ said the sergeant, slowly. ‘Why would you invent such a story? The question is, where would we begin to look for him? We could have a look in those woods, I suppose – but I’m inclined to agree with Paul that those tracks were never made by a human being.’ He walked a little way towards the trees, peering closely at the ground. The photographer plodded after him, holding his camera.

‘Come back,’ pleaded the doctor. ‘This is getting beyond a joke. I’m not here to search for missing bodies.’

‘Aren’t you?’ muttered the constable, giving Thea a wink. The sergeant and photographer paused indecisively.

The snow was disorientating: an endless white blanket covering mysterious humps and bumps, which could be anything. Thea knew there was little prospect of further investigation. ‘Why would the cows come over here?’ she wondered aloud.

‘Curiosity,’ said the photographer. ‘If there really was somebody lying here, they’d come over for a look.’

‘So the fact that they then went up to the woods means they
followed
him,’ she said earnestly. ‘And so should we.’

‘No!’ Again it was the irascible doctor. His nose had turned blue, and his teeth were chattering. It made Thea feel a lot colder, just to look at him.

The sergeant was rubbing his chin vigorously. ‘We can’t see any human footprints on this side of the fence except for ours,’ he repeated. ‘Nor any wheel marks, so there hasn’t been a tractor over here this morning. Even if we wanted to, we wouldn’t know where to start searching. Best get back,’ he decided. ‘Nothing we can do here for the time being.’ He gave Thea a look that was almost kind, when compared to the doctor’s baleful glances. ‘No harm done,’ he added.

‘But—’ Thea felt a surge of alarm at the implications. The afternoon was already half over, the long hours of darkness not far off.
‘You can’t just
go
,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m absolutely sure he was dead. Somebody must have moved him.’ She shuddered. ‘And why would they do that?’ She wasn’t sure which explanation was more alarming – that a dead man had been spirited away, or a live one had dragged himself off somewhere and was in the process of dying that very moment. She tried to spell this out for the sergeant. ‘What if he’s over there in those trees?’ she demanded.

‘If he could get that far, he could get to a house,’ said the sergeant, with a shake of his head. ‘It’d be a wild goose chase to go off trying to find him. We’d be better waiting to see if there’s a missing person reported.’

The four men were arranged in a semicircle around her, all embarrassed to a greater or lesser degree. ‘It isn’t very likely anybody took him, is it?’ The doctor spoke for them all. ‘Let’s face it – it would be quite a job to lug a dead body anywhere in all this. Look how worried
we
were at the idea of having to do it.’

‘Besides, it would leave marks,’ said the photographer, repeating the obvious, much to Thea’s irritation. He had been scrutinising the ground assiduously for the past five minutes, with an air of frustration. ‘There’s no sign that anything was dragged away from this spot. Is there?’ he challenged to nobody in particular.

Thea’s fertile imagination conjured images of a half-dead man crawling doggedly over the fields to Lucy’s Barn, and then either dying on the doorstep, or forcing entry to the house and accusing Thea of interfering with some complicated plan. These were quickly followed by even more alarming visions of a hugely strong man, carrying the frozen body out of the field and away to some unspecified point where nobody could find him. There he would lurk, dangerous and unpredictable, until the snows melted.

‘Come
on,
’ whined the doctor. ‘Why are we standing around like this?’

‘Good question,’ muttered the constable, and by mutual accord they began the return journey.

Hepzie and Jimmy were curled together in the grey light of the conservatory, the snow on the glass roof obscuring much of the daylight. Spirit, the black cat, was on the back of the sofa, staring out at the snow through half-closed eyes. The donkey had been standing with his head and shoulders out of the shed, observing the unfamiliar world with a very Eeyore-like expression. Thea had been left to the company of the animals by the bemused police people, with a half-hearted instruction to call them again if anything more happened. She almost felt sorry for them, watching them
struggle with the impossible facts. Tempting as it might be, they couldn’t go so far as to disbelieve her whole story. There
were
marks in the snow, compatible with a human body lying there. Easiest to assume he had only been asleep, not dead, and had simply got up and stumbled home. During the return to the Barn, this was what they had concluded, slowly exchanging remarks that fortified the theory, until Thea herself was close to believing it.