Guilt in the Cotswolds (7 page)

‘She was older than Rita. She’d be in her late nineties now. She had a grand funeral. That’s all I can remember. She said her name … something nice. It’s gone.’ He shook his head as if the name might be dislodged.

‘But why would anybody give house room to a dead sister’s clothes?’

‘For lack of any other idea, probably. I mean – what else should she do? She probably intended to dispose of it, and never got around to it.’

‘For seventy years? That’s insane.’

Drew shrugged. ‘Time rushes by, you forget about it, and then it doesn’t seem to matter any more. I can imagine how it might be. Rita had her own life to think about. Husband. Son. Interests.’

Thea had a thought. ‘Have you still got Karen’s things somewhere, then?’

He lifted his head, aware of a moment that mattered. ‘Her mother took it all away. There wasn’t much. In the last year or two, she hadn’t bought anything new. She wasn’t interested, and we hardly had any money.’

There was a sadness gathering in the air, which was far from what Thea wanted or expected. ‘Enough!’ she announced. ‘We’re having tea and cake, and then we’ll go for a little drive with the dogs. It’ll be dark otherwise and we won’t have done anything.’

Brooking no further distractions, she bustled him through this plan, so that shortly before four o’clock they were piling three dogs onto the back seat of her car. Drew had refused to use his, on the very reasonable grounds that the child booster seats would get in the way.

Almost at random, Thea drove down to the lower street and turned left. ‘Where are we going?’ asked Drew.

‘No idea. But take note, because we might never find our way back again. The place is pretty confusing and I have no electronic assistance.’

‘This road goes to Yanworth,’ he said with confidence.

‘It’s not the main village street, is it?’ she said, a moment later. ‘I thought it was.’

‘No. For that you need to turn right past the pub and then left. I think. It’s the other side of the river. I did take notice, despite having the gadget telling me what to do. That’s where people go wrong,’ he added piously.

They were climbing a steep hill, which ended in a tight bend to the right. ‘Blimey!’ said Thea. ‘This must be grim in winter.’

‘Indeed. We need to find a footpath, don’t we? Those woods look appealing.’ He gazed out of his window with interest. ‘And look at this amazing old barn! Slow down, Thea. Let me have a proper look. I want to take some photos of it.’ He produced his phone and began to fiddle with it.

On the left was a jumble of buildings, oddly conjoined and centred around a large stone barn with a very high red-tiled roof. Thea stopped the car, and immediately the dogs in the back went wild, scrabbling at the car windows to be released.

‘Let’s walk from here, then,’ she said. ‘Don’t open your door until I’ve got them on leads.’

Awkwardly, she leant over and grabbed each dog in turn, attaching leads to their collars. ‘Okay,’ she panted. ‘I’ve got them. Hepzie can go loose, so long as there’s no car coming.’

They scrambled out in a tangle, the sheepdogs showing extraordinary excitement. ‘What’s got into them?’ asked Drew. ‘They’ve gone mad. I’m going over there to take my pictures.’ He started walking to a point where he could see the whole building.

The behaviour of the dogs was certainly excessive, Thea agreed, as the animals hauled her along the grass verge towards the buildings. ‘I think they must know this place,’ she called back to Drew, who had his phone in his hand, apparently ready to take photos. ‘Oi! Dogs! Slow down.’

But there was no stopping them. Through a field
gate adjacent to the barn and across a small ditch they dragged her, then onto the yard in front of the barn. Drew trotted some distance behind her, protesting weakly that they were trespassing. ‘What’s the matter with those dogs?’ he demanded again.

Thea was rather enjoying herself, not trying very hard to slow the animals. They were so sure of what they wanted, so determined in their trajectory, that she was caught up in the quest for whatever it was they were heading for. They towed her up to the vast stone-built barn, which had a wide-open hole where a door might be expected. Hepzie followed, though not showing anything like the enthusiasm of Betsy and Chummy. ‘We’re going in!’ called Thea to the distracted photographer. ‘It’s like a cathedral in here.’

She had time to stand in awe on the threshold, looking up into the immense height of the roof, and wondering why it had been built on such a vast soaring scale. There were big bales of straw stacked against the back wall, and a modern-looking tractor parked near them. The dogs were straining and yelping even more desperately than before. Almost without realising it, she dropped the leads. Her arms were hurting, and she saw little risk that they would suddenly turn round and dash away over the fields.

She was right. They flew to a shadowy corner and started nuzzling and whining at something on the floor.

‘They’ve found something,’ she shouted to Drew, who was still aiming his phone at the barn from outside.
He had gone some way back towards the road, to get a good angle. ‘Come and see.’

He came unhurriedly to her side. ‘A rats’ nest, probably.’ He was standing as Thea had done, his head tilted back as he stared upwards. ‘You know what’s so amazing about this place – it’s still being used as it was first intended. It must be the only working barn in Gloucestershire. Why hasn’t somebody converted it into a house?’

‘You wouldn’t want a roof like that in a house. And I doubt if you’d be allowed to change it. It’s gorgeous.’

‘But they’ve ruined it outside, adding all that modern concrete blockery.’

Thea didn’t reply. She had moved closer to the dogs, thinking she ought to recapture them before they ran off. There was a small niggling worry dawning as they whined in unison. Hepzie had joined them, and kept looking back at Thea as if asking for advice.

‘What is it, girls?’ she asked. ‘Why are you so upset?’

Then she saw it, as if a spotlight had suddenly been switched on. A round shape with close-cropped grey hair, and a chin. Shoulders. Hands.

‘God, Drew. It’s a body!’ she gasped.

Drew was supposed to be good with bodies, having seen so many of them. But he let himself down quite badly on this occasion. ‘It can’t be,’ he said, flatly.

‘It is,’ she insisted. ‘Look!’

He approached at a pace that felt glacial to her. ‘It’s a man,’ she said.

‘Must be a tramp, then.’ He finally got there, leaning down, careful not to touch. ‘Amazing the way the dogs knew.’

‘Drew, look. I think it’s … it is, you know. That hair. It’s Richard Wilshire. The dogs have found their owner.’

The body was lying awkwardly, not quite flat on its back. One arm was under the torso and the head was twisted sideways. One leg was bent, the other straight. Blood was congealed on the forehead and cranium. The nose looked flatter than it should.

‘No!’ He took a few steps back. ‘How can it be? That’s insane.’

She could see that he was shaking with shock. ‘His poor mother!’ Drew gulped. ‘This is going to kill her.’

Thea was more immediately concerned for the dogs, and how to deal with them. They had already scrabbled at the body, moving it fractionally. They undoubtedly understood that this was their master and had probably known he was lying here in the dark since the car stopped in the road. The strangeness of it was set aside in the more pressing need to remove them from the scene before all hope of an effective forensic examination would have to be abandoned. ‘We’ll have to put them back in the car,’ she said.

Drew was still paralysed by the implications of Richard Wilshire being dead. He cared nothing for subsequent police investigations, and little for explanations of what had happened. ‘It’s impossible,’ he spluttered. ‘How can it be him? It’s all
wrong
.’

‘You can say that again,’ Thea agreed. ‘About as wrong as it gets. He’s been murdered, Drew. Look at his head.’

Drew looked reluctantly. ‘He might have fallen from up there,’ he said, looking at the open-edged platform far above them. ‘And landed on his face, somehow.’ He grimaced painfully. ‘You’d probably twist and turn in the air, in the panic. Don’t you think? It looks to me as if his neck’s broken.’

‘So he dived head first from up there.’ She was still staring upwards. The roof space was partly occupied by sturdy flooring, originally designed to hold corn, most likely in hessian sacks. ‘I suppose he must have,’ she said slowly. ‘But what was he doing up there, if so? And there’s no ladder. How would he have
got
there?’

Drew shook his head. ‘Not our problem. We have to call the police.’

Thea had managed to get the resisting dogs a few feet away, relieved to see her own spaniel nosing about in a distant section of the barn and ignoring the fact of a dead man. ‘Help me with these two,’ she ordered Drew. ‘Then make the phone call. This is such a …’ She wanted to say
nuisance
or
pain
, but they would both sound outrageously insensitive. Nonetheless, they were the words that best fitted her feelings.

‘Quick, then,’ said Drew. It was obvious that in his opinion the animals were quite definitely a nuisance. Impatiently he took both leads and heartlessly dragged the orphaned dogs outside. ‘We can tie them up here, look.’ There were horizontal and vertical metal poles creating barriers alongside an odd construction that Thea had noticed on her rapid rush into the barn. ‘What is this?’ Drew asked.

‘Could be where they dipped the sheep,’ she ventured. It was a long narrow alleyway made of concrete blocks, about the width of a sheep, with a parallel section running alongside. It was weedy and rusty and clearly long disused. But it offered a useful place to tie dogs, for the time being.

The 999 call took the usual protracted time while details were laboriously repeated and fatuous questions asked. For a man who conducted sensitive business on the telephone every week of his life, he made something of a mess of it, offering irrelevant information and finally shouting, for the third time, that he had no idea what the road number was. As far as he was aware, it
was far too small to have a number at all. Thea itched to take over from him, despite knowing nothing more than he did about the geography of the place.

Finally, he ended the call, and said irritably to Thea, ‘You know these people. Detective Inspector whatshisname and that nice woman I met in Stanton.’

‘Gladwin. She’s a superintendent. The other one is Higgins. They’ll probably only get involved if it really is murder.’ She spoke distractedly, struggling to get to grips with the appalling turn of events. It had been so far from what she had expected, her mind was taking its time in catching up.

‘You think it might not be, then?’ he sounded hopeful, as if a reprieve had been offered.

‘I don’t know, Drew. He’s got dreadful injuries. A broken neck and his skull – what can have done that to his skull?’ She flinched at the vivid image of the crusted crack in the front of the man’s head. His very short hair had done nothing to cover the stark sight. ‘Let’s not go back in there, okay.’

‘We have to watch out for the police car, anyway. That’s if they ever manage to locate this road.’

‘It’s not a very efficient system, is it?’ she said. ‘It’s not the first time I’ve almost given up explaining to some girl in Bristol or Birmingham how a little village works. They never listen properly, that’s the trouble.’

‘They think it can all be done by satellite.’

‘It probably could, if they used the right technology. I mean – doesn’t your phone send a signal that gives the
location? The police are always talking about finding criminals through their phones.’

‘I think that’s more on TV than in the real world. They only use it for very high-powered terrorist stuff.’

‘Ironic, really,’ she said, mainly for the sake of talking about something other than a dead man with a cracked head. ‘I hate all this surveillance and CCTV and stuff, but when you
want
to be found, everything falls apart.’

Drew was more than willing to keep up this line of conversation, finding it helpful in soothing his own distress. ‘We don’t know it’s fallen apart, yet. They could turn up at any moment and prove us wrong.’

‘The trouble is that Chedworth really is hopelessly complicated. I’m not even sure I could get back to the house from here. I certainly wouldn’t like to do it in the dark.’ She looked around. ‘Come here, Hepzie. Don’t go back in there.’ The spaniel was idly sniffing the ground, retracing their steps back towards the barn. The whole incident appeared to have left her unmoved and incurious. Upstaged by the sheepdogs, Thea supposed, with their superior skills on every level. Hepzie had seen dead people a time or two before, and might have developed associations of stress and confusion with such discoveries. She was also liable to be left shut in a car or a house for long periods when something like this happened, which did not suit her at all. ‘Poor old girl,’ said Thea. ‘Things never go smoothly for you, do they?’

‘You said he wasn’t liked,’ Drew said suddenly.

‘What?’

‘Richard Wilshire. Nobody liked him, you said.’

‘Oh. Farmers, mostly. His job made him unpopular. Bringer of bad news. Telling people their cows had to be destroyed because of TB.’

‘So a farmer did this?’

‘Probably.’ Just at that moment, it didn’t seem very important. Waiting on a darkening October afternoon for people to come and examine a broken body, then bundle it away to a horrible sterile mortuary to be dissected by a pathologist: it was all sickening and stupid and she wished herself a thousand miles away. ‘There’s one called Andrew, round here somewhere. Except …’ She gave it some reluctant thought. ‘He says Richard never showed up. That’s what Millie told me. All the cows were gathered and waiting, but Richard didn’t come.’

‘Perhaps he did, after all, and this Andrew person killed him, and then pretended he’d never seen him.’

She shivered. ‘Seems unlikely. What about his car? And there must be other people on the farm as well.’

‘What’s happened to us?’ he asked, wonderingly. ‘We used to find all this sort of thing fascinating. We were ace detectives, only a few months ago.’

‘We grew out of it,’ she said. ‘Or something.’

‘That must be it. It’s all so
sad
, isn’t it.’

She stroked one of the sheepdogs. ‘What’ll happen to these two, I wonder? Millie isn’t going to take them on, I bet. And there’s nobody else.’ Again, she thought back over the dreadful fates that had befallen dogs she had known. In Winchcombe, Hampnett, Lower Slaughter,
Cranham, dogs had become incidental casualties of human wickedness. Throughout history, there were similar stories she could not bear to hear. She knew it was a failing, but there had been times when she cared more about the dogs than the people. Human beings, after all, had a choice. They were meant to have enough brains to foresee the consequences of their actions, whilst animals were merely victims. She sighed miserably, and felt oddly guilty at the way she was thinking.

‘That might be them,’ said Drew suddenly. Until then, they had not noticed a single passing vehicle. He trotted down to the road, only to find a large metal gate firmly locked, between him and the approaching car. He and Thea had entered from the side, jumping over a ditch and onto the concrete forecourt of the barn. But Thea’s car was parked in full sight on the verge. That would be enough, surely, to announce their presence.

It was, and before another minute had passed, Thea had gone to wave at the two uniformed police officers who emerged from a squad car. ‘Over here,’ she called.

With squared shoulders and determined chins, the men followed her directions and disappeared into the barn. They quickly came out again and set in train the usual processes necessary for dealing with a sudden violent death. Questions, explanations, all conducted with a stiff formality that barely concealed the excitement and nervousness that came with the drama of such a rare event. The officers were young and unfamiliar to Thea. Charged with a first response, they knew they would very soon be
elbowed aside by the detectives from CID, and given no more importance. They would carefully write their report, and be lucky if they had any further involvement. Possibly some house-to-house questioning, or computer searches, would come their way. But for the moment, this was their pigeon, and a dead man in a barn did not come along every day. They were intent on doing a thorough job.

Questions were muttered as they carried out their unfamiliar duties. ‘Where’s his car? How long’s he been lying there? Have the dogs messed him up much? Who’s the CID on duty this evening?’ They threw the queries at each other with little expectation of answers. Thea heard them but refrained from participating in the conversation, such as it was. She had supplied the man’s name and a brief summary of how the body had come to be found. More than that could wait.

But the policemen could no longer delay the handing over of the business to more senior officers. As evening approached, more cars arrived, blue tape was strung in all directions, and Thea and Drew made their escape with the dogs. They had hovered on the sidelines for longer than was strictly necessary as it was, unsure as to what was required of them. Because of the dogs, they were not given warm haven in a spacious police car, but left in the open as the temperature fell. When Drew announced that they were leaving, nobody took much notice. ‘Okay, then,’ said a newly arrived detective. ‘We’ve got your details. We’ll be in touch – in the morning, most likely.’

‘Can’t wait,’ muttered Thea. ‘Come on then, dogs.’
Only then did she remember that she had Millie Wilshire’s phone number at the house – but of course it would be entirely unthinkable to call her and ask what should be done with Betsy and Chummy. She would have to explain her reasons, and that really wasn’t her job.

‘They thought it was odd, the way we found him,’ Drew worried in the car. ‘They think it’s too big a coincidence.’

‘Well, it sort of is, when you look at it objectively. Of all the people in the area, why should it be us who found him?’

‘Exactly. I mean – nothing was further from our minds.’

‘Although we did know he was missing. Maybe we were subliminally looking for him.’

Drew snorted. ‘You mean sub
consciously,
I believe. Surely you don’t think that?’

She was negotiating the disgracefully sharp bend on the way back into the village, finding it even more alarming now they were going steeply downhill. ‘It makes a sort of sense. We knew he was missing, and we had his dogs. We also knew he was supposed to be in Yanworth yesterday. I did, anyway,’ she amended. ‘It’s possible that’s why we headed in that direction to start with.’

‘Nope,’ he said, firmly. ‘You’re rationalising. It was just a very nasty coincidence, that’s going to cause us a whole lot of aggravation. I’m not looking forward to tomorrow one little bit.’

She sighed. ‘I don’t even want to think about it,’ she said.