Revenge in the Cotswolds (6 page)

So, not for the first time, she found herself with no choice but to speculate on local happenings. The people she’d met were interesting, to say the least.
Sheila Whiteacre was a delight, while Sophie and Nella were intriguing. There were loose ends in abundance, now the identity of the dead man was established. Jessica’s immediate suggestion that foul play might be involved was an added ingredient to the story, raising a host of possible motives even amongst the handful of people Thea had met so far. There would be others, if she cared to go out and find them: Ricky Whiteacre, for one, and people she still knew nothing about.

The obvious scenario was that Danny had been prominent in a group intent on forcing a number of issues that locals might prefer left just as they were. Most people grumbled gently about change, but adapted to it well enough when it came. A large proportion of the residents of Cotswold villages were rich and powerful enough to organise life as they wanted it to be and ensure that they kept well clear of any nuisance. A wind farm on the top of Cleeve Hill was never going to happen. Fracking was unlikely. The landscape itself was relatively safe from predation, other than the erection of new houses in large numbers. Nobody liked new houses, however loudly the need for them might be asserted. It was always a need more acute somewhere else. All those neglected, weedy sites in the scruffy end of town – towns such as Reading, Croydon, even perhaps Guildford, but definitely not Cirencester or Winchcombe. They weren’t towns at all in that sense. They were oases of history, impervious to the vagaries of population and politics.

Danny would inevitably have fallen foul of Farmer Handy and his intention of selling his field for building, along with the rest of the activists. But it was a big stretch from that to suspecting Handy of deliberately killing the man. Why Danny, when there were so many other protesters who would rise up to take his place? Besides, the house would or wouldn’t get built, regardless of who died amongst those who opposed it.

Maybe it was the badgers, then. Dairy farmers wanted the animals dead and gone. The government was cautiously on their side, but very conscious of the opposite view. The whole question of what to do with annoying wildlife – foxes, badgers, squirrels, rabbits – never really went away, and was never properly understood by politicians. It wasn’t altogether understood by Thea, either. She just knew that it was very far from simple, with whole new layers involved when it came to badgers and foxes.

The speculating occupied about half an hour, as she sat in the living room with both dogs on the sofa beside her. Gwennie leant a tentative snout on her thigh, and sighed. Hepzie rolled her eyes and fidgeted. Outside it was dry and reasonably bright, with almost no passing traffic. Lower End was apparently in the universal shutdown mode that was the norm for the Cotswolds. Whatever activity there might be at the quarry was quite out of sight and earshot. In any case, it would surely all be over by this time.

Restlessly, she extracted herself from the dogs and went to the door into the hallway. It was a more characterful house than the one in Bagendon, but much less so than the one inhabited by the Whiteacres. Mr and Mrs Foster were not obsessively tidy; not ashamed to let the stair carpet get frayed or the occasional spider to set up home over a window. Curious for more information about them, she went into the dining room and in a heap of papers on one corner of the table she found an opened letter from an estate agent, enclosing details of a house in Frome, Somerset, priced at something very much lower than Galanthus House must have been worth. So they were downsizing, or at least moving to a cheaper area – which happened to be not far from Drew and his green cemetery. It was none of her business, not relevant to her commission, but it aroused her interest. Mr Foster must be retiring, she supposed. Perhaps they knew people in Somerset. Perhaps Drew knew somebody they knew.

Poor Gwennie, she thought. Such an old dog would be dreadfully traumatised by a change of environment. She’d never find her way around. Were the Fosters planning to have her put down before they moved? Or was it all just a tentative plan for the future, scheduled for two or three years’ hence, and simply getting a feel for prices and facilities in other parts of the country?

And wasn’t it a bit peculiar to have the details sent on paper in a letter? Didn’t people do it all online
these days? She remembered that her dealings with the Fosters had all been by phone from their first approach about house-sitting. A friend of a friend had passed them her name. She had not come across a computer in the house – but then people used iPads and even smaller gadgets to send their emails these days. And they took them along on holiday, leaving nothing in the house. Even so, Thea began to suspect that here was a highly unusual couple, not so very old, who did not engage in any online activity. It made her smile to think such people still existed.

And so the afternoon drifted by, with no sense of urgency or obligation. At five she turned on the TV, and caught some local news, which made much of the discovery of a body in the Daglingworth quarry, but did not name the victim or the manner of his death. A little while later, a national news summary headlined a police raid on a nursing home in Somerset, which was suspected of either neglecting or actively killing a number of inmates. A whistleblower had drawn attention to the fact of a spate of deaths in a short time, with associated elements that might suggest all was not well.

Thea knew instantly that the whistleblower was Drew. He had been taken seriously, to the extent that within hours the police had descended on the establishment. How did you ‘raid’ a nursing home? Did they batter down the door and dash down corridors shouting ‘Police!’? Almost certainly not. There’d be
a quiet approach to the matron, or whatever the top person was called, and a request to see every scrap of documentation, with names of doctors and relatives and medications. But the media had got hold of it from the start. Probably listening in to police radio, she thought wryly.

She broke the rule and phoned him.

Drew was still agonising about his reckless reporting of the suspicious nursing home. The police had reacted quickly, and the place was already being investigated. ‘If they don’t find anything wrong, my career will be over,’ he wailed, plainly suffering from panic and regret. ‘They’ll know it was me – who else could it be? I’ll be blacklisted and scorned. I don’t know what made me do it.’

‘Conscience,’ she said.

‘I suppose so. It sounds horribly pretentious when you put it like that.’

‘Come on. You wouldn’t want your poor old mother starved to death in such a place – or whatever it is they did to them.’

‘No,’ he said doubtfully. ‘But it’s not so simple, is it? I mean – a lot of them probably
want
to get it all over with. They might be refusing food. You’re not allowed to force feed anybody, after all.’

‘That makes it worse,’ she said decisively. ‘You can’t let the idea catch on that these homes are really places to go to be finished off. They’re supposed to
provide warmth and comfort and distraction and company in your final years. It’s supposed to be happy and interesting for the inmates.’

‘Right.’ He didn’t sound convinced.

‘Did they have dementia – your customers?’

‘Not that I know of. Let me think – one did, maybe. It was a niece who made the funeral arrangements in advance, but the old lady signed the forms herself. Why?’

‘I just thought that might make them more annoying for the staff, and more likely to refuse to eat, maybe.’

They talked around the subject for a few more minutes, before Drew asked how things were going in the Cotswolds.

‘A man died in a quarry,’ she said. ‘They found him this morning.’ For the first time, the thought hit her that perhaps the body had been there when she’d walked past the previous day. He might have been just below her feet, perhaps not quite dead. She had actually looked down and thought it a dangerous spot. Had he been inaudibly crying for help? Had she mysteriously heard him telepathically? Until that moment, she had felt entirely removed from the death, only interested in an intellectual, theoretical fashion. ‘I passed that way on my walk yesterday,’ she added, slightly breathlessly.

‘An accident, then?’ said Drew, sounding as if he needed that to be the case.

‘Probably. He had a fiancée. I met her briefly, and
her friends. He was one of the people protesting about local environmental threats. Specifically, a proposal to build a big new house somewhere near here.’

‘I see,’ he said absently.

‘You should go. Where are the kids?’

‘Upstairs. I’m meant to be doing supper.’

‘I’ll phone again tomorrow. Eight o’clock.’

‘It’ll put the whole place out of business,’ he burst out. ‘The home, I mean. What have I done? Why the hell did I do it? I must have been mad.’

‘It’ll turn out right, you’ll see. Stop stressing about it. What does Maggs say?’

‘Nothing. She’s too busy being sick.’

Only then did Thea remember that particular added layer of complication in Drew’s life. And if it was in his life, then it was in hers as well.

‘I’ll ring again tomorrow,’ she repeated and left him to his family.

She fed the dogs and took them round the garden. Then she settled with the bland Sunday offerings provided by the television and did her best not to think very much. She wanted life to remain quiet and uneventful while she was in Daglingworth. It didn’t seem a lot to ask. But then, she had wanted it many times before and been denied her wish. Trouble followed her on so many of her house-sitting jobs. Trouble and malice and deception and fear had all dogged her footsteps from one village to another. People behaved badly
much of the time. And Thea, with her sharp nose for connections and dissembling, was very often the linchpin in teasing out the truth of what had happened.

Not this time, she resolved. If indeed it was a
this time
. If it did turn out that somebody had deliberately hurled the protester into the quarry, she wanted nothing to do with it. She had no reason at all to concern herself with it. She was still mentally insisting on this sort of approach when a police detective came to the door.

It was Jeremy Higgins, a familiar face from only a few months before, as well as occasions prior to that. He smiled ruefully and said, ‘Me again, I’m afraid.’

‘What sort of time is this to pay me a visit?’ Her attempt at a lightly flirtatious tone was not a great success. Already she was asking herself how in the world he knew where to find her. And the effort required meant that this must be something serious; something professional to do with a crime. ‘Come in, anyway.’

Hepzie seemed to remember him – but then she did the same scrabbling at legs and frantic wagging with every man she met. She was a man’s spaniel at heart. Thea wondered whether she still missed Carl, who had known and loved her for the first few years of her life.

Higgins wasted no time. He stood in the hallway
and said, ‘You met a man called Jack Handy yesterday. Is that right?’

She nodded, waiting with increasing foreboding.

‘What time would that have been?’

‘Afternoon. He gave me a lift because it was raining. We got back here around half past four.’

‘Did you ask him in?’

‘No, I did not.’

‘Did he talk to you?’

‘Yes, a bit.’ She was beginning to feel defensive of the farmer, for no good reason other than he had been cheery with her, and went out of his way to drive her home. If Higgins was thinking of him as a murderer, she wanted to show him the error of his thoughts as soon as she could, even if she’d entertained the same possibility herself not long before.

‘What about?’

‘Something to do with a field he’s trying to sell and how people are making objections. Listen, Jeremy – he was a perfectly nice and polite man. What’s all this about?’

‘You know I can’t tell you. Even if you and I do have a history, you still have to answer like an ordinary witness. Okay?’

‘A history? Is that what you’d call it?’ She and Higgins had never entertained a moment of mutual romance, as far as she was aware. She had been the lover of his superior, Phil Hollis. She had cried on him a time or two. He had rescued her from awkward situations.
History was a fair word for all that, she supposed.

‘He says he was with you for half an hour or more, from four to half past.’

‘He’s right. You have to tell me why it matters.’

‘We’re trying to establish people’s movements between two and five yesterday.’

‘Because somebody died then? The man in the quarry? Who else can it be? I was there beside the quarry at about half past three. I didn’t see anything unusual.’

‘Which side of it?’

‘Um, the west, I suppose. The little lane joining Itlay to the road the map calls Welsh Way. There’s a viewing place. I stood there and looked down.’

‘He wasn’t far from there.’ The detective inspector rubbed his cheek and stared into the middle distance for a moment. ‘Along the northern side, actually.’

Thea tried to visualise it. ‘Off the Welsh Way, you mean?’

He nodded. ‘There are trees alongside it, and a steep drop.’

‘And you don’t think he just fell, of his own accord?’ There was an inevitability to his answer that she found depressing. She realised how much she had wanted this death to be a simple accident.

‘There’s plain evidence that he didn’t.’

‘But if you didn’t find him until today, how can you be sure of the time of death?’

‘We can’t. But there are indications …’ He stopped. ‘I’m telling you far too much.’

‘Okay. Sorry. But it sounds as if I was around at the crucial time. So were lots of people. The protesters, for a start.’

‘Which protesters?’

‘A couple of young women. And then another one – the dead man’s fiancée, actually.’

He closed his eyes and rubbed the flesh under his chin. It was developing into quite a dewlap, she noted. ‘How can you possibly know that? How long have you been here?’

‘A day and a bit. I just happened across them and heard them talking. I saw a few more of them today. People tell me things,’ she finished simply. ‘It’s not my fault.’

‘Nobody ever thinks it’s your fault,’ he said tiredly. ‘You’re like Typhoid Mary. It wasn’t her fault, either.’

Her heart lurched. ‘Don’t say that! That’s a terrible thing to say. It
never
has anything to do with me –
as
me. You know what I mean. Besides, you can’t generalise. They’ve all been so different. Until now I thought this one was an accident, anyway.’

He shook his head. ‘So did we, for about twenty minutes. But then we had a closer look at his injuries and … well, let’s just say the quarry was nothing more than a place of disposal.’

Thea frowned. ‘He was dead before he got into it?’

‘Looks that way. Signs of a scuffle, as well. Blood splashes. Nothing very subtle about it.’

She sighed. ‘I suppose I’m not really surprised.
Strong young men don’t just fall into quarries on a calm Saturday afternoon, do they?’

‘Why do you call him strong? Did you meet him as well?’

She put her hands up. ‘No, no. But he sounds very capable and outdoorsy. Doing something with badgers. He can’t have been anything else but strong.’

‘He weighed ten and a half stone, and was five feet nine. Well nourished, apparently. Not exactly a bodybuilder, but capable of putting up a fight, I’d say.’

‘How did you establish the time of death?’ She was pressing him, hoping he hadn’t noticed that he was revealing a lot more information than he was supposed to.

‘He was in the Bathurst Arms in North Cerney until two o’clock. So it must have been after that. And he didn’t show up for a date with his girlfriend at five, so we assume he was incapacitated by then, if not dead. She was expecting him and he never showed at the time agreed.’

‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘She spoke to us. Making a fuss, demanding to see the body. The name got out much too soon.’ He rubbed his neck again.

‘They listen in to police radio. They’ve got an app.’

‘Names aren’t sent over insecure radio frequencies, for that very reason. I think they must have been watching through binoculars from the other side of the quarry. The victim was wearing a distinctive
cagoule type thing. I imagine they recognised it and ran with it. They operate like MI5, you know. There’s a whole big network of them – more so since the badger thing. You can’t hope to keep track of them. It’s terrorism,’ he finished darkly. ‘They run rings round us.’

‘And they’re all quite respectable citizens most of the time. With jobs and houses and cars and money. Tricky for you.’ Looking at him, Thea wasn’t at all sure where her sympathies lay. The police were handicapped by so many rules and regulations, so vulnerable to accusations of bias and heavy-handedness. No wonder they spent so much time staring at computer screens, trying to catch villains that way. It was far less likely to lead to trouble.

‘Yeah. Anyway, there’s a problem with this chap’s identity. Or there would have been, if the girlfriend hadn’t barged in and told us who he was. Nothing on him to give a clue as to who he might be.’

‘Fiancée. She’s his fiancée,’ Thea corrected. ‘Nella something.’

‘
Fe
nella, actually. Fenella Davidson, she’s called. And he’s Daniel Compton. She says his parents are working in Dubai. Still married, apparently, with a younger brother who’s at school there. Haven’t traced them so far.’

As if poked in the back, Jeremy suddenly stiffened, lifting his chin. ‘Hey! I’m not meant to be telling you all this, damn it. You didn’t hear it from me, right? All I want from you is confirmation that you can
account for Mr Handy’s movements, for at least part of the afternoon.’

‘Because somebody told you he was the most likely person to bash Danny over the head and chuck him into the quarry? All I can say is, he didn’t look like someone who’d just done a murder. He was angry, in a general sort of way, but also rather nice.’ She thought about the man, and what she had just said. ‘Although he
was
very cheerful at first. As if something pleasing had just happened. Maybe it was relief to be rid of a pest.’ She laughed. ‘Ignore that. It’s not evidence, is it?’

‘It’s helpful. Anything that adds detail to the picture comes in useful. Well, that’s it for now. How long are you here?’

‘Two weeks. How
did
you find me, by the way?’

He gave her a patient look. ‘Jack Handy told us, of course. We questioned him two hours ago.’

‘That was quick.’ She narrowed her eyes at him. ‘I suppose you’ve been interviewing people all afternoon.’ There was something unsavoury about the whole idea of a hasty police investigation with the intrusive questions and horrible suspicions.

‘Sooner the better,’ he nodded. ‘I expect I’ll be seeing you again.’

And he left. She hadn’t even asked him to sit down, she realised. They’d been standing in the hallway for fifteen minutes and Higgins hadn’t made a single note of what she’d told him.

The regular encounters she’d had with the police over the past three years still left her hazy as to the details of how they went about a murder investigation. The body would not have been properly examined by a pathologist yet – that much she was sure of. So they had no conclusive evidence as to cause of death … except it did sound as if the fatal injury was of such a nature as could not possibly have been inflicted by a fall down a steep slope lined with trees, to land on sharp-cornered rocks at the bottom. She tried to imagine the various likely scenarios – the most credible that there was a large hole in his head, caused by his killer, who hoped it would look like damage from the fall. Or perhaps he had been stabbed or shot, with the killer making no attempt to conceal how the deed was done. So, as Higgins had already indicated, the quarry was more or less incidental. Somewhere to hide the body, or a final vicious shove for good measure, sending him over the edge.

She recalled DI Higgins promising that he would see her again soon. With a sigh, she braced herself for further involvement in the violence and mayhem that never failed to accompany a murder.