Shadows in the Cotswolds (10 page)

When the doorbell rang at eight-forty on Monday morning, Thea’s first thought was that Mo and Jason were disgracefully early. Fortunately she had been up and dressed for over an hour, worrying about Oliver’s birds and a number of other things. Fraser had been as good as his word, and risen at seven, restoring the sofa to its original state. When Thea went into the kitchen, it was because she’d been enticed by the smell of coffee that had filtered up to her room at seven-thirty.

She pulled the front door open with every intention of being less than welcoming.

‘Not too early for you, am I?’ breezed Gladwin. ‘I didn’t think I would be.’

The senior police detective stood there like a waif, thin and tired, her clothes rumpled and an angry
pimple on her chin. Thea knew she had two boys at home, who saw far too little of her, and a husband who seemed to be some sort of ghostly saint. Thea had never seen him, but was aware that he provided the energy and support that made everything possible.

‘You take too much for granted,’ Thea told her. ‘I might have been in my dressing gown.’

‘Come for a little walk with me,’ Gladwin instructed. ‘We have things to discuss.’

‘Can I bring the dog?’

‘If you must.’

It was cloudy outside, but reasonably warm. The detective led the way out into Vineyard Street and turned right. ‘We’re going into town?’ Thea asked. ‘Is that wise?’

‘I want to show you something. It’ll take us twenty minutes or so.’

Thea had a sense of being generously included in an investigation that she had no official claim to be involved in. She was simply the person who had found the body; traditionally, such a role was given very little status. But Thea’s connections with the police did not adhere to tradition. From the start, she had been privy to more than the general public ever were. Her husband’s brother was a senior police officer; her daughter was a police probationer. And she had found herself in the midst of a number of violent deaths over the past two years. ‘Must be important if you can spare so much time for it,’ she said.

‘I’m engaging you as an expert witness,’ Gladwin said, semi-seriously. ‘Another eye on the matter. Keep that dog close to you – I don’t want it causing any distractions.’

That dog
was a bit wounding. Gladwin was good with animals, Thea had discovered, but had never entirely warmed to Hepzibah. Such a failing was inexplicable.

They turned right at the junction and walked along the section of the main street known as Abbey Terrace, with Thea making a few remarks about the long-demolished abbey that had dominated the town. Gladwin hardly replied, but kept up a brisk pace in an easterly direction. Before long, the shops had finished and small terraced houses took their place. ‘It does have a certain symmetry,’ Thea remarked.

‘What?’

‘Winchcombe. We walked along the street, the other way, yesterday. Cheltenham Road. All the houses are different. And it’s the same this way. Have you noticed? It must have been deliberate. It’s almost against nature, when you think about it. It would have been far easier to just build a terrace of identical
two-up
-two-down like most places. Think of the Welsh valleys, with those rows and rows of miners’ cottages, all exactly the same.’

‘Mm,’ said Gladwin.

‘Come on,’ Thea urged her. ‘It’s …’

‘Gorgeous. Yes. It’s history right here in front of us. That’s a Tudor house, and two doors down there’s a Georgian one. Yes, Thea, it’s amazing. It makes you wonder who built them all, and how it was decided and planned.’

‘Yes.’ Thea was admiring the black and white house that Gladwin had identified as Tudor. It had an overhanging upper floor, with three handsome windows, making it one of the biggest houses in the street. An incongruous-looking bay window protruded at one end of the ground floor. ‘I bet it’s fabulous inside.’

‘That’s the first satellite dish I’ve seen,’ Thea pointed a bit further down the street. ‘I thought they must have been banned.’

‘They’ll all be at the back,’ said Gladwin. ‘Where nobody can see them.’

‘I must be getting old,’ Thea sighed. ‘Because I actually think that’s rather a good idea.’

‘Come on, we haven’t got time for this. It’s along here somewhere,’ Gladwin urged.

‘What is?’

‘There’s an alleyway, apparently. It leads down to Silk Mill Lane, and from there you can get onto the path that goes down to the woods where you found the dead girl.’

‘And why are we interested?’ Thea was panting slightly, with the effort of keeping pace with Gladwin’s long legs.

‘No real reason. It’s just … a hunch, I guess. Aha! Here it is.’

The alleyway’s entrance was a closed-in tunnel between two houses, the path itself sloping quite steeply downwards. ‘Murder Alley,’ said Gladwin.

‘What?’

‘I’m told there was a murder here a century ago. More than a century, actually. Rather a good spot on a dark night. Jack the Ripper territory.’

Thea tried to imagine it. The alley did feel deserted, with no windows overlooking it, high blank walls on both sides. Possibly nobody would hear you scream. ‘So?’ she asked, in puzzlement.

‘Nothing specific. It’s a short cut, from the town to the river. It’s marked on the map in the main street. We’ve found some evidence that whoever killed that girl headed this way afterwards. It’s a bit dubious, now we know that horse woman uses the path regularly, but it makes sense. If you turn right here, you get back to the high street and that big White Hart Inn on the corner. I’m wondering if the person waiting at the pub might have been in there, rather than the Plaisterers Arms.’

‘Which might explain why she headed through the woods and not back up Vineyard Street.’

‘Right. And then she’d come out into this road, look.’ Gladwin pointed to the end of Silk Mill Lane, where it met Castle Street. ‘There’s even a way down to the river just here, so you could creep through the
undergrowth and hop up here with virtually no risk of being seen. It’s all completely speculative, of course. But it does explain one or two puzzles.’

‘Small ones,’ Thea was bold enough to remark with some scepticism. ‘I don’t really see how this is helpful. What about the camera in the hide? The memory stick? The contents of those boxes? Haven’t they helped at all?’

‘The camera ran out of battery at six twenty-seven on Saturday afternoon. By that time nothing interesting had happened. The memory stick has disappeared, and the boxes only contain clothes and jewellery. There’s a teenage diary, which is full of references to people called Tony and Sally and Jax, but no mention of the school they went to, or any surnames.’

‘Did you find her car? It must be here somewhere, surely?’

‘Seems not. Every single one has been accounted for, in an area of half a mile. It was an interesting exercise, actually. Took three constables twelve hours to track them all down, even with it all on computer, but they did it. One or two people took exception to being phoned at midnight to be asked if they owned a blue Suburu parked ten miles from where they lived. But they all had good explanations.’

‘So she and the person in the pub must have come here together, and he drove away again. Which implies that it was him that killed her. That’s most likely, isn’t it?’

‘On the face of it, yes. Nobody in either of the pubs can come up with a credible individual, sitting alone at about seven o’clock on Saturday.’

‘So she made it up? She lied to me?’

‘We know that already. She wasn’t Fraser Meadows’ daughter, for a start.’

‘Mm.’ Thea’s thoughts were circling unproductively. ‘What did you think of him? Fraser, I mean.’

‘Slightly too good to be true, maybe. Presented as very eager to help, but was depressingly short of facts. He didn’t seem to know anything about his brother’s life these days. They almost never see each other.’

‘And he doesn’t know why a young woman should leave her possessions at his brother’s house?’

‘He did go a bit thoughtful about that, but said he really had no information to offer.’

‘He told me he knows where Oliver is, but he’s not allowed to say. Did you ask him that?’

‘He asked to be excused from that particular question. We didn’t press it, for now.’

‘You think he was holding something back?’

‘It’s possible.’ Gladwin shrugged. ‘It can take two or three attempts to persuade people that we really do want to hear the whole story. And I’m not sure I entirely get what’s going on with him and your mum. They knew each other – what? – fifty years ago? Seems a bit of a stretch to think they’d get along after all this time.’

‘It’s extremely weird,’ Thea burst out, only then
realising that this was her primary anxiety, and had been for nearly a week. ‘I’m not sure she entirely believes it’s really him.’

‘Really?’ The police detective’s expression changed to maximum alertness. ‘Can’t he prove it to her somehow?’

‘She scarcely remembers anything. A clever man could persuade her, I imagine.’

‘And why would he? What’s he after?’

‘Her house, probably. She’s got rather a nice house and he’s homeless.’

‘It must be possible to check.’

‘DNA,’ Thea suggested, with a wry grin. ‘Isn’t that the answer to everything these days?’

‘It’s very overrated. Useless unless you have something to compare it with.’

‘You took a sample from him, though. Are you planning to compare it with the dead woman?’

‘Eventually we might have to. He went very tense when I asked for it. But a lot of people do. They instinctively dislike it.’

‘Obviously,’ said Thea, knowing there was no need for her usual rant about personal privacy. Gladwin had heard it already.

‘It’s horrible when you don’t know who the victim is,’ Gladwin complained. ‘Not just because it thwarts any effective investigation, but you can’t tell the family, who just think everything’s fine, when it isn’t.’

‘Unless they did it.’

‘Cynic. They’d call her Jane Doe, in America. Any unidentified female is a Jane Doe. It hasn’t caught on here, for some reason.’

‘Too glib?’ Thea suggested.

‘No, not really. It’s rather nice, in a way.’

‘I didn’t much like her,’ Thea said softly.

‘I know. You said. But you didn’t kill her. We’ve been over that already. It doesn’t matter, does it? You only saw her for ten minutes.’

‘But you didn’t see her at all, and you care more about what happened to her than I do. What does that make me?’

‘Normal,’ Gladwin shrugged. ‘You probably do care more than you think, anyway. You look pretty miserable to me.’

‘Do I?’ Thea sighed. ‘I wasn’t too happy before all this, actually. It hasn’t been a very pleasant summer, on the whole. In fact, it’s been bloody horrible since Easter.’

‘You’ve had some grim experiences, I know,’ Gladwin sympathised. ‘You should probably have stuck with Phil Hollis. Everybody thinks so.’

Everybody
was the team of Gloucestershire police detectives, Thea presumed. Hollis was another detective superintendent, who had been her lover or boyfriend or significant other for a year or so. It had ended quite badly, and he now had a new partner. And Thea had almost forgotten about him.

‘Everybody’s wrong,’ she said. ‘He didn’t bring out the best in me.’
And Drew Slocombe does
, she silently added. She knew with absolute certainty that she would never treat Drew as badly as she’d treated Phil Hollis.

They were standing in Silk Mill Lane, speaking in low voices, the dog patiently waiting for further progress. Gladwin waved aside the tribulations of human relationships and pointed the way over the river and back to the Thistledown acres, through a rickety-looking gate that led to the eastern edge of the allotments. ‘Or, as I say, you could follow the Windrush Way for a bit and then cross the river. It’s passable when the water’s low.’

‘Do we have to wade across it?’ Thea was concerned for her shoes. ‘Is that part of this odd little walk?’

‘No, no. What’s odd about it? I just wanted to have a look round and chat with you at the same time. We can go back through the woods.’

‘Hang on a minute.’ Thea looked up Castle Street, where a tall house stood close to the road. Behind and above it loomed a substantial chapel. ‘Isn’t that lovely! So much character! I wonder what its story is.’

‘Go to the museum and ask, why don’t you?’

‘I just might do that.’

‘The woman we met yesterday lives here, doesn’t she?’

‘Priscilla Heap,’ Thea remembered. ‘I suppose she does. I wonder which house it is.’

‘She gave me the name. Something Cottage. That isn’t a cottage, is it?’

‘A “House”,’ judged Thea. ‘Definitely a “House”.’

They walked down the hill, passing a tiny dwelling entitled the Coach House, which Thea privately thought added substantially to her abiding impression of Winchcombe as a place created by magic and existing in some kind of alternative fairy-tale reality. Even the rickety gate that led into the allotments carried a suggestion of ageless mystery to her overactive imagination.

They found the route into Oliver’s woodlands, where Gladwin pointed out signs of recent use. ‘It’s like a Western,’ Thea laughed. ‘Looking for bent grasses and snapped twigs. We need an Indian tracker.’

‘It’s very much like that,’ Gladwin agreed. ‘But it doesn’t actually get us very far. I expect you could have done some of this yourself.’

‘Me?’

‘Didn’t Oliver bring you out here on Saturday?’

Thea looked behind her, seeing the view from a different angle. ‘Not quite this far, but he did show me this clearing, from over there.’ She pointed to where she thought the bird hide must be. ‘I think,’ she added feebly. ‘Are we on his land now?’

‘Apparently so. It goes right to this fence.’

‘Yes, that must be right. He keeps this part clear for birds that like grasses and meadow flowers. I imagine
he comes out here with his camera sometimes, even though there’s no hide.’

‘There’s a sort of flattened area, with marks that suggest a tripod, so I imagine that’s exactly what he does.’

‘Can I feed his birds again yet?’ She had abandoned her responsibilities all too readily, she felt. If she was to stay there all week, and perhaps beyond, she ought to try to get things back to how they had been. ‘Is the hide still taped off?’