Shadows in the Cotswolds (5 page)

There was an appalling tidiness to the corpse that Thea found almost unbearable. The hands were folded across the chest, the hair immaculately neat, the expression peaceful. The only jarring note was the three items of clothing that had been collected from the box in Oliver’s house. They were lying carelessly tossed aside, a few feet away. ‘It’s that girl!’ Thea said aloud. ‘What on earth has happened to her?’ She nudged an unmoving arm delicately with her foot, in needless confirmation that life really was extinct.

Nobody replied. All the birds had disappeared, apart from one crow, sitting in clear view on the stump of a tree that must have been cut down to make way for the hide. It eyed Thea and the body with calculating interest, its thick black beak slowly tilting from side to side as it moved its head for a better view. 

‘Go away,’ said Thea loudly.

The bird showed signs of asking itself just what it might have to fear from this human being and her dog. At her feet was some very tempting carrion, enough for every friend and relation for miles around. Perhaps, if it waited a while, the upright being would leave the way clear for the early pickings in the form of juicy eyeballs and soft fleshy tongue.

Robotically, Thea grabbed her dog’s collar and began to hurry back to the house, hoping the crow would hesitate before beginning its predations. The body had looked cold and stiff, the lips blue-grey and the visible skin drained of blood.

She called the police, and agreed to wait by the roadside to lead the way to the clearing. They knew where Vineyard Street was, and promised to be there quickly. Shutting the dog inside, Thea ran back down the woodland path with a rug she had grabbed from Oliver Meadows’ sofa, and threw it over the vulnerable corpse.

Only as she stood impatiently at the end of the little drive did she remember her expected visitors. What was her mother going to say? And – belatedly – it dawned on her that the victim was the daughter of Fraser Meadows, who was also shortly to arrive on the spot. The man would see his dead child, would perhaps wail and sob on her mother’s insubstantial shoulder. From past experience, she knew it was perfectly possible for the dead Melissa to lie undisturbed for the best
part of the day while the police examined the scene in every imaginable detail. A tent would be erected over her, and TV reporters would probably turn up and film it. The magnitude of the disaster expanded as she gradually overcame the initial shock and considered the implications.

The birds! There would be forensics people and photographers and a police doctor all crowded into the little space and probably wrecking Oliver’s careful arrangements. They would go into the hide and examine its contents.

The camera! Excitedly, she realised that there was a chance that the truth of what had happened to Melissa might be recorded on the little digital card. But it could wait until the police arrived. She would calmly show it to them, and invite them to take the card as a prize piece of evidence.

Despite some acquaintance with the local police, she had never met either of the individuals who first responded to her call. They were uniformed officers, a sergeant and a constable, and she felt uncomfortably old in comparison with them both. ‘I assure you she’s dead,’ she said. ‘Is there a doctor on his way?’

The sergeant smiled tightly, and made an excessively polite reply to the effect that all due procedures were in train, thank you, madam. If she could just indicate the exact location of the person concerned, they would quickly have everything in hand. She contemplated her choices: she could tell him in plain English that she had
done this before, and knew exactly what the procedure was, or she could flutter her eyelashes gratefully and let him get on with it. There were temptations to both options.

‘I know who she is,’ she said, neutrally. ‘And I can tell you that her father is expected here later today.’

‘Thank you, madam. That’s very helpful. Now, this way, am I right?’

‘Not quite, no. She’s down that little path, about a hundred yards or so. You won’t miss her. I covered her up with a rug. There was a crow …’

He made a peculiar sucking noise through his teeth. ‘Shouldn’t touch anything, you know.’

‘I didn’t. I just dropped it over her.’ Too late, she realised there would now be contaminating fibres, hairs, skin cells on the body that ought not to be there. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I suppose it was rather silly of me.’

The constable spoke for the first time, giving her a supportive little smile. ‘You weren’t to know,’ he said.

Oh, but I was
, she wanted to argue, but instead gave him the grateful flutter she had been debating. There was always the faint possibility that they would never find out who she – Thea Osborne – was. There was always the chance that Melissa had died of natural causes, or that someone was at that moment in Cheltenham police station confessing to having killed her. There might not be any sort of investigation at all.

It might have been her lack of hysteria that gave
her away; that suggested even to these tunnel-visioned policemen that something was not as usual. A single woman in a strange house – that much they had somehow ascertained – finding a dead body in the early morning woods, should not be so calmly collected. She caught an exchanged look, a raised eyebrow that was beginning to border on suspicion. Here was something unnatural, some story well beyond the obvious, which they felt themselves unequal to. ‘This one’s for the detectives, right enough,’ she heard the sergeant mutter, before he became welded to his telephone, his expression strained.

The constable shepherded her back to the house, and permitted her to answer the familiar questions before he had a chance to pose them. ‘Her name is Melissa, surname presumably Meadows. I saw her last night, at about five-thirty. She was cheerful and said she was meeting someone at the pub. I don’t know which pub or who the person was. This house belongs to her uncle, Oliver Meadows, who is away for a fortnight. I’m looking after the property while he’s away. His brother is expected here later this morning. He’s Melissa’s father.’

Clumsily the constable wrote it all down, referring to the G5, which would have to be filled in as soon as the doctor had been. He thanked her, bemusedly, before gathering himself to say, ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’

‘I’m afraid so,’ she smiled wanly. ‘It seems to happen to me very much too often.’ 

‘And you don’t know these people?’

‘I never met any of them until yesterday. But my mother knows the brother – Fraser Meadows. She knew him fifty years ago, in London. They’ve just rediscovered each other.’

This lad was never going to make detective, she judged. He showed no sign of registering the potential oddness, the underlying possibilities in the story he had been given. He was decently bovine, striving to reassure her that she was safe, seeking to offer her sympathy and family liaison services. She was a witness, and witnesses were one step away from being victims. They would be shocked and anxious, their memories unreliable and their emotions fragile. They were to be treated with kindness, and helped to get their facts straight. Nothing from the textbook was fitting this situation and the boy was floundering.

‘My daughter’s a probationer police officer,’ she told him, in an effort to convey some sort of explanation. At the same time, she hoped Jessica would show more flexibility, more imagination, if faced with the same circumstances.

‘Really? You don’t seem old enough,’ he said, less from gallantry than genuine surprise. Then he remembered that he was supposed to ask her full name, address and date of birth. ‘Actually, I ought to get your details,’ he said, opening a new page of his notepad.

‘I had her when I was twelve,’ joked Thea, before
realising this was a big mistake. The dratted youth was perfectly capable of believing her and finding it dubious when she explained. ‘No, no, forget I said that,’ she amended quickly. ‘I was twenty-two. Jessica’s that age now, actually.’ She trusted him to do the arithmetic.

The arrival of reinforcements stirred things up in a number of ways. Neighbours further along Vineyard Street began to realise something was happening and emerge from their houses for a look. With a glance of confused apology, Thea’s solicitous constable returned to the scene to convey her story to any newly arrived detectives. She promised to stay in the house and went to make herself some coffee.

She should phone her mother as a matter of some urgency. It was close to nine o’clock, and she wanted to abort the expected visit. If that caused difficulties for the police, then too bad. The prospect of playing host to the distraught father and unpredictable mother was not to be borne. She tried the landline first, expecting her mother to be gradually waking up over toast and tea. She lived sixty miles from Winchcombe – the journey could not take more than an hour and a half. But there was no reply. Quelling any thoughts of a night spent in Fraser Meadows’ bed, or at a romantic B&B somewhere, she tried the mobile.

Her mother had taken well to the new method of communication, on the whole. She liked texting, and would make experimental calls from unusual spots –
such as her husband’s graveside. But she had a dread of draining the battery and switched the thing off much of the time. ‘I like to be in control,’ she asserted. ‘The idea of it going off when I’m in the middle of something is awful. If something’s important, they can leave a message. I check it every day or so.’ Thea and her siblings had to accept that there was sound good sense in this attitude.

It was off. With no great optimism, Thea left a brief message – ‘Mum, something’s happened. Please ring me as soon as you get this.’ Her own experience of telephones was that they almost always let you down when you really needed them.

So far, her mother had not regarded widowhood as any sort of liberation. She had not taken herself off on foreign trips or circled the country visiting
long-neglected
friends. She had remained in the house she had occupied for the past twenty-five years and treated herself gently. There was a sense that she was testing herself, pinning down her own identity as a woman alone, and reviewing her options. She discussed these with her offspring, especially Damien, the eldest and the only son. The sudden acquisition of something alarmingly like a boyfriend was impossible to absorb. It had never once occurred to Thea that this might happen. It made it frighteningly difficult to guess the next steps and act accordingly.

She had to accept the strong possibility that her mother and Fraser would arrive at eleven-thirty or
thereabouts, entirely ignorant of the drastic turn of events. She wanted to take her dog and drive away somewhere and let things develop as they might, with no input from her.

But then a slim figure appeared in the doorway, trying to focus on the shadowy interior. ‘Is it really you?’ came a familiar voice. ‘Can this be the Thea Osborne I know and love?’

It was Detective Superintendent Sonia Gladwin, and Thea almost threw herself into her arms.

Gladwin was businesslike and concerned. ‘She’s so
young
,’ she breathed. ‘Poor thing. Now tell me everything you know.’

It turned out to be a very threadbare story, with Thea too stunned to recall details. She repeated what she had told the boy with the G5. ‘She’s called Melissa, and she keeps a lot of her possessions in a back room here. The owner is her uncle – Oliver Meadows. His brother is Fraser, and he’s her father. She comes and gets things regularly. Clothes, mostly. She’s got a flat in Oxford. She travels a lot for her work, and was due in Stoke today. Or perhaps it was tomorrow. She took a memory stick out of one of the boxes.’

‘Where is Oliver Meadows now?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who was the woman meeting in a pub?’ 

‘I don’t know.’

‘Who’s her mother?’

‘I don’t know.’

The memory stick was nowhere in evidence; Melissa did not have a mobile phone on her; her car had not been located. Gladwin sighed.

‘At least you might have something on the camera,’ Thea offered.

‘Camera?’

‘Oh, I forgot to say. There’s a video camera in the hide. It works automatically, filming all day, until the battery runs down.’

‘Good God. And what time did it run down last night?’

‘I don’t know. I’m supposed to replace it every morning. The battery, I mean. And the little card. It might have everything you need on it.’

‘Come and show me.’

The little clearing was full of people, as well as the gazebo-style tent erected over the actual body. ‘It looks as if she was garotted,’ Gladwin confided to Thea. ‘At least it was quick. Somebody really meant business.’

Thea was not consoled. She fingered her own neck, reminded of what a very vulnerable area of the body it was. People could all too easily do themselves a fatal damage by carelessly winding a tight ligature around their throat. Suicidal prisoners did it; small children got themselves tangled in string and cord; men seeking
extreme sexual thrills went too far; the heart stopped long before suffocation, if pressure was applied to a certain spot. Did the killer know that, or did they assume their victim would slowly strangle?

‘She was so
blithe
,’ Thea mourned. ‘Full of life. It doesn’t seem possible.’

‘Camera,’ Gladwin prompted.

Police people had been into the hide, but had not removed anything. If they saw the camera, nobody had made the obvious deduction. ‘They’d have thought it was only activated when the owner was here,’ Gladwin supposed. ‘It’s not the usual CCTV arrangement.’

To Thea’s ignorant eye, it seemed very much the same thing, but she refrained from comment. She was worrying about her mother, and Oliver’s birds and the whole miserable business of murder.

‘I can’t get hold of my mother,’ she whined. ‘She and Fraser will be here in an hour or two if I can’t avert them.’

‘Why would you try? We’ll need him to identify the body, anyway. I could accuse you of interfering in a police investigation, if you’re not careful. It seems to me it’s all rather convenient the way it’s going.’

‘You don’t know my mother,’ Thea gloomed. ‘I’m going to have to
deal
with her.’

‘Come on. She’ll be company for you, a distraction. Once this lot’s tidied away, you can get on with it here. At least …’ 

‘Precisely. You’ll have to find Oliver and probably bring him back. I won’t be needed any more.’

‘I can’t believe you let him go off without leaving any contact details. What sort of a house-sitter does that?’

‘I know. It was all such a rush. I never even managed to ask him. His brother probably knows where he is,’ she added hopefully. ‘This was all his idea, indirectly, I think. My mother thought it would be a neat solution – sort of win-win, with Oliver getting away and me getting some work. I had a sort of feeling that I was their proxy – that if I hadn’t agreed to it, they might have come here instead.’

‘So why didn’t they?’

‘Too big a commitment, I guess,’ said Thea vaguely. ‘A fortnight is quite a long time, after all.’ She swung a foot like a bored teenager, wishing herself somewhere quite else. ‘I’d better try her phone again, I suppose.’

‘Weird that Melissa didn’t have a phone on her,’ said Gladwin, watching the swinging foot. ‘Tell me again where she put that memory stick.’

Thea concentrated her mind. ‘She had a little shoulder bag,’ she recalled for the first time. ‘She put the clothes in a plastic carrier bag, that she pulled out of the shoulder bag, and dropped the stick into the first bag. Is that making sense? There might have been a phone in there as well.’

‘Car keys? Money? Where were they?’

‘In the shoulder bag, presumably.’ 

‘Which is nowhere to be seen.’

‘So she was mugged in a woodland garden, outside a bird hide? They garotted her and stole her bag.’

‘Looks like it. I hate to sound melodramatic, but I can’t help feeling there was something important on that memory stick. Sorry, Thea, but can we go through the whole conversation you had with her, one more time?’

Under the questioning gaze of another plain-clothes officer, who strolled towards them somewhat warily, as well as a team of white-clad forensics people, who all seemed to suddenly have nothing to do, Thea recounted everything she could remember. Very little was added to her original testimony, other than a description of Melissa as cheerful and unafraid. ‘You’ll want to look through those boxes,’ she realised, when she’d finished.

‘Right. And we need to get a look at whatever’s on this camera card, as soon as we can. And find that car. It must be out there somewhere.’

‘She didn’t seem to be coming this way,’ said Thea suddenly. ‘She went off towards Vineyard Street, and this is the opposite direction.’

‘Did you watch her go?’

‘Yes, for a little way. She must have doubled back after I’d gone into the house. There’s some sort of short cut into town through there.’ She pointed to the east, where Oliver had said something about Silk Mill Lane. ‘Or maybe she wanted to look at the birds.’ 

‘You got the impression she knew her way around? That she’d been here before?’ It was going over something Thea had already told her, but she was used to such repetitions when it came to police questioning.

‘Definitely. She went straight to those boxes, without any hesitation. She knew just what was in them.’

‘Would you have heard her if she’d doubled back?’

‘I doubt it. The dog didn’t bark or anything. But obviously all sorts of things must have been going on, and I had no idea.’ She sighed. ‘I hardly even thought about her, once she’d gone.’

‘You didn’t like her very much,’ said Gladwin astutely.

Thea frowned. ‘That’s putting it rather strong, but no, I didn’t take to her, I suppose. She didn’t seem to be inviting me to. She never really looked at me. I was just somebody she had to get past, in order to fetch her things.’

‘You tried to stop her?’

‘Not exactly. I tried to assure myself that she had a right to be there. That’s what I’m being paid for, basically.’

‘You got assurances from her – is that what you mean?’

‘More or less, yes.’

‘Thea – this is going to sound insane, and it is, of course. But
I’m
being paid to do a thorough job as well. So, I have to ask you, formally, whether you had any personal involvement in the killing of this young
woman. I’ll have to order your fingerprints to be taken and an examination of your shoes made.’

Thea’s chin lifted bravely. ‘There’s no reason why I should be immune, I realise that, of course. It’s just …’

‘I know. Just answer the question, there’s a love.’

‘I did not kill her. I don’t know who did.’ It was difficult to say, especially in the hearing of the other police officers. The mere act of proclaiming her innocence made the possibility of her guilt feel bizarrely real. ‘But my fingerprints will be all over the bird feeders, and my shoeprints might well be exactly where that body now is. But I think I’m too small to have done it,’ she added lightly. ‘Melissa must be six or seven inches taller than me. Wouldn’t that rule me out?’

Gladwin smiled humourlessly and made no reply.

Fingerprints and shoeprints were taken, back in the house, and people continued to come and go. Sensations of trespass and transgression began to overwhelm Thea, as Oliver’s paths were trampled and his home invaded. ‘This is terrible,’ she muttered to her dog. She was hungry and thirsty and defeated. It was a bitter world and her own pathetic efforts to maintain order and harmony counted for nothing.

All further efforts to contact her mother proved in vain, and at eleven-fifteen a young plain-clothes police constable entered the house to tell Thea there were two visitors for her. ‘We can’t let them come down
here just now,’ he apologised. ‘They’ll have to stay out in the road.’

‘Oh, God,’ Thea groaned. ‘One of them is the father of the dead girl. Am I supposed to be the one to tell him?’

‘It would probably be best,’ he said, with a faint frown. ‘Then we’ll take him for a look, probably. They’ll be moving her soon, though. Maybe he should go to the mortuary?’

‘No, no,’ came Gladwin’s voice of authority. ‘She looks okay. It’ll be kinder to get it over with here.’

Thea trudged heavily along to the road, and met her mother’s eyes. The expression was confused, but only slightly alarmed. The older woman smiled. ‘Thea? What’s happening? They said there’d be an incident in the woods. Did somebody get caught in a gin trap?’

‘Hi, Mum. I don’t think they have gin traps any more. Is this Fraser?’ She turned to a tall, colourless man standing at her mother’s side. Her heart was pounding with dread at what she had to do next. ‘Hello,’ she said, holding out a shaky hand.

He took it in a moderate grip, and smiled down at her. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, in an unexpectedly deep voice. ‘Are you going to tell us what’s going on?’

‘Somebody’s died,’ said Thea. ‘Actually, they’d like you to come and identify the body. I’m terribly sorry about this, and I’m sure it’s a shockingly harsh way of telling you, but the fact is, something terrible has happened to your daughter.’ 

His expression barely altered, but he dropped her hand as if it had bitten him. ‘Daughter?’ he repeated. ‘What do you mean?’

‘Can you come with me? It’s down by the hide. I expect you know your way around. Mum – they’ll let you go into the house, I expect. At least …’ She looked round for assistance. ‘Is that all right?’ she asked the detective constable.

‘Better not,’ he grimaced. ‘Forensics are going to want to have a look. Just hang on here for a bit, okay?’

But Thea felt a primary obligation to the
shell-shocked
old man, who had made no move since dropping her hand. ‘Listen, Mum. Can you stay in the car for a bit? It’s all rather a circus at the moment. As soon as Fraser has … well, as soon as it’s over, we can go off on our own somewhere, until things have settled down. We’ll have to talk about what we do next. And they’ll want to contact Oliver …’

Her mother took a deep breath and reached for her new friend’s hand. ‘Fraser,’ she said steadily, ‘I have no idea what this is about, but I’ll wait for you here, while you go with Thea. She’s very sensible. You’ll be all right with her.’

The accolade was familiar enough to be almost funny.
Thea has always been the sensible one
was a family mantra that contained only a dash of truth. Emily and Damien had possessed every bit as much sense as had Thea, throughout most of their growing up. Even Jocelyn was only sporadically ditzy. 

It seemed to be effective now, however, and Thea began a brisk walk down the path towards the woods. Fraser kept alongside her, his long legs betraying the early signs of shambling that overtook tall old men sooner or later. ‘I don’t really understand,’ he repeated in a low voice. ‘I can’t begin to grasp what’s happening.’

‘I’m really very sorry. It’s all been a complete shock for me as well. I only met your daughter last night, and now she’s … out here. Well, you’ll see. It isn’t too ghastly, really. Not compared to some.’ She stopped herself. This was no sort of consolation for a man who was about to set eyes on his dead daughter. She must have been the child of his declining years, if he was as old as he looked. Although she thought her mother had said he was younger than her. This man seemed closer to eighty than the seventy-five she had expected.

‘Here we are,’ she announced, superfluously. ‘This is Detective Superintendent Gladwin. She and I are friends, in a way. She’ll take over now.’

Gladwin had been talking to a pair of black-suited men by the door of the hide. She turned and smiled sympathetically at Fraser Meadows. ‘Hello, sir. I am so very sorry about this. I hope we can make it as quick as possible. It’s just for an initial identification at this stage. Of course you’ll have a chance to visit her again in the chapel at the undertakers.’ She flapped a hand at the two men, who suddenly became obvious as the men summoned to remove the body. ‘They’re from Maltby and Salmon, in Stow-on-the-Wold. You
don’t have to engage them for the funeral, but they’re available if you do want them. I can give you their number in a little while.’

Fraser blinked and opened his mouth to speak. But Gladwin was ushering him towards the gazebo, where a young uniformed officer stood guard. ‘In here, sir. If you’d just tell me …’

Thea could not see what happened next, but it all seemed to be over in seconds. Fraser stooped towards the ground, only his head and shoulders inside the tent. Gladwin had disappeared from sight, presumably to lift a cover from the dead face. Then the deep voice of the old man rang loud through the clearing.

‘This is not my daughter. I’ve never seen her before in my life. This woman bears no resemblance at all to my daughter.’