Shadows in the Cotswolds (7 page)

‘Your daughter’s name is Maureen – is that right?’ she asked, risking the renewed embarrassment this might cause.

‘I’m afraid so,’ he said ruefully. ‘I never told my wife why – which was very wrong of me, I know.’

Thea’s mind clicked into action at last. ‘So the murdered girl must have known your family. She must have
some
connection. She told me your daughter’s name. She knew her way around the house. Are you
sure
you didn’t recognise her?’ 

He bristled. ‘Why should I lie about it?’

‘No, no, I’m not suggesting … only, you were expecting to see your daughter. So when it obviously wasn’t her, that might have been all you focused on. If she was somebody you only met a few times, perhaps as a younger girl, you could easily not realise. Don’t you think?’

‘No,’ he said.

‘So where’s Oliver?’ Thea flashed back, following some urge to put pressure on the man.

‘I’m not at liberty to say. I promised him I wouldn’t tell anyone.’ He avoided her eyes, and ignored Maureen completely.

‘You’ll have to tell the police. They’ll be wanting to speak to him as a matter of priority.’

‘Matter of priority,’ he repeated, with amusement in his eye. ‘Really?’

She gave up and their food arrived. ‘Nice,’ approved Maureen after one or two mouthfuls.

Thea silently considered all the things that were wrong with the situation. For the first time all day, she wanted Drew. A warmth ran through her at the thought of him, and how he would sit comfortably beside her if he were there, helping her work things out, making no demands, simply offering himself without conditions.

Stop it
, she ordered herself. It wouldn’t be like that at all. He would be sad and stressed, preoccupied with his children and the fragile state of his business. He
would make demands without intending to, as she knew she had herself, after Carl had died.

‘We shouldn’t be long,’ she said. ‘The police will want to keep track of us, I expect.’

As if on cue, her mobile tinkled, deep inside her bag. It was still switched on, she realised, after the abortive efforts to contact her mother. ‘Thea? Where are you?’ Gladwin’s voice was almost calm. ‘You’re not supposed to just wander off, you know.’

‘We’re at the Plaisterers Arms, in the town square. In the garden at the back, having lunch.’

‘Right. Well, come back here afterwards, will you? We’re not finished.’

‘No – I was just saying.’

‘Half an hour, okay?’

‘All right.’ She felt more than a little like a schoolgirl summoned by a fairly friendly head teacher who nonetheless carried all the authority and might yet turn out to be unpredictable.

‘It’s
plasterer
not
playsterer
,’ came a voice from the table behind them. It took a moment to understand that it was addressing her. She turned to look. A man somewhat younger than herself was grinning at her, one eyebrow raised disarmingly. ‘Sorry – but I thought you’d want to know.’

‘Thanks.’ Her first thought was that he was a journalist, already onto the fact of a murder and cunningly tracking down the main witness. ‘I’ll remember that.’ 

‘I know you,’ he said, not to her, but to Fraser. ‘You were here a month or so ago, staying at Thistledown. You drive a big Renault. You had a dog with you.’

‘Oh?’ Fraser showed no inclination to respond any further.

‘And I think my wife met you yesterday, in the park,’ he went on, to Thea. ‘She was the one with the young retriever.’

It felt like several months ago to Thea. She forced herself to remember. ‘How do you know that was me?’

‘Spaniel, pretty, friendly. Actually, it’s the spaniel, mainly.’ Hepzie took no notice of him from her spot under the table. Thea tried to assess the credibility of his claim. Had his wife described such a brief encounter in sufficiently fine detail for him to recognise her and her dog from it? There had been a dozen or more people strolling in Sudeley Park, many of them with dogs.

She cocked her head sceptically. ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said.

He laughed. ‘How wise you are, Thea Osborne.’ He got up and moved to sit next to her on the wooden bench. ‘I assure you it’s true. But there’s more to it than that, of course. Your reputation precedes you, you know.’

She had been made aware in Cranham, a few months previously, that she had a certain fame throughout the Cotswolds. She had featured in newspaper reports and had made many acquaintances in a sparsely populated
area where people were connected by extended family ties in a fashion that had been common a century or so ago.

‘Oh?’ she said, feeling a chilly hand stirring her insides.

‘Temple Guiting,’ he said shortly. ‘We never met, but I know all about what happened while you were there.’

Temple Guiting had been over a year ago, but it was barely five miles from Winchcombe. Blockley and Snowshill were similarly within walking distance – if you could walk ten or fifteen miles. People did. The entire area was crisscrossed with well-used footpaths. It was not so much a revival of Victorian times as of medieval practices. News would travel from one settlement to another, exchanged in the taverns and marketplaces. As in Cranham, she found it a sinister notion. She did not want to be discussed and observed behind her back. It felt threatening, like being followed from in front, people anticipating her next move and lying in wait for her.

‘Who
is
this, Thea?’ came her mother’s voice, endearingly protective. Like Hepzie should have been. She nudged the dog with a foot, most unfairly.

‘My name is Reuben Hardy and my wife is Jenny. We’re quite harmless, I promise you. But we are good friends of people in Temple Guiting, as I say, and we actually saw Thea in the shop there, last year, just before all the trouble came to a head. You’re not easy to forget, you know.’ 

It was impossible to ascertain whether or not the man knew there had been a murder close by, only hours earlier. If he did know, he was making an excellent job of concealing the fact – and why would anybody do that? Perhaps if he had come directly to the pub from a house on the other side of town, he could have missed all the activity down in Vineyard Street.

She had forgotten that he had claimed to know Fraser as well. The old man reminded her.

‘You say you saw me, too?’ Fraser rumbled. ‘Strikes me you do a lot of it, watching people instead of minding your own business.’

Right!
Thea silently applauded.

Reuben Hardy merely smiled. ‘I have a good memory for faces, that’s all.’

‘And names,’ Thea accused.

‘True. And I have good ears, as well. I gather the police are wanting to speak to Mr Oliver Meadows. Well, we all know where he is, don’t we? I imagine they’ll have to await their turn.’

‘Please be quiet,’ said Fraser, with heavy pomposity. ‘My brother’s whereabouts are of no concern to you or anybody else.’ His glance flicked from Thea to Reuben Hardy and back again. ‘Perhaps we could finish our lunch in peace now?’ He returned doggedly to his cottage pie. Thea and her mother tried to do the same, but neither of them found eating to be possible. The question of Oliver’s location was apparently not so much of a mystery after all. If this man knew about
it, Thea felt decidedly aggrieved at being kept in the dark.

‘Oh … sorry,’ said Reuben Hardy, obsequiously. ‘I understand. Say no more.’ He tapped the side of his nose in a parody of the Monty Python sketch.

All three turned their backs on him then, and for five minutes they maintained their position. Then Thea glanced at him again. His facile grin had faded, and he was chewing a lip while keying something onto an iPhone. One foot was tapping a leg of the table. She thought over what he had said to them, trying to understand his motives in making contact as he had.

‘What did you want from us?’ she burst out, her instinctive curiosity getting the better of her. ‘Why did you speak to us at all?’

‘Want?’ he repeated, with wide-eyed innocence. ‘Nothing at all. I was just trying to be friendly. My wife said you seemed nice. I can see Oliver’s bird hide from the window of my flat, so I feel a sort of fellowship, if you like.’

‘In that case, you’ll know there’s been some trouble there today, won’t you?’ She was hoping to shock him into revealing how much he knew about the murder, if anything.

‘Pardon?’

‘There’s been a lot of coming and going all morning,’ she prompted.

‘You know – I don’t think I’ve looked out of the
window all day. It’s been rather a rush, one way and another. Why – what happened?’

She scrutinised his face for a long moment. His colour was definitely different and he was finding it impossible to meet her eye. But it seemed to her that he was betraying little more than a natural worry that his equilibrium might be disturbed by whatever she might tell him. ‘I can’t say, I’m afraid. It’ll all come out later today, but for the moment it’s better not to spread gossip. I’m sure you’ll understand.’

His iPhone warbled at him, and he looked down at the screen.

Thea didn’t wait for further conversation with him. ‘We’d better go,’ she said, noticing that Fraser had finally put down his fork. The old man hesitated fractionally, as if resistant to being given instructions by a woman. Thea stood up impatiently, yanking at her placid dog, and marching determinedly back through the pub. She had no reason to rush, nothing enticing was beckoning, but her patience had run thin. She felt irritated with her mother for taking up with these Meadows people in the first place. Seen from that angle, everything was her fault. She turned back, tempted to say something to this effect.

She caught a complicated look passing between the elderly pair. Some kind of warning was being given by him, received with a pleading expression by her mother – an expression that made Thea angry. But there was also an intimacy, an indication that
there was something shared, something understood, that softened the apparent aggression. As if he might be saying
Just be careful, you know how important this is
. And she was replying
Yes
,
I know, dear, but I really don’t like it.
Thea felt no need to defend her mother – rather her anger spread to them both. She was being excluded, even possibly
used
. They had engineered her into this house-sitting commission, without telling her why or forewarning her of the hazards. She felt isolated and exploited and childishly rebellious.

Gladwin was in the road talking to a stout woman wearing leather riding boots and a corduroy jacket when they got back to Thistledown. There seemed to be some animosity in the air. ‘But I
always
go through here on a Sunday,’ the woman was saying, as if for the third or fourth time. ‘It’s a regular routine.’

‘I’m sorry, madam, but today you won’t be able to. This is a crime scene now. The entire woodland is cordoned off.’ She caught Thea’s eye and made a silent
God-help-me
face.

‘Well, I think it’s a disgrace. It was hard enough to persuade the Meadows man to keep the path open, without this. He’s been impossibly obstructive, over the years.’

‘You’re telling me there’s a public right of way through this property?’ Gladwin appeared to register this somewhat belatedly. 

‘Precisely! That’s what I’ve been telling you for the past five minutes.’

‘And do people use it?’

‘Almost never. We agreed that it should be limited to locals. There hasn’t been a signpost up for ten years or more, so he doesn’t get stray ramblers scaring his precious birds. The path isn’t obvious at all. It leads through to my field, do you see? Where my
horse
is. If I have to go around the road, it’ll take me three times as long.’

‘Well, I’m very sorry, but I really can’t allow it,’ Gladwin insisted, albeit with less force than before. Her mind appeared to be making some sort of calculation. ‘Although … perhaps if you could show me where the path goes, that might be rather helpful.’

The triumph was plain in the woman’s eyes. ‘Come on, then,’ she said, impatiently. ‘We’ve wasted enough time already.’

‘Can I come?’ Thea whispered to Gladwin, having swallowed back a thoughtless assertion that she already knew where the path led. She was slowly learning that it was generally best to remain silent in the company of the police and potential witnesses.

Gladwin shrugged and said, ‘Why not? But leave your relations behind, okay? And the dog.’

Quickly Thea asked her mother and Fraser to take Hepzie into the house. Gladwin reinforced the request by adding, ‘There’s a detective inspector waiting to
talk to you, Mr Meadows. Make yourself comfortable, and I’ll send him in right away.’

With impressive skill, the superintendent arranged the interview with three short words. ‘Jeremy! Meadows. House.’ DI Jeremy Higgins, already known to Thea, peeled away from where he was scrutinising the screen of a Smartphone, and obediently made for Thistledown.

Passing the much emptier clearing in front of the bird hide, the stout woman led the way at a sharp angle to the right, between tall willow trees, in a direction that seemed quite wrong for the centre of Winchcombe. Before Thea could raise a query, another sharp turn, this time to the left, corrected their trajectory, and within two minutes they were skirting the grassy area that Oliver had shown Thea the previous day. There was a stile in the corner of the property, with a narrow but obvious path beyond it. The buildings of the lower edge of Winchcombe were only a few yards away, jumbled on rising ground, a mixture of periods and styles that would keep a historian happy for weeks.

‘That way to Silk Mill Lane, and this way to my horse,’ explained the woman. ‘Can I go now, please?’

‘Just leave me your name and address,’ Gladwin said. ‘I might need confirmation that this was an established path, known to several local people.’

‘Priscilla Heap,’ came the ready reply. ‘Anything I can do to help, just ask.’ She added her address, which Gladwin noted carefully, along with a phone number.
‘My house is just over there, behind that tree,’ she elaborated.

‘Thank you,’ said Gladwin. ‘I’m sorry to have delayed you.’

‘Think nothing of it. There’s obviously been something ghastly going on – but I’d prefer not to know any details. I’ve seen enough mayhem in my time. All I care about these days is my horse.’