Slaughter in the Cotswolds (15 page)

‘Oh gosh! What happened?’

‘Nothing – that’s the problem. His back – I told you about his back, didn’t I?’

‘Oh, I get it. No rolling in the hay, as I guess they’d call it around here about a century ago, in case it goes again.’

‘It was rolling in the feathers that slipped his
disc,’ said Thea, with a shy grin. ‘Don’t you ever tell him I told you.’

‘Poor man.’

‘Yes, well, it put things to the test and it looks as if we’ve failed.’

‘And are you upset about it?’

‘A bit. I still can’t quite believe it.’

‘So does that mean you’re on your own? I mean you can’t call him if you feel lonely or scared or bored?’

‘I don’t know. I was just wondering the same thing when you turned up. I’ve got rather a crisis with the dogs. They’ve gone missing.’

‘Oh? Is that usual?’

‘Certainly not. Somebody’s taken them. They might even have shot them by now. I should not be here talking to you – I should be out there searching for them.’

‘But why? I mean – what’s going on?’

‘Never mind. First things first. We need to concentrate on your Peter.’

A look of fondness settled on Ariadne’s face, a daft smile on her lips. ‘My Peter,’ she murmured. ‘That does sound nice.’

But when they tried to focus on Peter’s plight, and how they might best help him, they found little to say. ‘If we could just firm up the alibi, that would settle it once and for all,’ said Thea.

‘And that’s entirely down to your sister. She has his life in her hands.’ Ariadne’s tone was melodramatic. ‘It all rests with her.’

‘The police will realise that. They’ll probably send somebody to check the times again with her. They’ll have the log of her 999 call, of course. They’ll have worked it out from that, probably. And when they did, they’ll have come to the conclusion that there could just possibly have been time for Peter to be in both places. I’m not sure they will need Emily to add anything more.’

‘We could find the person who really did it,’ Ariadne suggested, with a glance around the bar. ‘What do we know about Sam? Can we think of a reason why somebody would want to kill him?’

‘He seemed inoffensive enough when I met him,’ said Thea carelessly.

‘What?’
Ariadne’s screech raised heads on all sides. ‘What do you mean? You never said you’d met him.’ Her eyes bulged and a chip was suspended halfway to her mouth.

‘Only once – at Emily’s. It’s nothing to get excited about. You know that Emily and her husband, Bruce – more Bruce than Em – knew him. He and Bruce went to college together. He went to their house a few times, and I was there for one of those times. It was a dinner party.’

‘I hadn’t realised they were really friends,’ Ariadne said loudly, ignoring the people listening
at the neighbouring tables. ‘Don’t you think that’s weird?’

‘Not at all. I’m sure it was just a horrible coincidence. Emily had no idea it was him. It was dark and wet and his head was crushed when she reached him. He was here to see Peter, and she was here to see me, and it just all came together in that terrible way.’

‘Rubbish. Utter rubbish. If she knew him, then she must have known he was here. She probably knows who his killer was. What if she was having an affair with him, and wanted to get out of it, and when he kicked up a fuss, got somebody to put him out of the way.’

‘
That’s
even bigger rubbish,’ said Thea, suddenly angry.

‘No, it isn’t. It could have happened like that. She might have lured him into that layby, away from the hotel and watched while the deed was done.’

‘But then she’d just have driven away. Why would she call the police?’

Ariadne paused. ‘OK – what if it went further than she intended? And the sight of his mangled body snagged her conscience. After all, she might still have loved him, but felt guilty at betraying her husband.’

‘Stop it,’ Thea ordered. ‘And stop shouting. You’re saying appalling things about my sister, in
a public place, and you’ve got to stop.’

A brief silence followed, during which they avoided each other’s eye and toyed with the food. ‘It’s obvious that she had no idea who he was,’ Thea repeated quietly. ‘She would have told me when she came back here afterwards. She would have told the police, as well. They didn’t get an identity for him until Sunday morning. It isn’t such a wild coincidence, anyway. She and Bruce know
loads
of people. They’re in a huge social network, with parties and clubs and all the rest of it. She probably knew three or four people staying at that hotel, if it comes to that.’ It was a daft exaggeration, of course, which she knew even as she spoke.

‘Where does she live?’

‘Aylesbury.’

‘Hardly local. And Sam lived in Oxford. And this is a very small village in the Cotswolds.’

‘I could give you four or five true instances of much bigger coincidences than that. They sound incredible, but they’re not.’ She opened her mouth to tell the story of the time she knocked on a door of a B&B in Cerne Abbas and discovered a woman who’d been in the same antenatal class as herself, twelve years earlier, but closed it again. Ariadne was in no mood to be convinced.

‘The clinching thing,’ she went on, ‘is that Emily wouldn’t have called the police if she’d
been in any way involved in Sam’s death. Isn’t that axiomatic?’

‘Double bluff,’ muttered Ariadne darkly. ‘Oldest trick in the book.’

‘You’re being much too complicated about it,’ Thea complained. ‘Far simpler to stick with what we all thought at the start – a psycho with a baseball bat or cosh of some sort sees Sam, thinks he looks good for a few quid and works himself up into a huge frenzy before attacking him. Maybe he got some kind of blood lust, a red mist thing, and didn’t know when to stop. He only came to his senses when Emily heard the noise and interrupted him. She saw him run off.’

‘But she didn’t describe him, did she?’

‘According to Phil, she said he seemed quite small and slim and not black. She was fairly sure he wasn’t black.’

‘As if that matters.’

‘It narrows things down a bit,’ Thea said.

‘It doesn’t, because she can’t possibly give a positive identification, even if they catch him. So it’ll be down to forensics, and he’s had time to get rid of every last molecule by now, hasn’t he?’

‘Well, this isn’t helping Peter,’ Ariadne sighed, after another short silence. ‘And if you’re not going to call Phil, then I suppose it’ll have to be me. Do you want me to give him a message?’

‘Tell him the dogs have been stolen, if you get the chance.’

Ariadne frowned. ‘What? How could they have been stolen?’

Thea shook her head. ‘Never mind. I’ll call him myself. It’s not your problem.’

She dreamt about dogs eating the brains out of a smashed human head, and woke with a sick feeling of horror swirling in her stomach. It was Thursday, almost a week since her father’s funeral, and not much over a week before she had to face the owners of Hawkhill, with whatever ghastly news there might be about their dogs – assuming her conscience didn’t force her to contact them before they returned. How could she have slept at all, knowing they were out there somewhere, shut in a dark prison, or even dead already? There had to be something she could and should do, instead of passively waiting for the next thing to happen.

Phil had not responded to the message she’d
left on his phone, which made her think he was sticking to his decision to keep her at a distance. It also implied that he thought it beneath him to get involved in a search for two dogs. After all, he’d decide, they came back of their own accord last time. It was probably safe to assume they’d do it again. She could think of nothing else but to return to Galton and try out her theory about the Lister man. But that did not much appeal as a strategy. The theory would be far better tested directly, she decided. If she could discover where Lister lived, she might also find Freddy and Basil.

The phone book and Google between them revealed enough of an address for her to locate the man’s house. She had expected a farm, with his talk of a large compound for his ridgebacks, but it was in fact a house in a row, between Hawkhill and the centre of Lower Slaughter. She remembered the spot well, with its tetchy notices about keeping dogs off the verges.

It was an easy walk from Hawkhill. The main dilemma was whether or not to take Hepzie. It felt risky to leave her behind, where she too might be stolen away. On the other hand, if there was any trouble, she’d be a liability. Better, then, to lock her firmly in the house and hope that she and Ignatius could establish a better relationship than hitherto.

The weather was dry but overcast. There was
a faint smell of woodsmoke outside and a jaded sense that summer was rapidly departing. She had always liked September, with the new school terms, new courses to attend, and the bounty of blackberries and nuts and mushrooms to collect on woodland walks. Carl had been a great enthusiast for autumn fruitfulness, organising old-fashioned family outings with capacious baskets and hooked sticks. But this was not yet September; this was August with its face still turned backwards to the summer almost over, with a feeling of time wasted. The English summer was inevitably disappointing. It never lasted for long enough, never provided the right levels of sunshine for what you wanted to do. June had been fabulous, July capricious and August a total disaster. It didn’t seem much of a deal, looking back.

She tried to plot her course of action once she reached the Lister establishment. Would she creep round to the back in the hope of finding Freddy and Basil in a shed? Or would she boldly knock on the door and insist on being allowed to make a search? Neither felt very promising, as she strode down the lane towards the village. The man was sly, and he possessed two very large dogs which might be trained to attack intruders – or at the very least make a lot of noise. She needed to be sly as well. She needed to invent a story that would deceive him into giving himself away, and
instantly one fell into place. She slowed her pace, rehearsing the details as they came to mind.

A woman answered her knock. ‘Mrs Lister?’ Thea asked, trying to seem breathless and a trifle sheepish.

‘No, but I live here with Mr Lister.’

‘Right. Well, I saw him yesterday afternoon, and we had a little talk. Is he in?’

‘He’s outside with the dogs.’

‘Oh.’ She feigned uncertainty. ‘Then would it be all right if I waited for him to finish what he’s doing? I saw the dogs yesterday, and they made me a bit nervous.’

The woman smiled. ‘To tell you the truth they have that effect on me sometimes. They’re not exactly lapdogs, if you know what I mean.’

‘Still, they’re not pit bulls, either. I don’t suppose they’re really aggressive.’

The woman waggled her head ambivalently. ‘Not really, no. You have to keep them under firm control, animals that size, of course.’

‘Right.’

‘Well, come in. My name’s Sharon.’

‘Thea. Thea Osborne. I’m house-sitting for Mr and Mrs Angell at Hawkhill.’

‘Oh?’ This information had a noticeable effect on her. Her brows came together in a thoughtful frown. ‘Are you indeed? So it was you who let the dogs kill Henry’s sheep?’

‘Er—’ This was an unexpectedly full-frontal challenge. ‘I don’t think—’

‘Come on, love, face facts. There’s no doubt about it, now is there?’

‘You know Mr Galton then, do you?’ As questions went, this was a particularly stupid one, but she found herself floundering badly.

The withering look was all the answer she needed. Then Sharon seemed to lose interest. ‘Well, I’ve got to be somewhere. I’ll shout to Mike that you’re here, and then I’m off. Though God knows why you’ve come. I’d have kept out of his way if it’d been me.’

Thea shrugged helplessly and said nothing more. She watched the woman go to the back door, and then tried to distract herself with a brief inspection of the house, which gave an impression of starkness. Varnished wooden floors with no rugs, no pictures on the walls, no clutter on the surfaces. She was half inclined to make an escape, but it was too late for that. She had to try and keep to her plan, and see where it got her.

Lister came in a minute or two after his partner had called him, swiping his hands together and smelling faintly of old meat. Thea had a sudden nasty image of him feeding road kill to his dogs, which seemed all too plausible when she gave him a closer look. Sharon gathered a jacket and a bag and slammed quickly out of the front door
leaving Thea and Lister together in the living room.

‘Oh, Mr Lister,’ she burst out, hoping she sounded genuine, ‘I came to tell you the dogs have come back, after all. I thought you must be worrying about them.’

He ignored this, rather to her consternation. Instead of responding, he demanded, ‘How did you know where to find me?’

‘Um – the phone book.’

‘Why not just phone me, then?’ His face was the epitome of suspicion. He stared at her as if she might suddenly pull a gun on him.

‘I felt like a walk.’

‘What’s your game?’ he said, his voice suddenly loud and angry. ‘What are these lies you’re telling me?’

She raised her eyebrows and repeated, ‘Lies, Mr Lister? What
do
you mean?’

It was like the moment when you realise you’ve got a word in Scrabble that not only uses all seven letters, but takes in two of the triple word scores as well. Lister was cornered. He couldn’t support his accusation that she was lying without admitting that he had Freddy and Basil, or at least knew where they were. She swelled with pride at her own cleverness. She hadn’t told him they were missing – so why hadn’t he picked her up on that, instead of her claim that they’d come
home again? It was a clear indication of his own involvement, which he proceeded to embellish, albeit with a desperate turn in the conversation.

‘I mean that I’ve seen those bloody dogs and they’re dead. Dead in a ditch a mile from here.’

Thea deflated rapidly. ‘They’re not,’ she whispered. ‘They can’t be.’

‘I can show you, if you want. Somebody’s taken the law into their own hands and done what Galton should have done days ago. So what are you playing at, telling me they’ve come home?’ Then his eyes narrowed as he mentally backtracked. ‘You never even told me they’d gone,’ he accused. ‘You came here to trap me.’ Small as he was, he was still substantially bigger than her, and very much stronger.

She hadn’t thought it through, she realised. It was one thing to catch the man out with a clever bluff, another to deal with what happened next. She had been so intent on extracting the truth, to have something she could take to the police, that she hadn’t planned the next step. But she couldn’t back away now.

‘You killed them,’ she accused. ‘You shot them and dumped them in a ditch.’

He shrugged. ‘Prove it,’ he challenged. But a faltering note caught her ear. Of course, he had never intended to reveal that he knew where the bodies were. He had, after all, been provoked
into giving himself away by her ruse. But it was a hollow victory, if the dogs really were dead.

‘Take me to where they are,’ she commanded. ‘I want to see them.’

‘I’m buggered if I will. You go and find them for yourself. Why should I help you?’

She couldn’t think of a way to force him, and sadness was beginning to engulf her bravado. She had got what she came for, up to a point, but now she couldn’t see what good it could do. Nothing would bring poor innocent Freddy and Basil back, and their slaughter was all her stupid fault.

‘I’ll go and find them myself, then,’ she said, and turned to go.

‘And don’t come bothering me again,’ he spat at her.

She felt abandoned as she walked back to Hawkhill. Ariadne would perhaps have helped her find the dogs if she hadn’t been so bound up with the arrest of her beloved Peter. Phil might have put in a word and got a constable to patrol the roadsides for a few hours, if he’d still been with her. Then she realised that a ditch could just as easily be under a field hedge, well away from the road, and take forever to find, as a result.

She badly needed a confidant, somebody who would understand her feelings of guilt and misery
at what had happened. She had met so few people since coming to Lower Slaughter, and of them, one was under arrest and the other had just virtually confessed to killing the dogs in her care. Which left only one other, and some strange instinct told her that he might just turn up trumps if approached for help.

This time, she walked to the beautifully situated old farmhouse, surrounded by its huge barns and lambing sheds. She’d gone back to Hawkhill first, had coffee and released Hepzie from her confinement with the parrot. The bird had its back turned to the room, and was concentrating on cleaning its claws. The dog was huddled in a corner of the sofa, not even getting up when Thea came into the room. There had obviously been no rapprochement between the two. Indeed, it was tempting to think the parrot had been roundly abusing the dog.

‘You can come with me this time,’ she told the spaniel, once the coffee was finished. ‘You can’t do any harm now.’ She even had the vague idea that Hepzie might come in useful.

Galton was driving his tractor across a field as she walked down the track. It was a few hundred yards away and she assumed he hadn’t noticed her. Finding a gateway, she went into the field
and stood watching him as he pulled some sort of implement behind the tractor. It took a while for her to work out that it was spraying something onto the grass, through fine jets. ‘Blimey!’ she murmured. ‘He’s not organic then, is he!’

She waited patiently for twenty minutes, during which the man noticed her, waved, and carried on with his work. Eventually he finished the job and drove at high speed to where she stood, jerking the tractor to a bouncing halt beside her and switching the engine off.

‘Is that a chemical spray?’ she asked, waving at the implement.

‘It is,’ he nodded. ‘Kills the eggs that give the sheep intestinal worms and liver fluke. What would you have me do?’

‘I wouldn’t presume to judge,’ she said.

‘So what can I do for you?’

She clenched her jaw against the urge to rest her head on his chest and sob. ‘I came to tell you that Mr Angell’s dogs are dead.’ It was no good – a rogue tear trickled down her cheek before she could stop it.

‘No!’

‘That Lister man told me he’d seen them. He must have done it himself. He gave himself away.’ The full impact of the loss of Basil and Freddy had barely hit her yet. Now she conjured their good-natured manners, their soft coats and
unexciting lives and felt a wave of misery. How and why they’d died seemed less important than the fact that they were dead, wasted on some stupid man-made altar erected to sheep, of all things.

Galton sighed. ‘It’s nearly time to stop for some lunch. Do you want to come in and tell me the whole story?’

Without asking herself what she thought she was doing, she nodded, and he took her arm without ceremony, steering her down to the house. The spaniel trotted awkwardly behind them, pulling back occasionally to remind her mistress that she existed.

The story emerged in a handful of jumbled sentences, to which Galton listened carefully. He had given no sign of impatience for his lunch, and offered her nothing to eat or drink. ‘What a bloody mess,’ he said heavily when she’d finished. ‘Not one of us comes out of it very well, do we?’

‘Thanks for listening,’ she mumbled, aware of imposing on him.

‘Well, I was always an easy touch for a damsel in distress. Story of my life,’ he grinned.

He would make a brilliant friend, she decided. Unusually easy to talk to, big and amiable, but capable of vigorous action when needed – a man for every eventuality. Why had his wife deserted him, she wondered? Had he raged at her a few
times too many? Had she given up competing with the sheep for his attention?

But she needed to stick to the immediate subject before exploring the man’s emotional life. ‘Do you think it could have been the Rhodesian ridgebacks who killed your sheep?’ she asked. ‘I’m sure it must have been, and he’s been trying to put the blame on Freddy and Basil. Now he’s gone and shot them. I suppose he’ll tell people he found blood on their jaws or something.’

‘He won’t tell anybody anything. You’ve got it all wrong,’ he told her. ‘He’d never let those precious ridgebacks out of his sight, believe me. It couldn’t have been them. And the coincidence would be too much, if your theory was right.’

‘So why – I mean, what—?’

‘He’s always had a down on Cedric. It goes back years. That house of his – it belonged to Cedric’s old uncle, thirty or forty years back, with some land attached. Lister’s mother was the housekeeper there. I never quite knew the whole story, but it ended up with a scandal, and when the uncle died he left the house to old Mrs L.’