Trouble in the Cotswolds (The Cotswold Mysteries) (19 page)

‘We discussed it,’ said Gladwin, ‘and decided not to take further action. Mrs Callendar has a strong alibi for Saturday afternoon. The only way she could be implicated is if others in her family are lying.’

‘A conspiracy!’ crowed Drew. ‘All in it together. So you just need to wait for one of them to crack and drop the others in it. Isn’t that what happens?’

Gladwin regarded him with diminished liking. She frowned. She pursed her lips. ‘Generally not,’ she said tightly. ‘When a number of people have a great deal to lose, they tend to very successfully deceive the police and conceal evidence for as long as necessary.’

‘But you’d still really like to know what she removed from next door,’ Thea said. ‘Wouldn’t you?’

‘Among many other things, yes I would.’

An electronic buzzing made Thea look at Timmy, assuming it was his Nintendo, but Gladwin reached for a phone in her bag and answered it. Within seconds she was on her feet, flapping her free hand at Drew, giving wordless instructions that he failed to interpret. Thea was quicker. ‘She wants something to write with,’ she said, recalling a device Gladwin had used before – a sort of electronic notepad. Drew widened his eyes helplessly.

‘Hang on,’ Gladwin told her caller. ‘Sorry,’ she said
to Thea and Drew. ‘I’m being terribly disorganised. I don’t really need to make notes. There’s some sort of incident at the pub. Higgins thinks I ought to go and see.’ She replaced the phone to her ear. ‘I’m only a minute away. I’ll meet you there, okay?’

‘Can we come?’ Drew asked like an eager child, when she’d finished.

‘Of course not. What about Timmy?’

‘What’s happening? Did Jeremy say?’ Thea was sharing some of Gladwin’s impatience with Drew’s flippancy. He seemed to grasp this, and subsided with a resigned expression.

‘He didn’t know. Normally we – CID, I mean – wouldn’t be concerned with something like this. It’s only because of what happened here that Higgins got the call.’

‘Poor old Stanton,’ Thea realised. ‘They’ll be getting special treatment until the whole case is closed. It’s probably just a rowdy Christmas sing-song.’

‘Probably,’ Gladwin nodded, pulling on her jacket. ‘I suppose I’d better drive there.’

‘It’d take ten minutes at least to walk it. And it’s up a steep hill at the end.’

‘That clinches it. See you soon.’ And she was gone before anyone could say another word.

‘It’s four o’clock,’ noted Drew, a moment later. ‘We can only stay another hour at most.’

‘And it’s dark already,’ sighed Thea, feeling an inner darkness that matched the world beyond the windows.
‘I suppose you’ll be getting excited about Christmas any minute now,’ she said to Timmy, who was still bent over the toy, but threw increasingly anxious glances from one adult to another.

‘We’re not going home yet, are we?’ he asked Drew. ‘The lady must be coming back.’

‘Why must she?’

‘She said I had to give the DS back.’

‘So she did. I think she might have forgotten about it.’

‘Keep playing while you can,’ Thea advised.

‘Somebody at the door,’ Drew observed, as a light tap was heard.

Timmy gripped the Nintendo more tightly, and adopted a mulish expression. ‘It’s okay,’ said Thea, peering out of the window. ‘It’s not Gladwin.’

‘I’ll go and see, shall I?’ Drew said, with another dash of his earlier sarcasm. Before Thea could apply herself to the question of exactly what was annoying him, he had gone. Had she been patronising him somehow? Had she missed some important remark, or inadvertently said something hurtful? She couldn’t think of anything.

He returned followed by a young man who Thea found familiar, but could not immediately place. ‘Hello,’ he said shyly. ‘I’m Richard. I was here on Saturday. I mean – in the street. When—’ he looked worriedly at Timmy, ‘you know. When there was that trouble next door.’

‘Of course! Now I recognise you. The student,’ said Thea, still staring at him. ‘What do you want?’

‘How do you know I’m a student?’

‘Oh – I just guessed. Home for Christmas?’

‘Actually, no. I live in Scotland.’ Only then did she register his accent. ‘And I’m a postgraduate, doing a doctorate.’

‘Good Lord! How old are you?’

‘Twenty-four.’

‘You look nineteen. What subject?’

‘Biochemistry.’

‘Why am I not surprised?’ said Thea, with a well-worn sense of impending drama.

Drew fidgeted in the doorway, uncertain of his role. Richard had barely glanced at him once he was inside the house, fixing all his attention on Thea.

‘You tell me,’ he said. ‘How can you possibly have expected me to say that?’

‘It just seems to be a theme around here. The Callendar connection, basically. I just bet your thesis has something to do with horses.’

‘Not directly. It’s at a much more molecular level than any particular species. It’s essentially to do with the deterioration and preservation of blood cells.’

‘Fascinating. So why are you here on Christmas Eve?’

‘I wanted to talk to you about Saturday.’ Again he glanced at Timmy. ‘Except you’ve got people, so I suppose I should go. Can I come back later in the week?’

‘Did you know Natasha?’

‘A bit. We did some lab work together a few months ago.’

‘What were you doing outside her house that afternoon?’

‘Um – I was rather hoping to be the one to ask the questions.’ He spoke diffidently, but there was a determined look in his eye. ‘I was wondering whether Mrs Callendar has been back here, since the … since Saturday?’

‘Why?’

‘There were some … samples … that Natasha was keeping safe for me. It’s nothing sinister, but I didn’t want them to get muddled up with anything in the laboratory, so she kept them in a special storage unit she had upstairs. Marian Callendar knew about it – the samples sort of belong to her, in fact. I doubt whether the police would have found them, so they might well still be there. But if the power gets turned off in the house, then they’ll be ruined. I tried to ask Marian what we should do, and she brushed me off. That made me think she’d already been here ahead of me. And if she had, it would make sense for her to go round the back, via this house. I’ve been all round, and that’s the only realistic way to get in.’

‘Where do you live?’

‘Laverton. I’m lodging with a family.’

‘Not the Wilsons?’ Thea could not resist asking.

‘No. They’re called Perkins. Why?’

‘Just checking,’ she smiled. ‘It would be a
coincidence, but I’ve learnt that coincidences are really very common.’

Richard had no answer to this, but shifted from one foot to another like an awkward teenager. ‘Um …’ he began.

‘We can’t let him, can we?’ said Drew slowly. ‘We can’t be party to a completely illegal forced entry into a house that’s been sealed by the police.’

Thea quailed inwardly at this reminder that she had already committed exactly such a misdemeanour when she let Marian Callendar use the back way. ‘Not really,’ she said. ‘Gladwin could come back at any moment and catch us.’

‘Who?’ asked Richard.

‘She’s the SIO, Detective Superintendent Sonia Gladwin. She’s been called to some sort of fracas at the pub.’

‘Fracas?’ It was Drew picking her up on the word. ‘Is that what it is?’

‘Shut up,’ she told him, none too gently. ‘It’s the word the police use.’

‘Sounds as if you know a bit about the way the police work,’ observed Richard. ‘And you’re matey with the top banana lady. Just my luck.’

‘Banana lady?’ came a little echo from Timmy. He smiled tentatively as if noticing a joke that the others had missed.

‘You can sit down if you like,’ Thea invited ungraciously. ‘If you’re staying, that is.’

‘Why would he?’ Drew looked directly at her, searching her face. ‘If we won’t let him do what he came for, he may as well go again. Unless you want to ask him some more questions.’

She frowned at him in puzzlement. Something had been getting him increasingly irritable for the past hour or more. Ever since Gladwin had turned up. The penny dropped with an almost audible clatter, bringing with it a surge of warm emotion. He wanted her to himself! He wasn’t really interested in murders or mysterious samples or even fights in the pub. He just wanted to spend time with Thea on this difficult Christmas Eve when his wife was dead and his daughter unwell.

Except he had been the one to stop and worry about the pale woman in the woods. He had asked Gladwin if he could go with her to the pub. He had given total attention to Thea’s account of events since Friday. She’d got it wrong, then. Something else was bothering him.

‘I should go,’ dithered Richard. ‘It’s dark. I’ll get lost.’

‘Why haven’t you gone home for Christmas?’ Thea wondered. ‘Have you
walked
here? Do you know something about Natasha’s death?’ The questions flooded out of her, almost involuntarily. He had
been
there on Saturday afternoon, slouching boyishly in the background, like a face in a picture that gathered significance the more you looked at it. He might be a missing link, a crucial factor. ‘Why were you here when it happened? What were you doing?’

‘Steady on!’ he protested. ‘You’re worse than the rozzers. I’m not answerable to you. I’ve told you everything you need to know. More, if anything.’

‘The Scots make more fuss about the New Year than Christmas,’ said Drew, answering her first question on Richard’s behalf.

The implied support seemed to fortify the young man. ‘Listen – just you three stay in here, doing whatever you were doing before I came. Pretend I’m not here. I’m leaving – okay? I’ll go. You don’t need to show me out.’

Drew was quick to grasp the underlying message. ‘Why not?’ he asked Thea, in a sudden change of mind. ‘What does it matter to us?’

‘I told Gladwin when Marian Callendar did it. I’ll tell her about you, as well,’ she warned Richard.

‘Snitch.’

Drew and Timmy both snorted identical laughs at that. Thea felt seriously and unfairly outnumbered. She regarded herself as being firmly on the side of the law and its enforcement agents, but there had been moments when she had sympathised with wrongdoers, or felt the police were misguided. She suspected there could be circumstances where she might add her weight to the balance in favour of a suspect, against the official agencies. There had been times when she’d felt a definite affection for someone who turned out to have done terrible things. This Richard was a likeable fellow, with no sign of malice in him. She remembered feeling
sorry for the trauma he appeared to be suffering in the aftermath of Natasha’s murder.

‘You said when you first got here that you wanted to talk about Saturday. Then you wanted to know whether Mrs Callendar had been into Natasha’s house. Now you want to get in there yourself. What’s next?’

‘I never actually said that. It was you, who gave it away just now.’ He raised one eyebrow at her, like a schoolmaster pointing out the subtext of an argument. ‘It’s all smoke and whispers, isn’t it? None of us has said anything for definite.’

‘You mean, I haven’t got anything concrete to tell the police. No
evidence.
’

‘Precisely.’ The Scots emphasis gave the word an almost comical force. ‘You’d make a terrible witness in a court of law.’

‘Fortunately, I’ve never been called upon to put that to the test,’ she said, bravely, closing her mind to the knowledge that recent events in Winchcombe were almost certain to lead to her being called as a witness when the trial eventually took place. By then, she feared, she would have forgotten all but the crudest basic facts. The system was deplorable, with its delays and games and subtle tricks.

‘Let’s get on with it,’ said Drew. ‘Timmy and I are going to have to go in a minute.’

A sad resignation gripped her. Drew’s visit, so delightfully unexpected, had turned into a fractured series of interruptions. She had only ever seen him in the
process of unravelling a crime. All their encounters had been overshadowed by police and violence and fears for their own safety. They’d had no chance to be normal, to sit companionably together in front of a film, or stroll along a Cotswold footpath. The closest they had come had been at Cranham, earlier that year, when he had brought both his children along. Drew’s children were always going to be part of the picture, anyway, not to mention Maggs and Den and the constant demands of his business.

She wanted to beg him not to go. She shuddered at the prospect of forced jollity on TV as the only way of passing a long dark Christmas Eve. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘It’s been rather a messy visit, hasn’t it?’

‘It’s not finished yet,’ he said firmly. ‘I vote we let Richard do what he has to do, make another pot of tea, and decide on our New Year Resolutions.’ Then he winked at her, which she remembered she’d done herself, for the first time in her life, very shortly after first meeting him. Then, she had meant him to feel included, reassured. Now she drew a very similar conclusion, with the roles reversed. He meant she shouldn’t worry, that he wasn’t going to abandon her. That he was speaking for Richard’s benefit, but his words had a different, deeper meaning for her.

She wondered if something were expected of her – something she ought to say to Richard or Timmy? Some phone call she should make, or crucial detail she should remember. There was something ominous in the
air, beyond the imminence of being left all on her own.

‘Oh, all right,’ she said. ‘Off you go, Richard. Let yourself out, will you? I’ve got myself too comfortable to get up.’

The young man wasted no time. ‘Thanks!’ he crowed. ‘You won’t be sorry. See you again, maybe.’

‘Bye,’ she said, thinking that she very probably
would
be sorry, if only because he’d just said what he did. And thinking, too, that she was highly unlikely ever to see him again.

He went out into the hallway and closed the door behind him. Half a second before he could have had time to get into the kitchen, she remembered Blondie. ‘No – wait!’ she called.

Too late. There was a throaty bark, a snarl and a cry. ‘Oh, God!’ cried Thea. ‘What’s she done to him?’

Drew had moved to his son’s side, and was watching his incomprehensible Pokemon antics. He looked up much more slowly than Thea might have wished. ‘The dog – she’s attacking him. Can’t you hear?’ Her own dog, who had been at her side on the sofa, as usual, gave a mildly interested yap. ‘Shut up!’ Thea told her fiercely. ‘Drew – go and see what’s happening, while I hold her. I’ve no idea what she might do if we let her join in.’ A day earlier, she would have sworn that her spaniel was entirely incapable of wreaking damage on anybody. Now she wasn’t so sure.