A Cotswold Ordeal (25 page)

Thea remembered the glimpse she’d had of Nick Franklyn, a solitary limping figure she’d taken for a vagrant. She hadn’t felt drawn to him, hadn’t really cared even when she’d found his body. If it meant she might be spared, she didn’t think it was beyond the limits of her conscience to agree to Robert’s suggestion.

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Yes what?’ Desmond snapped.

‘Yes, I can see it your way.’ Talking hurt her throat, roughened by the vomiting and constricted by fear. She realised she was very thirsty.

‘You’d say anything now, though, wouldn’t you?’ he sneered. ‘What about for the rest of our lives? I don’t think so.’

‘I would – for Julia and the others. Such a nice family. And Flora. Lovely girl.’ She was gasping for breath, not knowing if she was making any sense.

Suddenly he was shining a torch in her face, hurting her eyes with it. ‘You called the cops soon enough when you found her, didn’t you? What d’you do that for?’

‘No choice,’ breathed Thea. ‘Ask her.’

She was still thinking about Nick and the fulsome promises she was eager to make. Was it too great a betrayal to conceal a murderer? Could the dead possibly care about justice? She visualised his pale face above the damaged neck. Surely he was beyond it all now. Surely it couldn’t matter what she vowed – provided innocent people weren’t imprisoned because of it. Already she knew she couldn’t go as far as that. She frowned at the light, still bright through her closed eyelids. ‘Switch it off,’ she said.

‘Anyway,’ Robert said. ‘You’ve got the alibi. It’d be her word against yours.’

‘You won’t let me down, then, Rob?’

‘No way. It’s all sorted. Cast iron. Nobody can be in two places at once.’ He laughed grimly.

To Thea’s relief, the torch was switched off. When she opened her eyes again, she couldn’t see the tunnel mouth any longer. Everything was deeply black. Death must be like this, she thought.

Silence fell, while the situation impressed itself on the three of them. Some of the tension seemed to lift in the absence of sights or sounds. Thea waited, barely thinking. There was certainly nothing further she dared say, until Desmond revealed his decision.

‘We’ll stay here quietly for a bit,’ he ordained.

‘That’s fine,’ said Robert. ‘Doesn’t do to be too
hasty.’ But Thea could hear worry, and remembered his wife expecting him at home.

For the first time, Thea understood the meaning of the term ‘to marshal one’s thoughts’. They had to be tightly controlled in order for them to be bearable. The first one to be bound and gagged was any idea of Hepzie. To entertain an image of the frightened dog locked in the car, thirsty and hungry and miserable, could only lead to hysteria or despair. And Hollis was a no-go area, too. Intent on his mistaken quest for the wrong people, he had abandoned her to her fate and might never redeem himself. Which left the murder itself. A murder case now solved and explained, but perhaps never to be closed. Except – she jerked spastically at the fresh thought.

‘Why did you hang him in the stable?’ she croaked, before she could consider.

Desmond reached out and gripped her upper arm. ‘What?’

‘The body. Why did you hang him up there hours after he was dead?’

‘I didn’t,’ said Desmond, his voice oddly blurred.

‘Somebody else did that.’

‘Who?’

Desmond didn’t reply. After a long pause Robert spoke. ‘We don’t know,’ he said. ‘We don’t bloody know.’

Time passed in a stupor, with Desmond now and then shining the torch on his watch and prevaricating as to his best course of action. Nothing had been resolved, but Thea permitted herself the conclusion that she was not shortly to be strangled. The dangerous energy of panic had dissipated, mainly thanks to Robert Craven and his very ordinariness. Although it hadn’t been stated, she somehow assumed he had not been present at the killing of Nick Franklyn. Robert was an accessory after the fact, but not an active accomplice. But Desmond was still to be feared. Whatever that elusive element that maintained civilised behaviour in daily transactions might be labelled, it was missing in this man at this point in time. He had laid violent hands on another human being, and in doing so had crossed a line that set him apart. And he knew it. Something inside him was broken, and Thea suspected he was only just understanding the implications.

Surely, she thought, it must be midnight. She was stiff and cold and smelly. The moon had moved across the sky and no light filtered through the entrance to the tunnel. Robert was shifting restlessly, now and then humming mindlessly to himself until Desmond told him to stop.

And then the voices came. And a bright light, flickering across the entrance but not directly into it. There were people on the canal towpath, just outside the tunnel. It was so unexpected that Thea
took it for a dream and made no move. A woman spoke, clear in the silence of the night.

‘I’m going to jump down there and have a proper look.’ A dull splash followed, and the torchbeam was suddenly pointing directly at them. ‘Robert!’ came the voice. ‘Are you in there?’

Robert did not answer, and Thea wondered whether the beam was reaching far enough to make them visible. ‘There’s something in there,’ the woman called to her companions.

‘Is it him?’ It was the younger voice of Frannie Craven. Thea almost laughed. Beside her Desmond gave a hiss, like a cornered rat.

‘I can’t see. Wait a minute. Robert!’

‘It’s my mother,’ Robert muttered, barely audible.

Thea never quite knew where the strength came from, but thought it had to do with the realisation that there were now more women on the scene than men. That altered the balance and changed everything. ‘He’s here,’ she called. At the same time, she roused herself and jumped off the platform, expecting to be grabbed back by one of the men.

But she wasn’t. Wading through the mud, slipping and staggering, she approached the woman. ‘Hello!’ she called. ‘Can you see me?’ The torchlight seemed to be dimming, the tunnel mouth further away than she’d thought.

‘Who’s this?’ came the older woman’s voice. ‘Where’s Robert?’

‘Go on,’ muttered Desmond. ‘Leave me, and don’t say I’m here. I can still do some damage if I want to.’

Thea and Robert obeyed like frightened children. ‘Ma – we’re coming,’ Robert called. ‘Get out of the mud, will you.’

They pushed aside the flimsy barrier across the tunnel entrance and a confusion of hands reached down for them, and helped them onto the towpath. Voices and lights came and went. Thea took some time to register that there was a second familiar accent. ‘Cecilia?’ she queried. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘Never mind that now,’ came a tone of brisk authority. ‘Let’s just get you warm.’

They had to half carry her back to the Daneway pub. Questions went unanswered, the voices lowering as they approached the pub and neighbouring houses. Except for Robert’s mother, who repeated, ‘I knew where you’d be, my lad. Always did come to this daft tunnel when things got a bit rough. Thought I’d forgotten, I suppose. But a mother never forgets. When Frannie phoned me to ask if I knew where you’d got to, it only took me a minute to think.’

It made little sense to Thea and she didn’t care. All she wanted was her dog, and Hollis and a nice safe bed.

She tried to make her priorities clear, appealing to Robert for an assistance that he seemed deeply reluctant to provide.

‘We have to rescue Hepzie,’ she repeated. ‘She’s in Superintendent Hollis’s car, in Sapperton.’

Mysteriously nobody seemed to hear her. Cecilia drove her own silver vehicle in a direction that Thea was sure did not lead to Sapperton. Frannie and Robert were with her in the back, one on either side.

‘Please!’ she tried again. ‘Robert, tell them. Where are we going? I must get my dog.’

Again, nobody responded. Thea drew breath for a scream, wondering as she did so whether she had been right, and this was actually just a dream all along.

Then Cecilia spoke. ‘Thea, please calm down. Robert will go and get the dog for you. Everything’s under control.’ Thea heard exasperation and impatience in the voice, along with a reassuring strength of purpose.

But the absence of explanations began to strike Thea with a deep foreboding. Had she escaped from Desmond only to fall into a new kind of captivity? Did Frannie know what was going on, or had she been told to keep her questions for later?

‘Where are we going?’ she asked again. ‘What’s going on?’

‘You’re quite safe.’ Cecilia threw the words over
her shoulder. ‘I told you, it’s all under control.’

Control. The word fixed itself in Thea’s head. Cecilia Clifton was in control. Frannie was under her command, and Robert’s mother, whatever her name was, was a friend. They were Night Riders, vigilantes, righters of wrongs, in the silence of a Cotswold night. Everything was indeed under their control.

‘What about Valerie?’ she asked, aware of a missing figure. Nobody gave an answer, and Thea went back to worrying about Hepzibah. Only then did she remember that Desmond Phillips had the key to Hollis’s car. He had click-locked it and pocketed the key. Robert would have to break into it to retrieve the dog. And Robert was unlikely to want to do this. Alarm filled her as she realised that Desmond was liable to return to the car and use it to make his escape. Before driving off, he would eject the animal, or – if in a certain mood – strangle her to rid himself of the nuisance.

‘I want my dog,’ she wailed. ‘Let me go and fetch my dog.’

Cecilia heaved a loud sigh. ‘Thea, dear, do be quiet. We’re on delicate ground here, and we certainly don’t want to draw attention to ourselves. Now poor Frannie has been dying to know just what you and her husband were doing in that tunnel, but she’s got the good sense to wait until Robert can explain it all to her at home.’

Thea made a sound of outrage at being given such a low priority.

‘I’m joking,’ laughed Cecilia. ‘We know what a loose cannon you’ve been, right from your first few hours here. The fly in the ointment and that’s a huge understatement. You know,’ and she turned round quickly to emphasise the point, ‘you almost scuppered everything. If we’d had any idea that you’d seen Nick at the barn, it would all have been different.’

‘Hold on,’ begged Thea, convinced that she would never catch up with these complexities. ‘You make it sound as if you were all in the murder together. Some awful great conspiracy, the minute Juniper Court was empty. Except—’ She had been on the brink of adding something about Desmond, before remembering that he was the real wild card in the matter. Even if she didn’t betray him directly – and she was already wondering why in the world she shouldn’t – there might be a more effective moment to do it.

‘Nothing of the sort,’ snapped Cecilia. ‘The Innes brothers killed him. Some drastic falling-out in the cell led to it. I can see now that it was coming on for some time, but I never dreamed – well, too late for that now. Justice is being done, thanks to the magnificent Superintendent Hollis. Given how influential and noisy their father is, I had my doubts.’ She sighed again. ‘And of course I had hoped they might escape detection. They’re
my 
boys in a lot of ways, and I grieve for them.’

Thea leaned back in the car, overwhelmed with frustration. ‘They didn’t kill him,’ she breathed, half expecting to be ignored as before. ‘And I want my dog.’

‘Of course they killed him,’ Cecilia shot back. ‘And you have yourself to thank for their arrest.’

Thea almost didn’t take this up, tempted just to lay her head back and close her eyes. But nobody liked to be blamed for something they felt innocent of.

‘How on earth can it be my fault?’

Cecilia sighed gustily. ‘It you hadn’t directed the police to the Inneses’ barn, there’d have been no evidence against the boys. The fact of the body hanging in the pony shed would have caused hopeless confusion, with no leads or clues.’

Thea tried to match the two accounts she had heard that evening, and make sense of them. She tried to see Robert’s face, but it was too dark. He knew the truth, and must be quaking with the dread that she would disclose it.

‘So why do you think Robert was hiding in the tunnel?’ she asked, feeling that she had at last found something intelligent to say.

‘Loss of nerve, I assume,’ said Cecilia. ‘Keeping himself out of harm’s way.’

Robert’s wife and mother each made sounds, but spoke no actual words. Robert himself muttered

‘Hey, steady on,’ in a feeble protest.

‘Sorry, Rob,’ Cecilia threw over her shoulder. ‘I’m sure you had your reasons.’ She turned the car abruptly to the right, announcing, ‘We’re here now, look. We’ll go inside and have a milky drink, and find Thea a bed for the night. It’s all going to be fine, dear. Believe me.’

Thea barely glanced at the house as she was bundled in through the front door. It was old, with subtle lighting and small rooms. She was settled into a soft old sofa facing a fireplace that looked as if it was well used in winter.

Seeking an ally, she focused on Robert’s mother, a wiry little woman in her mid sixties, whose eyes followed her son constantly. When Frannie came into view, the eyes would harden briefly and the lips tighten. In calmer circumstances, Thea would have found the trio fascinating. As it was, they were merely obstacles to her urgent quest, unacknowledged captors side-stepping her concerns. It seemed the only one willing to speak to her at all was Cecilia.

It was barely thirty minutes since they’d left the tunnel. Desmond could well still be lying low there, waiting until he was sure everybody had gone. But he wouldn’t wait forever. He was liable to work out for himself that Thea’s silence would be fragile. Then he would run along the path to Sapperton, retrieve Hollis’s car, and do unspeakable things to
Thea’s dog. She sat on the sofa, rerunning this scenario in a fever of foreboding, until she had gathered the energy to act.

The others were in the kitchen, muttering amongst themselves. Their confidence that she wouldn’t jump up and run outside screaming for help was annoyingly patronising. She almost opted for that very course, before pausing to think.