A Grave in the Cotswolds (26 page)

‘Tom and I have only been together for a couple of years,’ she began. ‘We have properties we can sell, so money wouldn’t be a problem. We both have children who wouldn’t want to be here full-time, but obviously would visit quite a lot. I really like the farming, and would be more than happy to take a share of the work. I have worked with animals before.’

Melanie held up a hand and stopped her. ‘Sarah,’ she said with gentle reproach, ‘we covered most of that stuff this morning. This isn’t a job interview. What I’d like now is your
feelings
. Can you imagine yourself living in this community? What level of commitment do you think you feel at this moment?’

‘Well, to be really honest, I don’t think it would work. I think the pressures would outweigh the benefits where Tom and I are concerned. I notice you have a lot of unattached women here.’ She threw me a possessive look. ‘I’m afraid that would worry me.’

Melanie inhaled, and her curly hair quivered. ‘Well, thank you, Sarah, for being so honest. You have identified an issue that must, of course, be considered.’ She managed to convey that she thought it unlikely that I would be poached by any predatory females, but stranger things had happened.

Then it was my turn, and I saved everybody’s time by quickly confessing to a palpable lack of commitment. ‘I suppose we’re just not ready for something like this,’ I concluded. ‘But I am very grateful for the chance to get a closer look at what it would involve. You’ve all been very open and generous with your time.’

Melanie blossomed under this easy praise. ‘Thank you, Tom. That’s very kind of you.’

I glanced at my watch, finding it to be past three o’clock. ‘We do have to go quite soon,’ I said. ‘If that’s OK.’

‘Please don’t let us keep you. We’ve almost finished, anyway.’ Melanie swept the room, where another six people were waiting to have their say, and smiled tightly. ‘Are you planning to hear the others, or will you be leaving now?’ she asked sweetly.

I cocked an eyebrow at Thea and she began to flex her legs, preparatory to freeing herself from the beanbag that clasped her in its depths. ‘We’d better go now, I think,’ she said. ‘Sorry, everybody.’

At the door, we both turned back. ‘Good luck,’ said Thea to the room in general. ‘And thank you. It was extremely interesting.’

Outside, we stifled giggles and somehow managed to be holding hands when we got back to her car. ‘Oops – we’re still being Tom and Sarah,’ I said, feeling hot. ‘Better get back to reality.’

‘I knew it was you – I recognised the car,’ came a voice close by. Looking round, I finally located Jeremy Talbot standing between two woodpiles at the edge of the parking area. ‘What are you doing here?’

His accusing stare was locked onto Thea, as if he cared nothing for me and my part in his family’s trouble.

‘Oh!’ she said. ‘Hello, Jeremy. What a coincidence!’

‘Not really,’ he disagreed. ‘You’ve obviously come because of Auntie Greta – but why were you doing the tour with the wannabes? If she told you anything about this place, she’d have warned you to keep clear.’ He spoke in a low voice, looking round for anybody likely to overhear. Thea and I moved closer to him, the sense of a conspiracy quite irresistible.

‘You don’t like it? So why are you working for them?’

He smiled a bitter smile. ‘For a start, it’s the last place my mum would think to look for me. And it’s easy money. They pay over the odds because they feel bad about my auntie. I don’t stay here. I’ve got a place a couple of miles away.’ He looked at Thea’s car again. ‘Your wing mirror’s cracked,’ he observed.

It was an uncanny echo of Thea’s daughter and her criticisms of my car. I snorted, wondering what it was about their generation that made it so satisfying to examine cars for defects. Finally he gave me a proper look. ‘You,’ he said. ‘I didn’t believe it when I saw you this morning. What’s your game?’

‘Much the same as yours, I imagine.’

‘What – hiding from my mother?’

‘No – checking out precisely what they had against your Auntie Greta.’

He gave me a look, full of suspicion and intelligence and bravado. ‘Why would you care about that?’

I groped helplessly for an answer, unable to explain it properly even to myself. It had to do, of course, with my situation regarding the police investigation, which I felt unable to explain to Jeremy – but there was also more to it than that. ‘I’m not sure, really. We saw there was an open day and it seemed too good a chance to miss.’

‘And you two – is something going on, then?’ The directness of the question sent my stomach into alarmed spasms.

‘Of course not,’ I snarled. ‘Mind your own business.’

‘Jeremy,’ Thea tried again. ‘We really haven’t any proper excuse for being here. It’s exactly as Drew said – we wanted to see for ourselves where Mrs Simmonds had been living. And when she actually died here, it…’ she tailed off, no better able to give an account of herself than I had been. ‘We just followed our gut feeling,’ she finished feebly.

‘They killed her,’ he said flatly. ‘When she came back to see them, being all friendly and nice, they rounded on her and killed her, like dogs.’

We both stared at him wordlessly for a bit. Then I found my voice. ‘Were you here?’ I asked him.

‘For a bit. She and I were going to Paris for three days, and then on to Berlin and Moscow. We had the tickets and everything. It was cheap, because I was young and she was a pensioner, and it’s out of season. Anyway, she had plenty of money.’

‘Oh, gosh – how awful for you!’ Thea’s sympathy was genuine. She even reached out a hand to the boy, but he avoided it with a neat backward step.

‘I went home to pack my stuff, and fixed up to meet her at St Pancras. Nobody told me she was dead, so I waited, and she never showed and I missed the train. Can you see what a fool that made me feel?’ He was flushed with pain and rage and perhaps guilt.

‘Didn’t you phone her?’

‘She never had a mobile, and I never thought to call here. I thought she’d changed her mind. I was in a major strop with her.’

‘So when did you find out?’

‘My mum called me the next day. She didn’t know about our holiday.’

‘Weren’t you supposed to be at school?’ Thea demanded. ‘What was your aunt thinking of, taking you off in term time?’

‘It was only a couple of weeks early,’ he shrugged. ‘And it’s college, not school. And I hate the fucking place, if you must know. What chance do I have of a decent job, whatever they say?’

‘You look as if you can work well enough when you want to,’ she observed. ‘We saw you digging, earlier on.’

‘They don’t count that as
work
, though, do they? No exams and stuff for digging. That’s only fit for Romanians and Latvians now.’

He could be a gravedigger, I thought with some irony. There was still money to be made if you were prepared to travel to several different churchyards at short notice. Probably not enough to live on, though, even if it was cash in hand and little risk of the taxman finding out, provided the undertakers played along. Which most of them didn’t any more, unfortunately.

We all seemed to be drifting off the main subject. For a moment, I couldn’t even recall what that was. Right – Mrs Simmonds and her funeral. ‘You came to the burial,’ I said. ‘With your family. You looked quite together then. What’s all this about avoiding your mum?’

He gave me a look that seemed to contain a sort of yearning, as if needing me to understand something, but unable to voice it directly. ‘Yeah,’ he nodded. ‘The funeral was good. Just what she’d have wanted.’

‘I hope so.’

‘Jeremy,’ Thea said gently. ‘You didn’t really mean the people here killed your aunt, did you?’

‘I meant they stressed her out. She wanted to set things straight – tie up the loose ends, was what she said. But it ended up in a fight, though they’d never admit it.’

‘Was she ill?’ Thea asked.

He nodded, his face clouded with misery. ‘Yeah. She never said it right out, y’know, but she dropped little hints about it.’ He sniffed and said nothing more for a minute, before squaring his shoulders and facing us full on. ‘And now I need a bit of space, OK. I’ve got stuff I need to think about.’ It struck me that his relatives had been planning to sell his aunt’s house without consulting him. Perhaps, I thought wildly, I could let him stay in it as my tenant, if I really did gain ownership of it. He could even run the cemetery for me, if that ever materialised. Suddenly it all looked neat and almost predestined. I gave him a beaming smile that seemed to startle him.

‘Do you know the Watchetts?’ Thea asked him, surprising us both.

He shook his head. ‘Not really. Seen them once or twice.’ His features hardened. ‘None of the others came, did they? The tenants, and old Mr Kettles. Her neighbours. They all stayed away.’

‘I don’t think they knew about it,’ I told him. ‘Your mother wanted it to be kept very discreet.’

‘Yeah,’ he sneered. ‘A lot of good it did her.’

‘Oh?’

‘She thought she and Charles between them could just take over the deeds of the house, and sell it in a few weeks and pocket the cash.’ His mouth twisted. ‘I knew that wasn’t going to happen. Not that she cares a fuck what I think.’

‘How did you know?’

He gave me another complicated look. ‘I knew she’d left it to you. She told me not to be upset about it. Said you were a good bloke.’

I remembered, for the first time in hours, that I was under suspicion of murder, and therefore not at all a good bloke in society’s eyes. ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘I liked her, as well.’

‘Yeah…well, at least she got the grave as she wanted it. Good old Auntie Greta.’

‘We must go,’ I realised with a sudden panic. ‘I said I’d be home by four.’

‘Quarter to, now,’ said Jeremy, consulting his mobile. ‘You won’t make it.’ It was some seconds before it dawned on me that this meant he knew where I lived. Understandable, since I’d performed his aunt’s funeral, but still quite a surprise. I hadn’t expected him to take that much notice.

‘Well, we can do our best. Thanks, Jeremy, for talking to us,’ said Thea, coming over all brisk. ‘We’ll see you again, maybe.’

‘Can I take your phone number?’ I asked, on a whim. ‘Just in case.’

‘Just in case what?’

‘Oh…well, we might want to keep in touch, don’t you think? We both liked Auntie Greta, and want what she wanted, don’t we?’

‘OK then. Give me yours and I’ll put it in.’ With relief I handed over my phone and watched his rapid thumb add his number to my meagre list of names.

‘However did we manage before mobile phones?’ breathed Thea. ‘Now, come on. We’ll be in trouble with your wife.’

It was a careless comment, not meant unkindly at all, but it gave me a little pang.

Chapter Twenty

Karen was not remotely reproachful when I walked in at half past four. She gave me a sunny smile and poured out a big mug of tea. ‘Nice day?’ she asked.

I had resisted any temptation to invite Thea in, despite knowing she would probably be glad of a drink before her long drive home. My head was full of impressions, questions, tentative connections and the perpetual dread of what the police might decide to do to me next. Peaceful Repose burial ground was well down the list of my priorities, and my neglected family only a notch or two higher.

‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘Did anybody phone?’

‘Not a soul. It’s been blissfully quiet. The kids have been brilliant, making Easter cards and stuff. Timmy’s got religion. He won the Head Teacher’s Merit for telling the Easter story at school. He seems to have got the Gospel of St Matthew off by heart.’ She chatted brightly, the perfect happy housewife, and almost had me convinced that everything was utterly normal.

I winced at the reference to religion in the children’s school. Karen hadn’t been surprised at all by it, having worked for years as a teacher, but somehow it came as quite a shock to me to discover the casual use of prayers and mangled Bible stories and grace before meals. I had assumed that institutionalised religion had somehow withered away, but it appeared to be staging a strenuous revival, with a lot more than I ever had in my own early years.

‘I suppose he’ll grow out of it,’ I said.

‘He’ll do as he sees fit,’ she said pertly, and I registered that this was my old Karen speaking – the wife who had had opinions and stood her ground in an argument.

‘I just wish they’d go easy on the brainwashing,’ I replied, eager to seize the moment.

‘Don’t be daft,’ said Karen.

It was a topic we couldn’t agree on. I could never work out whether it was my experience as an undertaker, or something prior and deeper, which made me so sceptical. I understood quite well that ‘Abide With Me’ and the standard funeral service were consoling to almost everybody. The ritual had been carefully constructed, and stood the test of time. As far as I could see, it had almost nothing to do with the basic tenets of Christianity, where mankind had somehow been ‘redeemed’ because a man was tortured to death on a crucifix. There seemed to be a glaring logical gap between all that and the visceral human need to cling to some hope that death didn’t instantly obliterate who and what they had once been. Personally, I was content to have my molecules continue as dandelions or honeybees or even a lump of stone – but I could appreciate that this view might change as I approached my final days.

‘Well, you know what I think,’ I said, wearying suddenly of the topic.

Karen asked me nothing about my day, as I sank unresistingly into the easy jumble of family life. I took charge of the evening meal, cooking sausages in a casserole with our own onions, stored over the winter, in a sauce made from our own tomatoes – also bottled in the summer and stored. That co-housing crowd couldn’t have taught me anything about growing vegetables. Originally Karen’s department, I had taken it over after her injury, and made it my own. I liked to think that my poor showing as a money-earner was balanced out by the cash I saved on food.

Before bed, I watched a film with the children, squashed uncomfortably into our big armchair with them both on top of me. I put them to bed, reading a long chapter from
The House at Pooh Corner
, and helping them plan the coming week of their school holiday.