Death in the Cotswolds (26 page)

‘You…you…!’ he said thickly, and the hatred on his face came as a serious shock. I forced myself to think.

‘You hoped the police would suspect me of killing two women who were my friends,’ I accused him.

‘You flatter me,’ he said, avoiding my eye. He opened his mouth to say more, but then closed it again. I took him to mean there had been no real plan behind the murders. He had simply wanted to annihilate Caroline’s Lodge. And there was quite enough Masonic mumbo-jumbo to make him think he was justified. Reams of quotations from so-called ancient texts babbling about Betrayal and people being stabbed through the heart if they revealed secrets of the Craft. It was all part of the initiation rituals, with the knife pressed against the bare breast of the new recruit to warn him of what would happen if he transgressed.

The mystery of his involvement with Caroline still nagged at me. If I had understood things right up to then, she was his next potential victim. And he
had
just slapped her face. I examined her cheek in the poor light. It looked red from the blow.

‘You truly didn’t realise it was him?’ I asked her.

‘I had no idea,’ she said with evident sincerity. ‘I was totally convinced it must have been you – or
just possibly somebody else from your pagan group. I
hated
that group, you see. They seduced you away from where you truly belonged – with me and my new Lodge.’

‘Huh?’ I choked, remembering what she’d said a few minutes earlier about hoping I’d still agree to join her. ‘But I’ve never given you reason to think I might.’

‘Verona thought you would. She could see how it was the obvious next step from paganism.’

‘So why tell Eddie about what you were doing?’

‘I didn’t. Nobody did. We struggled to keep it a secret from anybody in the area. Gaynor especially was adamant that nobody should know about it – least of all you. But despite what people think, Freemasonry isn’t really a secret society at all. I had to register my Lodge, list the members —’

‘How many members are there?’ I demanded. ‘Only the three of you?’

‘Three new initiates applied to join us this month, as it happens,’ she said with dignity. ‘By this time next year we’d have reached double figures.’

‘And were you going to execute all of them, one by one?’ I asked Eddie, aggressively. I found that despite his knife, I was not afraid of him.

Slowly, as he listened to us, his wrist had relaxed, until the point was directed more and more towards the floor. There was little risk, I judged, that he would try to use it, now there were three of us. But
its very presence suggested that he had indeed been intending to kill Caroline, there in Greenhaven’s attic. The idea was horrible.

And then, with a sense of everything coming into sharp focus, I allowed myself to remember how much I had hurt her when she had begged me to join with her in forming a new female Masonic Lodge. She had appealed to our friendship, reminding me how close we’d been, what fun we’d had when her children were small and life was fresh and good. And I had refused, not so much from a distaste for Freemasonry, as a refusal to become so permanently bonded to her. I couldn’t face a friendship as all-consuming as that threatened to become. And between us, working as some dreadful emotional glue, was the lost Emily, the dead daughter who was an integral part of those happy memories. She had only been dead a few months when Caroline approached me with her proposal. I rejected the suggestion with unnecessary violence. And in so doing, I might have saved my own life. This last thought made the whole thing infinitely worse.

It could only have been ten or fifteen minutes since I had climbed through the bathroom window. The dogs were still quiet, and nothing seemed to stir in the street outside. Cold Aston was coldly ignoring us as we enacted a surreal climax to a horrible story. I don’t think any one of us had the slightest idea of what might happen next.

Eddie was becoming more and more agitated, and he started to wave his knife with fresh vigour. ‘I could slaughter the lot of you,’ he said, in an obvious attempt to convince himself.

I almost laughed in his face. ‘The Cold Aston massacre,’ I said. ‘You’d be famous for centuries.’

‘That’s enough,’ said Thea. ‘There’s no need to say any more.’ She seemed to be more upset than any of us. The room was very dark, lit only by the street lamp outside. Our eyes had adjusted, but suddenly I realised I could not see any expressions clearly.

Eddie made an angry snort, as if thwarted. ‘Stay here,’ he ordered us, brandishing the knife again. ‘I’m going. You’ll never see me again, any of you.’ He pushed his face close to Thea’s. ‘You lied about Ariadne calling the police,’ he accused.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I truly thought that’s what she would do.’

It didn’t seem to matter. I felt limp and dirty and very
very
unhappy. ‘Let him go,’ I said.

He went, and for a few moments all we heard was footsteps, a yap from one of the dogs and the front door opening. Then there were bright lights and shouts and more barking, as if Eddie had triggered some bizarre new reality.

They arrested him without much of a struggle, and Phil came up the stairs with a bright torch. He shone it on our faces, one by one, and then took Thea into his arms.

We couldn’t have a proper conversation by torchlight. There were too many pools of darkness, too many shadowed faces and unbearable emotions. Inevitably we all trooped over to my house, including Caroline, with the dogs somehow bringing up the rear.

We made Phil explain himself first. ‘It was Ursula Ferguson,’ he said. ‘She had a call from Pamela at the hospital, when she couldn’t get hold of Ariadne, and she came over here to see if she could find you. There was nobody here, and only the dogs in Greenhaven, the whole place dark. So she drove Pamela home, and then came back here. She found Ariadne’s car, but still no sign of you two.’

‘She ought to have guessed we were in Greenhaven,’ I said.

‘Well, she did, at it happens.’

‘Why didn’t she just knock on the door?’

‘Because the house was in total darkness. And
she didn’t want to set the dogs barking like she had the first time.’

‘What on earth did she think was going on?’ Thea demanded.

‘The mind boggles,’ I said, with a bitter laugh.

‘But she didn’t give up,’ Phil continued. ‘She went round the back, and saw the ladder. She actually climbed up as far as the window, and heard voices. Enough to know there was something highly unpleasant happening. So she contacted the police.’

‘And you just sat outside waiting for something to happen,’ I accused. ‘He might have killed us all.’

‘It was a calculated risk,’ he said. ‘We had no reason to think he had a weapon, for a start. We couldn’t storm the house without alarming him, which was likely to be much more dangerous than just letting him walk away.’

‘And,’ said Thea thoughtfully, ‘unless Ursula heard everything, you couldn’t be entirely sure who exactly was the criminal. It might yet have been Caroline.’

‘Precisely,’ he said, with a fond smile at her, and a rueful grimace at his ex-wife.

It was late in the evening when we dispersed. Caroline had stayed on much longer than I had expected. She had phoned Xavier, her new husband, who promised to come and collect her.

The aftermath of Eddie Yeo’s arrest was threaded
with all kinds of extraneous considerations. The two damaged hips could not be ignored – Phil’s distress at his injured dog never quite left him, and I was weighed down even further by Sally’s accident.

But the main obstacle to a full and frank debriefing was embarrassment. Thea seemed to be aware that she had missed something between Caroline and me, but didn’t like to ask directly what it was. Instead we stuck firmly to Eddie Yeo’s extraordinary attitude to female Freemasons. Caroline managed not to look at Phil throughout the whole conversation, but she did give an account that would probably satisfy a criminal court, when it came to it.

She had always admired the Freemason brotherhood, as Phil well knew. Her father had been a Grand Master, and she had grown up quite familiar with much of the symbolism. It had seemed almost inevitable when the idea eventually dawned on her that she might establish a Lodge of her own. The procedures already existed and she had little difficulty in gaining the acquiescence of the authorities in the Grand Lodge. Then she had set about discreetly recruiting her members.

‘I knew Eddie didn’t approve, but I had no idea he took it so personally. I still can’t believe he decided he had to take it upon himself to destroy it completely. He was always rather pleasant to my face, when I saw him around.’

‘What were you doing in his car at the Horse Fair?’ Thea asked her.

Caroline giggled with threatened hysteria. ‘That, oddly enough, was nothing at all to do with the Masons. He wanted Xavier to do him a patio in his new house. He was giving me a drawing of it. I do some of the admin for the business, you see,’ she added vaguely.

Something reminded me of another niggling loose end. ‘And what about Gaynor and Oliver?’ I demanded. ‘Why was that such a secret?’

‘Secret? I don’t think it was a secret. They were just pals, as far as I know.’

‘But what was in it for
him
? Why did he drive her around when he was working?’

Caroline gave me a severe look. ‘You have never appreciated Gaynor, have you? You always thought she was a pathetic little mouse with nothing to offer anybody. But Oliver thought she was good company. He encouraged her to join my Lodge, as well, of course. He liked her stories of her childhood in Wales, and she made no demands on him.’

‘But she wanted to. She wanted to be in a proper relationship with him. She asked me to do a divination…’ I trailed off helplessly. ‘And when I told him she was dead, he didn’t seem to care at all.’

‘He cared,’ said Caroline. ‘We all cared.’

I looked at Phil. ‘Didn’t you suspect it was him,
right from the start?’ I wanted to know. ‘Right from when we found the stuff in the attic?’

‘He was on the list,’ Phil nodded. ‘But the timing was all wrong. And there were none of his prints on anything.’

Then there was a knock on the door, and I opened it to Xavier Johnson. Small, smiling, he had a boyish, rather pixie-like manner. ‘Come for Caroline,’ he said. ‘I hear there’s been a bit of bother.’

She was at my side before I could turn round. ‘Thanks for being so quick,’ she said. ‘I’m ready to go.’

‘Won’t you come in for a minute?’ I remembered to say.

Caroline gave me a look. Then she tucked her hand through Xavier’s arm in an old-fashioned gesture and steered him out into the street.

Thea left Greenhaven the next day, giving up on the impossible task of finding homes for all Helen’s things. Phil had delivered his injured dog to his sister at Painswick, where he would get some dedicated nursing.

‘Where next?’ I asked her, remembering the house-sitting work.

‘I’m not sure,’ she said. ‘But I have just seen that somebody’s advertising for a sitter in Blockley, next March. Sounds like my sort of thing.’

‘Blockley’s nice,’ I said non-committally. ‘Maybe I’ll come and see you while you’re there. Meanwhile, be nice to Phil, won’t you?’

‘Yes, Mary,’ she said with a disarming grin. ‘I’ll be very nice to Phil.’

R
EBECCA
T
OPE
lives on a smallholding in Herefordshire, with a full complement of livestock, but manages to travel the world and enjoy civilisation from time to time as well. Most of her varied experiences and activities find their way into her books, sooner or later. Her own cocker spaniel, Beulah, is the model for Hepzibah, but is unfortunately ageing much more rapidly.

www.rebeccatope.com

A Cotswold Killing
A Cotswold Ordeal
Death in the Cotswolds
A Cotswold Mystery
Blood in the Cotswolds
Slaughter in the Cotswolds
Fear in the Cotswolds
A Grave in the Cotswolds
Deception in the Cotswolds

Grave Concerns
The Sting of Death
A Market for Murder