Shadows in the Cotswolds (14 page)

Gladwin sent Thea away, making a great effort to be pleasant, when it was obvious that she was deeply troubled by events of the past thirty hours. Two deaths in so short a time threw a glaring searchlight on her and her colleagues. If they had been simultaneous, that might have made more sense. But the chilling implications of a calculating killer picking off victims a day at a time were inescapably terrifying. ‘If the Jason chap turns up, hold onto him, will you?’ Gladwin asked, having elicited an account of Thea’s movements since they had parted earlier. The possibility that he had hurtled down to Silk Mill Lane, slaughtered Reuben and laid him out in the alley for the others to find, was remote, but initially the only half-baked idea they had. ‘It’s too soon, of course, for this sort of thinking,’ Gladwin admitted. ‘But we obviously have to speak to him.’

Fraser and Mo were in Oliver’s house, and they stood in a traumatised circle with Thea and her mother, all more or less stunned. There was no sign of Jason. ‘Something is going on,’ Thea challenged them. ‘This whole thing is aimed at one of us, somehow.’

They all looked at her. Mo laughed harshly. Her mother put a hand flat to her chest. ‘Not
me
, Thea. It can’t possibly have anything to do with me.’

Thea was inclined to agree with her, before she caught Fraser’s eye. There was profound doubt as to his actual connection to her mother, whether he really was who he said he was. Gladwin herself had registered this, promising to investigate the authenticity of his claims. Was it possible that Fraser was somehow orchestrating the murders in order to terrify Maureen into his welcoming arms? It seemed insanely melodramatic to imagine such a thing. But he
could
have done something of the sort. He could be using Jason as his hitman.

And Thea herself had been dragooned into the house-sitting by the Meadows brothers, with her mother liaising between them. She had been manipulated into it, not so very subtly. She had been put in position, given sight of the mysterious Melissa, and then somehow manoeuvred into finding the body in the alley. But
how
had that been done? Was it not her own idea to go that way? Nobody had steered her, and certainly her mother had no knowledge of the lower streets of Winchcombe.

Except nothing was certain. Her mother knew the alleys of Tewkesbury, after all. Perhaps she had explored Winchcombe, too, without mentioning the fact. Perhaps her first loyalties now lay with Fraser, and whatever he demanded was blindly acceded to. It felt deeply improbable, but not entirely out of the question.

Mo was capable of anything, if Thea was any judge. There was a strong sense of lawlessness about her, a flouting of any regulation that struck her as irrelevant. The sort of woman who would smoke in a public building and refuse to wear a seat belt. You had to respect a person like that, with such a solid sense of individual worth and natural human entitlement. Thea had moments when she was not too dissimilar herself; when the law cried out for contempt rather than obedience.

Jason was impossible to assess, but he appeared to have a good heart and an easy charm. In wartime he would have been a spiv, a cheerful chappie selling nylon stockings on the black market and stashing away a lot of cash into the bargain. Jason, too, might be capable of anything.

All these impressions were flooding her mind as she fondled her dog and tried to obliterate the image of the dead Reuben. It was not so difficult to do – she had already done it with the dead Melissa of the previous day. Any hauntings that the dead might perpetrate were rarely visual ones. They were obligations and
anxieties, perpetual demands for attention and the righting of wrongs. Carl, dead for three years now, was a faceless presence somewhere in her bones, a black cloud where her future should have been. Any guilt accrued directly and solely to the driver of the vehicle that had killed him, and Thea had never found it easy to reproach him. She had driven every bit as badly in her time, as had Carl, and she was convinced that everybody had. The courts understood that, and gave leniency to dangerous drivers, which Thea saw no reason to challenge.

But murder was altogether different. Until the killer was tracked down and punished, there was no possibility of order and trust. Suspicion ran like wildfire through every relationship in the victim’s life. Rage and retribution blossomed and turned inwards, without an external object on which to vent it. You absolutely had to do everything in your power to assist the course of justice. It was unavoidable, as Thea knew already, and confirmed to herself again now.

Her mother might be expected to feel something the same, although they had never really talked in such terms. The events of the previous year in Lower Slaughter, involving Thea’s sister Emily, had strained their mother’s endurance almost to breaking point. She had been permitted to avoid direct confrontation with the truth, and only slowly, over the ensuing months, did she acquire the courage to accept what had happened in all its shame and sadness.

‘That poor young man!’ her mother sighed, as if to validate some of Thea’s chaotic thoughts. ‘I can’t stop thinking about him. It’s all the more dreadful because I can’t say I liked him, from the little I saw of him yesterday.’

‘I know what you mean,’ agreed Thea, in some surprise. She had forgotten until then that she, too, had taken a mild dislike to Reuben Hardy. It added a layer of queasy self-reproach to the other emotions, she realised. When someone you regarded with aversion was cruelly killed, it was all too horribly easy to wonder if somehow you’d brought about his death. As if you might have accidentally uttered a magic spell, and the powers of darkness had misunderstood the degree of your animosity.

Fraser spoke from the armchair, where he had sat bowed and silent for several minutes. ‘I imagine it was me the killer had in mind, if your thesis is correct. After all, that girl told you she was my daughter. It seems I am intended as a target of some sort.’ He raised haggard eyes to Thea. ‘At least that’s how it feels. The way the bodies were both laid out, as if in their coffins – that is plainly no coincidence. And equally plainly, it was aimed at me.’

Thea frowned at him. ‘What do you mean?’

Mo made a startled little cry as an idea struck her. ‘Dad! That doesn’t make any sense. You’ve never worked in the business. And it’s not as if—’ She stopped herself, with an awkward cough. ‘I
mean … somebody would have to be
insane
to kill two people just because …’

‘You know nothing about it,’ he said hollowly. ‘You were never interested, never understood the implications.’

Thea looked at her mother, and raised her eyebrows in an urgent question. Maureen Johnstone shrugged. ‘I suppose they’re talking about the undertaker business,’ she said. ‘I told you that’s what the Meadows family did.’

The connection hardly registered with Thea as significant. For her, the only association she could find with undertaking was Drew Slocombe and his natural burials.

Fraser spoke again, more quickly than before. ‘Where’s Jason? He’ll be wondering what’s become of us by now. Mo – can’t you phone him?’

Mo laughed, a donkey-like bray that caught Thea’s attention. ‘Jason doesn’t do mobile phones. It drives everybody mad. He says it would turn him into a caricature, whatever that might mean.’

Fraser echoed the laugh, a single nasal honk that contained no vestige of mirth. Again Thea was alerted. ‘The murdered girl!’ she remembered. ‘She laughed like you two.’ She stared hard at the old man. ‘And she knew so much about you. She knew about my mother, and Mo and how this house was laid out. I’d forgotten that part of our conversation until now. She was so relaxed and open about your family, calling
your brother
Uncle Ollie
. She knew where to find that memory stick. She went straight to it.’ At least she had told Gladwin that part of the encounter, she consoled herself. But after Fraser’s insistence that the body was not that of anyone he knew, she had not returned to the detective with her own contrary evidence. ‘I ought to find Sonia and tell her,’ she added recklessly.

‘Shut up,’ snarled Mo, her colour heightening. ‘You’ve been duped, you silly thing. Oldest trick in the book – easier than ever these days. Just find out a few basic facts, and drop them in, and people are always convinced. She was conning you. Do you think I wouldn’t know if I had a young sister?’

‘I think that’s quite possible, actually. She called you “Mo”. How would she find that out? You must be officially Maureen.’

‘I’ve got my own Facebook page, with family background, where I put my name as Mo. Uncle Ollie gets a mention, because he’s quite a well-known photographer. There was a big book out last year,
Birds of Britain
, that he illustrated. I drop his name all the time. I joke that, as he’s childless, I might inherit some of the dosh.’

‘Mo!’ Fraser reproached. ‘I hope you don’t do that. That would be …’ He grimaced, lost for the right word.

‘Tactless. Yes, Dad, I know. But that’s me, isn’t it?’

‘They’re all on Facebook,’ confirmed Thea’s mother. ‘That’s how Fraser and I found each other again. It’s
happening all over the place. It’s a sign of the times. So that girl, whoever she was, could easily have fooled you. Mo’s right about that.’

Thea was confronted by three emphatic faces, all apparently eager to persuade her. It came close to working. ‘But the
laugh
,’ she persisted. ‘And she did look like you,’ she addressed Fraser. ‘Tall, fair, small ears. Even the walk was similar.’

‘Again, it’s easy to see similarities if you’re looking for them,’ said Fraser. ‘If this has been some elaborate plot against my family, then just such a girl would be chosen for the job, wouldn’t she?’ He spoke slowly, his gaze on a corner of the carpet. Thea suspected that something else was going through his mind, as he spoke.

‘And then murdered,’ she said, suddenly angry. ‘Employed as a spy, on the first day I was going to be here, sent to fetch that memory stick and then killed before she’d gone three hundred yards. So
who
? Who masterminded this ghastly scheme – and why kill Reuben the very next day? What did
he
have to do with it?’

‘What’s this memory stick you keep on about?’ asked Mo. ‘First I’ve heard of it.’

Thea clamped her lips together. It was probably very foolish of her to have mentioned it. The police routinely trusted her to keep such salient details to herself, and sometimes their trust was misplaced, she noted with chagrin. ‘I probably shouldn’t have said
anything about that,’ she explained. ‘It makes things more difficult for the police if people know stuff like that.’

‘You’re a spy yourself, aren’t you?’ Mo accused. ‘You’re so buddy-buddy with that detective woman, telling her your stupid ideas about our family. Reporting every word we’ve said to you, I shouldn’t be surprised. Poor Uncle Ollie won’t know what he’s let himself in for.’

‘Be quiet, Mo,’ ordered her father. ‘Don’t bring Oliver into this, for God’s sake. He’s got enough to worry about as it is.’

There was a key to all this, Thea told herself. Some crucial connection or motivation that would explain everything. A code had to be broken, so that the incomprehensibly garbled impressions and facts could be deciphered. It was almost within her grasp, she believed. But she was completely confused as things stood. How much did her mother understand about what had happened? How important was the absent Oliver to the story?
And who was the woman who called herself Melissa?

Gladwin would be comprehensively tied up with the aftermath of the second murder, as well as the intensive efforts to identify the dead woman of the previous day. But Thea felt obliged to see her again and complete her account of everything Melissa had said to her on Saturday. The scraps she had conveyed thus far were looking more and more insubstantial, as new exchanges came back to her. Remembering everything a person had said, without prompting, was no simple task, even a day or two after the event. There had been no indication at the time that the conversation would have to be recalled. Much of it had been casual chat, routine explanations and comments that may or may not have been carefully rehearsed as part of an elaborate deception. Much of the trick of it, in that case, would be to keep it light and easy, throwing
out reassurances and telling details as part of the smokescreen.

But I did challenge her
, Thea remembered.
I insisted she convince me, before I let her into the house
. And she had readily been convinced. The notion that Melissa had been prepared for just such a challenge now seemed all too credible. But if that were so, then the blithe young woman had not understood how dangerous her associates were. Whoever had instructed her in the facts of the Meadows family had given her no hint that she would be slaughtered when the task was accomplished. And the task, it seemed obvious now, was the acquisition of the memory stick.

But even that made little sense. Why not just burgle the house? It was obvious that ‘they’ – the shadowy mind behind the entire structure – knew precisely where it was, because they had told Melissa how to find it. Why go to such lengths to construct a fake daughter and niece and fool the hapless house-sitter with elaborate acting?

Had Oliver somehow arranged it himself? He would know the exact timings, and the location of the boxes in his house. He could easily have organised an alibi for himself, wherever he was, and maintain a steadfast innocence of all that had happened. And he struck Thea as a deeply improbable murderer. He was too fragile, surely? One kick to his shin, and he would topple. And Fraser was scarcely more robust. Fraser, if guilty of anything, was likely to be the perpetrator
of a far more subtle crime – a crime against her own mother.

And there was that laugh. Were laughs hereditary? Would you laugh the same as your father, even if you had never met him? Thea was sceptical of the claims of separated twins to have led identical lives, in which they choose the same colour schemes for their bathrooms and both marry men called Steve and go to a remote Cornish village for their holidays every year. Thea suspected that any two people, chosen at random, would find as many points in common, once they started to search for them.

But laughing was a peculiar thing. Her father and Damien both cackled in exactly the same way – but then Damien had grown up hearing it, and could easily have imitated it from his first months. Nobody else in Thea’s family did it – and here were
three
people all braying in the same weird way: Mo, Fraser and Melissa.

She tried to guess where Gladwin might be and what she might be doing, so soon after discovering a second body. It was close to two o’clock and nobody had yet had any lunch. Any social requirement to escort her mother and the others to a local hostelry seemed to have evaporated. There was an aimless hanging about that was getting increasingly on her nerves. She remembered Fraser and her mother saying they planned to stay another night, and wondered whether the events of the morning had changed their
minds. They would probably opt to stay, assuming that Thea could not be left; that at least one person must remain on guard, staying overnight again. Her mind suggested that this was in fact not a bad idea, but her feelings rebelled. She preferred to be alone. She was thoroughly accustomed to her own company, whether in Witney or one of the house-sits. She understood her own rhythms and quirks, and found another person jangling.
Two
other people comprised a crowd.

‘Listen,’ she began, ‘we can’t just mess about here, with nothing to do. I think you should all go and look for Jason, and then go home. I’ll be fine. Sonia will probably want to see me before long, anyway.’

‘We’re in the way,’ summarised Mo, with a forgiving smile. ‘And I for one am hungry.’

‘And where
is
Jason?’ asked Thea’s mother. ‘Will he still be waiting for us in that pub? It’s an hour and a half later than we said.’

‘He’ll have had some lunch on his own, and then he’ll have to come back for me,’ Mo pointed out. ‘Otherwise I won’t be able to get home.’

‘You could come with us,’ said Fraser. ‘I imagine I could stay with you again tonight if necessary.’

Mo rolled her eyes exaggeratedly. ‘Yes, I imagine you could, Pa. My home is your home now. I thought we’d established that. But I can’t believe Jason would just abandon me.’

‘But my car’s at Damien’s,’ said Maureen, showing
little faith in Jason’s reliability. ‘We’ll have to go there first.’

Thea washed her hands of their complicated logistics, and wandered into the kitchen, thinking she might make herself a sandwich. Her spaniel went with her, plainly sharing her desire for some peace and quiet. ‘I suppose we’re being rather rude,’ Thea whispered to the dog. ‘But there’s a limit to hospitality, don’t you think?’

Hepzie gave a slow wag and sniffed idly at the table leg.

‘Are you making some for us all?’ Her mother was in the doorway, watching the sandwich preparations. ‘I’ve hardly eaten anything today. I’m rumbling.’

‘There isn’t enough bread. I never reckoned on catering for a crowd.’

‘Don’t be so mean, Thea. Nothing that’s happened was what we expected. You have to rise to the occasion. Can’t you bake a few potatoes or something?’ The older woman went through the kitchen cupboards, bringing out pasta, tomato sauce, crispbread, along with jars of honey, Marmite and jam. ‘Look at all this!’ she crowed. ‘And there’s sure to be butter and cheese in the fridge.’

Thea stood back and let her mother get on with it. She
was
being mean, she supposed, if there was an assumption that she was hostess to all the visitors. Somehow she could not persuade herself that the role was appropriate. She had been in the house for less
than twenty-four hours when everything descended into chaos, and she was still trying to regain her balance. She might have been making sandwiches for a murderer – especially if Jason reappeared. The longer he was gone, the more he seemed the most obvious candidate for villainy. She might be next on his list of victims. Or her mother might. Fraser could be plotting to kill her, as revenge for her cavalier treatment of him fifty years ago. She had broken his heart and then forgotten all about him. It was not difficult to imagine that he had brooded over it ever since, intent on making her pay for the damage she had so carelessly done to him.

Maureen’s efforts to provide sustenance were poorly rewarded. She carried a plate of fractured crispbreads spread with Marmite and scraps of cheese, back into the living room. ‘They’re a bit stale, I’m afraid,’ she laughed. ‘And they mostly broke when I tried to spread the butter on them.’ Mo took a scrap, but clearly found it unpalatable. ‘I could boil up some pasta, and put tomato sauce on it,’ Maureen offered.

‘Don’t bother,’ said Fraser tetchily. ‘We’ll go. We can find something in town on the way. I seem to remember a Co-op or something, down North Street.’

‘What about Jason?’ asked Thea.

‘He can fend for himself,’ said Mo. ‘He’s big and ugly enough to sort himself out. Anyway, I think we’ll find him out there somewhere. He could even be sitting
in the car waiting for me. He does that, playing with his laptop. He loves his laptop,’ she added fondly.

‘The police …’ began Thea. ‘Surely …?’

‘What?’ Mo was challenging. ‘You think they think he killed that bloke? Why him? Why not any one of the five thousand people who live here?’

‘Good question,’ Thea realised. ‘Except …’

‘You’ve convinced yourself this all has something to do with our family, haven’t you? You’re putting down the poison against us in that detective’s mind.’

Thea felt breathless at the injustice. Her thoughts lost any coherence they might have had, as she stared at the big confident woman. ‘No,’ she gasped. ‘Not at all. But that girl – Melissa. She came
here
, to this house, minutes before she was killed. Who was she? Why did she come? She
knew
about you all. And Reuben Hardy seemed to know something, as well. He was teasing us yesterday, making some sort of hint about Oliver and the rest of you. Fraser heard him – didn’t you?’

Fraser was at the door, intent on departure, not listening. ‘I’ve had enough,’ he rumbled. ‘Every damned time I come here, there’s trouble. It’s that brother of mine – he casts a pall over everything he touches. He’s a jinx – we always said so, right from when he was little. He brings it all on himself.’ His eyes clouded. ‘And yet … you can’t help but feel sorry for him. He’s had a rotten life, poor old chap.’

‘Come on, Dad,’ urged Mo. ‘This isn’t the time for all that. Uncle Ollie’s perfectly all right, tucked away
here with his birds. He’ll be back in a little while, no harm done.’

Fraser heaved a great sigh. ‘Cedric was never right, you know. That’s where it all started. His mother dying the way she did, sent him off his rocker, and nobody even noticed until it was too late.’

‘Who’s Cedric?’ Thea asked her mother in an undertone.

‘The older brother,’ was the whispered reply. ‘Half-brother, actually. Inherited the business. Always been in the shadows.’

Whoever he might be, if he was Fraser and Oliver’s older brother by a previous wife, he was probably well into his eighties and therefore scarcely relevant to any of the matters in hand. Mo seemed to feel the same. ‘Never mind Cedric,’ she said briskly. ‘That’s all being dealt with. We don’t have to worry ourselves about it. We’ve gone over all that.’

‘But I
should
be there,’ moaned the old man. ‘Not let Ollie carry it on his own. I could be lending him a shoulder, instead of playing silly buggers here.’

Silly buggers
seemed to Thea a somewhat dismissive way to refer to two brutal murders, if that was what he meant. Perhaps he was talking about her mother, or Mo, or the tepid quest for the missing Jason. Whatever he meant, there was an implication that somewhere there had been a plan, a covert agreement that involved Thea and Thistledown and possibly the murdered Melissa. Or so her muddled mind suspected. Because
her mind was increasingly muddled. The Meadows family seemed to comprise a lot of very elderly men, living mainly in the past and suffering from a package of unpleasant feelings, including guilt for certain failures or misdeeds. ‘Who runs the business now?’ she asked. ‘Or has it been sold to that American outfit?’

Mo gripped her father’s elbow and pulled open the door. ‘What’s that to do with anything?’ she demanded impatiently.

‘Nothing. I’m just interested. I’d have liked to talk a bit more about it. I have a friend who’s an undertaker, as it happens.’

‘Well, it’s still in the family. My cousin Henry runs it. He took over from Cedric a few years back. It’s doing very well.’

Fraser gave the family bray. ‘Doing very well,’ he mimicked. ‘The bloody man’s making millions.’

‘Hardly,’ said Mo. ‘That is, only if he did sell it, and he’s not going to do that, is he?’

Fraser mumbled something, and let himself be pushed down the path towards Vineyard Street. Thea let them go, past caring what would become of her mother, who might find herself stranded without a car, but who showed no sign of going back with the man she arrived with. Only gradually did this strike Thea as peculiar. ‘Are you staying, then, Mum?’ she asked.

‘I think I am,’ she said slowly. ‘There’s too much going on. I can’t just
leave
you, can I?’

Fraser seemed oblivious to this abandonment. He
did not turn back to see where his friend might be. ‘He doesn’t seem to have noticed,’ said Thea. ‘Not much of a boyfriend, is he?’

Maureen smiled ruefully. ‘He’s not a boyfriend at all, Thea. It’s not like that. He just wants to be friends and relive his youth. He’s hardly conscious of what’s happening in the here and now. All he cares about is the distant past.’

‘Are you sure? It seems to me to be much more than that. You were full of him last week, and you introduced him to Damien. That strikes me as pretty thick.’

‘Your father has only been dead a year. I’m not going to get
thick
with anybody. But it’s nice to have some company. He’s very interesting, once you get him started. Some of his stories about Australia are extraordinary. And he was so keen to meet you. It’s a shame it all went sour.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Thea. ‘It all went completely rotten, didn’t it?’ She tried to kick-start her brain and work out what to do next. ‘And I’ve got to speak to Gladwin again. I keep remembering more about Melissa.’

‘And I remember a few things about that Reuben,’ said her mother, surprisingly. ‘Perhaps we should go together and see if we can find her?’

It was an oddly endearing proposal, as if by simply walking up to the high street, they might stumble across a senior police detective. ‘She’ll be at the station by now,’ said Thea. ‘Trying to establish a proper course of action. Briefing the team, and so forth.’

‘Well, we’ll go there, then.’

‘It’s not that simple. For a start, they’ll be setting up an incident room, if they haven’t already. They’ll want us there, I expect, for a formal interview. And we can’t really expect it always to be Gladwin we speak to. She’s quite likely to delegate us to somebody else.’

‘For heaven’s sake, Thea. You’re not making any sense. None of that matters, does it? If we’ve got important facts to tell them, we should go and do it, right away.’

‘I think it would be better to phone. That’s what I was trying to say. I’m sorry, Mum – my head’s not working very well. I can’t really decide what I should do, to be honest. For one thing, I ought to go and feed Oliver’s birds.’

‘Too late for that. They’ll have given up expecting anything by now. If you’re in that bad a state, you should come home with me. We can go in your car and that will solve my transport problem.’