Slaughter in the Cotswolds (11 page)

‘Nothing much.’ He eyed her thoughtfully. ‘He hit another boy, a lot harder than he intended, and broke his nose. There was quite a bit of trouble over it, but it calmed down in the end. I
doubt very much if he’s ever done it again. He’s very decent at heart.’

‘I feel sorry for big men. They’re like big dogs, aren’t they? Always having to stop and think before they do anything, in case they cause some damage. It must be awful.’

‘I guess it’s a matter of training in both cases.’

The reference to dogs returned them to their contemplation of Freddy and Basil. Thea sighed. ‘It’s not much of a life for the poor things, is it? I mean – why keep them if they have to be chained up the whole time? It’s cruel.’

‘It’s also very common. I’d guess half the dogs in the country never get to have a proper run in their lives. They certainly don’t have a chance to chase anything out in the countryside. They’ve come a long way since their wolf ancestors roamed the land.’

‘Cats have done better, on the whole, haven’t they. They take what they want from people, while making very few compromises.’

He made an effort to engage fully in the conversation, pointing out that a lot of cats were confined within four walls much as dogs were – especially in towns and cities. ‘But I guess their survival instincts are in better shape than dogs’, all the same,’ he concluded.

After a pause, he began on a new topic. ‘So there’s no prospect of anybody coming to join
you, then? You’ve got to get along on your own for a change.’

She snorted. ‘You make it sound as if I’ll find that difficult. I’ll be perfectly all right.’

‘I hope so. If I remember rightly, this is the first time for over a year that you’ll have gone without somebody to share at least part of the stay with you.’

‘You’re here,’ she said lightly. ‘I’m assuming you’ll drop in like this, from time to time.’

‘Are you?’

His voice was low, and he was looking at the floor, one hand holding the mug of tea. How could there be so much to scare her in those two small syllables? Something flexed and swelled inside her, and she stared hard at him. Her heart thundered and the air turned cold.

‘Phil? What are you trying to say?’

He looked cold, too. ‘Only that I don’t feel sure of a welcome. You didn’t kiss me when I arrived. You’ve hardly smiled at me. You weren’t going to tell me about Ariadne and the vicar. What’s going on, Thea? I’m not stupid, you know. I can read the signs of indifference as well as anybody.’

She desperately did not want to have this conversation. It was one thing to fantasise about another man, and to feel guilty about it, quite another to be confronted with the apparent end of a relationship which meant a lot to her. The
chill wind of abandonment blew round her, and she reached out like a child whose hand has been dropped by its mother.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Don’t say that. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean – I’m not
indifferent
. Not at all.’ She stopped herself from employing the excuse of her dead father, because not only would that be playing dirty, it would carry little weight, since they both knew the problem went back much further than that.

‘You haven’t felt the same about me since Temple Guiting,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t blame you. I know it was annoying having me laid up with my back. But I couldn’t help it, Thea. Accidents happen to people – you can’t blame them for getting hurt.’

She had always regarded herself as unusually mature and understanding. She, Thea Osborne, had interceded with people in a calm collected way, seeing through to the core of things, pointing out the bullshit that people employed to hide their real feelings. Now she felt like a child, a selfish blinkered child, letting her own frustrations wound a perfectly good man.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘I’ve behaved very badly.’

‘No,’ he sighed heavily. ‘No, you haven’t. I’ve asked too much of you. You gave up those weeks to stay with me in Cirencester and nurse me.
You’ve never said a word about the sex – not having any, I mean. But you have been pushing me away more and more, whether you realise it or not. Every time I try to get near you, you go all chilly and withdrawn. So how much more of it can we take? Either of us, I mean. It’s not exactly a barrel of laughs these days, is it?’

‘If we were being grown up about it, we’d accept that there are bound to be down times.’

‘That’s true. But I’m wondering how solid a foundation there is to cope with down times. I mean – won’t we both be asking ourselves what the point is, if we’re not having fun any more?’

She looked him full in the face. ‘It is all my fault,’ she insisted. ‘You wouldn’t be saying any of this if I hadn’t gone chilly on you.’

‘I don’t think blame comes into it. We never made any rules or promises.’ He scratched his head uncomfortably. ‘I want to say some things that will sound accusing and unkind. I don’t mean them that way.’

‘Go on,’ she invited, feeling intense resistance to whatever he might be planning to say, but knowing she had to let him say it.

‘Well – I think that for you the sex was the main thing. Neither of us realised it until my back put a stop to it. And I know we weren’t at it five times a week—’

‘Far from it,’ she interrupted.

‘Yes, I know. But it was something to look forward to, something we got a lot of pleasure from. And I’m not saying I wouldn’t miss it terribly if it stopped altogether. But without it I’m not sure what else we’ve got.’

‘We’ve had a whole string of murders to preoccupy us. You’ve been very generous in letting me share in the investigations—’

‘I’m not sure I could have stopped you,’ he said with a wry smile. ‘Besides, you were darn useful most of the time.’

‘Yes, and a bloody nuisance at other times. I know. Which is why I don’t know where I stand with this one. It’s more personal to me than any of the others, and yet I feel very much detached from it.’

‘My problem is,’ he scratched his head again, ‘you always seem so
vulnerable
. My instincts are to protect you. And then I find out you can take perfectly good care of yourself, and it’s just as likely to be me that ends up getting hurt.’

‘Which we both know is no good basis for a serious relationship,’ she summarised sadly. ‘But I hate to think of it finishing. I’d be bereft.’

‘We don’t have to do anything drastic – I hope we’re adult enough to disengage in a civilised manner. It’s just – well, you don’t have to feel I have exclusive rights.’ He smiled into her eyes, suddenly fatherly and understanding. ‘I wouldn’t
throw too violent a fit if you slept with someone else, for example.’

It should have been what she wanted to hear, and yet it felt like rejection. He no longer felt she was his special partner. The pill was all the more bitter because she couldn’t pretend to herself that he had some other sexual partner waiting in the wings. With his malfunctioning back, he could hardly be plotting to introduce another woman into his bed the moment he’d squared it with Thea. It was all much worse than that: he was being unbearably generous, releasing her to find what satisfaction she might with somebody other than him.

A tear escaped from the corner of her eye. ‘Stop being so nice about it,’ she sniffed.

‘Oh, Thea,’ he groaned, and took her to himself for a tight hug. ‘What are we going to do with you?’

He could not have said anything more effective in giving her strength. She nuzzled briefly into his chest, and then pulled away. ‘I’ll be fine,’ she said. ‘You’re absolutely right about everything. I’ve got to sort myself out and decide what I really want. In spite of how it might seem, I do like this house-sitting work. I like the different animals and the villages and the sense of adventure. The money’s not brilliant, but it keeps me afloat. And surprising as it might seem, I’m in quite big demand.’

This time they both laughed. The growing number of crises during Thea’s various commissions might be expected to ruin her for future work. Instead, she seemed to have a reputation for holding the fort, keeping her nerve and bringing order out of chaos. Nobody blamed her for the awful things that had happened, and each time she seemed to have emerged with an enhanced image.

‘It’s no laughing matter,’ came a stern voice from the next room. Thea and Phil both froze for a moment, until she remembered Ignatius.

‘It’s the parrot,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I’ll ever get used to him. He says the most amazing things.’

‘It all works by association,’ said Phil knowledgeably. ‘If he hears laughing, he’ll remember what somebody once said about it not being a laughing matter. It’s not as clever as it seems.’

‘Hmm,’ said Thea.

Phil left at about five, and Thea did the rounds of the animals, talking quietly to them, watching the ferrets for a few minutes. She was trying hard to persuade herself that this was all she needed right at this moment. If she had lost Phil, and been shown that she could not have Peter Clarke, then so be it. She had a big family, several friends,
plenty of interests. She had her health and her looks and enough money. Where was the problem?

The immediate problem mainly lay, not with Det Supt Phil Hollis, but with Ariadne Fletcher and the Reverend Peter Clarke. It had been painful and shocking to be ordered out of the house by Ariadne because of a perceived challenge to her relationship with the vicar. Not since the fourth year at school had she contested with another girl for a man. It was undignified and embarrassing. It demeaned the man, too, by implying he could be taken by the triumphant female, regardless of his own actual preference. Besides, she knew perfectly well that she was one of those women who would choose to maintain a loyal friendship with someone of her own sex rather than make an enemy in order to get a man.

But her friendships had also proved less robust than she might have expected, since Carl died. Those closely bonded sisterhoods of the late teens and early twenties had worn thin under the weight of marriages and children and work and relocations. There was nobody she could readily phone for a heart-to-heart at that precise moment, and this struck her as a serious piece of carelessness on her part. ‘I’ve got lots of friends,’ she had often said and believed. The truth was, she knew a number of people, but very few of them would set other claims aside in order to be
available to Thea Osborne, that pretty girl from school who’d lost her husband so young.

Which left sisters. Jocelyn and Emily. Both of them very much taken up with their own demanding lives, but the careless intimacy of siblings ensured that they could be leant on in times of need. And vice versa, of course. Just now, Emily was the needy one, and Thea ought to brace up to this reality. She felt a renewed surge of determination to help find Sam Webster’s killer. She would have liked to summon her sister back and make her explain the holes in her story that Phil had pointed out. But Lower Slaughter was going to have gruesome associations for Emily for the rest of her life, and she was highly unlikely to voluntarily show her face again in the village. There was, if Phil could be believed, even an element of risk attached to doing so. If the killer had learnt who the sole witness to the murder was, then he might be tempted to silence her. A man capable of such a vicious and sustained attack was a man to be feared, despite Thea’s tendency to dismiss warnings of danger.

An hour or two passed with mundane chores, eating a scrappy supper and assembling a healthy section of the jigsaw, which included the off-white sheep in the snow, and a broken old gate. Then two car doors slammed outside, and two pairs of feet walked to the front door.

It was Ariadne and Peter, she the taller by a good two inches, but he the more vivid presence by some margin. He spoke first. ‘I understand you two know each other,’ he began. ‘And there’s been a bit of a falling out. It seems to me that we can’t let that situation persist, so we’ve come to bury the hatchet.’

All the damning things that Phil had told her came urgently to mind. He was ‘smarmy’ and deceitful. He had been dismissed from at least two posts in the Church and was here on sufferance because there was nobody else. She met the blue eyes, the frank smile, and could do little else but believe the evidence of her own senses. He was a lovely man.

‘Come in,’ she invited quickly. ‘It’s great to see you both.’ She looked then at Ariadne, who seemed young and vulnerable, her emotions so naked and needy. She was also rather sheepish, after the way she’d spoken to Thea that morning. Thea herself felt relieved to the point of weakness that things seemed to have come right again between them so quickly.

She found them some olives and white wine that had been in the box of provisions she’d bought in Stow. The grubby living room with its poor lighting served as a surprisingly cosy venue for the intimate exchanges that followed. It was as if some layers of reticence had been shed at the door, leaving no necessity for caution. After all, she and Ariadne had shared some visceral moments less than a year before, and if Peter had such a convincing alibi for Saturday, there was no need to regard him with any suspicion over his brother’s murder.

‘Hey – a parrot!’ cried Ariadne, spotting Ignatius. ‘Does it talk?’

‘Oh yes,’ Thea assured her. ‘He talks all right. But he doesn’t seem to be in the mood just now.’ Ignatius was hunched morosely on his perch, eyes almost closed, ignoring the activity in the room.

They wasted no more time in small talk. ‘We want to tell you about Sam,’ said Peter. ‘Given that it was your sister who witnessed his final
moments, it seems as if we owe you a bit of an explanation.’

‘I’m sure you don’t, but I’m happy to listen,’ Thea said. ‘You’ll know about my involvement with Detective Superintendent Phil Hollis, of course?’

‘Oh yeah – everybody knows everybody,’ said Ariadne with a sigh. ‘That’s the trouble.’

‘Well, we don’t know who the monster was who smashed Sam’s head in,’ said Peter. ‘I’m not at all confident that he’ll ever be caught.’

‘Oh, he will,’ said Thea, surprising herself at the confident tone. ‘If he’s as crazy and out of control as it sounds, then he’ll give himself away. Probably sooner rather than later.’

‘You mean because he’ll do it again?’ Ariadne sounded scared.

‘No, no,’ Thea said quickly. ‘He can’t be
that
crazy.’

Peter took over from her, his voice was thick, and his hand went to his mouth. ‘His body was such a mess. I’ve never seen anything like that before. They cleaned him up as well as they could, but with his skull so shattered – well, I honestly couldn’t say for sure that it was him. Not from his face. It was his hands that clinched it. He had very long fingers and a slightly odd joint at the base of his thumb. He broke the scaphoid bone when he was ten and it was
missed, so it mended crooked.’ Thea recognised the outpouring of irrelevant detail as a reaction to trauma.

‘Phil said his hands weren’t hurt at all,’ she said, without stopping to think.

‘That’s right. I assume that means it was all over before he had a chance to defend himself.’ He was restless, fiddling with a spoon and kicking one foot against a table leg. ‘Poor old Sam.’

Ariadne reached out a hand to him, while looking at Thea. ‘Do we have to talk about it?’ she asked. ‘It’s not very easy to take, you know.’

Did she mean for herself or Peter, Thea wondered? The reproach was no less real for being so gentle.

‘Sorry,’ she said.

‘No, no, it’s all right. We have to talk about it,’ said Peter, giving Ariadne’s hand a warm squeeze. ‘I think our stomachs can take it.’

There were questions breeding more questions in the air between them. What was Peter Clarke really like? How did he really feel about Ariadne? How much did he care about his brother’s death? And why had Thea assumed that it was jealousy that had motivated Ariadne’s angry ejection of her earlier in the day? Was it not arrogant of her, Thea, to make such an assumption, with virtually nothing to support it? It had been the reference to Emily that had done the damage, she remembered
– and how could that connect to Peter?

‘Can I say something about my sister first?’ she asked, looking at Ariadne. At a nod, she went on, ‘It’s the fact that she was there that somehow made you angry, and I don’t understand why.’

‘Nor do I, now I’ve calmed down,’ admitted the woman. ‘It seemed to give you some special claim, I suppose. It meant you had a place in the inner circle, and I didn’t. I just flipped. When I told Peter, he couldn’t understand it, either.’ She gave a giggle, which sat uneasily on her statuesque frame. ‘Can we just say I’ve been in a funny sort of mood for a while now? I never quite know how I’m going to react.’

Peter patted her hand and smiled indulgently at her. Thea began to wonder how much of such mush she could take. The word
smarmy
came to mind again. But why in the world should he pretend to be in love with Ariadne if he wasn’t? She had no great riches or influence, she could be awkward and inclined to utter outspoken remarks that made people uncomfortable. And she
was
genuinely lovable, as Thea had discovered for herself. She could do no other than believe him, just as Ariadne so obviously did.

‘And the coincidence seemed all wrong, somehow,’ Ariadne continued. ‘Peter’s brother and your sister, out of all the people in Gloucestershire, involved in such a bizarre
incident right here on a wild wet night. It’s just so
unlikely
.’

‘It
was
wet, wasn’t it,’ she said deliberately. ‘It was really pouring when Emily left here. That’s why I didn’t watch her go, and didn’t give her proper directions for getting back to the main road.’

‘The layby was very muddy,’ agreed Peter. ‘It washed away most of the tyre marks.’

Thea frowned. ‘What tyre marks?’

‘Oh – none directly concerned with his death. But cars use laybys, don’t they? Especially all the tourists in the summer, stopping to look at their maps. And the view’s not bad from there, either. There was a dirty great puddle. He was more or less lying in it.’

‘The police told you that, did they?’ She tried to keep the question light, while inwardly tense with this unexpected revelation that had not been lost in the little rush of verbiage that Peter came up with. How did he know what the layby was like?

‘That’s right,’ he said, just as lightly. ‘They had to explain why Sam was so muddy.’

That could make sense, she assured herself. They’d have wanted the body identified before the post-mortem – although she wasn’t clear about the precise sequence of events on Sunday. She resisted the urge to ask him, not wanting
to make any more of his slip – if it was a slip. Catching Ariadne’s eye, she did her best to mask the suspicions that were rumbling just below the surface.

‘So the murderer would have been all muddy as well as covered with blood,’ she said.

‘Right,’ said Peter with a firm glance at his beloved.

Thea’s thoughts turned unbidden to the mud on the dogs, Freddy and Basil, when they finally returned from their escapade. Could it be that it indicated their guilt, after all, just as it would on the mysterious human murderer?

And of course Peter Clarke could not have been covered in mud when he turned up at the Diocese Meeting or whatever it was, by nine that evening. He had to have been crisp and clean and calm, or somebody would have noticed and told the police when the alibi was checked.

Emily’s description of the attack had been brutally clear. Phil had not given any further detail, but neither had he said anything to contradict the basic story. Emily had still been shaking and white-faced some hours later, repeating herself and muddling the chronology. ‘The man who did it – do they think he had a car, then?’ Thea asked.

‘Presumably he must have done. I don’t remember anybody saying anything about it, though.’

‘No,’ said Thea slowly. ‘Emily didn’t mention it, either. She just said he ran away when she yelled at him.’ She had an image of the sudden cessation of the kicks and blows, the aggressor fleeing jerkily into the wet night. It was almost as if she had witnessed it herself. ‘It must have been terrifying,’ she added. ‘Thinking he might come back, as she knelt by your brother.’

‘She acted quite sensibly, calling 999 and not moving anything,’ Peter said. ‘After all, you never know how you’ll behave in a crisis as horrible as that.’

There was a nausea developing somewhere in her middle, and she wanted quite badly to change the subject. Ironic, when she’d been the one to insist on gory detail. Much of her initial trust and confidence in Peter Clarke had been restored. Whatever Phil might have told her about the trouble he’d been in with the church, she could not believe he was a conman when it came to emotional matters. She believed what he’d said about his wife and the little girl, the brief glimpses of his childhood. But then she remembered the discrepancy over his mother. That had certainly been a deviation from the truth.

‘Your daughter,’ she blurted abruptly. ‘Where is she?’

‘Daisy? Oh, she’s with my mother. They’re great friends.’

‘Your mother can cope then, can she? I thought you said she was almost incapable when we talked yesterday.’

‘I said nothing of the sort. What do you mean?’

‘You were dreading telling her about Sam. Of course, the police would have told her by then, anyway.’

‘I had no idea of that. It never occurred to me.’

‘Thea!’ Ariadne remonstrated. ‘Why the third degree, all of a sudden? Why does it matter what Peter said about his
mother
?’

It was a good question, if slightly odd in its emphasis. ‘Sorry,’ she smiled. ‘I just wanted to get the picture straight in my mind.’

‘It was Phil, I suppose, seeing the dark side as usual. What’s he been telling you?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

The other woman was onto her in a flash, simply from the way she said those words. ‘Hey! Something’s gone wrong between you two, has it? And there was me thinking you’d be making an announcement any day now.’

Thea grimaced. ‘What – you thought I was going to marry him?’

‘Maybe not that, but moving in with him. You seemed so
together
, last year. What went wrong?’

‘He slipped a disc,’ said Thea sourly.

‘Oh, yes, you told me.’ Ariadne stifled a giggle and looked to Peter for rescue. The vicar was
clearly not keeping up. ‘Phil?’ he queried. ‘That’s the police chap, is it?’

‘Hollis,’ Ariadne confirmed. ‘Detective Superintendent. I told you – I’ve known him since I was a kid.’

‘Small world,’ said Peter. ‘I feel as if I’ve walked into a very tight little community here.’

Thea felt suddenly weak. She wanted to hear more about Webster, while leaving Emily out of the conversation. She wanted to understand the jumble of feelings aroused by Peter Clarke. And she wanted to hang on to Ariadne as a friend and confidante. But it all felt out of reach. One or both of the others were in control of this conversation, effortlessly diverting it away from anything important and the struggle to guide it back was proving exhausting.

But at least she seemed to have her friend back. ‘It was very nice of you to come,’ she said, sounding pathetic in her own ears. ‘I was upset to think I’d made you cross.’

Ariadne waved a dismissive hand. ‘We’ve sorted all that,’ she said. ‘Don’t say another word about it. I was a cow, and that’s all there is to it.’

Thea watched Peter’s reaction to this. It was very much as she’d expected. ‘Hey, don’t do yourself down,’ he reproached his girlfriend. ‘You’ve explained what you were thinking, and it makes perfect sense to me.’

S
marmy
, thought Thea.
Definitely.
It gave her a small sense of relief to know that this man she might have thrown herself at was actually less desirable than she’d first thought.

‘We’d better go,’ said Ariadne. ‘I hope you’re going to be all right?’ she asked Thea. ‘I mean – does this place have everything you need?’

It was an odd question, especially from a woman who lived in a cottage to which the concept of modernisation was entirely alien. It was always intriguing to discover what people thought about house-sitting: precisely who was doing who the favour, and what was the deal regarding food and facilities.

‘It’s comfortable enough,’ she replied, looking round the dusty streaky walls and threadbare rugs. ‘It reminds me of my granny’s house, when I was very young. She had a rug just like that one.’ She indicated a handmade rug, with tufts hooked through canvas. In some places the canvas had frayed, leaving holes, and the colours had faded. ‘It’s a bit of a time warp.’

‘And you just love to be surrounded by dogs,’ Ariadne teased.

Thea groaned. ‘Not this time. Those dogs have got me into some pretty deep trouble already.’

‘Explain,’ Ariadne ordered, settling back into the chair she’d been about to leave. Thea did as instructed, with gratifyingly serious results. ‘My
God, Thea – you don’t want to mess with Henry Galton. He’s practically the Squire of Lower Slaughter.’

‘Too late,’ said Thea. ‘The damage is done – except I still maintain that Freddy and Basil are innocent.’

‘Freddy and Basil – is that their names?’

‘No, not really. I don’t know their real names, so I rechristened them.’

‘You’re mad.’

‘Aren’t we all?’ grinned Thea unrepentantly. ‘Anyway, I don’t think the Galton man is as bad as he’d like me to think. He calmed down eventually, when it got past the point where he might have shot them out of hand.’

Ariadne made a sceptical face, which did nothing for Thea’s peace of mind. Peter Clarke, listening quietly, finally made a contribution. ‘They’d have been shot on sight in Africa,’ he said.

‘They would have been here as well, if Galton had been able to catch them,’ Ariadne assured him. ‘It happens all the time – the law’s on the side of the sheep farmer even these days. And – well, Thea, I hate to say this, but it does sound bad. I mean, it all points to them having done the worrying, doesn’t it? I don’t want to alarm you, but I think you’ll find you haven’t heard the last of it.’