Slaughter in the Cotswolds (12 page)

It was an unsettling note to end on, but nobody appeared able to think of a new topic. The visitors got up to leave, and Thea resigned herself to a quiet evening with the spaniel and parrot for company.

‘Lock the doors, Daddy! Lock the doors!’ cried Ignatius, suddenly waking up and noticing that something was going on.

‘Good God!’ gasped Peter. ‘That’s extraordinary. I’ve never heard a parrot say a whole sentence like that.’

‘Didn’t you have parrots in Africa?’ Ariadne asked him.

‘Of course not. They’re in South America and Australia, not Africa.’ He didn’t quite add
you
idiot
, but the scorn hung unmistakably behind his words.

‘What about the African Grey, then?’ Thea asked. ‘Where does that come from?’

‘Doh – silly me,’ he said, easily. ‘But I’ve never seen one.’

She watched them go without regret. They’d given her more than enough to think about for one evening.

When Wednesday morning dawned almost as wet as the previous one, Thea’s spirits sank. What was a person supposed to do in a rainy Lower Slaughter? Abandon it, she concluded, for somewhere that had more indoor facilities to offer. A library or a museum or even, in a real emergency, a cinema. There were numerous attractive pubs in every direction, but she had never seen any appeal in sitting alone in a bar, whether it be crowded or deserted.

The ‘fine by eleven’ rule worked at least to the extent that the rain turned to a very English mizzle, but not enough to persuade Freddy and Basil to emerge from their dogwood shelter. Poor
things, Thea thought for the fiftieth time. What a rotten life they lead.

Her mobile chirruped at her at half past eleven. A man’s voice said ‘Thea?’

She knew she knew him, a familiar voice that she just couldn’t name for a moment. Damien? Uncle James? ‘Bruce!’ she finally managed. ‘What a surprise!’

Her sister’s husband was phoning her on a mobile number she couldn’t believe he knew. ‘How did you get my number?’

‘It’s on our pad by the phone,’ he said, as if this was obvious. ‘Listen – I want to talk to you. Can you get away for lunch?’ He spoke hurriedly, his voice low, as if expecting to be caught at any moment.

‘Today?’

‘Absolutely today. There’s a pub in Lower Oddington. The Fox, it’s called. It’s got virginia creeper all over it and flowers. Do you think you could get there for – say – twelve fifteen?’

‘I suppose so, except I’ve never been there.’

‘It’s east of you, on the A436. Go to Stow and turn right. It’s easy enough. If you get to Adelstrop, you’ve gone too far. But be aware that there are three Oddingtons, and you want the third one. Turn right at the sign for Lower Oddington, and the pub’s a little way along there on the right.’

‘This is very cloak and dagger, Bruce. Is there a password I have to say at the door?’

His sigh caused a slight turbulence in her ear. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I can tell it’s something important. I’ll set off in ten minutes – will that get me there in time?’

‘Easily, if you don’t get lost.’

She didn’t get lost, and found Bruce sitting in his distinctive black 1978 Jaguar in the street outside the self-consciously traditional Cotswold pub. ‘You’ll never make a spy if you insist on driving that thing,’ she said, once they were within speaking distance. ‘It must stand out a mile on the CCTV and sattelite surveillance systems.’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ he said shortly. ‘I haven’t got anything to hide.’

She refrained from launching into her customary diatribe to the effect that there wasn’t a person alive who could honestly say that. And even if there was, why did that make it all right for Big Brother to track his every move?

Leaving Hepzie yet again in the car, they settled down in the fox-obsessed bar, having ordered beer and baguettes, and Bruce wasted no time in getting to the point. ‘I need your help with Emily. She isn’t sleeping and looks like death. I have no idea what to do for the best.’

‘How should
I
know?’ she flashed. ‘I’d have
thought a husband trumped a sister when it came to that sort of thing.’ Bruce had always been essentially useless in a crisis, she remembered. When Emily miscarried their first baby, Bruce had become a neurotic mess, leaving others to support his wife through her misery. Over the years, the habit of shielding Bruce from anything unpleasant had spread through the family, despite mutterings about how over-protective they were being. His vulnerability had a dreadful power, which none of them was strong enough to resist.

Now he gathered his dignity, raising his chin and meeting her eye. ‘Not at all. If it’s grief over your father that’s affecting her so badly, then you’re in a much better position to understand than I am. After all, isn’t that why she drove over to see you on Saturday?’

She had almost forgotten about her father, she realised to her shame. ‘But what if it isn’t about Dad?’ she said. ‘What if it’s about your friend Sam Webster?’

The idea seemed to surprise him. ‘Sam? But Emily has no reason to care particularly about him.’

Thea blinked. Was it possible that Bruce knew nothing of what had happened? ‘Um – Bruce – you do know he was killed on Saturday evening, don’t you? Emily
did
tell you what happened?’

‘Of course she did. Damned bad luck, in one
sense. But she did the right thing, scaring the chap away by blaring her car horn at him. For all we know he might have decided to have a go at her as well.’

Thea tilted her head thoughtfully. Had she heard the bit about the car horn? If not, did it matter? ‘I thought she yelled at him and that’s what sent him off into the dark.’

‘Bit of both, probably,’ he said carelessly.

‘But – she’d left the car in the gateway. How could she have sounded the horn?’

‘Thea – I don’t know. She didn’t want to go over it all again. I had trouble enough getting the basic story. You know how much she hates anything unpleasant.’

A classic piece of transference, Thea noted complacently.

She left the matter of the car horn, assuring herself that there was scope for both versions to be true, as Bruce had claimed.

‘So how well did you know him – Sam, I mean? Emily seems to think he was more your friend than hers.’

‘That’s perfectly true. We were at college together. He was always a clever clogs, but we both liked old cars and Alice Cooper and we were in a bit of a group together for a while. I always thought he’d end up working for MI5, with his brains. He would invent codes just for the fun of it.’

She realised she’d assumed that Webster’s subject was something like History or European Literature. ‘Was he a mathematician, then?’

‘Didn’t you know? I thought you met him that time at one of our dinner parties?’

‘Yes, I knew he was a don. But I don’t remember asking him what his subject was. He talked about Proust mostly, if I’ve remembered right.’ She paused to assemble her thoughts. ‘Are you sure he didn’t? Work for MI5, I mean. Maybe the Oxford thing was just a cover. He must have had plenty of money, to afford to stay at that Manor Hotel place. You should see it – it’s like a castle!’

Bruce laughed. ‘I’m fairly sure he wasn’t with MI5, yes. Why – do you think he was murdered because he was working for a secret organisation? The way I see it, it was some drug-crazed psycho, choosing a victim at random, assuming anybody at that hotel must be carrying a wallet full of cash.’

‘Was anything stolen?’ Oughtn’t she have asked Phil that question, she rebuked herself. Nobody had said anything about robbery, which now seemed rather strange.

‘I have no idea.’ Bruce had a small old-fashioned moustache, which he would nibble absently, catching at individual hairs and making his eyes water. Then he’d rub the sore spot with
a finger. It was very distracting. ‘To be honest, Thea, I agree with Emily – the less that’s said, the quicker it’ll all fade. The man’s dead – that’s all I need to know. I’ll miss him, but we weren’t exactly best buddies. I only saw him five or six times a year.’

‘OK, but the fact remains that it was Emily who saw the whole thing, and it seems to me that it must have been pretty traumatic for her. And if I’ve got it right, you wanted to see me today precisely to talk about how upset she is. It might be about Dad, as you think, but it might just as easily be about Sam. Actually, I suppose it’s a combination of the two. She’s overloaded.’

‘I probably haven’t made myself clear. It’s worse than just being upset. She’s
ill
. She’s like somebody having a breakdown. I don’t know what to do about it.’ He caught another moustache hair and trapped it against his lip in a complicated process that must have hurt.

‘So call a doctor.’

Bruce closed his eyes in a give-me-patience sort of way. ‘And what’s a doctor going to say? Take some anti-depressants or sleeping pills and give yourself space to grieve. Why waste NHS money?’

For such a conventional man, Bruce could be surprisingly cynical, as Thea had discovered years before. He mistrusted institutions even more
than she did herself, and the NHS had seldom earned a positive word from him, ever since his teenaged brother had died on a trolley from some obscure sort of blood poisoning. He didn’t like the police very much, either, presumably because they carried such unpleasant associations with violence and lack of control and other dangerous aspects of human society.

‘OK,’ she tried again. ‘From what Emily said on Saturday, it seems she feels guilty about Dad, that she never said the things she meant to and now it’s too late. She had a bit of a cry, and beat herself up for a bit, and then she seemed much better. It was all fairly normal stuff, as far as I could tell. She did have a more difficult relationship with him than the rest of us. He never seemed to approve of her quite as much – although I think she’s exaggerated it tremendously, the way people do in families. It’s turned into a myth in her own mind. If she’d ever managed to confront him about it, he’d have been mortified. I tried to tell her that.’

Bruce nodded dubiously. ‘Good,’ he murmured vaguely. ‘Well, perhaps you’re right that it was what happened next that sent her off the rails. Because she
is
off the rails, you see.’ He looked forlorn and out of his depth, and oddly scared. Thea began to experience some reciprocal anxiety.

‘Well, she didn’t seem too bad on Sunday when she left. And then I spoke to her on the phone and she sounded all right. She went back to work, didn’t she, on Monday?’

‘I can’t work it out. The police came on Sunday to tell us it was Sam, and that was obviously a big shock to both of us.’ The moustache suffered a further attack, which presumably explained the tears in his eyes. ‘But things were more or less normal on Monday morning. Then when I got home, she was weepy and distracted. Didn’t make any proper supper and took no notice when Grant said he wanted to get his nipple pierced.’

‘Gosh!’ Thea murmured, with a wince of physical pain in her own nipples at the very thought. ‘That sounds bad.’

‘Then she tossed and turned all night, and when she did fall asleep she woke us both up with a dream that had her shouting out loud.’

‘It must have just hit her a bit belatedly. Delayed reaction.’

‘Possibly,’ he nodded. ‘That’s not really the point, though, is it? The point is what I am supposed to
do
about it?’

‘Hold on. What’s been happening between Monday night and now?’

‘Well, Tuesday – yesterday – she said she couldn’t face going to work. She would try and catch up with some sleep, and just stay quiet all
day. I went off as usual, and when I got back last night, about half past six, she still wasn’t dressed, and looked as if she’d done nothing but cry all day.’

‘That’s still fairly normal,’ said Thea. ‘All hitting her at once. It was a bit like that with me when Carl died. You have to get it out of your system.’

‘And how long is it meant to take?’

‘Is she still crying today?’

‘No, she’s trying to act normally, which is almost worse. All glittery smiles and jerky sentences. But she’s so white and jumpy.’

‘Well it sounds to me like plain old post-traumatic stress. After all, it’s still terribly recent. She ought to talk to somebody professional, who can help her debrief. I wouldn’t worry too much, Bruce. It’ll all come right in the end.’ A thought occurred to her. ‘Although I suppose she might be scared that the killer will come and get her, in case she might be able to identify him. Did she say anything about that?’

‘Not exactly, although that might explain the jumpiness. Any loud noise has her acting like a shell-shocked soldier.’

They’d talked right through their lunch, hardly noticing the food. The bar was well patronised, but most people were eating on a terrace outside, shielded from the damp day by an awning. It
was the first time they’d been together, just the two of them, and Thea found him to be better company than she’d previously thought. There was something kind and solid about him; it was evident that he cared deeply for his suffering wife and was seeking advice on how best to help her.

‘Encourage her to talk about it,’ she offered. ‘Not bottle it up.’

He looked doubtful again. ‘Hasn’t all that rather gone out of fashion? Don’t we think now that bottling up has its uses? She obviously doesn’t
want
to dredge it all up again.’

‘Well, you won’t be able to force her. Just let her know that you’ll listen quietly if she wants to dump anything.’ And it was a rare man who could manage to do that, she thought, with a twinge of envy at the knowledge that Bruce just might be one of them.

He sighed and nodded. ‘I’ll do my best. But honestly, Thea, she’s in a real mess.’

‘Poor old Em. She’s always needed to be in control and have things predictable. She’s the worst person I can think of to have this sort of thing happen.’

‘And yet she coped magnificently. I told her that. She’s got nothing to reproach herself for. She couldn’t possibly have done anything else for poor old Sam. Everybody’s going to think she acted heroically.’

‘She ought to like that.’

He cocked his head at the hint of sarcasm. ‘Well she doesn’t like anything about it. She’s utterly miserable.’

Misery was catching, and Thea found herself feeling pretty gloomy herself as she kissed Bruce goodbye and got back into her car.

The drive home passed in a blur as she mulled over everything Bruce had said. He had to be seriously worried to take an extra long lunch break and summon her as he’d done. Between Monday afternoon and Wednesday morning, Emily had apparently lost all composure, behaving alarmingly like a stereotypical madwoman. The speed of her collapse gave Thea an irrational hope that she would just as quickly recover. A momentary response to emotional overload, intimations of mortality, shock at the dreadful things that could happen – all had combined to send her reeling into a maelstrom of fear and guilt, but surely she’d come out of it again just as rapidly?

Poor old Em, she thought. And a tiny nasty voice muttered,
and about time too.
Emily had always been the one who pointed out other people’s failings and weaknesses, how they brought trouble onto themselves, and everything could be traced back to some character defect. Where Thea herself could be cavalier about trivial
anxieties and excessive attention to danger, she hoped she was essentially kind enough to show sympathy for anyone in trouble. Jocelyn, the spoilt complacent youngest, who whined and complained at the unfairness of life, had nonetheless reared her five children in an atmosphere of good-natured affection. All three had had their share of setbacks and accidents – Thea outclassed the others by losing her husband to a speeding lorry, but Jocelyn had problems with her husband and Emily had suffered a miscarriage which came completely out of the blue, and which had left her and Bruce both very shaken.