Slaughter in the Cotswolds (20 page)

The walk back seemed much longer than the outward leg. Hepzie was tired, and jogged along at Thea’s heels with no dashing off to the side or scrabbling at mysterious holes in the hedge. It was almost six when they finally reached Hawkhill, and the animals were waiting to be fed. The cats showed their faces in the barn doorway, and Ignatius greeted them with ‘Here’s a fine kettle of fish,’ as soon as they got through the door.

It was difficult to resist the conclusion that something had happened, and the bird was warning her about it. Quickly she went from room to room, checking that things were as she’d left them, finding nothing untoward. She
was weary and still thirsty, as was her dog. After drinking the contents of the water bowl in the kitchen, Hepzie flopped down on the grubby rug in front of the Rayburn and fell into a deep sleep. Thea drank a glass full of tap water, and thought wistfully of bedtime and the chance of a long dreamless night. But first, she remembered, she was participating in a police reconstruction of a vicious murder. Slumped on the sofa, she tried to imagine how it would be.

There was something almost superstitious about the mere fact of replaying events, keeping them as closely identical to the original as possible. It might conjure something unexpected. The murderer himself might materialise – indeed that was one of the best hopes of the police. If it was somebody who always passed that point on that day, then he just might be doing it again a week later, even though he’d committed such a ghastly act there. A certain sort of criminal would be careful to allay suspicion by behaving normally. If the murder had been less irrational and psychotic than it seemed, the man’s cunning might be in full working order. If it was a barman from the hotel or a local lorry driver, he might take a quiet satisfaction in standing idly by and watching events in all their clumsy drama. There would be mistakes and wrong assumptions that would make him quietly chuckle.

She knew, deep down, that everything she had done that afternoon had been designed, at least partly, to distract herself from the one thing she ought to be thinking about. Something she felt she was dodging to a degree that was almost immoral. Her sister, whose husband had reported as being ill, obviously wanted help from her, and what had she done about it? Precisely nothing.

She looked at the big old clock on the wall, which kept perfect time. Six thirty-five, and she had not yet fed the ferrets or cats. Heaving herself up, she did the job in five minutes flat. Hepzie never even noticed her leaving the house and coming back again. Ignatius said ‘We aim to please,’ four times, which she interpreted as a call for some supper of his own. His feeding times had not been given as precisely as the others. ‘Just give him a handful of seed when the bowl’s empty,’ Babs had told her. ‘And pick him some stuff from the garden – anything that’s got nuts or seeds on it.’ So far she had overlooked this part of the bird’s diet, worried that she might give him something poisonous.

Then she phoned Emily.

It was a relief when her sister answered, sounding more or less normal, if a trifle flat. ‘Oh, hi,’ she greeted Thea. ‘How’s things?’

‘All right. What about you? I’ve been hearing
all kinds of dire reports about you.’

‘What do you mean?’

Almost too late, Thea realised that Bruce might well not have mentioned his lunchtime rendezvous with Thea. ‘Oh, Mum. She phoned and said you weren’t very well.’

Emily groaned softly. ‘Yes, she’s here, making a fuss of me. It’s very sweet of her, but I’m not
ill
. I just had a bit of a funny turn. I’d rather not talk about it now, if that’s OK. I’ll be all right by Monday.’

It seemed an odd thing to say. ‘Why Monday?’

‘For work, of course. I have to get back to work.’

‘I see. But Em – Bruce told the police you weren’t well enough to come to their re-enactment this evening. That’s why I’m phoning. I wanted to check a few details. I’ve got to be you, you see.’

‘Re-enactment?’ Her voice was suddenly hollow, as if all the breath had left her body. ‘Is that what you said?’

‘Yes.’ Thea was losing patience. ‘Or reconstruction – I think that’s what they call it. I suppose Bruce didn’t want to tell you, in case it upset you. I suppose I wasn’t meant to, either. Well, sorry, but I think we all need to face up to things. We’re grown up people, after all. What is there to be scared of?’

‘He didn’t tell me.’ It was almost a whisper.
‘But you’re right, of course you are. Trust Thea Osborne to rub everybody’s nose in it. I can see you’re never going to let me forget about it. Fifty years from now, you’ll be saying, “Remember that night when you saw a man die in a layby?” Won’t you?’

‘I might,’ said Thea, defiantly. ‘If I haven’t lost my own memory by then.’

‘They think it’ll help catch the man, do they? If they play the whole thing over again. Is that what you’re telling me?’

‘They think it could jog the memory of somebody who was passing at the time.’

‘Nobody passed,’ said Emily, with such emphasis that Thea believed her. ‘The whole thing’s utterly pointless.’

‘Oh, well—’ she didn’t know what to say to that. ‘I suppose they think it’s worth a try.’

‘I’m glad Bruce told them I couldn’t do it. It would be
disgusting
.’ Emily’s voice rose on this word, and then she went silent for several seconds. ‘And I can hardly leave Mum now she’s decided I need to be cossetted, can I? Besides – it isn’t raining today. That makes all the difference in the world.’

‘That’s what I said,’ said Thea.

The police came for her as promised, in a car the same colour and model as Emily’s. Thea sat
in the back thinking it was a lot earlier than the time Emily had left, the previous week. In the front seats were two uniformed policemen, who had introduced themselves familiarly as Jamie and Chaz. The sky was still entirely light. Given that the nights were closing in earlier each evening, this seemed significant. ‘I’m sure it was later than this when she left here,’ she said.

‘Don’t forget it was darker because of the rain,’ said Chaz wearily, as if he’d already said the same thing many times. ‘Sunset was eight twenty-four last Saturday. It’s eight-ten tonight.’

‘How depressing,’ said Thea, thinking of the dreadful days in January when it was dark at four.

It seemed to take mere seconds to reach Emily’s gateway. The policeman carefully reversed the car until it was off the road, and then both officers got out. ‘All yours,’ said Chaz, who’d been driving.

She opened the door carefully, trying not to bang it against the gatepost that was only eighteen inches away. It was a squeeze to get out and move to the driver’s seat. ‘Is this where she got the scratch?’ she said, knowing it had to be.

‘That’s right. Look.’ The policeman indicated an abrasion on the post, at about knee level. ‘There was paint from your sister’s car just here. That’s about the only part of the story we can
confirm with forensics. It all matches perfectly.’

‘You examined her car? I thought she said you didn’t.’

‘Not at the time. But we had someone from Bucks go and have a look, on Monday. Just to get the whole picture.’

‘Right.’ This chap was very clued up, she thought. Probably trying for promotion to CID, acquainting himself with all the details in the hope of making an impression. Well, good luck to him. He seemed pleasant enough, with a look of intelligence that was all too rare in the average cop. When her daughter had insisted on going into the Force, Thea’s first response had been, ‘But you’re far too bright for that.’

‘So what next?’ she asked.

‘Wait until you hear shouts from the layby, and come walking – or running, as you think fit – to see what’s going on. Then shout until the attacker runs off.’

‘When do I sound the horn?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Emily says she sounded the horn.’

He rubbed his earlobe reflectively. ‘Did she? I guess it must have been when she first heard the shouting. Seems an odd thing to do, though, before you even know what’s going on. You can’t see anything from here, the way the road curves.’

It
was
odd, Thea had to agree. ‘She could
have come back afterwards and done it then. She probably left her phone in the car and had to come for that.’

‘Possibly. But isn’t it just as odd to do it
then
? After the bloke’s disappeared into the bushes? What would be the point?’

‘I suppose people do funny things. She must have wanted to make sure he wouldn’t come back. That would make sense.’

‘Maybe,’ he said doubtfully. ‘Which doesn’t answer your question, does it? Plus, nobody we’ve spoken to has said anything about hearing a car horn.’

‘We ought to do it, though. It’s exactly the kind of thing that jogs people’s memories.’

‘Hmm,’ he said. ‘OK – well, do it afterwards. Come back for your phone and do it then.’

‘Is Phil here?’ she asked, trying to work out the whole set-up.

‘DS Hollis? No. The DI is, though.’

‘Jeremy? Right.’ Jeremy Higgins was a friendly man, but somehow lacking a dimension. Phil spoke of him more as a piece of equipment than a human being, and when she met him Thea could see how that might happen. Inconspicuous, uncontroversial, obliging – DI Higgins was an ideal detective in many ways.

‘He’ll be over the road, watching what happens. We’re trying not to be intrusive, obviously. But
we need to be very alert. It’s not just jogging memories, you see. It’s figuring out exactly what must have happened.’

Thea frowned. ‘Surely you’ve done that already?’

Chaz shrugged. ‘Can’t do it too many times.’

He went ahead of her up the road, and she was left to get into role, imagining herself to be Emily, cross about the scratched wing on the car, annoyed at the incessant rain, embarrassed at being lost. Into all that, the shouts of men fighting would have seemed the final straw. Or would it have been a minor background noise, something she needn’t worry about in the more urgent concern for the car? As she stood there, she heard shouts.

Inarticulate cries floated down the road, deep-throated roars of aggression. Beneath them were feebler cries that were barely audible. It was loud, but in pouring rain might not be enough to attract curiosity. It was in any case something that any sensible woman would ignore. She would get back in her car and lock the doors. And
then
she might sound the horn. That at least began to make some sense. It even felt like quite a clever thing to do.

But Emily had told everybody that she walked up to the layby to investigate. So Thea did the same. She strode briskly, and was soon in sight
of what was going on. The cdeep – the sort of place people would stop to consult a map, or eat their picnic, or even turn their car around. In the fading light it looked as if it had been created by accident – a natural bend in the lane where a heap of gravel might have been positioned, in those days when such heaps regularly appeared. Or it could have been an ad hoc sheep enclosure, in even earlier times. There was a low bank separating it from the road, leaving openings at either end for cars to enter and exit. A bank apparently much more recently constructed, perhaps as a deterrence to the dreaded New Age travellers of the nineteen-eighties, now long forgotten. As laybys went, it was a pleasing one, with a view of a rising hill across the road and a handsome oak tree close by.

The two men were against the hedge, as far as possible from the road. Still shouting, one was standing upright, pumping a leg as if inflating a car tyre with a foot pump. Not until she had got right off the road did Thea see the second man lying prone. ‘Hey!’ she called, feeling intensely self-conscious. ‘What’s going on?’

The upright man lifted his head and looked at her. Then he gave a final pretend kick to his victim, and turned to run away. But where should he run? To obey a natural instinct to leave Thea/
Emily as far as possible behind, he would have to go up the road towards the hotel. Across the road was a substantial hedge that even a determined goat would hesitate to try to penetrate. If he came back, past the interfering woman, she would get a good look at his face, which was not a good idea.

The fourth option was to get over the hedge into the field beyond the layby. Beside the oak tree there was a gap, with nothing more than a few strands of wire fencing blocking it. With a thoroughly out-of-role slump of the shoulders, he made towards it, looking as if he hoped somebody would stop him before he had to climb over. He and Thea both knew that there were watching police officers at various points, but not one was visible.

Thea left him to it and walked hesitantly towards the figure on the ground. ‘Hello? Are you all right?’ she stammered. His head was imaginatively draped with a bright red piece of cloth. ‘Oh, my God!’ she squawked. ‘Help! Oh, God. Where’s my phone? Listen – can you hear me? I’ll go and phone for help.’

She knew she ought to kneel down and touch him, turn him over, listen to his final gasps, but she could not bring herself to do it.

She hovered for a few more moments, expecting instructions that never came. Then she went back to the car at a trot, remembering to
sound the horn. Except the horn only worked if the engine was turned on, and that seemed too big an effort, in the circumstances. She waited uncertainly, with little idea of what she ought to do next. Not a single car had passed since the role-playing began. The whole exercise began to seem futile at best and a stupid waste of time at worst.

Her policeman rejoined her. ‘Very good!’ he approved. ‘Except you didn’t sound the horn.’

‘No – because it seems to me now that she’d have done it early on, if at all. When she very first got out of the car and heard the shouting. She’d be in too much of a hurry afterwards. You have to turn the ignition on for it to work.’

‘Ah!’ he said, with an intelligent little nod. ‘That’s very helpful in itself.’

‘Is it?’ she said, feeling strangely alarmed.

‘So – what else seemed peculiar to you? I noticed you didn’t actually kneel down by the body. Your sister certainly did. Next time, I must ask you to do it.’