Blood in the Cotswolds (18 page)

He closed his eyes against the great wave of weakness that rushed through him. How had he become so pitiable, so out of control? could it just be his damaged back, bringing with it a host of profound fears? Fear of disablement, death, loss of self-esteem? Fear of being left alone, because the only woman who was permanently attached to him was his sister Linda, and she had plenty of her own problems. Thea would abandon him if he didn’t come up to her expectations, and who could blame her?

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I’ll try and pull myself together by lunchtime. I’m sorry,’ he added miserably.

‘That’s OK,’ she said, much too coolly for his liking.

She and the dog drove off, taking bottled water and some fruit. The sky was as blue as ever, the
heat already quite un-British. Phil was settled under the willows, where the full blast of the sun would be kept away until midday. The silence was broken only by a distant drone of some agricultural activity – probably haymaking, he concluded. It felt like being in a parallel reality, where nobody ventured and nothing ever happened. He wasn’t interested in the books or magazines, but dozed fitfully, dreaming about his dogs, which were in his flat, chewing the cables of his computer, which abruptly turned into snakes that hissed in the animals’ faces. But Baxter, the Gordon setter, merely grinned his goofy grin and sat down watching the snakes slither harmlessly across the floor. The nightmare had been conquered and Phil woke up gently, with a welcome sense of peace overlying the guilt and worry at the way he’d been earlier with Thea.

It took him several bleary seconds to focus on the object standing four or five feet away, in the bright sunlight. A very tall man was facing him, his expression desperate. In his hand was a small gun, directed right at Phil Hollis’s heart.

‘Giles Pritchett,’ he breathed, some seconds later. ‘You must be Giles Pritchett.’ Not only the extraordinary height, but the features that so closely resembled those of Pritchett Senior, had served to identify him. ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’

Already he knew that a line had been crossed with utterly inevitable consequences for the gunman. It was not possible to point a pistol at a senior police detective and get away with it. In those first moments, Phil’s concern was more for the other man than for himself. A murky picture of a succession of interviews, charges, trials, punishments flashed through his mind. Even if he put the gun down now and walked away, there would be repercussions.

It was a small weapon, in a large hand. It looked like a harmless toy, and Phil’s fuddled brain had to remind itself that there was death contained within it. It was not an automatic association – the fear was a long time coming. When it did finally hit, it was with almost as much physical force as if the bullet had already struck his flesh. Sweat flooded from his armpits and hairline, and his guts filled with a thick dark cloud that roiled in strange waves. ‘Put the gun down,’ he said with as much authority as he could muster.

In twenty-three years as a police officer, this had never once happened to him. He knew people it had happened to, and had been present at their debriefing. He had trained and practised the correct procedure for when it did happen. You examined the situation calmly, kept control of yourself and, ideally, the gunman as well. You offered him respect and full attention. You tried to understand what it was he most wanted at this present moment. Compared to an ordinary untutored person, he was coping well. Only his skin and internal organs knew the truth.

‘What do you want, Giles?’ he asked, trying not to look at the steadily pointing gun. ‘What are you doing here?’

‘You know who I am.’ It was not a question, but there was surprise in the words.

‘I know your father. He told me you were missing. You look like him.’ Phil aimed, with partial success, for a neutral, conversational tone.
Keep things normal.
‘What do you want?’ he repeated.

‘I want to kill you.’ It was said with a calm conviction that Phil found terrifying. ‘You’ve ruined everything, finding those bones.’

Don’t argue,
a voice insisted in Phil’s ear. ‘Have I?’ he said.

The gun came closer, unwavering in its aim. How much noise would it make, he wondered? Would nobody hear it, his body lying undiscovered until Thea came back to find it in a glistening red pool, covered with flies? A long time seemed to pass, all thoughts suspended as both men waited for the promised moment.

A sound attracted their attention, at the top of the drive. The sound of a car engine being turned off, and a car door slamming. Was somebody walking down to Hector’s Nook? Giles Pritchett turned to look and Phil cursed his defective back which prevented him from launching himself valiantly from the lounger
and knocking the gun to the ground. Cursed it, and secretly gave thanks for it, at the same time. Heroics only looked good if they succeeded. Giles could easily pull the trigger at the slightest hint of movement.

Nobody appeared, after a full minute, and Phil abandoned hope of rescue. It was probably a sightseer come to gawp at the fallen tree where the remains had been found. He tried to guess what time it was from the height of the sun, and estimated it to be around ten o’clock.

Already he was minimally less afraid of the gun, the small black hole of its muzzle growing almost familiar. The received wisdom was that the longer an attacker delayed in pulling the trigger, the less likely he was to do it. The necessary adrenalin and bloodlust dissipated quickly, making it harder for the fatal act to be accomplished. His own imagination would start to operate, images of the man before him flopping lifelessly to the ground, the blood and screams gaining reality minute by minute. Only a true psychopath, who relished these aspects of murder, would remain intent on his plan.

Giles did not seem to Phil like a psychopath. He was angry and frustrated, irrational too – but
there was no cold glint of malicious insanity in his eyes. He seemed young and lost, but Phil suspected that was more in his own mind, knowing how Giles’s parents had worried about his disappearance.

He wanted to ask a hundred questions. Where have you been? What do you know about the murdered man? How have I thwarted you? Why have you caused your poor mother such anguish? But none of them was possible. He wanted Giles to see him as a fellow human being, just another man, and certainly not as a policeman. ‘We can talk about it,’ he offered. ‘If you’d only put the gun down.’

‘I came to kill you,’ he repeated as if trying to convince himself. ‘When I saw your girlfriend leave, I knew you’d be here alone. And I knew the snake hadn’t done what I’d wanted. You deserve to be killed, you know. Janey says so.’

‘Janey? Does she know you’re here?’

‘Of course not. Don’t be stupid.’

‘Sorry,’ muttered Phil. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You don’t need to.’

Phil met the man’s eyes, which were shadowed now by the willows, a halo of sunlight behind him. He could not read their expression clearly, but
he thought he saw a softening, a desire to squat down on the grass and just explain everything. He thought he saw signs that he would not be shot after all, that the danger was all but past.

And then, behind Giles, he saw movement. A figure in black had stepped out from the hedge bordering the drive and was pointing a long-barrelled gun at Giles Pritchett’s back. Before he could stop himself, Phil shouted, ‘No!’

Pritchett spun round, waving his own gun wildly. Then a
crack!
rang out and the tall man jackknifed violently, his legs and shoulders shooting forwards, his midriff bending back. The bullet had hit him somewhere in the abdomen, causing him an agony that Phil knew he was never going to want to think about. There were screams and shouts.

People appeared then, scuttling over the garden like alien creatures, their faces pale and intent. Sonia Gladwin materialised and headed directly for Phil. He stared helplessly at her, marooned at the same twenty-five degrees he had been in from the start. ‘What have you done?’ he demanded. ‘Is he dead?’

‘He would have killed you.’

‘No,’ said Phil, with conviction. ‘No, he
wouldn’t. How on earth did you get an armed response here so quickly?’

‘He was seen an hour ago with the gun.’

Pritchett was being attended to, there on Miss Deacon’s lawn, before medics came rattling down the drive to collect him. People spoke into phones and radios, and Phil half-expected a helicopter to join the action before long.

‘Poor chap,’ said Phil. ‘What have you done to him?’

‘What do you expect?’ Gladwin spoke angrily. ‘What else could we have done?’

‘Left him to me,’ muttered Phil, knowing he was talking nonsense. Hadn’t he realised, from those first moments, what danger Pritchett had placed himself in? Hadn’t much of his fear been for the other man, and not himself, throughout the encounter? Didn’t everybody know, by now, that they couldn’t mess with the police and firearms with impunity? For heaven’s sake, even a man carrying a chair leg was blasted out of existence, just in case he was dangerous.

And Thea. What was Thea going to say?

Phil was still in the garden two hours later, when Thea returned. So were a dozen personnel
with cameras, specimen bags, tape measures, notebooks. Most of them wore white jumpsuits and face masks. She came running down the drive, having been unable to get her car past those belonging to the investigators. Hepzie lolloped after her, tail held horizontal behind her.

‘Are you all right?’ Thea cried, hurling herself at Phil. ‘Nobody would tell me anything, except there’d been a shooting incident. Why didn’t you phone me?’

‘I wanted to keep you out of it for as long as I could,’ he said, pulling her to him. He was sitting on a more upright chair, in one corner of the garden, watching the proceedings. He would have to produce a detailed report of what happened, answer a thousand questions, and eventually appear in court. The automatic attention of the Independent Police Complaints Commission would mean a prolonged and distracting investigation into every detail of what had taken place.

‘And yes, I’m fine,’ he assured her, when she asked again.

‘So – who was shot? Where did the gun come from?
You
haven’t got one, have you?’ she demanded, eyes wide.

‘No, of course I haven’t. We can go inside and I’ll explain it all. It’s a miserable business, I warn you.’.

When she finally had the whole story straight, she was every bit as outraged as he’d expected. ‘That poor man! What if he dies? They’ll have murdered him. God, it makes me sick.’

‘There wasn’t really any choice,’ Phil insisted. ‘What else could they do?’

‘Not have been here in the first place,’ she said mulishly. Phil raised one eyebrow at that piece of nonsense. Thea lifted her chin in defiance, but changed tack to less confrontational ground. ‘Who told them about Giles being here? Have they said?’

‘Not yet. But if he was marching down here with a gun in his hand, he must have looked as if he meant business. Anyone would have called the police.’

‘But how could they get here so quickly? I thought it took ages to mobilise an armed response.’

‘It takes twenty or thirty minutes. We think Giles must have been here watching me while I slept. He didn’t want to kill me until I woke up.’
He laughed ruefully. ‘He didn’t really want to kill me at all. He just wanted me to understand how angry he was. He wanted to frighten me and possibly make me apologise. He was just coming to the point when it happened. And it was my fault,’ he added with a shudder. ‘I shouted out and distracted him. That gave them their chance. They couldn’t shoot while he had the gun trained on me. It might all have been defused if I hadn’t been such a fool.’

‘They’ll think you did it deliberately to help them,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ he agreed sadly.

They sat in the hot living room, closing the curtains against the relentless sun. Finally DS Gladwin came in, having left the scene some time earlier, and now returned. ‘We need to interview you formally,’ she said. ‘And Mr Pritchett Senior wants to speak to you, not surprisingly.’

‘How’s Giles?’ Thea asked.

Gladwin sighed. Her narrow face was drawn and pale. ‘Still alive. His liver’s been damaged and his guts are in a mess. He won’t be right again, whatever happens. When will people realise…’ she burst out, and then stopped, seeing
Thea’s expression. ‘There was no choice,’ she said firmly. ‘None at all.’

‘That’s what Phil says,’ Thea nodded. ‘Excuse me if I don’t entirely believe it.’

‘Would you go and see Janey?’ Phil suddenly asked Thea, the words erupting from an idea that he could scarcely grasp before it faded again, leaving him wondering at the odd deviation.

She stared at him in surprise. ‘What on earth for?’

‘I have a feeling Giles means quite a lot to her, and she’ll be needing some comforting, that’s all,’ he floundered. ‘I mean – she should know what’s happened.’ He recalled Giles saying Janey thought he, Phil, should be killed, and it forged a link between the two that he had not previously detected. ‘But be careful,’ he added. ‘She’s going to be very cross.’

‘That’s no problem,’ said Thea. ‘We can be cross together.’

‘Hang on,’ interrupted Gladwin. ‘Is this something I ought to know about? I’m not sure you can just dash off and splurge restricted information to anybody you like.’

Thea bristled and opened her mouth to challenge the concept of
restricted information.

Phil headed her off. ‘It’s OK,’ he told Gladwin. ‘You haven’t missed anything important. Anyway, it’ll all be in my report, including the bit about the snake.’ Gladwin’s nervous glance around the room confirmed his suspicion that she was afraid of the creatures, despite her efforts to pass off her earlier reaction as outrage at the exotic pet trade. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘She’s safely in her cage again now.’ He looked at Thea. ‘Did you get that padlock?’

She nodded. ‘I’ll go out now and attach it.’

‘Try not to let any of those bods outside see what you’re doing. The snake might complicate things if you do.’

She gave him a wide-eyed look, checking the implications of what he had said, remembering the events that had begun their day far too soon. ‘They wouldn’t take her away, would they?’ she asked.

Phil shrugged. ‘I doubt it, but you never know.’

‘Because it might have been Giles who—?’ She glanced at Gladwin.

Phil nodded. ‘Yes, it was him. He said so in no uncertain terms. He hoped Shasti would kill me.’

‘What a mad thing to do.’

‘So is sneaking down here and pointing a gun at me,’ said Phil forcefully. ‘I never did find out what exactly I’m meant to have done to upset him.’

‘I think I know the answer to that,’ offered Gladwin, calmly. ‘You gave his parents renewed hope of finding him.’

‘But how—?’ Phil’s mind began to whirr. ‘Oh – Stephen was at Janey’s on Wednesday. And Janey’s close to Giles. She must have told him everything she’d gleaned about us. But that still doesn’t really explain anything,’ he finished with a sigh.

‘Too soon for explanations, mate,’ said Gladwin. ‘All I can hope is that Giles P. confesses to killing the man under the tree, and makes as good a recovery as possible.’

‘Only to be sent down for ten years or more,’ said Phil dryly.

‘How could it have been him, though?’ Thea spoke quietly. ‘If it was five years ago, he’d only have been fifteen. That doesn’t sound very likely to me.’

‘Plenty of fifteen-year-olds have killed people,’ sighed Gladwin. ‘But I admit it looks just a bit
too tidy. I really just want to get this case off my desk. I can’t pretend I’m enjoying it. It’s all whispers and mirrors. I
really
don’t like this business about saints and martyrs. It seems as if everyone we’ve spoken to’s been involved in it in some way. Have you ever heard of St Melor?’