Malice in the Cotswolds (25 page)

‘If she were here, she would let me in. I am certain of that. Victor always said she was a soft-hearted woman.’

Soft-headed more like,
thought Thea, with a small inward grin. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said again. ‘But you really must go now.’

And miraculously, the woman went. She walked with a firm step, a rucksack over one shoulder, and turned towards the village centre. Somebody would take pity on her, Thea assured herself. The pub, probably. And if she told her story, they would think harshly of the unfriendly house-sitter who would not admit her. Or would they? Much depended on the general view of Victor and Yvonne, and quite how a young Asian mistress would be regarded by the respectable citizens of Snowshill. Dimly, she knew that she ought to call Gladwin and report the appearance of this key witness to whatever had happened to Victor. She was fumbling for her phone when a voice made her forget what she was doing.

‘Who in the world was that?’ Blake stood at his own front door, watching the departing figure.

Thea regretted lingering outside, instead of going back into the house right away. It was Hepzie’s fault – she had pottered off into the vegetation, forcing Thea to wait for her.

‘Nobody,’ she said. ‘Hurry up, Heps. I want to go in.’

‘Come on – don’t give me that. She was talking to you for ages, but you never let her in.’

‘You were watching us?’

‘Of course I was,’ he said brazenly. ‘I was curious.’

‘Well go and ask her, if you want to know. Maybe she’ll persuade
you
to give her a bed for the night, because she failed miserably with me.’

‘Maybe she will,’ he said, and to Thea’s amazement he trotted down the hill after the vanishing Filipina.

She wanted someone she could trust and speak her mind to. Someone who knew she wasn’t a cruel mean-spirited person, but was just being sensibly careful, and following her gut feelings about the importunate female who had pleaded for hospitality. The look Blake Grossman had cast at her, before setting off on his rescue mission, had been harsh enough to hurt. Accusing, contemptuous, angry – a look she did not ever want to see again.

Questions were making her dizzy, their possible answers even more so. Why had that female turned up as she had? What would she have done if Thea had let her into the house? Was she looking for something? Would Blake really bring her back to stay next door? Was she in fact being pursued by Belinda or Gudrun and cunningly calculated that her best hope was to take the fight to their own home ground? Or had she actually killed Victor, sick of his slobbering attentions? The swirling questions prevented her from taking the obvious course of phoning for DS Gladwin.

What if this foreign girl was perfectly innocent, simply in automatic flight from a scene of horrific violence, bringing her by some unconscious instinct to a place where she thought there might be people who loved Victor as she had done? If so, it had taken her forty-eight hours to cover the ground – and where had
she been in the meantime? Where had she slept for the past two nights? How much money did she have on her? How could she possibly hope to exist in Britain without proper papers?

Should she, in short, be feeling sorry for the wretched creature? Would reporting her to the police result in a cruel deportation to some ghastly fate back home?

The living room window was open and she heard voices approaching. As expected, when she went for a look, she saw they came from Blake and the newcomer. He was carrying her rucksack, bending his head towards her in solicitude. As if aware that Thea was watching, he shot a venomous look towards Hyacinth House before escorting the girl through his own front door.

She tried not to mind. He could have no proper idea of her reasons for refusing entry – certainly couldn’t make any accurate assessment of her character on the basis of a single act. He didn’t know that Victor was dead, that this was his girlfriend come in search of succour or sympathy or revenge. Presumably he was shortly to find out.

Eighty-five miles away, Drew was at breaking point. His mother-in-law had forced him to admit his conviction that there was no longer any hope for Karen’s recovery. The resulting reproaches were even worse than Maggs’s had been.

‘But you
can’t
just give up!’ she protested. ‘What about the children?’

‘I told the children this morning. I think they deserve to know the truth.’

‘But it isn’t the truth, it’s just what you think. You can’t be sure. You
have
to assume she’ll come through it. She’s my only child!’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I can’t help it.’

‘But Drew, it’s desperately important. You’re her next of kin. If you tell the doctors you’ve abandoned hope, they’ll stop treating her. You
owe
it to her to hang on.’

Karen’s mother was a robust woman in her mid sixties, who had spent the past twenty years with her husband on a farm in Wales, the pair having become belated bohemians when Karen left home to go to college. They had made approving noises about their daughter’s marriage and the arrival of the two children, but kept at a remote distance from the little family. Her mother visited once or twice a year for a single night’s stay, but her father never left his farm. Drew’s mother-in-law was unsure about the funeral business, despite being unsentimental by nature and quite unsqueamish. Her inspection of Peaceful Repose Burial Ground had been cursory.

When Karen had been injured, three years earlier, she had briefly rallied and spent a week helping Drew with the children. Since then her visits and phone calls had increased somewhat, but she could still hardly be
counted as an active member of the family. Karen’s father was even worse. He remained at home, claiming to be indispensable and sending stilted messages via his wife.

‘I suppose they do love you?’ Drew had asked his wife, years before. ‘In their own way?’

‘I think they feel they’ve done right by me and now I’m your responsibility. They’ve always been much more to each other than they have to me. I don’t hold it against them at all, although it would have been nicer with a sibling. They’ve just sort of forgotten about me, somehow. I promise I won’t be like that with ours.’

‘Good,’ he’d smiled. ‘Although my parents aren’t very much better. Don’t they call couples like us “babes in the woods”? Orphans of the storm, or something?’

Now, of course, Karen had broken her promise, and as far as he could tell, forgotten her children completely. And his mother-in-law had shown interest at last, when it was just about too late.

‘I suppose Jack and I will have to move down here, then, to help you. He has been talking about selling up and retiring, although I don’t quite believe him. He loves that farm, even if it doesn’t make any money.’

‘Don’t do anything rash,’ said Drew tightly. ‘Let’s wait and see, shall we?’

She had rolled her eyes and sucked her teeth and gone off to inflict a totally false jollity on her
grandchildren. The sound of her forced laughter, and Timmy’s grimly polite rejoinders, was too much.

‘I’m going for a bit of a drive,’ he called to them. ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be.’

Feeling like a cowboy spurring his horse into a wild dash across the prairie, he accelerated the car down the small country lane, turning northwards when he reached the main road.

Barely ten minutes elapsed before there were shouts and screams from Blake’s house. Thea froze, listening helplessly and trying to work out whether murder was going on, and if so who was victim and who the aggressor. Odd words from Blake could be made out, which proved entirely useless for the purpose of interpretation. ‘NO!’ roared at full blast, was the most frequent, and ‘Oh, God!’ scarcely any less stentorian. The female screams resolved themselves into something slightly less disconcerting – more like placatory wordless bleats, like a puppy trying to soothe an enraged lion. There was no suggestion of actual physical harm, Thea decided with relief. Perhaps she needn’t summon the police, after all.

But she could hardly just ignore it. Blake sounded dangerously angry and out of control. Already doubting his trustworthiness, she began to suspect that he had less than pure motives in taking the Filipina into his house. But she had gone willingly, and was quite old enough to know what she was
doing. The last thing Thea felt inclined to do was to stage a dramatic rescue, only to have to eat her own words and offer the little nuisance shelter, after all.

Then a vaguely familiar green Peugeot appeared and parked neatly beside Thea’s Fiesta, fitting itself onto the narrow space with effortless ease.

‘Good God!’ said Thea to her spaniel. ‘It’s Yvonne.’

If Yvonne was back, then did that mean that Thea would have to leave – perhaps that very evening? Obviously she would no longer be required, and she was at a loss to imagine how they would operate together, allocating dog and cats, breakfast toast and troublesome phone calls. Despite the chaos and the sadness and the noise from next door, she found she was reluctant to just gather herself up and go.

And yet Yvonne deserved a friendly greeting, and a patient ear for whatever the explanation might be for her early return. Perhaps she had argued with her sister, or heard about Victor and come rushing back by some miraculously rapid means of transport to console her fatherless offspring. Perhaps she would be nicer to the Filipina woman than Thea had been.

Her confusion as to her role made her slow to go
to the door, and before she was properly into the hall, Yvonne had opened it and come into the house. ‘Oh, there you are,’ she said. ‘Good.’ She seemed almost ludicrously normal, a smile on her face and a plump red bag over her shoulder.

‘Hmm?’ said Thea. ‘Hello. Did something happen?’

Yvonne laughed ruefully. ‘Just a few things, yes. I’ve had quite a time of it. I’m really sorry to come home sooner than I said. Of course, you must stay tonight, and I’ll pay you the full fee. It’s not your fault.’

Thea relaxed and smiled. ‘Shall I make some coffee or something? Everything’s all right here. The cats are fine.’ Then she remembered the dog hairs on the sofa and the bed upstairs, and the crumbs on the kitchen table. ‘It is a bit messy, though. I was going to do a big clean-up tomorrow.’

‘Don’t worry about that.’

‘At least we haven’t broken anything. All your things are just as you left them.’

‘Good,’ said Yvonne again. ‘Coffee would be lovely, actually, if you don’t mind doing it. I’ll just go upstairs for a minute, and come back when it’s ready.’

Only gradually, as the coffee machine gurgled into action, did Yvonne’s manner begin to strike Thea as odd. For a start, she obviously knew nothing of what had happened to her husband. She showed no sign whatsoever of distress or shock. For another thing, the dithery woman from Saturday had mutated into somebody a lot more confident and decisive.
Perhaps Thea’s memory had exaggerated the air of incompetence, or perhaps the relief of getting home after such demanding travels had wrought the change.

The next set of thoughts were not so much confusing as alarming. Would
she
have to break the news about Victor? Should she explain that his lady friend was next door, being yelled at by Blake? Should she try to recount all the events that had taken place since she discovered little Stevie on Sunday afternoon? Would Yvonne want to know about Belinda’s visit and Gudrun’s arrest? If she, Thea, didn’t tell her, then who would? And what on earth had happened to send the darn woman home more than a week sooner than planned?

Take it a step at a time,
she advised herself.
Make the coffee, tidy the living room, and wait to see what happens next.
It was only about half past six – there was a long evening ahead, and the calmer it could be kept, the better. In London, the police would be collecting evidence as to who killed Victor Parker, with Belinda presumably still there. But … the woman next door with Blake was at least a witness to the essential events of his death, even if she insisted she neither saw nor heard what was going on in the next room, while she spent two minutes on the loo. She should be speaking to the police, not hiding away in a Cotswold village, even if it was the one where the former wife of the victim lived. That, she supposed, must be why Blake was making such a fuss. He was reproaching her for dereliction of duty.

This made the girlfriend seem considerably more vulnerable to Thea than she had at first. In the surprise and bewilderment of her sudden appearance, the real extent of her importance had not been immediately clear. Now, perhaps because of the shouting, Thea started to worry. Blake was too closely connected to the Parkers for comfort. Perhaps his loyalty to Yvonne explained his rage at her replacement. Pouring out the coffee, the fear blossomed and burgeoned until Thea was physically shaking. Because it would be her fault. She had virtually handed the wretched creature over to the untrustworthy man next door. By being so stupidly suspicious and unkind, she might have caused real harm to the girl.

‘Coffee’s ready!’ she called up the stairs. A door opened and closed, and Yvonne replied to say she was coming. Thea watched her walking steadily down the stairs and wondered how to begin to explain her fears for the woman in jeopardy next door.

‘Yvonne – would you say that Blake is a reliable person?’ she began clumsily. ‘He hasn’t been here much, so I’ve hardly spoken to him. I just thought … well, he does seem a bit … um, moody. Volatile. He seemed nice at first, but then …’

Yvonne seemed to give this some serious thought, as she slowly took the coffee and went into the living room with it. ‘He’s always been all right with me,’ she said. ‘Why should you worry? You won’t ever have to see him again.’

‘Well, I might. You see—’

Yvonne waved an impatient hand at her. ‘Let’s not talk for a bit, all right? I’m exhausted. I need to settle down quietly. If that’s awkward for you, I can go upstairs.’

‘Gosh, don’t be silly! If I’m in the way, then it’s for me to go upstairs, or into the kitchen. But, honestly, I do think I should tell you—’

‘Please! I’m sure people have been intrusive, with the awful business you told me about – you know, the little boy …’

Thea nodded helplessly. Yvonne was obviously incapable of listening to anything unpleasant or upsetting. ‘But I really don’t want to talk,’ she went on. ‘Not yet. Do forgive me.’

The conversation with Belinda came back, in which Yvonne’s odd hormonal deficiencies had been described. Knowing that, the present behaviour did make some sense. The equivalent of a teenage girl shutting herself in her room rather than listen to sensible lectures from the adults, perhaps. The prospect of conveying the news about Victor felt more and more daunting with every passing minute.
And why should I be the one to do it, anyway?
she wondered mutinously. Eventually the police, or Belinda, or even Mark, would presumably make contact and force Yvonne to hear what they had to say.

But it felt close to ridiculous to be sitting there quietly when a few yards beyond the walls of Hyacinth
House there was violence and grief and tragic loss all going on, much of it closely linked to Yvonne herself.

The ban on talking was astonishingly powerful, as well as ludicrous. Even to open her mouth felt unkind and aggressive after such clear pleading for silence. The paradoxical strength of weak individuals had struck Thea before, on occasion. The pathetic
don’t hurt me
stance effectively rendered all but the most insensitive quite incapable of action. Yvonne Parker clearly had it off to a fine art, worthy of any languid Victorian lady. And yet she functioned as a schoolteacher, she had reared two children and seemed capable of all the requisite tasks for normal life. She surely couldn’t be as feeble as she pretended. Thea could feel a rising surge of impatience, as Yvonne simply sat there, eyes almost closed, and she fidgeted at the imposed hiatus.

‘Yvonne – I’m afraid I think this is rather silly,’ she said eventually. ‘There are important things going on, and you will have to know about them sooner or later. I can’t see anything to be gained by postponing it.’

The eyes closed more firmly, and a small sigh escaped from the immobile lips. ‘Oh dear,’ she murmured, almost inaudibly. ‘I do see that this is awkward for you. Perhaps it would be best if I go upstairs after all. And if you could do the usual with the cats, and act as if I wasn’t here, we can manage. I’d like you to leave early tomorrow, if you don’t mind. I’ll send a cheque on to you.’

Again there seemed to be no defence, no way of
insisting on being heard. The sheer implacable force of the woman was extraordinary. ‘All right,’ she said. ‘You’re the boss.’

‘Thank you, dear. Do feel free to carry on with any plans you had for the evening. TV, or a little drive – anything you like. And you’ll need to do your packing, of course.’ And with that, she got up from the sofa, and without a backward glance went out of the room and up the stairs.

Thea was at a total loss. Angry, frustrated, bemused, she looked at her dog for suggestions. Hepzie had providentially settled on a rug in front of the empty fireplace, rather than jumping on any of the furniture, and was curled up peacefully as if nothing strange was happening. ‘It’s all right for you,’ said Thea crossly. ‘Get up. We’re going out to look at cows for a bit.’

The dog was always ready for exercise and new smells, so got up willingly enough. They went out quietly and followed the path to the back of the house and the gate into the field. The arrangement was very reminiscent of the first house-sitting commission in Duntisbourne Abbots, two years earlier, she realised. In that case, the field had been a rougher patch of land, sloping downwards to a pond and bordered by hedges. This one sloped upwards and had fences on three sides. Duntisbourne sheep were replaced by Snowshill cows. But the fact of a violent death, leaving shattered relatives behind, was similar.

‘It’s not the same at all,’ Thea muttered aloud.
Only the gate, leading from a well-tended garden into a field, was a common factor – and Thea’s instinctive resistance to actually going into this field, because of what she had found in the earlier one.

She leaned her forearms on the top bar of the gate and tried to still her turbulent thoughts. If she had had somebody to talk to, she could have aired the legion of questions and half-made connections that were swarming through her head. As it was, it felt almost dangerous to her sanity to give them a free rein. What about Yvonne’s car, for one thing? She must have gone to collect it from the street in Crouch End, oblivious of what had happened to Victor.
But wouldn’t she have called in on him while she was there?
came a niggling voice. Or had she scuttled rapidly to the vehicle and driven away, hoping not to be seen by him, unaware that he was dead? That would be more in character, Thea judged. In any case, she must have moved it before Belinda discovered Victor’s body, or the police would have swooped on it and arrested it as suspicious.

She listened for sounds of further strife in Blake’s house, but all seemed quiet. Had they arrived at some sort of understanding? Had he thrown the woman out again? Had she managed to explain to him exactly who she was and why she was there? Should she, Thea, behave responsibly and go to check that all was well? Blake had sounded furiously angry, capable of violence, in the moments before Yvonne had
appeared. To confront him now felt like the height of recklessness. The more she thought about it, the more unreliable Blake Grossman seemed. Yvonne had dismissed any hint that he should be mistrusted, and she ought to know. She had spoken warmly of him when Thea had first arrived. And yet she had no choice but to go with her own gut reactions, and they told her that he was not on the side of the angels. He had shown little concern for Stevie’s death, which had become, in some clouded way, Thea’s rule of thumb for assessing people in recent days.

She felt lost and alone, a small figure in an indifferent landscape. She could, just possibly, have an early night, get up at six the next morning and drive home, leaving Snowshill and its residents to resolve their own foolish problems as best they might. She had no special insights, had witnessed no key events that cast any clarifying light on the terrible things that had happened. They could perfectly well do without her. She could even load up her dog and her bag and go now. As she stared into the field, the other side of the gate, she was tempted to do exactly that.

But there was Gudrun, surely falsely accused. There was the Filipina woman, distraught and adrift with little hope of rescue. There was Belinda, who had seemed rather a nice person, as far as Thea could judge. Above all, there was Yvonne, upstairs in her bedroom, fiercely refusing to be told that people had died and questions really did have to be answered.
In spite of her impatience and frustration, Thea felt a degree of responsibility towards the owner of Hyacinth House, whose life seemed so narrow and difficult and frightening that she simply retreated from it when things became threatening.

The summer evening was already closing in, an hour earlier than it had done in June. While the sun had some way still to go, the light was changing and some of the birds were starting to sing their day’send songs. By the same time tomorrow, she would be back in Witney, in her own dusty silent house, where she still felt as though she lived in a suspended state, three years after losing her husband. She should sell it perhaps and find something in the Cotswolds, now that she knew the area so well. Or she could bank the money and alternate short-term rentals with
house-sitting
, becoming a real Flying Dutchwoman, with no permanent base. She could spend time abroad, as more and more people did. And if the
house-sitting
commissions dried up, she might consider some completely new career in a completely new place … fantasies began to flit into her mind in which she found a position as live-in matron in a boarding school, or full-time carer for a rich old lady …

‘Hello?’

She turned lazily, forgetting for a moment where she was and why she might be well advised to remain on guard.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Nothing,’ she told Blake, who stood with his hands on his hips and eyes wide open with indignation.

‘That’s Vonny’s car out there. I’ve just noticed it.’

‘I know.’

‘Where is she? I have to speak to her.
We
have to speak to her. The three of us.’

Victor’s girlfriend glided up behind Blake, looking sinister in the slanting rays of the sun, which caught her face and turned it to bronze.

‘You can’t. She’s gone to bed. She won’t talk to anybody.’

‘I’ll damn well
make
her,’ he said, with a jerky twist of his body, as he turned towards Hyacinth House. ‘She can’t hide away like that.’