A Cotswold Mystery Part 12

He approached Thea, arms wide, and she folded herself into them for a thorough hug. Phil's body was nothing like Carl's had been. The two men smelt different, wore different clothes, put their hands in different places. But there was still, in a lurking corner of her heart, a sense of betrayal. She had truly and profoundly intended, when she married Carl, never to get as close as this to another man.

Jessica averted her gaze, bending down to the dog, watching a young woman with a baby across the street.

'See you, then,' said Phil at last. 'Not sure when.'

'We'll let you know if we solve the murder,' said Jessica lightly, and Thea held her breath. But no more was said, and the police car sped away. When they'd gone, Thea turned to Jessica. 'You didn't feel like giving him your theory about who killed Julian, then?'

'I didn't get a chance, did I?'

'Were you planning to?'

'I don't know,' the girl admitted. 'Very probably not.'

'Better have that tea, then,' said Thea hoping she sounded more stoical than she felt. 'Maybe we could give the patio a try.'

'The seats'll be wet,' Jessica objected. 'Haven't you had enough fresh air for one day?'

'I'll wipe them. I like the quiet, and the garden's so pretty, it needs somebody to admire it.'

'You're mad,' said her daughter, but she followed her out with a plate of biscuits.

They sat at the small wrought iron table for five minutes, before Jessica s.h.i.+vered and announced she was going back indoors. But before she could move, the silence was cracked into ear-splitting shards.

'What's that?' Jessica squealed.

'Oh, Lord. It's Granny's buzzer. She must have gone out.' Thea got up and hurried through the house. The buzzer was making its maddening sound just over her head as she threw open the front door. Hepzie was at her heels and she turned to order the spaniel to stay indoors. The dog seemed hardly to notice the noise, until Thea caught the strange look in her eyes. Apprehension and something like pain filled them. 'Stay!' she ordered. 'Go and talk to Jessica.'

But Jessica was already following her into the hall. 'What a ghastly din,' she complained, at the top of her voice.

'Can't you turn it off for me?' Thea shouted, pointing at the switch. 'I'll go after her.'

Thea could see no sign of Mrs Gardner, until she looked to her right and caught sight of a bowlegged figure heading towards the woods at the end of the street. The old lady was moving at quite some speed, she noted, and seemed very purposeful.

Putting on a spurt of her own, she drew level with her quarry within sight of the trees ahead. 'Off for a walk?' she puffed. 'You look as if you're dressed for it.' Mrs Gardner was wearing stout shoes that looked as if they'd been made around 1946, and a felt hat with a very droopy gauzy flower attached to it.

'That's right,' chirped Granny. 'I thought I'd go bird's nesting. I know all the different eggs,' she added proudly.

Thea entertained a flash of early memory, where her brother had come home with three different eggs from three different nests and their father had chastised him with astonis.h.i.+ng violence. That had been, she supposed, during the Seventies, when wild birds were disappearing rapidly, thanks to the chemicals and hedge-removal involved in farming at the time.

'You're not allowed to collect eggs any more,' she said, trying to work out when Granny's egg-collecting heyday must have been. 'The birds need protecting from that sort of thing. Besides,' she realised, 'I think it's still a bit early in the year for it.'

The old woman pulled in her chin, and gave Thea a beaky stare of reprimand. 'I don't take take the eggs,' she sniffed. 'I never did. That was the sort of thing boys did blowing out the yolk. Very messy business. I just like to the eggs,' she sniffed. 'I never did. That was the sort of thing boys did blowing out the yolk. Very messy business. I just like to look look, and watch the mother bird with her babies.'

'Can I come with you, then?' Thea asked, resigned to retracing the route she and Jessica had taken less than an hour before.

'I suppose so, if you're quiet.'

There followed sixty minutes of peculiar magic. A nostalgia that went back to a few brief years of Thea's childhood where she had been a country child. Not only did it remind her of her own experience, but it conjured her husband Carl and his stories of growing up on a farm in the sixties, where even then he had been unusual. Most of his peers had already caught the television bug and seldom went outside. He, however, had been born with a fascination for the outdoors.

With a shock Thea found herself revelling in her strange companion, who did indeed know where to find birds' nests amongst the patch of woodland so close to human settlement. And although Thea had been partly right in thinking late March was rather early for such activity, there were signs that the birds were gathering themselves for the breeding frenzy that was almost upon them. They sat on a fallen tree, quietly watching a robin flitting to and fro with dry gra.s.s in its beak. They listened to a bullfinch clattering in some overhead branches, and Granny pointed out three or four other species which Thea would never have noticed.

What must Jessica be thinking, she wondered? Had she followed un.o.bserved for a few minutes, enough to understand what was going on? Or had she decided to make the most of an interlude on her own?

It took days for Thea to fathom everything she learnt from that enchanted hour in the woods with a very old woman whose brain only partly functioned. The emotion that surfaced first, and was initially hard to name, turned out to be respect respect. Respect for a person who knew she was defective and vulnerable and liable to lose herself in the tangle of contemporary realities and who still got herself mobilised every morning and followed whatever the urge of the moment might be. It gave Thea a soaring sense of discovery to feel this, as well as something close to complacency. She was impatient to explain it to Jessica and others, until it dawned on her that this might be what Yvette Montgomery had been hoping to convey, without actually uttering any words that might be taken wrongly or dismissed as foolish.

It would explain the comparative freedom that Granny was still allowed, for one thing. And it would also account for the relations.h.i.+ps she appeared to have around the village. Giles, her occasional surrogate son, for example, and the elderly Thomas, who Granny claimed to dislike. They had both treated her with dignity. Even the bizarre Ick, with his glittery shoes and strangled English, had taken her seriously. No age discrimination in Blockley, it seemed.

And if that was how it was, then Jessica's outrageous suspicions concerning the murder of Julian Jolly might not be so unthinkable, either.

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Monday seemed to stretch unnaturally, thanks to the change to British Summer Time. Jessica had settled in the living room with a dusty-looking police textbook, and the spaniel on her legs.

'You've only been here twenty-four hours and it feels like weeks weeks,' said Thea restlessly.

'What's the matter with you? You can't be bored already. How will you manage after I've gone?'

'Good question,' gloomed Thea. 'I expect I'll go on a lot more nature rambles with Granny.'

'You'll enjoy that,' said Jessica encouragingly. 'You came back really happy just now.'

'It was lovely,' Thea agreed. 'Totally unexpected. Like time travel back thirty years.'

'Sounds more like a hundred years to me.' She closed the book with her thumb marking the place. 'She's a complicated character, isn't she?'

Thea considered her reply. 'I guess everybody is, once they've got to her age. Think of all the things she's seen and learnt in her life. Even if she forgets ninety per cent of it, there's still plenty left. And it isn't a normal sort of forgetfulness in her case. She hasn't got Alzheimer's. It's more like one area of local damage to her brain. If Giles is right about the cause, it isn't likely to get any worse over time. It might even get better.'

'Which would explain why she isn't kept completely under lock and key,' Jessica nodded. 'When I first met her, I thought she should be in some sort of home.'

Thea winced. 'Where she could never again go and watch birds building their nests,' she said forcibly. 'Kept sedated and patronised around the clock.'

'OK,' Jessica held up a hand. 'I get the idea.' She glanced at her book. 'I was hoping I could have a few minutes to revise a bit. Is that very selfish of me?' She squinted at her mother doubtfully.

'Haven't you finished with all that cla.s.sroom stuff? I thought it was all practical now.'

'It is, but I still have to know it.' She flourished the book. 'It isn't enough just to pa.s.s the a.s.sessment and then forget it all. I have to keep refres.h.i.+ng my memory.'

'I see,' muttered Thea. 'Very commendable. I bet none of the others spend their time off "refres.h.i.+ng their memories".'

'I don't care what the others do.' Jessica sighed. 'To be honest, I'm worried they might send me back to the cla.s.sroom after what happened last week. They might think I'm not ready to be let loose on the streets.'

'Does that ever happen? It sounds pretty unlikely to me.'

'I don't know. And I'm scared to ask.'

'James didn't say anything, then?'

'Not about the course, no. He did his best to rea.s.sure me. All the usual stuff about everybody making mistakes.'

'Which is true, of course.'

'Except-' Jessica gave up, and let the textbook drop to the floor. 'Except I can't imagine ever having the nerve to go to a real incident again. It's too messy messy. Nothing happens according to the book. People are impossibly unpredictable. And there's so much we're not allowed to do.' She turned a tormented face to her mother. 'I have been thinking a bit about what you said earlier on, you know. Some of it might be right. I don't want to spend my working life torn by ethical dilemmas and seen as the enemy by my own mother.'

Thea writhed and tried to interrupt, but Jessica forged on. 'I think I might just give the whole thing up and find something else to do. Maybe law. I could be a solicitor.'

'Where practically everything happens by the book,' said Thea drily. 'How dull would that be?' Her sudden flare of hope that Jess might actually leave the police was quickly doused by concern for the girl's loss of confidence and sense of purpose.

'The way I feel now, I might prefer dullness to all this anguish. anguish.'

Thea bit back the easy words of consolation that she instinctively felt like offering. She had not especially wanted Jess to go into the police. Not many mothers would, she suspected. But she had only gradually come to see it as a threat to their relations.h.i.+p. And that was perverse, given that she was the girlfriend of one senior police detective and the sister-in-law of another. With Jessica it was different. The constant danger was an obvious anxiety, but it was more the unsavoury influences that could so easily blunt a young woman's spirit that Thea feared. Her daughter had been a fairly average teenager. She had not joined political protests or raged about the state of the planet. She had shown little pa.s.sion about anything, as far as her mother could see. There had been two boyfriends, but both had been labelled 'annoying' after a few weeks. Shortly before Carl was killed, Jessica had written from university saying she had enrolled for a short course in Latin, which would run just for a year and count for a handful of points towards her degree. 'It's like nothing else I'm doing,' she'd written. 'A complete change from Sociology and Economics. I could never have guessed what fun it could be.'

But when Carl died, she missed too many Latin cla.s.ses and never took it up again. Thea hadn't given it another thought, in her own black hole of grief.

'Can you remember why you opted for the police in the first place?' she asked.

Jessica shrugged. 'To please Uncle James, probably.'

'Don't give me that. James never put any pressure on you. He was always very good about it. None of us knew how delighted he was until after you got accepted. It came from you, and don't pretend otherwise.'

'Well, I don't remember why I wanted to do it, now. Something about a challenge, and being a bit different from the rest of the crowd.' She looked up. 'I got full marks in the Law module you know. I could could be a lawyer instead.' be a lawyer instead.'

'It's entirely up to you,' said Thea, knowing how irritating she was being.

'Thanks for the support,' Jessica muttered with a scowl.

'Don't mention it,' snapped Thea.

The tension was not so much broken as diverted by the manic jingling of Thea's mobile. She rummaged in her bag for it, feeling as if she'd been wrong-footed in some way.

'h.e.l.lo,' she said briskly.

'Thea? It's me. Just to say how good it was to see you today. I'd been missing you.'

Her response to the soft romance in his voice was far from what Phil might have been expecting. He's He's too old for all this too old for all this, she thought. And so am I. It And so am I. It should be my daughter having mushy phonecalls, should be my daughter having mushy phonecalls, not me. not me.

'I'd only been here two days,' she said. 'We often go longer than that between seeing each other.'

'True,' he agreed. 'But I was anxious about you doing another house-sit. You know how accident p.r.o.ne you can be.'

'Phil, I'm not actually in a very good mood at the moment. That's the trouble with telephones they never sense the atmosphere, do they? It's not your fault, but you're managing to say all the wrong things.'

'Oh!'

Yes, yes, I know honesty hurts. I ought to be able to switch on the sweet nothings at a moment's able to switch on the sweet nothings at a moment's notice. notice. She gritted her teeth. Suddenly she seemed to be surrounded by landmines, and with every step her temper grew shorter. She gritted her teeth. Suddenly she seemed to be surrounded by landmines, and with every step her temper grew shorter.

'Sorry, Phil. It isn't you at all. And yes, it was very nice to see you so unexpectedly. But I'm actually not at all accident p.r.o.ne. I thought we agreed months ago that by its nature, house-sitting involves walking into the unknown. When people go away, they create opportunities for other people to misbehave.'

'Right. And that puts you at risk.'

'And I've got a big strong police probationer daughter to watch out for me. And a ferociously intelligent c.o.c.ker spaniel for good measure.'

The jokiness must have rea.s.sured him. 'Oh, I don't know what I'm to do with you,' he said lightly.

'Don't do anything,' she said, not quite knowing what she meant by that. All she knew was that she felt an urge to push him away, at least enough to let in a bit more air and light. She knew that he was starting to think they should set up home together, and that she came over cold whenever she tried to imagine it. And that the conversation about it was drawing inexorably closer with every pa.s.sing day.

'I really want to take you to lunch one day this week,' he persisted. 'At that Churchill Arms place in Paxford, preferably. Jessica would like it,' he added unfairly.

'That would be lovely,' she said. 'Jess leaves on Thursday, though, so you haven't got many days to choose from.'

'I'll give it top priority,' he said firmly. 'Work permitting,' he added, as he so often did.

'OK then. We'll await your pleasure.'

She terminated the call and looked at her daughter. 'Phil's taking us to the Paxford place as soon as he can get away,' she said. 'Is that all right?'

'Why are you so horrible to him?' Jess was staring accusingly at her. 'He's a perfectly nice man, and you treat him like dirt.'

Thea shook her head wearily. 'Don't you start,' she begged. 'I was only being honest with him. What's the point of a relations.h.i.+p where you can't be honest?'

Jessica rolled her eyes, and leant off the sofa to retrieve her police textbook from the floor.

The scratchy atmosphere was sustained for another hour, during which Thea mainly stayed in the kitchen, giving Hepzie her supper and sitting at the table with a Chat Chat magazine she had found in the living room. It seemed an odd journal for the Montgomerys to have in their house, given that most of the stories in it concerned people famous for going to parties and having a lot of love affairs. It was only halfway through that she understood. A half-page photograph featured the two young celebrities from The Crown the previous evening. The caption was unambiguous: magazine she had found in the living room. It seemed an odd journal for the Montgomerys to have in their house, given that most of the stories in it concerned people famous for going to parties and having a lot of love affairs. It was only halfway through that she understood. A half-page photograph featured the two young celebrities from The Crown the previous evening. The caption was unambiguous: Supermodel CLEODIE MASON captured last Supermodel CLEODIE MASON captured last week at Annabel's with her new beau ICARUS week at Annabel's with her new beau ICARUS BINNS. BINNS.

Underneath, a small piece of text elaborated further.

[image]

Thea examined the photograph with minimal curiosity. What must it be like, she wondered, to have one's every move followed by mindless journalists who produced simpering pieces of prose like this? Had they known what they were getting into when they set out to become famous? Did either of them have a sc.r.a.p of genuine talent to justify the money and attention that they now wallowed in?

Thinking to smooth things over with Jessica, she took the magazine into the living room. 'Look what I found,' she said.

Jessica had evidently arrived at the same resolution to effect a rapprochement. With a smile, she took the magazine. 'Oh!' she chirped. 'How exciting. Do you think they're still here, then? In Blockley, I mean? Is this where their Cotswold hideaway is?'

'I have no idea,' said Thea. 'But Ick seemed to know his way around when I saw him on Sat.u.r.day. And they were obviously staying last night at The Crown.'

'I hope we see them again. I might get to talk talk to him.' Jessica's eyes sparkled and she looked about fourteen. 'Imagine that. Icarus Binns!' to him.' Jessica's eyes sparkled and she looked about fourteen. 'Imagine that. Icarus Binns!'

'It makes me feel horribly old old,' Thea confessed. 'I've honestly never heard of him. Too much Radio Four and BBC2, I suppose.'

'You never were into that sort of thing,' Jessica said kindly. 'You always took more interest in the past. Dusty old history, I used to call it.'