A Grave in the Cotswolds (31 page)

‘That gives us an hour or so in which to get what we want. Should be plenty,’ she said.

‘Thea – I ought to tell you,’ I began hurriedly, ‘you ought to know that I have been involved in something rather like this before. People behave with serious violence when they’re under pressure. I’ve seen it happen. You need to know what you’re doing.’ She seemed like a barely credible character at that moment – something from a comic strip: Nancy Drew or Lara Croft. Not a small English widow in her forties.

‘I like to make things happen,’ she said, with a ridiculously sweet smile. ‘It usually works.’

‘But what if it goes wrong? What if Charles or Mr Watchett has a gun? Or a knife? I mean – everyone can get a knife easily enough, can’t they? There’ll be a drawerful of them in the kitchen.’

‘Why would they want to knife anybody?’ She gave me a wide-eyed look that didn’t fool me for a moment. ‘All we’re going to do is talk to them.’

I gave up. Beneath all the plans and instructions thrummed the constant question – who killed Mr Maynard? He had certainly been deliberately coshed by somebody, even if they hadn’t meant to kill him. I thought I understood where the guilt must lie, but to my slow-moving brain, the proof was flimsy and the whole exercise fraught with hazard.

‘It’s simple,’ she said impatiently, when I stammered out my confusion, without explaining precisely what it was that was so plain and obvious.

I did my best to concentrate on the present moment, trying to trust that Thea knew what she was doing. At least there was no sign that Harry had blundered too badly, so far. No screaming or slamming doors or gunshots issued from the house. No wailing police sirens attending an alarm call. At exactly nine o’clock, Thea opened her door, told the dog to stay where it was, and said, ‘Come on, then,’ to me. Feeling rather like a second spaniel, I did as I was bid.

We were admitted to a living room that seemed uncomfortably crowded. The bright overhead light left nowhere to hide, and all the faces, as I looked from one to another, displayed varying emotions, from irritation through impatience to boredom. There wasn’t much of a heightened atmosphere, as far as I could discern.

Thea made her opening speech and then waited for me to deliver mine. ‘I know you all think badly of me,’ I began, ‘but I came to try to convince you that I truly did not harm anybody. Not Mrs Simmonds or Mr Maynard.’ I stood up straight and met any eye that fell in my direction. ‘It has all been a complete mix-up, and it’s time we straightened it out before any more damage is done.’

Seven people stared at me. Charles Talbot was standing by the fireplace, in a pose that seemed deliberately calculated to suggest the final act in a play from the Thirties. He ought to have been smoking a pipe for maximum effect, I thought crazily. His young brother was slumped in a corner of a big green sofa, his mobile phone in his hand, as if just about to compose a text message to someone, taking no notice of me and my announcement. Did he have a girlfriend, I wondered? Someone he was relaying all this family turmoil to?

Judith Talbot was beside her friend Susan Watchett, slightly squashed on the remaining sofa space. Mr Watchett was in an armchair, his head and shoulders pressed back as if trying to withdraw from the proceedings. His stare came and went – more a snatching of quick glances than a sustained attention to what I was saying. Oliver Talbot squatted incongruously on a leather pouffe close to his elder son, his expression sulky.

Harry and Thea had gravitated to a point behind the sofa, leaning over it like latecomers to the drama. A big grey cat was curled on a rug in front of the unlit fire, ignoring the whole performance.

‘Poor Greta,’ sighed Harry, apparently not quite done with his own presentation. ‘She was her own worst enemy, of course. Would never give an inch in a disagreement. I never expected her to be murdered, but I sometimes wondered how she escaped a good smack.’

Thea gripped his arm. ‘What do you mean? How well did you know her? Who
are
you, anyway?’

It struck me as deeply unconvincing, but nobody else seemed to spot a piece of bad acting when they saw it.

‘Oh, I do beg your pardon,’ he gave a quaint little bow. ‘The name’s Harry Richmond. I knew your Mrs Simmonds for six months before she left the cooperative. I actually took her side once or twice in an argument, just for the sake of fair do’s, but it never seemed to help. She was such a very
abrasive
woman.’

A protesting snort came from the boy on the sofa, but nothing more articulate emerged.

‘So you agree with us that she was murdered?’ said Judith Talbot, in far less belligerent mode than earlier in the evening. ‘But you don’t think it was Mr Slocombe who did it?’

‘Of course I didn’t do it,’ I shouted hotly. ‘How many more times?’

‘Be quiet,’ ordered Charles Talbot. ‘Please be quiet. We just might be getting somewhere at last.’ He eyed his mother. ‘Ma, you’ve already heard what this man has to say. It doesn’t really change anything, when you think about it. At least – it confirms what you thought.’ He frowned, and chewed his lower lip. ‘Although—’

‘If I understand him, it means Drew’s in the clear,’ Thea interrupted. ‘And
that
means she wasn’t murdered at all, and there shouldn’t be an exhumation.’

I hadn’t expected her to reach this point so soon. She was deviating from the script, leaving me to flounder.

‘Or…someone we know did it,’ said Charles, again giving his mother a thoughtful look. ‘And we might be sorry to have it brought into the open.’ He might be slow, but he was certainly functioning more effectively than most people in the room.

I caught Harry Richmond’s eye. He seemed to be feeling something close to triumph, his eyebrows twitching manically.

Time was passing far too rapidly for comfort. If everyone was to have a say, and the goal achieved of averting the exhumation, a lot had to happen in the next half-hour.

‘Helena Maynard sent me a very nasty letter,’ I said, hoping to shift things along a bit. ‘Completely out of order it was.’

‘But the police are convinced that you killed Gavin,’ Susan Watchett said, speaking for the first time. ‘You’re only out on bail because they’re still collecting evidence. As I understand it, you’ve already been charged with murdering Gavin. I don’t know how you can have the gall to come amongst decent people, you two-faced creature. Swindling poor Greta out of her money and then bashing Gavin to death when he threatened to expose you for what you are. It’s all quite clear to me what happened. You made that stupid mistake about the field, which obviously meant you wouldn’t inherit the house as you expected. So you thought if you could shut Gavin up, it might not be pursued by anybody else. It might all be hushed up and you’d get what you’d wanted all along. Of course, you killed Greta as well. That much is perfectly obvious.’

She spoke without drawing breath for most of this speech. Her face was pushed forward, with red cheeks and wide staring eyes.

‘That’s right,’ endorsed Judith Talbot, with scarcely less passion. She proceeded to repeat much of what Susan Watchett had just said, which was quite unnecessary, to my mind.

The melodrama was finally getting going, it seemed, in accordance with Thea’s plan. Furthermore, she was stating the received wisdom about what had happened, in a summary that was both painful and frustrating to hear. I wondered whether I would ever see myself in the same light again, after being so directly accused of a double murder. For some reason, my glance fell on young Jeremy, still fiddling with his phone. Wasn’t he too young for all this adult hysteria, for accusations about murder and greed? Feeling my eyes on him, he looked up and met my gaze. He smiled tightly, embarrassment evident on his face, and something that suggested shame. He might well feel ashamed of his raving mother, I thought. Any boy would.

I was grateful for the smile, at least. Here was someone who apparently did not believe I had committed murder, who had not recoiled from me as everybody else had done when I first entered the room. I was something close to monstrous in their eyes – or at least in the eyes of all those who had not themselves killed Mr Maynard. Perhaps this, too, was part of Thea’s plan – to observe which person failed to react that way, knowing I was actually quite innocent. Trying to visualise that initial scene again, it seemed to me that it was the women who had been outraged and vituperative, while all the men showed varying levels of fatigue or exasperation. Except Jeremy, who seemed to care for nothing but his phone.

In the brief silence following the two female tirades, I wondered about motivation. What could be so bad that it drove a person to kill? Mrs Watchett thought it was basically about property and business expansion. Plus an element of face-saving, perhaps. ‘You’re wrong,’ I told the women. ‘Completely wrong.’

‘Why would it mean he wouldn’t inherit the house?’ asked Thea slowly. ‘Why would the mistake about the field lead to the loss of his inheritance?’

‘It’s in the will,’ supplied Judith Talbot. ‘A condition of him getting the house is that he establish a natural burial ground in that field.’

‘Didn’t you know that?’ I asked Thea. ‘Surely I told you?’ I remembered our fractured conversation in the car. ‘I thought you knew about it.’

‘You didn’t tell me,’ she said. ‘I had no idea.’

It was one reason why I had decided that honesty was the best policy, very early in my career: I could never remember what I had told which person. The deliberate evasions over the past week where Karen was concerned had been one of the most unpleasant aspects of the whole affair. I could only cope with it by telling her almost nothing. She still had no idea there had been a murder, never mind that I was the chief suspect. But I did think I had been completely frank with Thea. ‘I meant to tell you,’ I said.

She was clearly thinking hard. ‘Hmm,’ she said, unhelpfully. Only then did I realise she was acting for the benefit of her byzantine plan.

‘So, what now?’ came a new voice. Finally, Jeremy had spoken from the corner of the sofa.

I remembered that he and Harry must surely know each other. How had the boy reacted when Harry first showed up at the Watchetts’ door? Had he contributed when Thea’s friend had delivered his little speech about enemies at the commune? He had, after all, told Thea and me that his aunt had effectively been killed by the people there –
like dogs
, he said. Jeremy, at least, did not believe that I was in any way involved.

I addressed him directly. ‘Jeremy – you don’t think I murdered your aunt, do you?’ Before saying more, it struck me that he might not want his mother to know about our conversation on Saturday. Evidently, he had decided to return to his family, instead of hiding away in Somerset.

‘Nah!’ he said carelessly. ‘Course you didn’t. The whole thing’s daft.’

‘Jeremy!’ His mother looked as if she would like to smack him.

‘Well, it’s true. You’ve got it all wrong, as usual. You never did understand Auntie Greta, did you? None of you understood her.’ He looked around the crowded room, his gaze finally resting on Charles, his much older brother. ‘But she put one over on you all, in the end. She got what she wanted, exactly the
way
she wanted it.’

‘Except now it’s all going to be ruined,’ said Thea softly.

The effect on Jeremy was galvanising. ‘No!’ he shouted. ‘It’s not gonna happen. This bloke never went near her. How could he have killed her? You should get your facts right before going off to the police with your rubbish ideas.’ He switched his attention to Harry, twisting round to look at him where he still leant over the back of the sofa. ‘
You
know,’ he hissed. ‘You tell them.’

Reprieved from the full glare of a room full of people, I found my brain starting to function more effectively than it had done for some hours. I had understood that Thea was not divulging every detail of her plan, but a startling suspicion took root, germinated by Jeremy’s words. I checked it from all angles, but it held fast.

Harry reached out to lay a hand on the boy’s shoulder. ‘Sorry, lad, but I think it is. If we can’t convince the police that your mother’s accusations are groundless, then they’ll be forced to do another post-mortem examination.’

‘It’s rubbish,’ insisted Jeremy. ‘And you all know it is,’ he challenged the whole room.

His mother seemed to become more aware of him than she had so far. ‘Jerry – who’re you texting?’ she suddenly asked.

‘Who d’you think?’

‘It’s not your sister, is it?’

‘Christ, Jeremy!’ exploded big brother Charles. ‘You’re not, are you?’

‘None of your business,’ snapped the boy, closing the front of his phone. I caught a fleeting look of pain cross his face, as if his mother and brother had somehow wounded him. I gave the phone a closer examination, wondering just what functions it possessed, only dimly aware of the speed at which technology was moving, and the dinosaur nature of my own elderly gadget. This one looked more like a tiny computer than a telephone.

‘Can it do pictures?’ I asked.

He gave me a withering glance. ‘Does a bike have wheels?’ he said with impressive sarcasm.

Susan Watchett stood up, moving fluidly. She spoke to the gathering in general. ‘Well, I don’t know about you lot, but Frank and I are almost ready for bed.’ She gave her husband a meaningful look. ‘Can you put the cat out?’

As far as I could tell, they had all four Talbots as house guests. One of them was very likely to be sleeping on the sofa. I tried to catch Thea’s eye, for instructions as to what happened next. As far as I could figure out, her plan had failed. The high stakes had been called, and if my hunch was right – a hunch that Charles Talbot evidently shared – she was about to be unmasked as a troublemaker with no rights, and every reason to be thrown out of the house.

My idea took a knock as I tried to think it through to its source. ‘When did you go to the police with your accusations against me?’ I asked Mrs Talbot.

‘She did it for me,’ she said, indicating Thea. ‘She knows some high-up bloke in the police, who could pull the right strings.’