A Grave in the Cotswolds (6 page)

Jessica threw her mother an exasperated look. ‘Why don’t you use the Blackberry I gave you?’ she demanded. ‘That would work here. You should throw that old thing away.’

‘I will,’ Thea promised with a disarming smile. ‘I did mean to, but I forgot to bring it. It’ll take a while for me to get used to it.’

We tried my phone, and found that Thea was right about the signal. I looked round at the scenery, wondering where I could go for better reception, since it was clear that the police officer had no intention of lending me her mobile. ‘Have I got time to walk up there?’ I asked, pointing across the road. ‘There seems to be a footpath going that way.’ The path led alongside a very substantial brand-new house built of yellow Cotswold stone that I thought warranted a closer inspection.

‘No problem,’ said Thea. ‘And when you come back, we can all go to the pub.’

And that meant spending money, I realised with a silent groan. Perhaps, after all, I should simply go home and do my best never to revisit Broad Campden.

I walked down the little lane and emerged quite soon onto rising ground. Looking back, I got a fine view of the new house, as well as another one of similar age, further along. I tried to imagine life in this tiny settlement, where people could afford to live in mansions with electrically operated wrought-iron gates, and pay a gardener to keep the topiary under control. The views were of tilted fields, bare hedges and leafless trees. Overhead, the clouds were being shredded by the wind. There was no sound of traffic, or voices or dogs. Even without the wind, I suspected the place would lack all the usual noise of normal life.

I had to walk to the very top of the field before my phone would work. I called Karen, who sounded distracted, even though she assured me the children were fine, and her headache had gone. ‘Oh, but Maggs wants you,’ she remembered. ‘There’s been a call from somebody in a nursing home.’

Aha! Here was my excuse to skip the pub lunch. I could easily plead sudden urgent work, with Maggs unable to remove a body by herself. But first I ought to phone her, to check that Karen had the right story. It wasn’t certain that anyone had died at all.

Maggs did not answer her mobile, so I left a message and then waited on the hillside to see if she would call back. It was no hardship, on that sunny March day, to do nothing for a few minutes. The wind was quite violent, apparently having shifted to the south or west, since there was no longer the easterly chill in it, and I enjoyed a sense of exhilaration as it tossed my hair about and swished the treetops. The hedge that ran alongside me sported patches of celandines and violets and the grass had begun to grow at the base. I meandered aimlessly as I used the phone, straying along the edge of a narrow piece of woodland. Strange little towns with names like Chipping Campden and Blockley and Paxford were scattered about within a mile or two – places I had never seen and which conjured another world where prosperous medieval Englishmen strolled down the main streets haggling over the price of wool. Just to my right somewhere was Mrs Simmonds’ grave, although I had lost my bearings so completely that I was far from sure of the direction or distance.

Maggs took just over five minutes to get back to me. ‘Where are you?’ she asked, before I could put the same question.

‘In a sloping field, on the edge of some very nice woods, in a tiny Cotswolds village,’ I said. ‘Where are you?’

‘In a lay-by, on the way to Ottery St Mary. Remember Mr Everscott?’

‘He died?’ We had both liked Mr Everscott, who was ninety-three and wanted to cause the least possible disturbance by his death. He had hated being in the nursing home, where they spoke baby talk to him and teased him simply because he was the only male. It was a small place, decently run, but nothing could make him like it.

‘Yes, and they want him removed right away. I said I was on my own, and they said they’ve got somebody there to help me.’

‘He’s not very big,’ I remembered. ‘But you shouldn’t have to go by yourself.’ For the second time in two days I was reminded of the plentiful staff at the undertaker where I had formerly worked. There had always been a team on standby, ready for just such a call.

‘But I’ve got the car!’ I remembered. ‘How are you going to manage?’

‘Den let me have his, with the trailer, but he says it’s just this once and I can’t have it again.’ Den Cooper drove a two-door Yaris, into which a dead body could in no way be fitted. But a trailer!

I groaned. ‘Maggs – we can’t remove him in a trailer. That’s awful. What are you thinking of?’

‘No, it’s fine,’ she promised. ‘It’s got a proper cover, and is just long enough. I don’t know why we didn’t think of it before.’

‘Somebody’s going to have to help you get him in. It won’t be dignified. They’ll tell the opposition and we’ll be a laughing stock.’

‘Drew!’ she interrupted. ‘Trust me. It’s fine. Stop agonising. I’ll make a virtue of it. It can be part of our image.’

The only image that I could come up with was of the cover blowing off the trailer on the dual carriageway, and poor Mr Everscott finding himself bowling along the road like a tree trunk lost from a timber truck.

‘No,’ I said. ‘It can’t. You can do it this once, if you’re very careful, but never
ever
again.’

‘That’s what Den said,’ she replied dolefully. Then she cheered up. ‘Why are you in the Cotswolds again, anyway? Did something go wrong?’

‘You could say that. I’ll tell you all about it when I see you. Meanwhile, I’m going to have lunch in a pub with a nice lady. Two ladies, actually, and probably a man as well. And a spaniel, I expect.’

‘Lucky you. But that doesn’t explain why you’re in a field.’

‘Signal problems,’ I said shortly. ‘It’s lovely here,’ I elaborated, looking around again at the landscape. ‘Very Cotswoldy. Mrs Simmonds’ house has got a fabulous thatched roof.’

‘Thatch isn’t typical of the Cotswolds,’ Maggs told me.

‘How in the world do you know that?’ It was a daft question – Maggs knew a million pieces of trivia like this. She seemed to absorb them through her skin, because I never saw her reading.

‘I just know,’ she said, as always. ‘But there are a few villages that buck the trend – you must be in one of them.’

‘I suppose I must,’ I agreed. ‘Well, I should let you get on. Pop in and see Karen when you get back, OK? She had a headache yesterday.’

‘I won’t be back for hours, probably. It’s a fair old way, you know. When are you getting home?’

‘I doubt if I’ll be able to rush this lunch, but I’ll try to leave by two, and be back around three-thirty.’

‘Hmm,’ she said, in her uniquely Maggsian manner. ‘Sounds as if you like it there.’

‘It’s Saturday,’ I defended.

‘Right, and your poor wife’s got to entertain two kids all day. Just like a man.’

I remembered Timmy’s hope that Maggs might take him swimming, but refrained from mentioning it. It was bad enough that she’d been called out on a Saturday, when she must have a thousand things to do at home. ‘So what’s Den doing?’ I asked, instead.

‘He’s still catching up with sleep, but this afternoon he’s doing the garden,’ she said. ‘Digging out buttercups, I think.’

‘Go!’ I ordered. ‘No more chit-chat.’

Her answering snort was perfectly reasonable, I acknowledged. I knew I had a bad habit of staying too long on the phone, somehow not liking to sever the fragile link between myself and the other person.

I found a gateway onto the road, went up to the junction at the top and turned right, my mind on Mr Everscott and the most likely day for his burial. Maggs and Den were more than I deserved, I reflected, not for the first time. They put their weekends aside when the business demanded, sacrificing normal married life without a murmur. Den’s suggestion of the trailer was typical – his practical nature would quickly identify the solution to the problem of Mr Everscott. He had been a police constable when I first met him, but had resigned shortly before Karen’s shooting, for reasons I never entirely grasped. His romance with Maggs had been sweet to watch, their wedding, only a few months earlier, a triumph of originality. The trip to Syria had been a kind of delayed honeymoon. Karen was already predicting an imminent announcement that a new little Cooper was on its way – but somehow I had my doubts. Maggs might be fond of my Timmy, but children in general appeared to leave her cold. I also selfishly dreaded such a distraction. As a mother, Maggs could not possibly hope to be such a reliable colleague in the business as she currently was.

My route back to the cottage seemed further than I expected, which turned out to be because I was going in the wrong direction. I’d reached an unfamiliar row of houses, the road dipping downhill, and swung round, trotting back in a state of embarrassment.

‘Where on earth have you been?’ asked Thea Osborne, when I eventually got back to where my car sat outside Mrs Simmonds’ cottage.

‘Sorry,’ I panted. ‘Have I made us late?’

‘You’ve been more than half an hour,’ Jessica accused. ‘We didn’t know what to do.’

I didn’t like to admit my stupidity, so shrugged and mumbled something about needing to sort something out at home. My idea of skipping the lunch and going back right away seemed to have evaporated. With a new funeral coming along, I would be more solvent than expected – enough to afford a pub lunch, so long as I didn’t have to treat everybody.

We turned right at the main street, walking in an untidy group, Thea’s dog straining at the lead, dragging her ahead of the others. The boyfriend was with us, as expected. Paul something – Middleman, I remembered after a few minutes – was young and relaxed, smiling a lot and giving Jessica fond glances. Twenty years earlier, he would have been horribly aware of sharp looks coming his way from locals, an alien in this impeccably white English village; but now he strolled easily along – just as Maggs would have done, skin colour a matter of utter irrelevance.

Maggs was mixed race, adopted out to a sensible couple in Plymouth, who raised her to ignore all issues of skin colour. No nonsense about culture or heritage for them – they simply cherished her for the amazing person she was, and shrugged away the ignorant and unkind remarks sometimes made by schoolmates. This Paul was very much blacker than Maggs, but he appeared to have arrived at the same confident attitude to life and I found myself liking him for this reason alone.

Because, I was slowly beginning to realise, there were not many other reasons to like him. He talked about a stag party he had recently been invited to, where monumental quantities of alcohol had been consumed, and the groom had been left tied to some railings outside his grandmother’s house, stark naked. Paul thought that was funny. I found myself musing on the differences between men – the cads versus the decent blokes, in the lingo of the Thirties. It was not a new topic for me, and as usual I came to the conclusion that you were formed by the sort of women there were in your life. A good woman could rehabilitate the most dreadful bounder, given a chance. But that didn’t explain why the decent ones remained decent, even if harnessed to a sarcastic nagging slut. That, presumably, was down to their mother, who sowed the seeds of right thinking so firmly they could never be uprooted.

I found myself catching the eye of Thea as she turned her head to see if we were keeping up with her. She had listened quietly to Paul’s story, revealing nothing in the back view she kept to us as she trotted along, but somehow I knew she hadn’t liked it. Jessica had giggled in the right places, for which nobody could really blame her.

Now, in Thea’s eyes, I saw my own feelings reflected. For good measure, she rolled them upwards in the universal sign of scorn, but she hadn’t needed to do that. I had already decided that she was a kindred spirit, the previous day. I did something I couldn’t remember ever having done before, and winked at her, wondering how she would take it. Her answering grin came as a relief.

We walked about half a mile to the Baker’s Arms, passing several beautiful buildings on the way. A long, low one on the right, calling itself the Old Malt House, was a very upmarket guest house, according to the sign. Then a small fairytale church, opposite a high wall topped by a hedge with birds and other things created out of its greenery. The pub came next, on the right. We all filed in, only to be told that dogs were not permitted in the bar. Crossly, Thea led us to a chilly little arrangement outside, just beyond the kitchen, where some sort of creeper provided a bit of shelter. ‘It’d be lovely in June,’ said Jessica.

Thea ranted briefly about society’s ridiculous change of heart concerning dogs. I paid a visit to the loo, pausing to admire a large wall hanging depicting the pub. ‘Distinctive,’ I murmured to the woman behind the bar. ‘Is it a tapestry?’

‘It’s actually a rug,’ she said wearily. ‘A local woman made it for us, ages ago.’

It then turned out that credit cards were not acceptable, so we had an undignified scramble for cash, with Paul producing a meagre sixty-five pence. ‘I don’t really do cash,’ he said, as if it were an obsolete practice. I emptied my pockets, managing to produce enough for myself and a little bit over.

Finally we got the food, which I spoilt for myself by a growing feeling that I should not be there. I should be at home, dealing with family and business, garden and car tyres – not indulging in this strange interlude with people I was never going to see again. We spoke briefly about the grave and its transgressions against the council, but Thea waved my worries away with an airy dismissal of petty bureaucracy. ‘They’re just trying it on,’ she said. Jessica tried to put the official view, but was out of her depth when it came to the legalities. I knew a lot more than she did on the subject, but refrained from making this too apparent.

Another person with pressing worries was Thea. ‘I was booked to stay here for another week,’ she said. ‘And now I don’t know what to do. They tell me the house belongs to the older nephew now, Charles Talbot, but he doesn’t seem interested. He hadn’t seen Greta for five years, and he’s in the middle of a horrible divorce. I couldn’t get a straight answer out of him when I asked what I ought to do.’