A Grave in the Cotswolds (7 page)

‘Have you been paid?’ I asked.

She shook her head. ‘That’s another thing,’ she said.

‘Well of course you should pack up and go,’ said Jessica. ‘If you don’t even know whether you’ll be paid, it’s crazy to stay on.’

‘Except it’s rather nice here,’ I commented. ‘You could see it as a free holiday, I suppose.’

‘Right!’ she agreed fervently. ‘Especially as they say the weather’s going to pull itself together.’

‘Don’t you get lonely?’ I asked rashly, imagining the solitary vigils in the various houses she was commissioned to take care of. ‘The days must seem long at times.’

‘I do in some places,’ she admitted. ‘But only in short bursts. There are always animals to look after, and Hepzie’s good company. And people come to visit.’ She smiled at her daughter. I noticed she did not include Paul in her smile, and wondered if this was his punishment for the distasteful little story he’d just told, or whether she had a deeper animosity towards him.

‘Well, you’ll do as you like,’ said Jessica, more in calm acceptance than any kind of huff. This was not a daughter who felt she should control her widowed mother’s life, I suspected.

‘Of course I will,’ said Thea. ‘Doesn’t everybody? What else would I do?’

‘The right thing,’ chipped in Paul, crassly. ‘Follow the rules.’

‘With some people, it’s the same,’ I could not resist saying. ‘I mean, what they want to do
is
the right thing.’ I looked at Thea, and clamped down on the obvious remark that she was one of those people.

‘That’s Mum,’ laughed Jessica, with a swift look at her boyfriend. ‘But in this particular case, there’s no clear rule to follow. Is there?’

It fizzled out at that point, with Paul ordering another pint, and Jessica resignedly foregoing any alcohol at all because she was to be the driver on their journey back to Manchester.

‘I must go,’ I said, without moving. ‘Duty calls.’ I threw Paul a conciliatory glance, which he ignored. ‘I hadn’t planned to come up here again today.’

‘I still don’t understand why you had to come back in person,’ said Thea. ‘You could surely have talked to the council man on the phone?’

‘Throwing his weight around, that’s all,’ I said. ‘You’re quite right – it could easily have been done on the phone. He didn’t even have a proper look at the grave.’

‘Will they really get you to move the body?’ Paul queried, with some relish.

‘They might try.’

‘The man’s an idiot,’ said Thea. ‘That’s obvious.’

I laughed at her plain speaking, but forbore to agree. The silent presence of Jessica was making me uneasy. She was bound to be on the side of the council. I looked at her, hoping she would say something light and good-natured. She did not meet my gaze. After our talk outside the grave field, I had thought we were making headway, but it seemed she still had severe doubts about me and my character.

‘Have you got any more funerals this week?’ asked Thea, sensitively changing the subject.

I told her about Mr Everscott, and she became quite energised, asking a stack of questions about my life and work, Karen and Maggs and the children. Her interest warmed me, and made it even more difficult to leave. But by then we were back on the road, walking in unambiguous pairs. I even took the dog’s lead, and firmly reined it in, to give Thea a chance to listen to me properly.

On the way, we walked down a track beside the little church we’d seen earlier, to look at an ancient Quaker meeting house. It was locked, which we all agreed was not in the right spirit at all. As we retraced our steps, Jessica ran up the little path to see if the church was open. A second locked door set us off on a discussion of petty crime versus open access, a conversation that went nowhere. Across the road we admired again the long curving wall made of the local stone, topped with a magnificent length of topiary hedge, which we could not properly see. It was twelve or fifteen feet high, at least. There was something medieval and forbidding about it. The contrast between the Quaker modesty and this piece of ostentation was unsettling. There were no people around. ‘Might as well get back,’ said Jessica. ‘Not much more to see here.’

When we got back to the cottage, the sun was shining, but the wind still strong. We stood indecisively at the junction with the small side road containing the cottage. ‘That’s the road to Blockley,’ Jessica told Paul, pointing ahead and to the right.

I tried to puzzle out the geography. ‘The grave’s down there, isn’t it?’

Jessica gave me a withering look. ‘How can you not know?’ she demanded.

‘These little lanes are very confusing,’ Thea defended me. ‘It took me days to get it all straight. It’s one of those places where it can be quicker to walk across the fields than meander round the lanes by car.’

Jessica seemed unconvinced. She actually marched across the road diagonally, to where the Blockley turn-off was. ‘There!’ she pointed. ‘It’s about half a mile down there. We drove up here only a couple of hours ago.’

‘Yes,’ I said, following her. ‘I realise now. I came back up there, after making my phone calls to—’

‘Hello,’ she interrupted. ‘Something’s going on.’ Following her gaze, I noted a couple of cars parked oddly further up the road.

‘Nothing that need concern you,’ said Thea, who had drifted after us, with the dog. ‘Stop being a police officer for one day, can’t you?’

But Jessica and Paul had already loped off to investigate, and we stood watching them. It was all going on about two hundred yards away, by a wooden gate that I rather thought was the one I had used to emerge from the field into the road, after my phone calls. I saw Jessica jerk herself upright in an assertion of her professional status. I saw Detective Paul reach for a phone in his pocket, and wave instructions at the three people assembled by the gate. He called to a fourth, somewhere out of sight, who suddenly materialised as if he had been sitting or kneeling and now stood up.

‘Oh, my God,’ said Thea. ‘It can’t be. Damn it, it is. Something awful’s happened.’ She looked down at her dog, which met her gaze. ‘Brace yourself, Heps. Here we go again.’

‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I’ll go and find out,’ she said. ‘Can you hold Hepzie?’

She trotted along to join the others, while I followed hesitantly with the spaniel. ‘There’s a dead man in there,’ said a shrill woman, waving at the patch of scrubby woodland beyond the gate. ‘I heard his phone going off, and when I looked, I could see his legs. My husband went to see. He says it’s horrible.’

Already she was repeating words almost drained of meaning, the shock alone giving her voice its high tones. She must have recited them to the two people from the second car, and then to Jessica and Paul. The picture she painted was clear enough, though – except she and her husband must already have been parked, with the engine off and the window open, if they were to stand a chance of hearing a ringing phone. Jessica evidently had the same thought at that moment.

‘Had you stopped here for some reason?’ she asked.

‘Yes!’ The woman’s excitement was at fever pitch. ‘David thought he saw a green woodpecker in that tree, and stopped for a better look. It flew away, just as he wound his window down.’

David was leaning against the gate, looking grey. That left me and Paul to be masterful and manly and all that stuff. Paul was looking at his phone in a dazed sort of fashion, which gave me a flicker of satisfaction. Even he couldn’t order up a signal at will, it seemed. But then he began keying in numbers and I realised he was connected after all. I handed Thea’s spaniel back to her, and strode to the gate, pushing my way through the opening, which was less than a foot wide.

‘Hey!’ said Officer Jessica. ‘Where do you think you’re going?’

‘For a look,’ I said. ‘Why not?’

‘It might be a crime scene. You’ll contaminate it.’

‘And what if the man isn’t actually dead? You’re standing back when you might be saving his life. Who said anything about a crime? Maybe he just had a heart attack.’

‘You won’t say that when you’ve seen him,’ croaked David, the birdwatcher.

‘I order you to stay this side of the gate,’ said Jessica, sounding more like the military than the police.

I paused, but already I could see what David meant. A fully clothed man was lying on his side only three or four yards away, with his face towards us. The top of his head was thick with blood, which had made a pool like a ghastly halo around him. His lack of protective hair made the wound somehow more terrible. At least two things indicated that he was unarguably dead: firstly, his wide-open staring eyes, and secondly. the clotting of the blood on the wound. His heart could not be beating – if it had been, the blood would still be flowing.

But these details occurred to me slightly later than the most startling and major observation. I knew this man. I had seen him only a few hours previously.

It was Mr Maynard, council officer, responsible for Parks and Recreation.

Chapter Five

If I hadn’t been so annoyed with Jessica’s heavy-handedness, I might have told her immediately who the victim was. Instead, I backed away from the gate, hands melodramatically raised as if she were a Wild West sheriff pointing a pistol at me. Perhaps this piece of foolish play-acting brought about the subsequent avalanche of trouble that landed on my head. At any rate, I couldn’t help feeling that quite a bit of it served me right.

As it was, PC Jessica Osborne went to the gate herself and took a good long look at the corpse. I quickly understood that I had underestimated her powers of observation. ‘Isn’t that the man you were with this morning?’ she said slowly. ‘I remember that jacket.’

Which was more than I did. His clothes had made no impression on me whatsoever. ‘I’m afraid it is, yes,’ I said. ‘Mr Maynard.’

‘What? Who? What do you mean?’ demanded Thea, who had been hovering on the grass verge with her dog. ‘It can’t be someone you know, surely?’ She stared from me to her daughter and back again.

‘The man from the council who was making a fuss about the grave,’ I explained. ‘Who summoned me here in the first place.’

‘And who you might well want dead,’ said Detective Paul, with reliably bad timing.

‘Good God,’ I huffed scornfully at him. ‘You think
I
killed him?’

The resounding silence on all sides made my internal organs quiver. Every single person – and the dog – looked at me.

‘Of course not,’ said Thea. ‘You couldn’t possibly have done. That’s obvious.’

‘Is it?’ said Jessica slowly. ‘He was gone for half an hour, right here. He’s just told us he came past this exact spot. He looked flustered when he came back. When I met him this morning, it looked to me as if he’d been in an angry argument with this man. Hadn’t you?’ she challenged me.

I could not have said anything even if I’d wanted to. I was sandbagged, stunned. I even wondered whether she might be right – had I gone mad for a few minutes and bashed the annoying Mr Maynard on the head? Enough of Jessica’s accusations were true for me to feel there might be something in the idea that this was my work. I had indeed been on this precise spot, approximately two hours earlier.

Thea was scrutinising me with an uncomfortably probing stare. ‘He’d have been more flustered,’ she said. ‘He’d never have acted so normally over lunch.’

‘How do you know?’ Jessica demanded.

‘So – prove it,’ Thea challenged. ‘Where’s the murder weapon, for a start?’

Jessica beckoned her to the gateway and pointed. I followed, peering over Thea’s shoulder. A large stone lay a yard away from the body. ‘That?’ snorted Thea. ‘It’s just a stone. It hasn’t even got blood on it.’

‘It wouldn’t, if it was only used once,’ said Paul. ‘The bleeding wouldn’t start instantly. Blood would indicate repeated blows.’ I could almost visualise the page in the textbook he was quoting from.

‘But Drew can’t be strong enough to make such a wound. He’s probably not even
tall
enough,’ my defender protested. I was warmed by the use of my first name, while thinking, yes, I probably was both strong and tall enough for the deed if I’d been sufficiently determined. Mr Maynard hadn’t been very tall, after all.

‘This is not the way it should be done,’ Jessica recollected herself. ‘We have to wait for the proper procedure.’ She gave me a narrow stare. ‘But I will have to report what I saw this morning, as well as the fact that you walked this way earlier on.’

‘I can see it looks bad,’ I said, aiming for a reasonable tone, the sort that an innocent man would use.

We’d been there perhaps ten or fifteen minutes, at most, eyeing each other warily, and studiously avoiding any further scrutiny of the corpse. I found myself wanting to give it a decent covering, to engage my normal undertaker’s stance and remove the vulnerable body to a place of safe keeping. I felt a burgeoning pity for the wretched man and his soulless beliefs about burial. All too grotesquely soon, he was going to be the occupant of either a grave or an ashes urn. There was something fateful in the sudden turn of events, as if he had brought ill fortune upon himself by his opinions.

Which was, I realised, rather the way Jessica Osborne saw it. The man had argued with me, and now he was dead. How could there not be a connection?

The backup began to arrive, summoned by Paul. Cars, people, a few more onlookers – all slowly assembled and disposed themselves in a more or less organised fashion along the verge. Only a tiny handful possessed the authority to pass through the gate onto the patch of land where the body lay. I found myself joining the two women who had been there from the start, asked by Jessica to stay in their car, even though they insisted they had seen nothing but Mr and Mrs David, clearly in some distress. ‘We should never have stopped,’ the older one said crossly. ‘This has nothing to do with us. We tried to call 999, but we couldn’t get a signal.’

Innocent bystanders, I thought, detachedly. Just utterly bad luck to be passing at that particular moment. But then, why
did
they stop? ‘Do you know them?’ I asked, indicating the Davids, wondering whether I was allowed to address witnesses. Nobody made a move to stop me.