Blood in the Cotswolds (2 page)

‘So tell me about the person who lives here,’ he invited, hoping to keep her beside him for a while longer.

‘Miss Polly Deacon. Mid-sixties or so. Retired civil servant. Plenty of money. Lived here all her life, and her parents before her. Never saw any reason to move, but likes to travel. She’s gone to Argentina for nearly a month. I’m only needed here for part of the time, because her brother, Archie, is taking over from me. Archie’s wife has just kicked him out, being a selfish bitch and a spoilt cow. Or perhaps it was a selfish cow and a spoilt bitch. Anyway, we don’t like her. Miss Deacon wears tailored slacks and expensive shoes, and has red dyed hair. She goes to local history classes and hoards magazines. And cultivates house plants. You might have noticed the house plants? And the fish, of course.’

Phil had only the haziest impression of greenery on a number of surfaces in the rooms he had passed through on the way upstairs. ‘Mmm,’ he said. Then he summarised: ‘She’s a character, then.’

‘You’d like her. She’s the last of a dying breed.’

‘Must be. Sounds as if she’s in the wrong generation entirely. Apart from the dyed hair. That doesn’t seem to fit with the rest of it. Not to mention the snake.’

‘Oh, that’s Archie’s. The wife kicked it out as well. But Miss Deacon has always liked them, and bought in a consignment of mice for it to eat.’

Phil gulped. ‘Mice?’

‘Dead ones – they’re in the freezer. They breed them specially, apparently, for people to feed to exotic reptiles.’

‘That’s disgusting!’

‘Yes,’ said Thea equably.

‘What time is it?’

‘No idea. Nearly twelve, I guess. We could go somewhere for lunch.’

‘Just what I was thinking,’ he said, with only a flicker of disappointment.

Thea had not fully researched local pubs, apart from establishing that Temple Guiting did not possess one. ‘Just a shop and a church,’ she said. ‘The shop’s a bonus, although it’s not open all the time. A local collective runs it on a rota system.’

‘Quaint,’ said Phil.

‘Oh, yes. Everything round here is quaint,’ Thea confirmed.

They used his car to drive to the next village, which was Guiting Power. There, the Hollow Bottom offered an acceptable bill of fare, and they ate outside, chatting easily. The pub had an unmistakable affinity with horse racing, which neither Phil nor Thea found particularly atmospheric. ‘We’ll try the Farmer’s Arms next time,’ he ordained. ‘It has a much better view of the village. Which, I have to say, is quite a lot prettier than Temple Guiting, unless there’s a part I haven’t seen yet.’

Thea tilted her head. ‘They’re completely different. Temple Guiting’s got a lot of trees. It must be very dark on a dull day. And there’s not really a proper centre like this one has. But it feels
older
, somehow. More history. Not least the Knights Templar, of course.’

Phil sighed gently. ‘You mean all that tedious Dan Brown stuff, I suppose.’

‘It can be tedious, but not in the way you mean. The mythology that’s grown up around them is completely idiotic. But if you research them properly, as a real historian, you get a whole new angle on the Middle Ages.’

‘And you’ve done that? Researched them properly?’

She shook her head. ‘Not my period, but I did have a bit of a trawl on the Internet, just to get myself clued up. And Miss Deacon’s got stacks of books and magazines all about it. I’ll be able to sit outside in the sun, reading for long lazy afternoons. It’ll be blissful.’

‘You’re right about the oldness,’ he said, after a pause. ‘I felt it right away. As if the trees are the real inhabitants and the people are just recent intruders.’

‘Very romantic,’ she approved. ‘And exactly how I felt when I first saw it. Guiting Power is quite different from Temple Guiting – there it’s all about the people and their buildings. I suppose they both feel a need to be different – given how confusingly similar their names are.’

Phil nodded and changed the subject.

‘And that Janey – is she going to be a regular visitor? She seemed to think you were best buddies already.’

‘She’s been twice so far. She likes Miss Deacon’s horses. She’s one of those people you find yourself talking to about personal stuff after ten minutes.’

‘She doesn’t
ride
, does she?’ He entertained
a grim image of the wretched animal sagging helplessly as the vast woman landed on its back. ‘Or are they Shire horses? That might just work, I suppose.’

Thea giggled. ‘Stop it,’ she said. ‘Don’t be so nasty.’

He looked at her steadily, making her giggle again. ‘It isn’t really something you can just ignore,’ he said. ‘Is it?’

‘Maybe not. But there’s a lot more to her than her size. She’s a very nice person.’

‘Well, as a local friend, I’m sure she has much to commend her,’ he said primly.

Thea turned her attention to the spaniel sitting patiently in the shade under their table, and said, ‘Hepzie likes her, as well. She took to her right away.’

Phil was unimpressed. ‘Hepzie likes everybody,’ he said.

Hector’s Nook boasted a small courtyard at the back of the house, facing south-west and filled with more pots of exuberant plants. One in particular caught Phil’s attention. It had large palmate leaves and a cluster of ripening seedpods in a striking shade of pale terracotta. ‘That’s a
castor oil plant,’ he said, his voice oddly harsh to his own ears.

‘So what if it is?’

‘The seeds are used for making ricin.’

Thea grinned. ‘My God! Miss Deacon’s part of the supply chain for al-Qaeda. Who’d have guessed it? Do you think she has a little chemistry lab in the cellar? Has the Government banned these plants? If not, why not?’

‘It’s not funny, Thea,’ he snapped.

‘You’re wrong, my lamb. It is actually
very
funny. There must be thousands of old ladies with one of these plants on their patios or even in the front room. It’s a handsome thing – I bet the Victorians loved them. Besides, I thought we decided that ricin isn’t especially lethal anyway. Didn’t we?’

He screwed up his eyes, struggling to reconcile the two extreme bodies of opinion in his daily life. As a police officer, he was expected to anticipate and prevent all activity that might present a threat to the general public. He was supposed to take the worst case scenario and act as if it was certain to happen. But Thea threw doubt and even mockery over much of what he was obliged to take seriously. With feigned
interest, she cross-examined him on the precise method of extracting ricin from the plant, and just what damage it wreaked on the human body. To his irritation, he found he could give only the vaguest answers. ‘It can kill,’ he repeated doggedly. ‘It killed that Bulgarian. The one that was stabbed with an umbrella.’

‘Oh yes,’ she recalled. ‘And Miss Deacon’s got an umbrella – probably. I can’t say I’ve seen it, but there’s sure to be one. So we can agree that ricin is dodgy if it’s injected into you. That’s true of quite a few substances, isn’t it?’

‘Stop it!’ he ordered, laughing in spite of himself. ‘You make everything I do look ridiculous. I don’t know why I tolerate it.’

‘It’s not you,’ she soothed. ‘It’s this idiotic Government. You’re just the helpless instrument. Just obeying orders,’ she added, less flippantly.

Phil was not much reassured. He had watched her becoming more and more enraged by the latest round of legislation further curtailing individual freedoms, sometimes floundering for the words with which to explain how sinister it all was. He worried at the wedge it threatened to drive between them. When sitting at one of the many briefings he received at work, he tried to
give space in his head for Thea’s point of view, with increasing difficulty.
The innocent have
nothing to fear
, came the official line.
These
measures are designed specifically to protect
the innocent.
But he wasn’t stupid. He could see some of the dangers for himself. When he visualised ‘the innocent’ they were pink-skinned, rural-dwelling, unambitious zombies. Anybody brown or clever or angry or unusual raised suspicions. And it didn’t stop there. The police were supposed to keep a close eye on people who behaved irresponsibly in their cars, who smoked or drank too much, who cast a lustful eye on young girls or accessed the wrong sort of websites on their computers. Surveillance was everywhere, and sometimes it seemed to him that it wouldn’t be long before half the population were being employed by the police to keep a close eye on the other half. He knew it was possible, that there were unpleasant precedents in countries not so very far away.

But he couldn’t let any of this spoil the day with Thea. The long lazy Sunday afternoon stretched invitingly ahead, slowing the pace of life almost to a standstill. There were scents of ripening grass and warm wood on all sides,
sounds of distant lawnmowers and bleating sheep. ‘It could be a hundred years ago,’ said Thea. ‘Except for the lawnmowers.’

‘If this is global warming, bring it on,’ said Phil, aware that this was something he said slightly too often, and with a lurch of guilt every time.

‘Easy to say,’ she reproached mildly. ‘But you know perfectly well it isn’t something to celebrate. All the same, it’s hard to argue with regular long hot summers. The Edwardians had them, after all.’

‘And what about the Knights Templar?’ he wondered. ‘Did they have good summers, as well?’

She shook her head. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea,’ she admitted. ‘But I’ll look it up and let you know.’

They walked a mile or so along the Windrush, much to Hepzie’s joy. The sense of perfection persisted for all three of them. Landscape, buildings, weather – it all came together to bathe them in a pure sensory harmony that combined with the physical delights of the morning to reinforce a growing conviction that they too
belonged together. Phil could hear Thea’s thoughts, hoping perversely that she wouldn’t utter them. Nothing needed to be said, as they meandered with linked arms, pressed closely together, savouring the best that England could offer. If niggling recollections of the working week ahead, the existence of malevolent forces, the fragile edifice of civilisation teetering on the brink of some cataclysm intruded into his thoughts, he firmly pushed them away. Stay in the moment, he adjured himself. Whatever might happen, there’ll always be this glorious afternoon to hold on to.

They got back to Hector’s Nook shortly after four, and sat outside with mugs of tea, watching Miss Deacon’s two horses in a good-sized paddock behind the garage and extending up to the road. Thea had checked that there was water in their trough, and given each a pat on the neck, before going to make the tea. Now she and Phil were lounging on the small patch of lawn at the corner of the house, surrounded by low maintenance shrubs, the willows screening them from the front. ‘Miss Deacon doesn’t like gardening,’ Thea remarked. ‘She says it’s pathetic. Those willows were just sticks that she bought on a whim. She rammed them in, along the edge of the grass, and in three years they were trees.’

‘Pathetic?’ The word had snagged his attention.
‘How does she work that out?’

‘Something about it being a substitute for real creativity and a forlorn attempt at immortality.’

‘You seem to remember a lot of her quotes. How long did you have together before she left for Argentina?’

‘A couple of hours. She does talk a bit like a book of aphorisms. I liked the way she’s obviously thought about everything, and not just adopted other people’s ideas.’

‘Like you,’ he said.

She looked at him, eyes wide. ‘Me?’

‘Thea, I don’t think I’ve ever heard you utter a cliché,’ he smiled, reaching for her hand. ‘You’re an original, same as this Miss Deacon.’

‘Oh.’ She swilled the last drops of tea around the bottom of the mug. ‘Nobody’s ever told me that before.’

‘You’re surprised?’

‘A bit. But in a nice way. It must be good to be an original – I suppose.’

‘Of course it is. It makes you more real than most people.’

She shushed him with a wave of her hand. ‘There’s a car coming down the track,’ she said. ‘What a nuisance.’

‘Perhaps they won’t see us if we keep still,’ he suggested.

‘Too late.’ Thea tipped her chin towards Hepzie, who had gone trotting towards the sound, long tail wagging in welcome. ‘She loves new people. Besides, whoever it is’ll see our cars and know we’re both here.’ The car engine was loudly evident now, the tyres crunching on the gravel in front of the house.

‘You go, then,’ he said ungallantly. ‘You’re better with visitors than me. I’ll watch from behind the laurel.’

Pulling a face at him, Thea got up and followed the spaniel. The slam of the car door reverberated just as she rounded the row of shrubs and set eyes on a tall dark man fondling the long ears of the excessively hospitable dog.

He was impossibly handsome. Words like
chiselled
and
debonair
flittered through her head. He had deep-set eyes, full lips, straight black brows. He looked to be in his mid-forties, perhaps, with no trace of silver in his hair and a supple body as he bent down to the dog. He wore a thin shirt, with at least two of the buttons undone, and cream trousers that made her think of cricket.

‘Hello?’ she said.

‘Good afternoon.’ It was a Noel Coward drawl: easy, assured, slightly amused. ‘I’m so sorry to intrude, but I’ve come to find Miss Deacon. Is she in?’ He glanced at the two cars parked tidily side by side in front of the garage.

‘No, she’s away. I’m her house-sitter. Thea Osborne.’ She almost held out a hand for him to shake, but something stopped her.

‘Hi, Thea Osborne.’ He paused, looking at the upper storey of the house, as if checking the veracity of Thea’s words. ‘I’m Rupert Temple-Pritchett.’ The scattering of plosives in his name made it sound military and intimidating. Thea silently repeated it to herself, wonderingly.

‘Temple,’ she said. ‘Something tells me that’s not a coincidence. This being Temple Guiting, I mean.’

‘Well spotted,’ he smiled. ‘A scion of the oldest family in the area, that’s me. Very much diluted, it has to be admitted, since the Temple bit derives from my mother, and I’m afraid the female line carries rather less clout – deeply unjust as that may be.’ He twinkled at her, conveying his awareness of latter-day sensitivities on gender issues. ‘So – the old girl’s away, is
she? That’s a disappointment.’ And it did look as if he was at a loss as a result. ‘I always like a chat with Polly. Sets me up for weeks, it does.’

‘She’s not back until the very end of the month.’ She bit back further information with an effort. Discretion did not come easily to her, but she had learnt a certain caution over the past year. Already there was something about the man that raised a wriggle of alarm in her insides. His manner was old-fashioned, languidly careless, but not genuinely relaxed.

‘Oh dear. Well, I should go then. Hot, isn’t it,’ he added irrelevantly.

‘Yes,’ agreed Thea. ‘Oh – would you like a drink? My friend’s here – do you want to come and meet him?’

‘How kind. But no, I’ve taken up too much of your afternoon as it is. It was lovely to meet you. And your dear little dog.’ He made an odd little quirk with his mouth. ‘Pity about the tail, though,’ he added. ‘Makes her look a very peculiar shape.’

Thea had had this conversation a score of times since she’d acquired a cocker with an undocked tail. Country people in particular thought it an outrage. ‘I like it,’ was all she said.

She watched him turn his low-slung car and retreat up the track, before returning to Phil. ‘Rupert Temple-Pritchett,’ she said. ‘How’s that for a name?’

‘Impressive. What did you mean by asking him to stay for a drink?’

‘Common courtesy. Did you hear the whole thing?’

‘More or less. What was that word – the thing he said he was? Not a Zionist, surely?’

‘A scion. He said he’s a scion – how about that?’

Phil shrugged. ‘He’s welcome, whatever it is.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘What should we do now, do you think?’

‘Why do we have to do anything? I’m all right here for ages yet. We can see without even getting up that the horses are fine, and the snake doesn’t need feeding again until Tuesday. This is a sinecure, compared to the other places I’ve had to look after.’

Phil sighed and slumped back in the garden chair. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

They drifted through to nine o’clock, when the sun finally disappeared and the house was an enclosed haven surrounded by trees and silence.

Preparation for bed carried a slight awkwardness with it, thanks in part to the unaccustomed house, but also to the fact that the number of nights they had spent together was still low enough for it to be a novelty. Phil had spent a total of six weekends in Thea’s Witney home, plus perhaps a dozen snatched nights, or part-nights. Their bodies had become familiar to each other, but the rituals were slower to establish. Each was more used to solitary sleeping, with pillows and windows set just so, the easy spontaneity of putting on the light to read at three a.m., or going to the loo at five was not possible with another person in the bed. Even more clumsy were the minutes before finally settling together. Phil felt himself to be tense and slightly irritated when they finally rolled into each other’s arms, not long after ten that night. Try as he might, he could not shake off a sense that the best moments had already passed. The coming morning, with its many necessities, was already forcing itself into his mind. Afterwards, he could not be entirely surprised by what happened next.

The sex began langorously, with much stroking and kissing. Then, before it had properly got
going, as Phil twisted in the suffocating mattress, intending to move Thea from his side, to lie on top of him, there came a pain in his back as shocking and sickening as a badly stubbed toe.

‘Aarghh!’ he cried. ‘Oh, bugger. Aarhh, oohh!’ He went rigid against the pain, pushing her away.

‘What? Is it cramp?’ She herself floundered in the feathers, before sitting up to stare at him in the fading light.

‘My back! Something’s gone. It’s agony.’

‘Gone?’ she repeated stupidly.

‘Slipped. Dislocated. I don’t know.’ He spoke through clenched teeth. He put a hand to the place, trying to roll sideways at the same time. With another loud groan, he slumped flat again. ‘I’ve never known pain like it,’ he gasped. ‘It’s unbearable.’ Tears seeped from the corners of his eyes. ‘What am I going to do?’

‘Try to relax,’ she ordered.

‘I need a doctor. An ambulance.’ The thought of being forced to move made him go rigid again. ‘But I can’t be moved,’ he wailed. Fear shot through him, as acute as the physical pain. ‘What if I’m paralysed? What if I’ve broken something?’

‘Don’t be silly.’

He subsided like a shocked child after a slap. Thea got off the bed and stood looking at him, her skin still flushed from the interrupted sex. ‘Doctors don’t come out these days,’ she said. ‘Especially not on a Sunday night. Haven’t you got a tame osteopath or something? Has this ever happened to you before?’

‘Never,’ he said. ‘Not a twinge.’

‘Well, I think we’d better not panic. Give it a few minutes to recover. It might just click back into place if you give it a chance.’

‘It’s this damned mattress,’ he said. ‘It’s lethal.’

Thea shook her head helplessly. ‘Just when everything was going so well,’ she murmured. ‘I feel as if we’re jinxed.’

Phil gingerly tried to pull himself up towards the headboard, digging his elbows and heels into the thick mattress. He discovered that if he kept himself completely straight, some movement was possible. But the procedure was far from painless and he groaned as he inched himself up the bed. ‘I feel such a fool,’ he complained.

‘Yes,’ Thea agreed. ‘I expect you do.’

‘You’re not being very nice.’

‘I’m a terrible nurse, I admit. Illness always seems such a waste of time. If people were less kind to the sick, I expect there’d be a lot less pressure on the NHS.’

‘You’re mad,’ he moaned. ‘I’m in the hands of a madwoman.’

‘Well – what are we going to do?’ She was brisk almost to the point of aggression. ‘I think we’ll try and make it through the night, and if it’s still bad in the morning, we can get you to a doctor.’

He stared at her wildly. ‘In a car? Down those stairs? I can’t possibly. I’m
paralysed
, I tell you.’

‘No, you’re not. You’ve pulled a muscle, or slipped a disc, and I can see it hurts. But the only other option is an ambulance, and that’s going too far. Imagine the drama if we called one now and all the locals saw the flashing blue light. They’d think there’d been a murder.’

Phil managed a tight grimace in place of a smile. ‘And we don’t want that, do we?’ he said.

Thea’s plan prevailed, and Phil endured a long tortured night in which he managed to doze from
around two to four a.m., lying flat on his agonised back, and snoring loudly. At seven, Thea got up and went down to make two mugs of tea. On her return, she insisted he roll onto his side, and from there to a sitting position on the edge of the bed. ‘You’ll have to go to the bathroom,’ she ordered. ‘It’ll be a trial run.’

He got himself vertical, with several cries of anguish, and shuffled pathetically to the lavatory. Then Thea forced him into some clothes, the effort of pulling trousers up almost too much for either of them. ‘Can’t I just wear a dressing gown?’ he pleaded, tears in his eyes. ‘This is killing me.’

He could see that even Thea was losing her nerve. She chewed her lower lip, and repeated several times a belief that nothing too desperately serious could have happened. ‘You can’t have
broken
anything,’ she insisted. ‘How could you? It’s not as if you fell off a horse.’

The next apparently insurmountable obstacle was the stairs. They were narrow, with a twist halfway down, and were made of stone. Thea had been especially taken with them on her first inspection of the house, realising that they formed the sturdy core of the whole building, and had
not been modified or moved in three hundred years. She tried to distract Phil from his anguish by fantasising over all the human crises the stairway must have seen. ‘Women in labour, dead bodies taken out by the undertaker’s men, visiting boyfriends tiptoeing down in the early morning.’

‘Not to mention crippled policemen crawling down backwards,’ he puffed.

And it was true that this had turned out to be the only possible mode of descent. One foot would be lowered gingerly to the next step, sharing the weight of the semi-prostrate body with his forearms, without any jarring or pressure to his back.

‘Try to see the funny side,’ Thea suggested incautiously. The snarl that met these words was more than a little alarming. Even Hepzie retreated from her concerned position at the foot of the stairs.

Because Thea was obviously going to have to drive, Phil assumed that they would use her car. But then he noticed how small it was, how little legroom it could offer, and thought again. ‘We’ll have to take mine,’ he said. ‘I suppose you’ll be covered by the insurance.’

‘Who cares?’ she said. ‘Just let’s get you in.’

The passenger seat was adjustable in all planes, and they eventually got him into a position that he could tolerate without constant groans and screams. It seemed to him that Thea’s driving was unbearably jerky as she mastered the unfamiliar clutch, and bumped them up the uneven drive to the road at the top. Pain tore at him like a mad dog, making him feel sick and tearful.

They arrived, finally, at the hospital in Cirencester, where they were met by helpful paramedics and Phil was gently stretchered into a cubicle in a department that appeared to have nothing else to do that day. Nobody took his agony lightly, or made ominous comments about the impossibility of backs. He was probed and questioned and X-rayed, given analgesia and generally reassured. Thea hovered, waited, smiled and sighed. Phil began to look less drawn and terrified. By ten he was hungry and impatient for something more to happen.

A little while later, a man in a clean white coat, holding a clipboard, materialised and made his diagnosis. ‘It’s what we used to call a slipped disc,’ he asserted.

‘What do we call it now?’ asked Thea.

‘Prolapsed or herniated disc,’ he responded with a tolerant smile.

‘What happens next?’ Phil enquired with unnatural meekness.

‘It will almost certainly get better on its own,’ the doctor said. ‘The pain will subside in a few days, and in three months or so, you’ll be back to normal.’ He nodded in a bobbing mechanical fashion, as if delighted with his own words.