Blood in the Cotswolds (25 page)

It seemed to be over. Janey emerged first, and called, ‘He’s coming.’ Then she added, ‘Robin’s been taken ill. Looks as if he’ll need a doctor.’

Phil realised, for the first time, that there was no waiting ambulance, as there ought to have been. Again he felt an angry horror at Gladwin’s lackadaisical methods. ‘So how—?’ he began, but again he was interrupted.

Everything sped up. Janey was just clear of the door when a blurred figure dashed past her. With astonishing momentum, the man they’d known as Rupert Temple-Pritchett almost flew out of the house, head down, legs at full stretch. He headed blindly towards the farm drive and the road beyond, with every prospect of complete escape.

But Phil could not let that happen. Here was a clear and obvious challenge which required no conscious thought. The runaway was bound to pass within a few feet of Gladwin’s car, against which Phil had been leaning ever since Gladwin had returned from her fruitless trip to the back of the house. All he had to do was launch himself at the right moment to intercept the flying figure.

Which is what he did, making contact with his quarry at roughly knee-level. The headlong dash took them both rolling violently onwards for some distance, before Phil’s limpet-like hold on the man’s legs brought him to a halt. A hail of blows from the man’s fists descended on Phil’s head and shoulders, but he kept his arms wrapped tightly around the struggling legs, until reinforcements came and took over.

‘Wow!’ said Thea, in his ear. ‘My hero!’

Janey appeared, the acres of skirt material blocking his view of anything else. ‘Oh bother,’ she said, in a voice that contained profound regret. ‘I didn’t think anybody would catch him.’ She reached down and gave Phil a hearty slap on the cheek. Then she did it again, saying, ‘And that’s from Soraya. She’d do it herself if 
she wasn’t seeing to poor Robin.’

Her victim tilted his head enough to look at her face. ‘You wanted him to get away,’ he gasped. ‘You planned it so he would.’

‘I tried to give him a sporting chance,’ she admitted. ‘Just for old times’ sake.’

A
huff
of amusement came from the flattened fugitive. ‘Good old Janey,’ he said. ‘There’ll never be another like you, old girl.’

Thea was crouching close to Phil’s head. ‘Can you get up?’ she asked.

He carefully started to try. ‘No,’ he said. But his attention was still on Janey and the man she had tried to liberate. ‘Who
is
he?’ he asked. ‘Somebody please tell me.’

‘Sammy Holmes, of course,’ said Thea. ‘This is Janey’s husband.’

Although they couldn’t be sure until proper analysis had been done, Phil forced Gladwin to concede that the powder that Holmes had been brandishing was indeed very much like ricin. Some of it was sprinkled on the floor of Robin Wheeler’s bedroom, but it seemed none had been imbibed or inhaled by anybody. Robin had been taken away, breathless and shaking, but Soraya insisted it was his pre-existing condition, and nothing to do with being held hostage by a murderer.

DS Phil Hollis was suffering for his act of heroism in more ways than one. Primarily, his back had been jarred and twisted to such an extent that he had been told to lie flat for at least
three days. ‘By rights you should stay in hospital,’ the doctor told him, after a night spent in a side ward at Cirencester General. ‘But if you’ve got someone at home, you’ll probably be just as well off there.’ Thea, with no discernible hesitation, had volunteered to nurse him, on condition the dog could come too.

Secondly, the general reaction amongst the people at the scene had been decidedly frosty. Janey had slapped him; Soraya had wrung her hands and wept; and Fiona – who had appeared moments after the capture of Sammy Holmes – had given him a cold stare and told him he’d ruined everything right from the start.

Thea had defended him angrily. ‘What are you talking about?’ she had flashed at them. ‘He’s just caught a killer, who was holding two people hostage.’ Her fury had effectively silenced their accusations, but Phil felt the effect of their reproaches, despite her efforts.

Order had slowly been restored from the farmyard chaos, although the wretched cows had not been milked until far into the evening.

Thea had handed Hector’s Nook over to Archie, who had arrived on schedule in the middle of 
Sunday, blissfully ignorant of the excitement that had been going on in the village over the past few days. Now she was in residence in Phil’s flat until he could fend for himself. ‘I know I’m a lousy nurse,’ she said, ‘but I can’t just abandon you, can I?’

They talked obsessively about the events of the past week all through Sunday evening, and Phil lay awake that night going over it in his mind. It was Monday morning before the final piece of the jigsaw fell into place and a revelatory light went on in his brain.

‘I’ve got it!’ he announced.

‘What? What have you got?’ Thea had resorted to drawing diagrams in an effort to make sense of the whole tangled business, with nearly a dozen elements ringed and linked with wiggly lines. ‘Saints and Martyrs’, ‘Soraya and Rupert/ Holmes’, ‘Templars’, ‘The Manor’, ‘Janey’s house’, ‘Janey’s baby’ were just some of them. She’d added dates and likely motives, but still it wasn’t apparent just why Sammy Holmes would have murdered Rupert Temple-Pritchett.

‘It was something Giles Pritchett said. Plus the way everybody behaved towards me yesterday. It suddenly dawned on me that they
all
wanted
Rupert dead, for a whole lot of different reasons.’

‘Oka-ay,’ said Thea slowly.

‘Except Stephen Pritchett. He genuinely had no idea what had been going on. He must have been supplying cash to Giles on and off, and been alarmed when the boy went quiet for the past six months or so. But Giles knew about the murder, as well as the rest of them.’

‘And was so furious with you he tried to shoot you – I remember,’ she said wryly.

‘The thing we’ve been so confused by was the way Holmes wandered so openly around the village, while telling us he was Rupert.’

‘Well, yes. That
is
confusing.’

‘But you see, he only told people who didn’t know him as Holmes. That’s obvious, of course, but it’s also a clever way of keeping Rupert officially alive. He used his credit cards every now and then, as well. There was never a death certificate, or a body. That’s the most important bit, do you see?’

‘Not really.’

‘They needed him to be alive so that Janey’s parents in Italy could keep on the legal case against him and his biological father. They
thought Rupert was still alive, and Holmes probably sent them emails or letters as if from him.’

‘But why?’

‘The trust. I’m only guessing, but I bet you there’s something in it to Janey’s detriment if her brother dies.’

‘Like what? Surely it would be to her benefit to inherit the whole place?’

‘Trusts are funny things. It could well be that if only a sole legatee survives, the whole thing has to be wound up, and she’d have to find the cash for maintenance and all the rest of it out of her own pocket. It seems quite likely to me that the thing was set up in the first place to keep an equal balance between the twins. If one of them dies, there’s no further need for that.’

‘Yes – she said something like that, didn’t she? When she was being so dopey and little-girlish. I assume it can be checked?’

‘Easily. In fact, I think you’ll find Gladwin’s already done it, knowing her.’

‘So what about Soraya?’ Thea had been especially enraged by the girl’s ingratitude on Saturday afternoon.

‘I think she and Holmes were genuinely in
love. Janey and he have been separated for four years, and although they’re still on friendly terms, she doesn’t seem to want him back. So there was no need for them to keep it secret, other than from her father. Robin and Rupert were much the same age, probably knew each other all their lives. We know Robin didn’t like him, from what he said when the horses got out. Didn’t he call him a waste of space? So he’d have gone along with the general protection of Holmes, even if he didn’t want his daughter getting entangled with him.’

‘But why would Holmes have taken them hostage like that?’

‘I can only assume Robin found out about him and Soraya and tried to put a stop to it.’

‘And Rupert – I mean Sammy – fought him off with ricin?’ Thea was openly sceptical.

‘I admit I don’t understand the ricin, other than that with it being so much in the news, all kinds of lunatics are going to try making it, and using it for their own ends. As a murder weapon it has some appeal – painless, bloodless, that sort of thing.’

‘But very stupid – he could have breathed it in himself at the same time as using it on them.’

‘Maybe that was the intention. If Robin stopped him having Soraya, maybe he was happy to die along with them. Don’t you think there was a sadness about him, right from when we first met him?’

Thea gave this some thought. ‘Not really,’ she concluded. ‘But he was acting a part then. It’s difficult to separate the actor from the real man.’

‘Do you remember, when he was talking about the baby, he said something about it being his. We thought he was its uncle, when really he was its father. The acting lapsed then, at least.’

She nodded. ‘That’s true.’ After a moment, she added, ‘So where is Graham Bligh?’

Phil shrugged. ‘No idea. He’s not part of this at all, is he? There’s no need to look for him now.’

She paused. ‘Except he’s lost his son. Shouldn’t he be told?’

‘He might never have known he
had
a son. It’s probably best to leave him in peace.’

‘Hmm,’ she said, and they lapsed into silence for a while.

Finally, Phil stirred himself to round it all off, before they moved onto more intimate matters.
‘So there we have it, more or less. Giles told me that if anyone in the village had found the bones, they’d have quickly covered them up again and said nothing. That’s why I’ve been the object of such fury. They were all desperate for me – and you – to shut up and stop trying to uncover the truth.’

‘But Gladwin would have done it, without us.’

‘Maybe she wouldn’t. Maybe the whole thing would have slipped further and further down the priority list until it was virtually forgotten.’

‘But can she prove it was Holmes who killed Rupert?’

‘Very probably not. He’ll be charged with holding persons against their will and using a dangerous substance – assuming it really was ricin. Unless he confesses, there might never be official closure on the death of Temple-Pritchett.’

Thea shrugged. ‘I’m not sure that would matter too much, would it? The whole village can’t be wrong. Maybe it was a necessary evil, bumping him off.’

‘You might think that, but I couldn’t possibly comment,’ said Phil with a grin.

R
EBECCA
T
OPE
lives on a smallholding in Herefordshire, with a full complement of livestock, but manages to travel the world and enjoy civilisation from time to time as well. Most of her varied experiences and activities find their way into her books, sooner or later. Her own cocker spaniel, Beulah, is the model for Hepzibah, but is unfortunately ageing much more rapidly.

www.rebeccatope.com

A Cotswold Killing
A Cotswold Ordeal
Death in the Cotswolds
A Cotswold Mystery
Blood in the Cotswolds
Slaughter in the Cotswolds
Fear in the Cotswolds
A Grave in the Cotswolds
Deception in the Cotswolds

Grave Concerns
The Sting of Death
A Market for Murder

 

 

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