Blood in the Cotswolds (9 page)

‘Why not go deeper?’ Phil wondered.

‘Lack of time. Tree roots in the way. It’s quite stony, too. Plus we can really only guess at most of this from the effects of the uprooted tree and the slope of the bank. It seems a peculiar place to choose, although the tree would have concealed the whole thing from the road.’ She was almost babbling in her hypothesising, painting a picture that Phil knew would stick in his mind for quite some time.

‘So, probably not a vagrant,’ he concluded. ‘How long had he been dead?’

‘Impossible to say for certain, but the pathologist thinks around five years.’

‘Not Giles Pritchett, then,’ said Thea, when Phil related these details to her.

‘Not Giles Pritchett,’ he confirmed. ‘Which leaves me with something of a dilemma.’

‘Oh?’

‘Whether or not to call the anxious father and put him out of his misery.’

‘Not to mention the invisible anxious mother.’ Thea’s tone was bordering on the flippant, and Phil gave her a probing look.

‘You don’t appear to care very much,’ he observed.

She sighed. ‘I care in
theory
,’ she said. ‘But I can’t pretend to take it very personally. Anonymous dead person found, not the missing son of worried village couple. It’s a bit of a non-story, somehow.’

‘Never say that,’ Phil warned her earnestly. ‘It’s never a non-story. Each man’s death diminishes me, remember.’

Thea sighed again. ‘I know. Normally I’d be the first to take that line. But somehow I can’t help feeling that the real tragedy around here has to do with something other than those bones.’

‘You mean Janey,’ he said slowly.

‘Yes,’ she nodded. ‘Yes, I mean Janey.’

‘How do they date the age of a skeleton anyway?’ Thea wanted to know. ‘I mean, the time since it died.’

Phil shook his head. ‘I’m not familiar with the precise procedure, although I was sent on a course a while ago which filled us in on the latest forensic stuff. There are all sorts of ways, especially when the body’s been buried outdoors. It involves insects and plants and worms. Are you sure you want to know?’

‘I can probably imagine for myself, if I put my mind to it. It’s quite interesting, isn’t it? I suppose the calcium leaches out of the bones at a specific rate, so you could get a good idea by measuring how much was left,’ she suggested. ‘I
mean, a very old bone is all white and brittle, isn’t it? And marrow – the marrow must all dry up and disappear. I rather like bones,’ she added thoughtfully, her eyes on her own bare arm.

‘That’s because your dog likes them,’ he teased.

She ignored the remark. ‘I always wanted to have the bones after Sunday lunch. I would suck them for ages and carry them around with me. My mother used to get furious.’

‘Disgusting,’ he smiled. ‘She should never have allowed it.’

‘She tried not to, but I was too devious for her. I hid them in my pockets.’

Phil made an exaggerated grimace. ‘That’s
really
disgusting,’ he protested.

He had been about to pick up the phone to call Stephen Pritchett when Thea had asked her question about bones. Now he achieved his goal, and was not surprised when the man answered before the second ring. The image of him sitting like a faithful dog watching the instrument was an unhappy one.

‘It isn’t Giles,’ he said, quickly. ‘It’s somebody older, who’s been dead for around five years.’ He shuddered at his own breach of security in
imparting even that much information. Why, he asked himself, was it so important to set Pritchett’s mind at rest? Could it possibly be the old Freemason bond, still operating in spite of everything?

‘Ah.’ It was less of a word than an emotional exhalation. ‘Thank you.’

Phil was greatly tempted to leave it there, to let Giles Pritchett slide back into whatever fragile oblivion he had found over the past two and a half years, and get on with his own unexpected holiday with Thea. After all, Giles’s disappearance was two or three years after the body had been hidden under the tree, which strongly suggested that it had nothing to do with that event. But he was too much of a professional to allow himself to let it lie.

‘I can’t leave it at that, you know,’ he said gently. ‘Something’s wrong, isn’t it?’ It was a foolishly trite way of expressing the unease surrounding Giles, but it served its purpose.

‘Wrong?’ Pritchett attempted. ‘In what way?’

‘I mean, Giles is still missing. And he could still be dead somewhere. Couldn’t he?’

‘His mother—’ Pritchett began. ‘I only came to you because she wanted it. She’ll be all right
now you’ve set our minds at rest. Please, Hollis, just forget I ever approached you. He’s got nothing to do with any of this business. I ought to have trusted my own judgment from the start. I knew all along – well, never mind that now.’

‘Well, all right,’ said Phil reluctantly. ‘But at least put him on the missing persons register, if only for your wife’s sake. Any news must surely be better than none.’

‘That’s true,’ Pritchett said softly. ‘You know, sometimes I don’t even feel sure that I ever had a son. I can’t picture his face any more. But other times I know he’s out there, not too far away. I can feel his presence, if that doesn’t sound too airy-fairy for you.’

Phil closed his eyes, and the features of his own dead daughter floated vividly before his eyelids. Always smiling, with that flickering mischief that had been her trademark, hair never quite tidy, waist as slim as a pencil. Surely it would never be possible for the picture to fade from his mind?

‘Well, think about what I said, and don’t be shy of reporting him missing.’

Pritchett cleared his throat, suggesting embarrassment to Hollis, even down the phone.
‘Look, old chap – the fact is I haven’t been completely straight with you. He hasn’t been missing for as long as I said he was. We did get word of him once in a while, up to last Christmas. He sent us a card, as it happens. But you know what it’s like now – no proper postmarks any more. We couldn’t see where it had come from. But it was enough to ease our minds. But that was six months ago, and Trudy’s getting desperate.’

Phil shifted in his seat, trying to placate the grumbling from his spine. ‘So she thinks he could have been killed sometime this year and buried under a tree? Why tell me he’d been gone for two and a half years then?’

‘Well, it was true, in a way. That’s when we last saw him. And besides that, I thought you wouldn’t listen otherwise. Why should you go to the trouble?’

‘Well, we like to have any theories about identity when a body turns up. It wouldn’t make any difference how long your son had been gone, if you thought there was a chance he was the victim.’ Phil’s mind was thick with puzzlement. This solid member of the community, Freemason and senior doctor, was playing the sort of game
with the police that was more typical of a petty criminal. ‘You could have been a lot more straightforward about it, surely?’

‘What I told you about our betrayal of the lad was true. We don’t intend to make the same mistake twice. All we need to know is that it’s not his bones you unearthed yesterday. What’s so strange about that?’

‘It’s strange that you should ever think it might be him. The usual procedure when somebody dies is to have a death certificate and a marked grave and announcements in the paper. You actually believed your son could have been murdered and buried a mile from his own home, with nobody knowing anything about it. Doesn’t that sound strange to you?’

He heard a long sigh of frustration coming out of the phone. ‘Things
are
strange here,’ he said. ‘I thought you might have realised that.’

Phil felt this as a put-down, and wanted to give a riposte that reminded the man that he was a senior police detective, a person to be taken seriously, with powers to make life uncomfortable for anybody he chose. But he clamped his lips together until the urge had passed.

‘Well, I’ve given you the news, such as it is,’ he finished. ‘Now we just have to hope there are other people around who can be of more assistance to us.’ A thought struck him. ‘I don’t suppose
you
have an idea who the dead man is – given that it isn’t your son?’

There was a long silence. Then a low ‘No’ came through, before Pritchett put down the receiver.

It was lunchtime and Thea had concocted an appetising meal from the items bought in the village shop. The sun was relentless, turning the day into something almost frighteningly hot. ‘More like Greece than Gloucestershire,’ said Phil. He had removed all clothes from his upper half, and periodically fanned himself with a magazine he had borrowed from Miss Deacon’s collection.

‘Be careful with that,’ Thea had warned him. ‘You shouldn’t take it out of the house.’

‘I know, but it’s so fascinating, I can’t put it down.’ He read her a paragraph from the June 1912 issue of
Country Life
, describing a garden party held by a certain baronet and his wife. ‘It’s a completely different world,’ he sighed.

‘That’s right. Now can you see why I get so excited about history? And that’s a primary source you’ve got there. There’s nothing so thrilling than delving about in primary sources.’

Phil looked thoughtful and slightly pained. ‘But yesterday you just waved it away as if you couldn’t care less,’ he reminded her.

‘Oh, did I? Sorry.’

‘Emily used to do that. Just when I thought I’d got to grips with what interested her, she’d roll her eyes and tell me I’d got it all completely wrong. Very unsettling it is when women can’t be consistent for two days together.’

Thea’s reaction to the mention of Phil’s dead daughter was subtle. She nodded, and pressed her lips together and said nothing. What could she say, after all? Phil knew he was allowed to talk about Emily any time he liked, and there had been one or two long evenings when he had indulged in an orgy of grieving memories, weeping into Thea’s shoulder as he described the child he had seen all too little of, as he worked up the ladder of police promotion. He would always blame himself for her death, for not spending more time with her. He had believed it was enough simply to adjure her to abjure drugs, rather than sit down and
debate the issue properly. He had never accepted the peer pressures, the need she must have had to find a substitute for her absent father. She had thrown herself into a wild social life and had died stupidly from taking too many Ecstasy tablets, ignoring her body’s warnings. For a time, he had thrown himself passionately into a war against all drugs, only to come slowly to understand that Em had been a rare exception, that Ecstasy very seldom killed anybody, and that random luck was the major factor at work in what had happened.

Thea had helped him to see this, little by little, along with her own stalwart daughter Jessica, who never minced her words.

But he had inwardly winced when Stephen Pritchett had mentioned drugs in connection with his missing Giles. He would always wince at any reference to a dead or missing youngster associated with substance abuse. He wanted to prevent any parent enduring what he had endured, but even more he wanted to avoid enduring it again himself. Which he did, vicariously, every time the subject came up.

He set aside the painful memories and kept his mind on Pritchett. ‘He’s been playing some sort of game that I can’t get a handle on,’ he
said to Thea. ‘Obviously the village rumour-mill got going as soon as the police showed up at the beech tree – and it’s not surprising that somebody let slip there’d been a body found. A phone call to Pritchett and he’s onto me five minutes later. The question is – how much do the local people know about what happened? When I think of the way Janey and her friend were this morning, it feels very much as if they’ve already agreed amongst themselves not to talk about it.’

‘A conspiracy of silence,’ said Thea in a melodramatic voice, refusing to be repressed. ‘You’ll have to apply to the Home Office for permission to torture the truth out of them.’

‘Thea!’ His warning was seriously meant, the limit of his patience finally reached. ‘Sometimes you really do go too far.’

‘Sometimes,’ she flashed back, ‘you don’t know how to take a joke.’

‘I can promise you there isn’t a police officer in the country who would find that comment funny. Not a single one.’

‘Well that just proves my point,’ she said obscurely, and walked off into the house.

Phil refused to shout after her, despite a desperate urge to do just that. She would be back
in a little while, the whole thing forgotten. One of the things she had taught him over the past year was how to let bad feelings go. She never sulked or harboured a grudge. Despite their differences over the politics of law enforcement, their feelings for each other always resurfaced undamaged. Or they had done so far. Always, there was a lurking anxiety that this time it might change. This time one of them might find it impossible to fully forgive and forget.

He forced his mind back to the subject of Pritchett and the other villagers, visualising them standing in a circle around the unearthed bones, every one of them potentially implicated in a murder. He mentally listed the possible scenarios that had been suggested by what he knew of the place and its people. An ancient family by the name of Temple, connected, apparently, to the renowned Knights who had owned land on this very spot. It was likely, surely, that they would fight to protect the name and all its associations. Secondly, there was a strange club devoted to keeping alive the memory of obscure saints by re-enacting parts of their stories. Stories which were almost always violent. Saints tended to meet gruesome ends, their martyrdom comprising
much of the attraction, as he understood it. Thirdly, another family, named Pritchett, whose son was lost, and whose patriarch denied any knowledge of who the dead man under the tree might be. Finally, an unexplained visitor whose name embraced both local families and who spoke as if he existed in a time warp. It amounted to a hazy sense of bygone times still exerting a powerful influence. Tucked away in these folded hills, funded by activities largely conducted in a virtual reality, the people he had so far encountered appeared to have the time and freedom to pursue their passions uninterrupted by the usual contemporary constraints. They did not rush for early trains to London, or juggle childcare and shopping and housework and aged parents like most people did these days. They spent a few hours at a computer keyboard, made a few phone calls and money fluttered down on them from the sky. Property deals, futures, currency trading, even buying and selling goods on eBay – it all brought in cash with almost no physical effort. Phil found the whole business bewildering and close to offensive. This, at least, was a point of agreement between him and Thea.

Thea did come back, her usual sunny self again, and they sat for a little while in the flickering shade of the willows. The subject of Stephen and Giles Pritchett refused to go away. ‘So,’ Thea summarised, ‘for all we know Giles is still alive and well somewhere. And you don’t have any proper grounds for trying to find him.’

‘That’s right.’ Phil sighed. ‘It’s a familiar feeling – the nagging sense that you know where the explanation lies, but you can’t follow it up because there’s no hard evidence to justify it.’

Thea nodded, with a small crinkling of her brow. ‘And it’s Gladwin’s case, not yours,’ she said. ‘Don’t forget.’

DS Hollis smiled in genuine amusement. ‘She’s welcome to it,’ he said. ‘But unfortunately it doesn’t quite work like that. I’m involved, whether I like it or not. I’m here on the ground, and people are going to talk to me every time I show my face outside this house. And Gladwin’s at even more of a disadvantage than usual. She’s new, and there’s much too little back-up for her, with all this ricin business taking up everybody’s time.’