Death in the Cotswolds (19 page)

It was Verona, of the chilling laugh and high ambition. Phil did not take me to the Barrow or ask me to identify the body. That had all been done hours ago. They had found her just after midday, when I had been looking at another body in the Northleach chapel belonging to Brown Brothers, undertakers. Stella could give me an alibi if I needed one, I thought wildly.

Instead, I was escorted back to the police station in Cirencester, and handed over yet again to DI Baldwin. ‘Routine questions, that’s all,’ said Phil, in the car. ‘Nobody thinks it was you who did it.’

‘So why can’t you talk to me at home?’ I demanded. ‘Why do I have to be dragged here all over again?’

‘It’s the way we do things,’ was all he would say.

Baldwin was with another constable, this time a man. He was tall and thin and fair, and I didn’t even try to catch his name.

‘Tell us all you can think of about Miss Farebrother,’ Baldwin said. A tape recorder sat on the table, and he showed no intention of taking notes. Over-reliance on technology, I thought with disapproval. Never a good idea.

‘About thirty-two or -three. Lives alone in Moreton, works in Gloucester, running her own business as a food distributor. A real high flyer. Probably lots of rivals,’ I added, rather to Baldwin’s irritation, to judge by his face. I ploughed on. ‘She has a sister – possibly more than one – who lives not far away. I forget where, but it might come back to me. She’s quiet, clever, self-possessed.’

‘When did you last see her?’

I sighed. ‘It must have been Monday morning. She came to my house, to see how I was when she heard about Gaynor. And before that was Saturday evening. She was at the moot. I told you at my previous interview.’

Baldwin nodded, and flipped back through some notes in front of him. ‘And what links her to Gaynor Lewis?’ he asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Except they were both killed at the Notgrove Barrow, and left in the same position, at the same spot.’

‘Weren’t you guarding it?’ I burst out. ‘Wasn’t it under police surveillance or something?’

‘We’d put a tape across the entrance,’ he said stiffly.

I snorted. There was nothing to be said.

They stuck to the point. ‘
You
knew them both,’ he said softly. ‘That’s a link.’

I felt chilled. Was everybody I knew going to be picked off, one by one?

‘They were both young, single, childless women. Both of a quiet disposition, with few friends.’ Baldwin was tapping the desk lightly as he drew each comparison. ‘And both unlikely to be too sorely missed,’ he added.

It was true. Verona’s minimal family had hardly seen her, to my knowledge, for years. She didn’t talk about them. Like Gaynor, she seemed happy with her own company.

‘You’re saying the murderer thought they were expendable?’ I said. ‘As if that might be some kind of justification, in his own eyes?’

He met my gaze. ‘Am I saying that?’ he wondered. ‘Or have you just jumped to that conclusion?’

I couldn’t think of a reply that would sound even remotely coherent. My mind was full of an image of some sinister hooded figure with a grudge against harmless women. One murder was ghastly, two were terrifying.

Then another idea took root. ‘And me,’ I blurted. ‘I’m another one, aren’t I?’

He just sat there, pushing his face forward slightly, inviting me to finish the thought. ‘The description fits me, as well.’

‘Does it?’ If I’d hoped for reassurance, I was doomed to disappointment. ‘And that scares you?’

‘Of course it does.’ I laughed shakily. ‘Although it seems daft. I mean – what possible
reason
could there be? Besides,’ I added, ‘I’m much bigger than either of them.’ It was stupid, but did in part identify a major way in which I felt different from either Gaynor or Verona. Maybe it was just me, but I’d always felt I had to make
allowances
for small women, as if they were slightly defective or inadequate. Walking along beside Gaynor, I had felt myself to be the normal one, and she the undersized runt. Although it wasn’t like that with Thea, I noted. Thea, who was even smaller than Gaynor, but somehow had a big aura, filling more space than her actual body did.

Baldwin didn’t take me up on it, didn’t refer to this as a point against me. Bigger, and stronger and in possession of several knitting needles – lots of points against me, in the eyes of the police. Except that anyone who knew anything about knitting might realise I never used anything smaller than a 4mm pair of needles.

Phil drove me home again, saying little in the face of my hyped-up condition. I couldn’t conceal my excitement, fuelled no doubt by adrenaline, at the abrupt descent into notoriety. ‘The papers will be full of it,’ I burbled.
‘Serial killer in tranquil
Cotswolds. Knitting needle killer stalks the wold
. You’ll be under terrible pressure to catch him.’

‘Who told you Verona was killed by a knitting needle?’ he asked tightly.

In a TV murder mystery this would have been the giveaway moment. The last persuasive piece in the jigsaw that had me locked up awaiting trial. And it was a good question, to which I had no credible answer. ‘I just assumed,’ I said. ‘Everything else was the same – you told me that. Besides,’ I ventured a little laugh, ‘there’s a partner to the first one out there somewhere. They come in pairs, you know.’

‘You amaze me, you really do,’ he said crossly. He had said it to me before, when I’d been flippant at a moment when he’d wanted to be serious. I’d joked a lot about Freemasons, for a start. And when his daughter died, I’d tried to keep him going with a robust approach that must have jarred against all the tiptoeing around and embarrassed words of sympathy.

‘But you like me,’ I said. ‘Admit it.’

‘I don’t like you calling yourself Ariadne,’ he said, turning to look at me for two whole seconds. ‘I think it’s daft.’

I took a deep breath. ‘You think paganism’s daft, as well. The two go together. Who asked you, anyway?’

Phil Hollis was a Detective Superintendent. That’s quite a senior position. He had a lot of
people working under him and a terrifying amount of responsibility. He’d moved out of the realm of ordinariness where people routinely addressed him as an equal. He had few genuine friends – at least when I knew him – his wife had gone and married someone else and the path of his new love wasn’t running very smoothly. I felt fairly safe in assuming that my straight talking came as quite a blast of fresh air. I might even go so far as to believe I held a unique place in his life. Someone who had known him from his late teens, seen him through a lot of ups and downs, and had been closely connected to his aunt. I knew the secrets, not just about the Masonic fiasco, but one or two more shameful events. I’d always had a habit of being there when things happened to Phil Hollis.

A car very often generates a kind of telepathy when two people are riding inside it. He read my thoughts pretty accurately, it seemed. ‘Why are you always there?’ he asked. ‘It’s like having a stalker.’ He said it resignedly, with a tiny hint of satisfaction, even.

‘I don’t do it on purpose,’ I said. ‘Not any more. I grew out of you a long time ago.’

‘What does that mean?’ He looked at me again.

‘You know what it means. It’s changed, over the years. It started as one thing, when I was about twelve, and evolved into what it is now. But there’s something that hasn’t changed. I
know
you, Phil – maybe better than anyone.’

‘And do you trust me?’

I hadn’t expected that. I watched the road, trying to find the answer. ‘More or less,’ I said, eventually. ‘Although I’m not so sure you trust
me
. You might think I’m the killer, even now.’

‘I think you’re centrally involved in whatever’s happening here. And even if you’re not, you’re my best point of entry into the community. You know everybody, after all.’

‘It’s not a community, not as it’s normally meant. People have more intimate relationships with their computers than they do with each other.’

‘I used the word carelessly,’ he acknowledged. ‘It’s not important. Besides – I didn’t see a computer in your house.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘There isn’t one.’

It was dark when we got back. I was hungry and Thomas was annoyed with me. Feeling vaguely sorry for myself, I let Phil go back to his beloved and settled down to a plate of scrambled egg, in the company of my cat. But before I did that, I locked the back door – something I very seldom did before finishing up for the night. And I tried not to imagine shadowy figures hiding under the bed or in a cupboard upstairs. I hadn’t felt this level of nervousness since I was seventeen and my parents had gone for a rare visit to some cousins in Norfolk, staying away for two nights. I had been alone in the
farmhouse for the first time in my life.

It was an unfamiliar feeling I experienced in my Cold Aston home, based as it was on the hard facts of two unlawful killings of women I knew. A sense of deliberate focused malevolence filled the house. All the stories and traditions of Samhain swirled around in my head. Lucifer walked the land, with his hosts of demons trying to snatch our unwary souls. It was easier to die at this season of the year, our hold on life becoming more fragile. Those who had already died crowded closer to us, pressing against the veil between the two worlds. They wanted us to join them. I imagined Gaynor’s wraith, timid and mournful, drawing me to her, wanting to tell me how it was she’d died.

I went to my spinning wheel, taking up a special hunk of pure Cotswold fleece, which I’d been looking forward to working on for months. It was from a two-year-old ewe, who had lived out all winter, avoiding the hayseeds and other rubbish that they picked up indoors. The fibre flowed through my fingers with no need for carding. It was moist and supple and when washed would be a dazzling white. Women had been spinning since neolithic times. It linked me to them, to the persistence of human survival. It made me feel that everything would be all right again. It sent the ghosts back to where they belonged, silent and untroublesome.

There were things I ought to get on with the next morning, regardless of this shattering second murder. Top of the list was visiting Gaynor’s flat and making sure everything was secure. The telephone and electricity would have to be turned off. The stopcock should be closed and all the doors and windows locked. It was a routine I’d gone through before, at Greenhaven and one or two other places. Gaynor had owned the flat outright, having bought it with the money her parents left. For the first time, I wondered who would inherit it now.

Verona Farebrother was not my responsibility, but she too owned a property. The sister would have to come and do the necessary, I supposed. Suddenly the whole area seemed full of people sorting out possessions abandoned by their dead owners. It was another aspect of Samhain that I had not considered before. Until that week, I had only been concerned with Helen’s things – and then only at a distance.

Returning to my nervous comparisons between myself and the two murder victims, I found myself listing all the others I could think of in the same general category. If you included women of all ages, I easily came up with a dozen, just in the surrounding villages. Women, it seemed, lived alone these days. They somehow acquired a house or flat and made themselves a home in which they were
answerable to nobody but themselves. Men must hate it, I realised. Women were supposed to need protection, to give men a reason for getting out there and earning money. If they made it too obvious that they genuinely enjoyed the single life, some fundamental balance was destroyed. When they prospered in the business world and drove flamboyant cars and held their heads up high there must be men out there who itched to slaughter them.

I was describing Verona Farebrother only too well, I realised.

But there would always be women like Thea to give such enraged men grounds for hope. Women who liked being part of a couple, who needed to have somebody else to think about first thing in the morning before they thought about themselves. And good luck to her, I said to myself. Without her and her kind, the social fabric really would come unravelled.

I fell asleep planning the next day in detail. It helped keep my mind off the sounds the house was making, and the conviction that I could hear somebody breathing right underneath my bed.

Saturday morning was upon me before I was quite ready for another day. The murder of Verona had stunned me more than I realised, knocking me into a profound sleep from which I was reluctant to
surface. But nudging persistently at me was a sense of urgency. My usual instinct to detach and back away, leaving others to do the worrying and general emoting was overlaid by the knowledge that what was happening was inescapably personal to me. I couldn’t dodge it any longer. And the next thing I had to do was go to Gaynor’s flat and shoulder my responsibilities as her closest friend – if indeed that’s what I was. It wouldn’t entirely surprise me to find that Caroline had usurped that position – or even Oliver bloody Grover.

I had forgotten to ask Phil how I could best get hold of a key to Gaynor’s flat. I was parking outside before it even occurred to me. Determined not to give up, I checked all the obvious hiding places. It was a ground floor property, with a small garden at the side for Gaynor’s use. She had stacked three plastic chairs against the wall, and a row of terracotta pots held straggly plants. I tilted each one to look underneath, then rummaged in the compost around the plants, to no avail. Then I noticed a big stone doing nothing much at the edge of the lawn. It was the usual yellowy-grey hue, typical of the area, and there were signs that it had been moved recently. The grass to one side of it was brown, as if that was where it had been sitting previously. I turned it over, needing both hands to shift it, and found a door key underneath. Only then did I feel a slight jolt of annoyance that Gaynor had never
disclosed the hiding place to me. I wondered whether anybody else in the world knew about it.

Making no efforts to conceal myself, I unlocked the front door and went in. There were no immediate signs that the police had searched the place, although I knew they must have done. Gaynor kept it tidy and dusted. She hadn’t hoarded knick-knacks or junk mail or old newspapers. She didn’t have a cat or dog or budgie, but the house plants in all the downstairs rooms had wilted, and some looked beyond recovery.