The Stone Man

The church was at first glance not especially impressive. A church was a church was a church, thought Maggs dispassionately. It had only been suggested as a meeting place because it was easy to find. And easy to park close by in the main street running through the little town of Winchcombe.

Meredith was kicking her heels repetitively against the bar of her buggy, shouting in time to the kicks. She also leant forward and back every now and then, like a child on a swing, urging more progress, faster momentum.

‘Have a heart, kiddo,’ said Maggs. ‘I’m going as fast as I can.’

The child twisted round to glare at her mother. The one-year-old face was a comical mixture of its two parents, an intriguing illustration of genetics at work. Very dark hair framed a high brow and lean cheeks. Brown eyes, set deep and close together, and a wide mouth gave every expression a healthy dose of character.

‘She’s no beauty,’ Maggs had announced, a week or so after giving birth. ‘The top of her face is Den and the bottom is me. She’s a shunt.’

‘Pardon?’ Drew had said. He was holding the baby at the time, blowing out his cheeks and crooning like any besotted grandmother. Drew Slocombe had always been fond of babies.

‘You know – when criminals weld two different cars together to make one they can sell. Merry’s just the same – it’s hilarious.’

As she grew, Meredith became more and more distinctive. ‘We’d certainly know her in a crowd,’ said Den.

Maggs was propelling the buggy along the narrow pavement of Winchcombe’s high street, only a little way from the church. She had agreed to meet two friends there, and possibly Thea, if she wasn’t too busy. Thea Osborne who was now Thea Slocombe. A summer day out had been proposed with a picnic lunch planned in the grounds of Sudeley Castle. The friends both had babies of much the same age as Meredith, which comprised the whole reason for the three-way relationship. They had met in the antenatal class and bonded in the way women do under such circumstances. A bonding that extended to several other new parents, in fact. There had been three reunions of the full group during the year, where infants had been compared obsessively. Maggs had come away with a shaky suspicion that her child was neither genius nor beauty. This picnic in Winchcombe was with the two women who had seemed to be the most uncritical. They both felt sufficiently unsure of themselves, with fractious offspring and absent husbands, for Maggs to feel less threatened by competition. Parenthood had never greatly appealed to her and the experiment had not been a wholesale success. By great good fortune, Meredith seemed to understand and accept this with equanimity.

Maggs had mixed feelings about the Cotswolds since Drew and Thea had moved there, leaving her in charge of the burial ground in Somerset. The existence of Meredith was more than enough reason for her to resent the change of circumstance. ‘How am I supposed to run it on my own, with a one-year-old child?’ she had demanded.

‘You’ll manage,’ said Drew. ‘I did it when Stephanie was a baby and Karen went back to work.’

‘Yes, but …’ grumbled Maggs. The truth was that the workload was quite within her competency, especially with Den such a dedicated father. He and Drew were both very much keener on small infants than she was herself.

The church, on closer inspection, was a surprise. There were quirky embellishments in the form of gargoyles and castle-style battlements all along the top of the wall facing her. Looking up further, she glimpsed a golden bird on top of the tower. When she tried to point all this out to her child, there was little response. ‘Oh, you,’ she said.

But then Meredith surprised her, pointing upwards and piping ‘Man!’ quite beyond any mistake.

It was the fifth word the child had uttered in her life, after ‘Oops!’, ‘nahnah’, ‘Dadda’ and ‘okay’.

‘Still not bothering with me, then,’ Maggs complained, trying to see whether there really was a man on the church roof. It took a minute to realise that the child was indicating one of the gargoyles over the main door. ‘Not much wrong with your eyesight, anyway,’ she said. ‘He is rather splendid, I admit.’ The stone figure was wearing a hat and apparently struggling to free himself from the building. Strictly speaking, he wasn’t a gargoyle at all, she reminded herself, because he served no function as a water spout, which she believed to be the strict definition. He was something stranger and more unsettling. It was easy to accept the idea that he’d once been a real man, trapped by some magic as a punishment for folly or wickedness. He did look a bit of a fool, she decided. Then a shadow fell across his face, or something of the sort, and he seemed for all the world to be moving.

Meredith squealed. ‘Man!’ she repeated.

‘Right,’ said Maggs. ‘Let’s have a look to see if there are any more of them.’ She pushed the buggy over a patch of short grass, to where another grotesque was trying to escape from the stone on the corner of the building. This one had a wide grinning mouth, and was possibly female. Meredith was craning round to look back at her original favourite, rather to Maggs’s irritation. ‘There are lots of them, look,’ she tried. There was a massive arched window round the corner, with figures above it.

But she had no chance to go and inspect them. ‘Hiya!’ came a voice from the church porch. ‘Over here.’

It was Olivia with her little boy Simon. Olivia who had moved to Stroud, in the south of the Cotswolds, and wanted to stay in touch. Olivia who was thirty-eight and an insurance assessor. She had dark-brown hair and very big hands. Her husband, John, was over forty with a previous wife and family. He had attended one class, full of complacency and world-weariness. Maggs and Den had both felt desperate urges to hit him. As far as Maggs could ascertain, he had suddenly increased his working hours when his new son was born, leaving Olivia to handle the whole business pretty much on her own. It had once or twice occurred to Maggs that her own situation, with Den so very attentive and involved, might come over as complacency to her less fortunate sisters. She had given in to the urge to play down the fact that things were going quite significantly well as far as Meredith was concerned. Instead she talked about the uncertainties of their income, and the sense of desertion that came with Drew’s move to Broad Campden.

Now Maggs waved and went to join her friend. ‘Have you seen Annie?’ she asked. Annie was thirty-one, fair in colouring and generally positive in her approach to life.

‘We’re having four,’ she had announced to the class with a laugh. ‘Preferably within five years. Like a litter of puppies.’ Maggs had warmed to her immediately, while at the same time envying the affluence that made such a prospect viable.

‘Nope,’ said Olivia, in answer to the question. ‘We’ve been inside for a look and she’s not there.’

‘We’d better wait a bit, then. How’s things, anyway?’

Olivia rolled her eyes, which had shadows beneath them. ‘I’ve forgotten what a night’s sleep is like, for a start. And he won’t eat.’ There followed a predictable catalogue of complaints about the trials of life with a small child, ending with, ‘I gather Annie’s Bethany’s perfect,’ with the hint of a sneer. Maggs was reminded yet again that a new mother was expected to find life intolerable and to moan loudly about it at every opportunity. The facts as she saw them, however, were not like that at all. A baby was far more robust and forgiving than she had ever imagined, despite close contact with both Drew’s children from infancy having taught her much about human resilience, both in adults and children. Meredith was perfectly reasonable in her demands and slept well enough provided her days had been sufficiently active and stimulating. The general fuss and self-pity that Maggs witnessed amongst new parents sometimes made her wonder if she came from some quite different species.

Olivia was waiting for a suitable response, she belatedly realised. ‘Last I heard from Annie, Bethany was suffering pretty badly with her teeth.’ She looked at Simon, who was deeply asleep. ‘Looks as if the fresh air has tired him out already,’ she noted. ‘It’ll probably make him hungry as well. Have you tried spicing his food up a bit? Meredith loves curry and anything with onion in it.’

The woman’s large brown eyes grew even larger. ‘Curry?’ she repeated, as if Maggs had said arsenic. ‘But that does such ghastly things to the nappies.’

Maggs shrugged. She had hoped for more adult conversation, while knowing that this was a forlorn wish. Olivia was working three days a week, and Annie shared a nanny with another family, so both mothers were pursuing their chosen professions. From what Maggs could glean, that meant that both sets of parents virtually never saw each other. Her own work as alternative undertaker, arranging burials in a field for eco-minded customers, was very seldom mentioned. After the nervous and mildly scandalised giggles that had emerged from the class when she first disclosed the deplorable fact, she and they had opted to avoid any further direct reference to it.

‘Well, it’s half past eleven already,’ she said impatiently. ‘Merry’s going to want some lunch soon. Have you seen all these fabulous carvings?’ She pointed at the stone man, whose eye she had felt on her for the past ten minutes. Meredith had been burbling nonsense to herself, also staring up at the figure from time to time. A feeling born of medieval superstition was taking hold of them both, Maggs thought fancifully. ‘I’m sure he’s watching us.’

‘Who? What?’ Olivia looked startled. ‘Where?’

‘The gargoyle. There’s a few of them, but the one just up there has a much more lively look than the others, don’t you think? I could have sworn he moved just now.’

‘You’re mad. It’s just a carving. Probably meant to ward off evil spirits. Isn’t that always what they were for?’

‘Probably.’ Maggs was finding it difficult to drag her gaze away. High up on the wall like that, he would see all kinds of behaviours and secrets that those on the ground were too distracted to notice. ‘I think there’s something special about him. There must be a story somewhere.’

‘I thought so when I first saw him,’ came a new voice. ‘You expect him to burst free at any moment, don’t you?’

‘Thea!’ Maggs embraced her employer’s wife with genuine gladness. ‘It’s ages since I saw you. How’s everything? Where’s Hepzie? We’re waiting for Annie. You’ll like her. This is Olivia. And Simon.’ Simon was slumped uncomfortably in his buggy, head lopsided and drool on his chin. Thea barely glanced at him.

‘Hello,’ she said to Olivia. ‘And hello to you, little Meredith. What a big girl you are now.’

‘She’s just said a new word,’ Maggs announced with pride.

‘Wow! She’s a prodigy.’

‘I didn’t hear it,’ said Olivia, with a hint of sulk.

‘It was before you got here. She said “man” and pointed at the chap up there. Where’s Hepzie?’ Maggs asked again. She had a great fondness for Thea’s cocker spaniel.

‘I left her with Drew and the kids. They wanted to take her on a walk over the fields. I thought she might be a bit of a handful, with all this lot.’ She looked from buggy to buggy, and then asked, ‘So where’s this other person? I’ve got all sorts of goodies here for our picnic.’ She indicated a bulging bag, which had the neck of a wine bottle protruding from the top. ‘Including some Cava. It’ll be horribly warm if we don’t bustle.’ Then she smiled. ‘Isn’t Winchcombe gorgeous? Like another age. I forgot how amazing it is.’ She waved at the street of small characterful houses leading away from the town centre. ‘They’re all different, you know. There’s a kind of madness to it.’

‘We should give up on Annie and just go,’ said Olivia. ‘She can phone to find out where we are.’

‘Hard to stick to precise times with a small child,’ said Thea, as if she knew what she was talking about. It was well over twenty years since she’d had to worry about such things.

‘What was that?’ Maggs had heard a sound that penetrated all else. Traffic was passing, people were talking, but through it all she caught a small whimper – which did not come from either child close by.

Both Thea and Olivia looked at her blankly. ‘What was what?’ said Thea.

‘I heard a baby cry. Just a quick bleat. Over there.’ Maggs pointed to the side wall of the church and the yew trees facing it.

‘It must have been a cat,’ said Olivia. ‘There’s nobody there.’

‘I’ll just pop round and see,’ said Maggs. ‘Cats don’t make that sort of noise, especially in the middle of the day. They’re virtually nocturnal, you know.’

‘Leave Meredith here, then,’ said Thea. She laughed. ‘Wouldn’t it be funny if you found an abandoned baby in the church porch? That would please him up there. Just like old times, it’d be.’ She waved at the stone man. ‘He must have seen a whole lot of that kind of thing. Wonder what he thinks about the twenty-first century. Must be boring by comparison.’

But nobody was listening to her. Maggs had gone round the wall into the church grounds and Olivia was intent on trying to straighten her little boy.

‘Hey! Come here!’ Maggs was suddenly shouting at them. ‘Call the police. Quick!’

‘What?’ Thea began to push Meredith’s buggy through the church gate. Then, seeing that Olivia hadn’t moved, she abandoned her charge and went on alone. ‘Watch her, will you,’ she called back at the other woman, who turned to her and nodded. She looked almost frozen with bewilderment.

Maggs was at the corner of the church wall beyond the big window, staring down at something out of sight at the back of the building. The very familiarity of her stance told Thea that this was terribly bad news. As she approached, she could hear the whimper that had alerted Maggs. It definitely wasn’t a cat, but a lamb might make such a sound. But what would a lamb be doing in a churchyard? Before the question was formed, she was standing at Maggs’s shoulder, seeing for herself exactly what was there.

A child was sitting in a buggy, pushed right against the church wall. Inches away lay a human form, crumpled and still. The side of the face was misshapen. Fair hair formed an untidy halo around the head. The light summer clothes were not disarrayed – cut-off blue trousers and a cream-coloured shirt suggested a carefree day in the sunshine, something far too flippant and optimistic for death to stand a chance of prevailing. But death had prevailed anyway. ‘It’s Annie,’ said Maggs. ‘And Bethany.’

‘She’s dead,’ said Thea.

Maggs squatted down and laid a gentle hand on the bare neck. ‘Still warm,’ she said. ‘But no sign of a pulse. It must have happened only a little while ago – maybe while I was right here with Merry.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Where’s Merry?’ she demanded.

‘Just over there. Olivia’s with her. She might be phoning the police, like you said.’

‘We should go and see. And take Bethany with us. She can’t stay here.’

‘No.’

Maggs gripped the buggy’s handle, only to realise that it was impossible to move it without touching the child’s dead mother. ‘Help me lift her,’ she ordered Thea. ‘I can’t get her away otherwise.’

As they carefully extracted the pushchair and its occupant and set it down a few feet away, the little girl repeated the soft cry that had first alerted Maggs. It was definitely like the bleat of a lamb, Thea insisted to herself. A self-effacing little sound, almost apologetic. ‘Poor little thing,’ she groaned. ‘What a dreadful thing to happen.’ She looked up. ‘Do you think a stone fell off the roof or something?’

‘Can’t see anything,’ said Maggs, in a steely tone.

‘What then?’

‘Somebody bashed her, Thea. Isn’t it obvious?’

‘What with?’

‘I don’t know. There’s plenty of stuff lying about.’

‘I can only see stones. Why couldn’t one of them have fallen on her? Why can’t it be an accident?’

‘Because she’d have had to be lying down with the side of her head facing up. Nobody does that. Or standing with her head bent down to her shoulder.’ Maggs enacted the posture, making her point quite vividly. ‘It wasn’t an accident.’

Thea was visibly resisting the inevitable conclusion, one hand on the buggy, rocking it slightly. Maggs led the way back to the church gate. Olivia was standing passively outside it, Meredith and Simon sitting side by side in their buggies. Simon had woken up and was reaching towards Meredith, his face full of keen interest. He was a nice-looking child, Maggs thought idly, but little Bethany far outshone both the others when it came to looks. New-grown blonde hair framed a winsome little face. Big blue eyes and a ready smile made her everybody’s darling. A poor, motherless little darling now, which was a tragedy beyond imagining.

‘Did you call the police?’ she asked Olivia.

‘Pardon? Oh – no. I didn’t know what I should say to them. What’s the matter? Where’s Annie? That’s Bethany, isn’t it?’ She eyed the child with something like distaste.

Maggs spoke slowly and loudly, in the belief that this was the only way to get through to the woman. ‘She’s been attacked. She’s lying round there dead.’

Olivia’s eyes went oddly opaque and tiny. They seemed to draw into her head like a snail’s. ‘No,’ she whispered. ‘I don’t believe it.’

‘Well, it’s true,’ said Thea. ‘Let me make the call. You two should see to the little girl. Phone her father or somebody. She’s the important one now.’

Maggs forced a smile at little Bethany, who was a lot smaller than her own chunky daughter. ‘Poor old you,’ she crooned. ‘We’d better get somebody to come and take you home, eh?’ Bethany wriggled her shoulders coquettishly and ducked her chin. ‘Where’s your bag, then?’ Every mother carried a large bag filled with spare nappies, wipes, food, drink, clothes, toys and assorted objects deemed essential for a day out with a small child. Bethany’s was slung over the bag of her three-wheeled pushchair. ‘No wonder it was so heavy,’ Maggs muttered, as she removed it. ‘Let’s see if there’s some nibbles in here.’

She unpacked a plastic box, which proved to contain a veritable feast. Only then did she remember they had scheduled a picnic, which explained the hard-boiled eggs, muesli bars, cold sausages and quite a lot of fruit.

‘She can’t eat that here,’ Olivia protested. ‘Simon’s going to want some if you start feeding her now. She doesn’t look hungry, anyway.’

Maggs ignored her and calmly broke a muesli bar into thirds, issuing a piece to each infant. ‘It’s for distraction,’ she said shortly.

Thea had walked a few yards away, speaking urgently into the phone. ‘Yes,’ she repeated loudly. ‘You’ll find us easily. Three women with three small children. Outside the church in Winchcombe.’ She threw Maggs a glance of appeal, to which there was no possible response other than a friendly smile.

‘Have you ever had to do this?’ she asked Olivia, for no clear reason. ‘Dial 999, I mean.’

‘Me? Absolutely not. The whole thing’s terrifying. I just want to get away and let the police do whatever it is they do. I’m hopeless with anything like this.’

‘There isn’t anything like this,’ Maggs corrected her shortly. ‘This is just about as bad as it gets. Lucky the kids are too young to understand.’ She looked at Bethany, nibbling quietly on her wholesome snack. ‘Poor little thing. What monster would do such a thing to an innocent child?’ Her insides were congealing, her hands beginning to shake, and she wondered at her own reaction. Then she remembered Karen Slocombe, Drew’s first wife, who had died and left two small children to get along as best they might. The association was suddenly unbearable and she felt her face crumple. ‘And what did Annie ever do to deserve this?’ she sniffed.

‘I still can’t believe she was killed on purpose. How long do you think they’ll be?’ Olivia was jittering from foot to foot. ‘Can’t we get further away?’ She glared angrily at Maggs. ‘Why did you have to go snooping round there anyway? We could be practically at the picnic place by now.’

Maggs worked as an undertaker; she knew the strange effects that death could have on people. She had seen apparent heartlessness before. But this was personal and altogether unacceptable. ‘And leave this little sweetheart beside her dead mother? Don’t you think it’s lucky I heard her when I did?’

‘Oh – I suppose so. I don’t know what I’m saying. It’s all such a shock.’

Thea came back to join them. ‘They’ll be here in a few minutes,’ she said. ‘One of us ought to stay with her, really. It’s the decent thing to do.’ She looked Olivia squarely in the face. ‘You were her friend,’ she hinted.

‘Me? I’m not going. What about Simon?’

Meredith prevented any response by kicking her feet violently against the buggy and breaking out in a tuneless babble that was plainly preparatory to expressing displeasure.

‘She wants to get out,’ said Maggs.

‘She’s not walking yet, is she?’ asked Thea. ‘You can’t let her crawl around here on the pavement.’

‘She could have a bit of freedom amongst the gravestones,’ said Maggs. ‘She’s used to gravestones, after all, even if ours are a bit different.’

‘No, she can’t. Besides, they’re mostly around the back. There’s nothing much on this side.’ The mood was turning dark, the horror of Annie’s death throwing a grim pall over everything. But at the same time, the children must not be upset, if it could be avoided. ‘What about phoning her husband?’ Thea reminded Olivia. ‘You must have the number.’

‘Why must I? All I’ve got is Annie’s mobile number. Her phone’ll be in her bag, presumably, with all her numbers in it.’ She shook her head as if there was nothing more to be done.

But Thea was not to be dismissed. ‘This bag?’ she asked, raising the one that Maggs had removed from Bethany’s pushchair. ‘We can look for it, then. Her husband’s number is sure to be in it. What’s his name?’

‘Mike,’ said Maggs. ‘They’re Mike and Annie Henderson. But are you sure we should? Isn’t it better to wait for the police?’

Thea was rummaging in the bag. ‘I can’t see it, anyway. She must have a handbag somewhere. Still with her, probably.’

The appearance of a police car put an end to the matter. Two uniformed officers, one male and one female, stood alertly before them, waiting for enlightenment. For Thea there was a numbing familiarity to the whole procedure, but for Maggs it was new and traumatising. Despite the fact that her husband had been a policeman for some years, she had experienced little direct contact with the force. Her ageing parents had lived most of their lives in Plymouth, reasonably law-abiding, but in no way relishing any attentions from the powers of justice. The general attitude had been that they were a necessary evil, liable to get things wrong and pursue ill-chosen avenues when it came to enforcement. Maggs was a natural rebel, thinking for herself and disdaining many of the smaller social rules when it suited her.

But this was a violent death and the police were an inevitable component. They had to be given facts, carefully and patiently, once they had inspected the body and called for all the different individuals necessary for the investigation of a murder. The presence of three little children evidently discomposed them. The female officer almost wept when she understood who Bethany was.

Quite why it was Maggs who supplied the essential information, rather than the capable Thea or the more closely connected Olivia, remained obscure. ‘Her name is Annie Henderson. She lives in Somerset. She has a husband called Mike. I last saw her six weeks ago, or thereabouts.’ She turned to Olivia every few seconds for confirmation of everything she said. Finally, she burst out, ‘Really, Olivia knew her much better than I did. They kept in closer touch.’

So finally the police questioned Olivia, who said there was nothing more to add.

‘What exactly were the arrangements?’ asked the female officer. ‘Time you were to meet, and what you intended to do? When did you last see your friend?’ She frowned. ‘How late was she, before you found her?’

‘Um …’ said Olivia, looking at her watch. ‘We were meant to meet here at about eleven. Both Annie and Maggs had to drive about fifty miles, so we weren’t sure if they’d arrive exactly on time. We were going to have a picnic in the park, and let the children have a bit of freedom.’

The policewoman looked to Thea. ‘And you? How are you connected?’

Thea hesitated, struck by the assumption that she could not be the mother of any of the babies. She was forty-five. The assumption was, strictly speaking, wrong.

‘I’ve known Maggs a long time,’ she said. ‘And Meredith’s my god-daughter – sort of.’ There was to be no formal christening, but Thea had accepted the role of ‘special aunt’, which would in earlier times have been formalised by the church.

They all knew that the questions were barely relevant. These junior uniformed officers were not authorised to engage in any sort of real investigation. All they had to do was complete a few initial basic details, the prime one being the identity of the deceased. Unless there was one even prior to that: was the victim actually irrevocably dead? For that a police doctor must attend – and that person was expected at any moment.

Olivia was the first to point out that she for one could not think of any reason to hang around. ‘The children will be getting hungry,’ she said impatiently, ignoring the residual traces of food in the infant fingers. Then she glanced at the knot of inquisitive passers-by, hovering on the pavement opposite the church. ‘And it’s not really good for them to be here, is it?’

Nobody contradicted her, but neither did they agree. ‘Where’s Mrs Henderson’s car? She did drive here, presumably?’

The three women gave equally blank looks. ‘No idea,’ said Maggs. ‘Most likely along the street somewhere. There was plenty of space when I got here. Where are you parked?’ she asked Olivia and Thea.

Thea waved towards the town centre. ‘Just down there,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ added Olivia.

Very little time had passed since the police officers had arrived, Maggs realised. There was still a sense of controlled panic, holding the line until reinforcements showed up. Hypotheses, sidetracking into a search for a weapon or questions as to relationships all had to wait for more senior investigators. There was no way the positioning of cars could be relevant.

‘We can’t just go,’ she said, looking at Thea. ‘Can we?’

‘Not really,’ said Thea. ‘They’ll soon be here. It might be somebody I know,’ she finished hopefully. ‘Like Gladwin.’

‘You know DS Gladwin?’ asked the female constable.

‘Oh yes,’ Thea told her. ‘And DI Higgins.’ She could have added more names, but refrained. As soon as anyone from CID arrived, her intimate connections with the local police force would become apparent. Winchcombe itself had been the scene of two brutal murders not so long ago. Thea had found both the bodies. The sudden appearance of a third made her both angry and weary.

Maggs noticed Olivia throwing strange looks at Thea. Confusion was plain on her face, as well as a sort of apprehension. There had not been time for proper introductions, she remembered, so Olivia knew almost nothing of Thea’s background. The house-sitter who moved from one Cotswold village to another, encountering bad behaviour on an epic scale almost everywhere she went. The new wife of alternative undertaker, Drew Slocombe, who was attracting considerable attention since setting up a new burial ground near Broad Campden. Olivia knew only that Thea and Maggs had been friends for some time, having somehow been connected through their husbands. Maggs had been deliberately vague, hoping to elaborate properly over the picnic.

‘I think we should go,’ said Olivia again. Her small son was grizzling and showing clear signs of needing to escape from the straps that imprisoned him. Not for the first time, Maggs grieved over the way little children spent such a lot of their time tied into some contraption or other, ostensibly for their own safety.

But then two more cars drove right up to where they were standing, oblivious of any normal parking rules. Five people emerged and were quickly standing along the pavement, asking questions and pulling on protective clothing, in one or two cases. Maggs, Olivia and Thea were ushered to one side and asked to wait. Activity and bustle ensued, with police tape barring entry to the church, a horrified vicar suddenly appearing for good measure. Maggs looked to Thea for some sort of explanation based on her experience, but she just shrugged. ‘Not Gladwin or Higgins,’ she sighed. ‘Nobody I know at all. Pity.’

A young man in plain clothes came up to them. ‘Mrs Cooper?’ he asked. Maggs raised a hand. ‘Good. Would you be kind enough to come with me, please?’

‘Why me?’ she muttered, but went willingly enough. She felt a small lurch of pride at being the one singled out. They must think her the most competent and responsible of the three, she concluded.

Annie’s body still lay exposed to the sky. A man in a suit knelt beside her. More men were stringing tape in a wide arc from church wall to shrubs at the edge of the grassed area. ‘Do you recognise this?’ the original policewoman asked her, holding a handbag aloft.

‘Actually, I do,’ said Maggs slowly. ‘That’s Annie’s bag. I remember it from the classes. We all admired it.’

It was a very distinctive item, made of soft purple leather and very expensive. A present from Mike, on first learning she was pregnant. She had made a great display of it, more than once. Seeing it now, surviving its proud owner, gave her a piercing pain. What would happen to it? What significance could it ever have, along with all Annie’s other possessions? Bethany might inherit it eventually, perhaps. But would she want it? If she was told that it had lain beside her dead mother, containing her personal things, would she not be repelled by it? Perhaps Mike would sell it or thrust it at Annie’s mother for disposal. For the first time – which given her occupation had to be rather shameful – Maggs considered the fate of a dead person’s belongings. Just so much clutter, in most cases, their meaning gone along with the person who had valued and loved them.

And then a distinctive sound was heard from inside the bag. Automatically, the policewoman reached in and removed the phone, which had indicated the receipt of a text. She looked at its screen and then showed it to Maggs, whose mind began to work as fast as a microprocessor.

JOHN, it said.

‘Do you know who that is?’ the officer asked her.

‘Um … I don’t think so. Might be anybody. Listen – are we done here? I need to get back to my little girl.’

‘Well …’ The woman looked around for someone to consult. ‘Can Mrs Cooper go now?’ she asked.

‘Go where?’ replied a man in jeans, who was probably a fairly senior detective.

‘Just back to the street, with the others,’ said Maggs.

‘No problem,’ he nodded.

‘So, actually, could we go and have some lunch as well?’ she pressed on. ‘We were heading for the park. Would that be okay?’

‘Leave your contact details, then. We’ll want to interview you this afternoon. All of you.’

She smiled co-operatively, and went back to the others. ‘They want our mobile numbers,’ she told them. ‘Then we can get down to the park, and try to eat something.’ She looked directly at Olivia. ‘I feel too sick, quite honestly. Sick as a … whatever it is.’

‘Dog,’ said Thea. ‘Dogs are often sick. What happened back there? You’ve gone a bit green. Surely not at the sight of a body?’

‘Let’s get going. I need to think,’ was all Maggs would say.

The male constable was hovering, and they gave him their numbers, reminding him of their surnames. Then Maggs led the way back towards the main square of Winchcombe, before turning right down a characterful little street that ended up at the gates of Sudeley Park. Thea paused for a wistful glance down over some allotments. ‘I stayed there, a year or two ago,’ she said. ‘You remember, Maggs.’

‘Yes. I came here to confront you about Drew.’

‘No, you didn’t confront me. You gave me a very sweet apology for being nasty to me.’

They exchanged fond smiles. They did, after all, have a substantial history behind them. From some obscure emotional connection, Maggs leant down and kissed the top of Meredith’s head. ‘It was a while ago now,’ she said.

They found a spot under a huge tree, spreading a cloth on the sparse grass and laying out a modest array of picnic food. Then Maggs looked at Olivia, with a mixture of pity and disgust.

‘There’s a message from John on Annie’s phone,’ she said. ‘They’ll have read it by now. I give them about half an hour to work out what that means. Perhaps you should call somebody to come and take charge of Simon. You won’t want to take him with you where you’re going, will you?’

Olivia went rigid. ‘I didn’t kill her,’ she said, forcing the words through a tight jaw. ‘I admit I was there. We were both early, because I wanted to have it out with her, before you arrived – to tell her she was ruining the lives of two little children, as well as mine and Mike’s. But she just laughed and said everyone had a right to happiness, and the kids were too young to notice anything. Besides, she said, their fathers were hardly ever at home anyway.’

Maggs closed her eyes against the rage that swept through her. ‘You hit her so hard it killed her. How could that have been unintentional?’

‘I didn’t hit her. It was that stone man.’

‘What the hell do you mean?’

‘A piece of stone fell off the roof and landed on her head. She was on the ground, because I’d pushed her over. I was trying to make her go away, before you got here. No way could I sit through a picnic with her, the little bitch. But I didn’t kill her. If you told the police we arrived together and never saw Annie, that’d be an alibi for me.’

Maggs could hardly speak, but she choked out, ‘I think you’re lying. I’m certain you hit her and killed her.’

‘But nobody can prove it, if I did.’

Thea made an instinctive move to cuddle Bethany, as she struggled to understand what had been said. ‘Oh, they’ll prove it all right,’ she said. ‘And what’ll happen to this little thing now? Not to mention your own little boy.’

Olivia looked at the child, then at the other two, her Simon and Maggs’s Meredith. Finally she stared hard at Maggs. ‘That’s up to you, isn’t it?’ she said.

For two seconds, Maggs considered these words. If she did supply a false alibi, she would have to live with the consequences for ever. She could never tell Den about it. The police would question her inconsistent testimony.

‘Sorry,’ she said.