It was well past six when Drew and Thea finally got to the Seven Tuns and ordered a meal. ‘Whatever’s quickest,’ said Thea shamelessly to the woman at the bar.
They sat in the largest room, set out as an informal dining area at the back of the building. Windows looked out onto a deserted garden and patio. They could see two other bars, revealing what a large hostelry it was, and had always been. ‘Must be costly to maintain,’ muttered Drew. ‘No wonder it was out of business for so long.’
‘Was it? How do you know that?’
‘Heard it somewhere,’ he said. ‘I’ve been doing lots of research into Cotswold society, you know. I need to understand my market, for the new business.’
‘Right.’ The meal wasn’t coming nearly as quickly as she would have liked, but the beer she gulped down did a lot to assuage the hunger pangs. ‘What a day!’ she sighed.
‘It’s almost dark,’ she pointed out. ‘I call that the end of the day.’
There were very few other customers in the pub. An October Sunday evening was hardly the most popular time for drinking, they supposed. ‘There are seven mirrors in here,’ Thea noted idly. ‘Is that meant to be lucky, do you think?’
He smiled. ‘I doubt it. They’ve just gathered up as many characterful old artefacts as they could, and hung them on the walls. Must have been fun to do.’
‘I like Chedworth,’ said Thea. ‘I didn’t think I would at first. It’s so much bigger than I expected, I wish I’d given myself more time to explore it.’
‘You can stay a bit longer,’ he said. ‘You don’t have to be anywhere, after all.’
She shivered. ‘That’s not a very nice feeling. I shouldn’t be so uncommitted. It’s like being in limbo, waiting for a decision. Why didn’t we just go back to your place this afternoon?’
‘We’d have missed Andrew Emerson, and I am very pleased to have met him. He could be the answer to a prayer.’
‘You mean God told us to stay, so you could meet him?’
‘If you like.’ He smiled. ‘More likely an old pagan deity who wants my burial practices to catch on. Getting back to pre-Christian times and all that.’
‘I miss Higgins,’ she realised. ‘Or Gladwin. Some police person to talk to. Poor Richard, swept away and ignored because it’s convenient to assume he killed himself. If he was murdered, the person who did it must be very pleased with himself.’
‘That’s part of why we’re still here,’ Drew said. ‘The poor man deserves better.’
‘He wasn’t particularly nice, though. A bit of a coward, actually, getting me to do the house sorting instead of facing it himself.’
Drew nibbled his lip. ‘That Judith seemed to like him.’
‘Did you believe her? I thought it might have been a bit of self-dramatising, the grieving girlfriend role, sort of thing.’
‘She never said that, exactly. Just that he was a welcome change from the people she usually mixes with.’
Thea sighed. ‘I’ve got very sceptical in my old age,’ she admitted. ‘I wasn’t entirely sure I could trust that Mrs Goodison, either.’
Drew nodded. ‘I know about women like her, remember. They value their reputation above everything. Nothing’s allowed to sully their precious home. If she had any inkling that Richard was murdered, she’d do all she could to distance herself from that.’
‘Especially if it looked as if his mother was involved.’
He snorted in amusement. ‘Like – she killed him?’
‘No, of course not. I meant, if it had something to do with her house, or money, or something. After all, the usual motive for murder is to acquire something that the dead person has.’
‘Is it?’
‘Or to stop them from revealing something. Or because they’ve done something awful to you. Or because you lose all self-control and just keep bashing them. Or—’
‘Stop it,’ he begged. ‘That’s enough.’
‘What’s the matter? You usually don’t mind murder talk.’
‘I feel guilty,’ he admitted. ‘All this is my fault.’
‘How is it your fault that Richard Wilshire’s dead?’ She was genuinely puzzled.
‘Not that. I expect he’d be dead regardless of anything I’ve done. But I dragged you here, and I keep on dithering about Broad Campden and what happens next. I’m pathetic.’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. Look – this is what we’ll do. We’ll go back to the house, tidy up the worst of the mess in the bedrooms, leave the key under a stone at the back and be out of here first thing tomorrow. We’re never going to be of any use hanging around like this. If Higgins and his boss persist in thinking it was suicide, then they won’t have any time for us. We’d never be able to change their minds. Millie seems reconciled to that explanation, even if his mother isn’t.’
‘We don’t know for sure what his mother thinks. I’m not sure I can just leave without another attempt to see her. I have an obligation to her.’ He scratched his head. ‘That’s another thing that’s making me feel guilty.’ Then his phone warbled in his pocket. He scrabbled for it and peered at the screen. ‘Must be Pandora,’ he said.
It wasn’t Pandora, but young Stephanie. Drew’s voice became warm and gentle, listening to a long story, his responses giving Thea no clue as to its import. ‘I was going to phone you,’ he said, pulling a face at Thea that suggested he had actually forgotten any promise to do so. ‘It’s been very busy here. You’ll have to find Timmy some clean pants and socks for school, okay? … Yes, I know. But it’s just for a day or so, sweetheart. You can manage perfectly well. It’s character-forming.’ Listening to this, Thea deduced that he had used a catchphrase that would reassure his little girl. He laughed lightly. ‘Don’t worry about me, darling. I’m perfectly all right. Thea sends her love. We’ll be back soon. I’m not promising, Stephanie. You know I never make promises. Can I talk to Timmy?’
A pause, in which nobody spoke. Then, ‘Hi, Tim. How’s it going? … Good! Great! Pandora might read to you if you ask her nicely. You can tell me what happens in the next chapter, when I get back. I know, son. But everything’s okay. Be good at school and I’ll see you soon. No fighting with Stephanie, right?’
The difference in his tone when addressing his two children was almost painful. It was an aspect of him that Thea was still getting to grips with. She had gathered some scraps of information about the early years, with Tim’s conception a surprise and his arrival not quite the cause for delight that Stephanie’s had been. Then Karen’s injury and eventual death had been made much worse by the existence of a small dependent boy. Timmy had a look that made a person wince. A brave, vulnerable, quiet child. Drew could try harder, Thea concluded, but she lacked the nerve to say anything.
The call ended, Drew continued to play with the phone. ‘I took photos of that barn,’ he said. ‘Just before you and the dogs found Richard. I wanted to capture its size, and the odd constructions in front of it.’ He skimmed through a few pictures. ‘They’re not very good.’
‘Let’s see.’ She took it from him. ‘They’re not bad. You should have done black and white. Then they’d be like something by Ansel Adams. The sky’s lovely. And these blocks of stone or whatever they are look good in the foreground.’
‘You’re an art critic,’ he smiled.
‘Not at all. But I understand a bit about composition. What are these stones? They look like paving slabs, stacked in a pile.’
He peered over the table, seeing the little picture upside down. ‘No idea,’ he admitted.
‘They’re quite close to the barn door. Something like a foot square. Maybe somebody was planning to make a hardstanding for tractors, or a path.’
‘Seems unlikely. They’d just spread a layer of concrete, surely?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’ She went on looking at the picture. ‘Um … Drew. Have we finished here? Can we go back to the house and do a bit of brainstorming?’
‘Brainstorming?’
‘Yes.’ She was emphatic, and just a bit excited. Little ideas were springing up like seedlings. Then she looked through the pub window at the sky outside. Her brain had done quite a lot of storming in the past two seconds, rendering superfluous any need for more. ‘It’s not quite dark yet. I think we should go to the barn, not the house.’
‘Now?’
‘Yes. Now. We might already be too late.’
‘Thea, it’s ten past seven. The sun set half an hour ago, at least. It’s much too dark to do anything useful. Besides, the police have probably taped it all off.’ He resisted the urge to point out that he had no idea what she was thinking.
‘No, they won’t have. Not for a suicide. Why would they? I’ve got a good torch in the car. It’s only a few minutes from here.’
‘I can’t stop you,’ he said, with a hint of irritation. ‘And I suppose you’ll explain at some point.’
‘It’s a wild theory, that’s all. It’ll probably turn out to be complete nonsense, but we should go and have a look, just in case.’
He stood up without another word. The meal had served its purpose, paid for jointly. Two more people had come in while they were eating, but the pub was still very quiet. Mindful that it had been closed for some time in recent years, it struck him that survival was far from guaranteed, even now it had reopened.
‘I need you to explain,’ he pleaded. ‘Somewhere I seem to have missed a major step in the logic.’
She had begun the walk back to the house, at a brisk pace. ‘In the car,’ she threw back at him.
Six minutes later they were negotiating the sharp steep bend in the road to Yanworth, and Thea was taking Drew through her thoughts. ‘What if he was murdered by somebody who had planned it all in advance? The person knew about the barn and its high platform, and decided it would be a good place for a suicide. But just pushing him off might not kill him – so they hit him in such a way as to make it look like an injury inflicted by a fall. It would have to be a flat thing, because the floor’s flat. Now do you see?’
‘Sort of. But those slabs must be too heavy to hold with one hand. How would the killer keep Richard still while they hit him in just the right place? Especially as the injury was mainly at the front of his head. How would you manage that?’
She pondered for a moment. ‘Perhaps he was already unconscious. Or stooping down for some reason, looking at the floor. That would work rather well, don’t you think? There are any number of possible explanations.’ She waved an airy hand.
‘We don’t know that he died from the damage to his head, of course. That might have been inflicted simply to make it look like a fall. If I’m right that his neck was broken, that’ll be the cause of death. And that is much more likely to be the result of a fall. And what about other bones? He would need to be covered in bruises and impact injuries to make it look convincing.’
She made a little sound of resistance. ‘I guess it would be possible to whack him in a few places – hips, back, shoulders – the places he’d be likely to land on.’
‘Horrible thought. I wonder sometimes about your imagination,’ he admitted. Then he said, ‘But if he was already dead, there wouldn’t be bruises, as such. Just the usual pooling of blood – and that would give the police grounds for suspecting foul play.’
They had arrived at the straight stretch of road just before the barn. ‘Here we are,’ Thea announced. ‘And it’s still not really dark.’
‘Too dark to find the sort of evidence you’ve got in mind.’
She stopped the car beside the gate directly in front of the barn. ‘We can’t go through there,’ said Drew. ‘It’s chained shut, look.’
‘So it is. We’ll have to go through that field gate, like we did before.’
‘Thea – I know this is what you always do, and so far you’ve come through more or less intact, but really I must just say it’s not the way civilised people behave. You ought to go to the police with your idea, and leave it to them.’
‘They’d fob me off and not do anything. Regulations would require a full SOCO team, forensics, reports – all the stuff they’ve decided to leave out, for some reason.’
‘Finances, presumably.’
‘Or another case they think is more important. Illegal immigrants or somebody looking at websites that tell you how to make a bomb.’
Thea led the way through the uneven terrain, across a ditch onto the concrete forecourt of the barn. The sky was growing darker by the minute.
‘They’re still there, look,’ she said, her voice suddenly loud. The torch in her hand was directed at the small pile of square stone slabs, scanning the surface of the top one. ‘Hmm – it looks fairly clean.’
Drew bent over it, without touching. ‘You think he would just put it back where he found it? Isn’t it more likely to be chucked into a thicket of nettles?’
‘If it was all as carefully planned as I think, he’d definitely put it back.’ She peered closely, pressed against Drew’s shoulder. ‘But you’re right – there’s no blood or anything on it.’
She straightened, and idly swept the torch beam left and right. ‘I was thinking, you see, that a person falling from a height has different injuries from any other cause. No sharp edges, or punctures.’
‘Yes, I understand.’ He sounded somewhat tetchy. ‘But the idea that he was hit a fatal blow with a slab of stone is very far-fetched, don’t you think?’
‘Probably. It made sense when I first thought of it. But now I don’t know. Would you land face down, if you deliberately jumped? You would if you were pushed from behind. And then you wouldn’t crack your skull open, would you?’
‘Thea …’ he begged. ‘This is all very graphic. I know I wouldn’t like you to be all girly and squeamish, but this is rather the other extreme.’
‘Sorry,’ she said crossly. ‘But if the police aren’t going to ask these questions, then somebody should. And we found him – we owe him some sort of attention.’
‘I know.’ He made a visible effort. ‘Well, he was lying partly on his side when we found him, wasn’t he? That fits with a fall. And his head was at a very unnatural angle. That fits as well. But the severity of the impact seemed excessive, given the height. Your theories are sensible, from that point of view. It’s been going round and round my head ever since yesterday, that it’s a highly unlikely suicide.’
‘It is,’ she agreed. ‘Very unlikely.’
‘And I can see that the only thing we can hope to do is find some hard evidence to take to the police and get them to open a proper murder enquiry. But I have to get home tomorrow. Stephanie sounded very bereft. And there’ll be work mounting up. There could be a new funeral at any moment. And I’ll really have to be there in time for the funeral on Tuesday.’ Anxiety was thick in his voice.
‘Okay,’ she pacified him. ‘If we can’t find anything now, we’ll have to give up.’
‘It’s too dark,’ he complained. ‘We’ll never find anything in this light, even with your torch.’
‘Think – we have to think,’ she urged. ‘What if there were two people, determined to kill Richard? Then one could hold him and the other crack his skull.’
‘There’d be signs of a struggle.’
‘No, but if there were two, they could have carried him into the barn and arranged the body to look like a suicide. There might be signs of a struggle out here somewhere, if we knew where to look.’
‘He was big,’ said Drew. ‘Heavy, but not especially strong.’ He sighed. ‘It’s no good. The more we guess, the less persuasive any of it seems.’
‘Lateral thinking,’ she said, mindful of a death she had been involved with where conclusions were drawn very prematurely. ‘We have to drop all our assumptions and start again.’
‘Is this when the brainstorming starts? I think we missed that part.’
‘The main thing we need is evidence. Until then, the police won’t listen to us. We can bang on about gut feelings and logical probabilities as much as we like, and they’ll take no notice at all. So we need a weapon, most of all.’
‘They must do some sort of post mortem,’ Drew said. ‘It was a sudden unexplained death. There always has to be a post mortem in that situation.’
‘Do they do them on Sundays?’ She already knew the answer, but had a feeling that Drew needed to feel as if he was the one in control, for the moment. Any more suggestions from her might well prove counterproductive.
‘Hardly ever,’ he told her. ‘It’ll be tomorrow at the soonest. And they’re not going to go into much detail. Cause of death; nature of his injuries; general condition.’ He laughed ruefully. ‘Actually, I don’t know exactly what they do.’
‘Neither do I, except for what I’ve seen on Silent Witness. But we should start by assuming he was murdered and see if we can construct a scenario that fits – with evidence.’
‘Oh, Thea. We’re playing at detectives here, aren’t we? Following our old game, because we both love it. I think it’s time we grew out of it.’
She could not see his expression in the vanishing light. ‘I can’t help it,’ she admitted. ‘Now we’re here, and we both knew Richard Wilshire, and we’ve met so many of his family, and he’s dead.’ She spluttered incoherently, with unexpected images of her own husband Carl intruding. ‘I know most people manage to let it all go and get on with ordinary lives. I know it’s peculiar, the way I go rushing in to confront anybody I think might have done something terrible. It’s something in my character, I suppose. A stupid need to get stories straight and stop people from getting it all wrong. I hate it when a myth gets established and perpetuated, based on wishful thinking and lies and secrets. I hate that.’
‘Okay,’ he said gently. ‘I get it. I suppose I’ve got the same thing in my character, more or less.’
‘You have. Yes. So if Millie Wilshire truly believes her father killed himself, and he really didn’t, that’s the story that’ll go down the generations, and nobody will challenge it. And that’s so horribly wrong. Isn’t it?’
‘Of course. Nobody would disagree with that.’
‘Except perhaps the person who killed him.’
She swung the torch again, following the beam intently. ‘What’s that?’ she said suddenly.
‘Where?’
‘Leaning against the barn, look.’ She kept the light on a thick plank of wood that nobody would look at twice, in normal circumstances. About four feet in length, and ten or twelve inches wide, it had no obvious purpose. Thea went towards it.
‘That can’t be a murder weapon,’ Drew objected. ‘Not left in plain view like that. Nobody would be so … blatant.’
Thea was examining the plank without touching it. ‘It looks clean, the same as the stone,’ she said disappointedly.
‘Turn it over,’ said Drew, with a hint of agitation in his voice. ‘Use a hanky or something.’
‘I haven’t got a hanky.’
But Drew had. He took an old-fashioned square of cotton from his trouser pocket, and wrapped it around his hand. Gingerly, he gripped the top of the wood and pulled it towards himself. It leant away from the barn, so they could see the underside. At first it looked as bland and insignificant as the top side, but Thea shone the beam on a smudge near the bottom. In the artificial light it looked dark brown. ‘It could be blood,’ said Drew doubtfully.
‘It’s exactly the right shape for the purpose, don’t you think? And there might not have been any blood left on it.’
‘Heads always bleed.’
‘Yes, but not instantly. If you whacked someone with this and then pulled it away, it wouldn’t have to get bloody.’
Drew inhaled slowly, steadying himself. ‘You’re describing a very brutal attack on a defenceless man. Defenceless and probably totally unsuspecting. A monstrous thing to do.’
‘All the more so for being planned, and made to look like suicide. Could that Andrew chap have done it, do you think?’
‘On first impressions – which are entirely unreliable – I’d say he might have lashed out in a rage, but not covered it up very well afterwards. And there’s still the small problem of how the killer managed to keep Richard still while he whacked him.’
‘He did look rather ravaged,’ mused Thea, not properly listening. ‘Maybe that was guilt, and not misery over his cows after all.’
‘I would venture to suggest it had to be someone quite tall and strong. This plank’s heavy, and you’d need some force to lift it and crack a skull with it.’
‘We don’t know it was this, for sure,’ she reminded him. ‘We’re jumping to conclusions.’
‘I think it’s likely enough for us to tell the police.’
She couldn’t hide her excitement. ‘Oh, good!’ she said.
Then Drew’s phone went again, and he carefully replaced the length of wood before answering it. ‘All right,’ he said, after listening for a few moments. He took it from his ear, and said to Thea, ‘Mrs Wilshire wants to speak to me. That was the woman at the nursing home … Yes, hello Mrs Wilshire. What can I do for you?’
Thea had never before heard his undertaker’s voice, but here it most unmistakably was: gentle, patient, professional and dependable. She wasn’t altogether sure she liked it.