He was quiet after the call ended. Thea had gleaned little from his side of the conversation except that he had promised to go back to Stratford to see old Mrs Wilshire, the next morning. ‘Is it about Richard’s funeral?’ she asked.
‘Not really. She said she has to talk to somebody and I’m the only one who she can trust.’
‘Can we trust her?’
‘I don’t think we have anything to fear.’ The very mildness of his tone felt like a reproach.
‘I didn’t think we had, personally. But we’ve already decided that people must be telling lies.’
‘Thea, she’s very old, and I’ve already got a relationship with her. She’s a bright, brave lady who faces the inevitable a lot better than most people do.’
‘Old people tell lies just as much as anybody else.’ She knew this from personal experience, she wanted to add. ‘And she’s clearly a bit peculiar, keeping all that stuff in the house, preserved for no sensible reason.’
He merely nodded. ‘Let’s get back,’ he said after a pause. ‘We can’t do any more here.’
‘And I need to rescue my poor dog. She doesn’t like being alone in a strange house.’
They got into the car, turned it round and returned down the steep twisting lane into Chedworth. Thea’s mood was jangled. She was irritated with herself and by extension with Drew for witnessing yet again her less appealing side. They wanted the same things, she insisted to herself. Not just to resolve the mystery of Richard Wilshire’s death, but to be together, a contented couple with enough money to live on and a joint purpose in life. The goal was clear, but the getting there seemed to be increasingly fraught.
The house was in darkness. It was anything but welcoming, even with the enthusiastic greeting they were given by the spaniel. It was not long after eight o’clock, the evening still ahead of them. A sharp panic gripped Thea at the prospect of having to entertain Drew for at least two hours before they could decently go to bed. The panic increased as she acknowledged how wrong this worry was for somebody meant to be in a loving committed relationship. She had forgotten what couples did together. Watching television felt like a failure. There were no games anywhere – and she was fairly sure Drew disliked anything as banal as Scrabble or Canasta, anyway. She must have asked him at some point, she thought – and now could not recall his answer.
What had she done with Carl? It felt shameful to even ask herself the question, but equally it was impossible to avoid. She had been half of a couple with him – everything she knew on the subject inevitably included him.
‘I’ll make some coffee, shall I?’ she said.
‘If you like.’ He was standing with his back to the living room window. A memory stirred in which Thea had been in a room when a missile came crashing through a window, sending shards of glass everywhere. Memories like this were popping up repeatedly, she realised. Episodes from her many house-sitting commissions, where there had been violence and complexities of every sort. Temple Guiting, she remembered. Fifteen minutes earlier she had been reliving her time in Blockley. Cold Aston – where she’d been in a house with an attic – and Lower Slaughter had both woven themselves into her thoughts during the day. It was a troublesome kaleidoscope of recollections, making it difficult to concentrate on this amorphous Chedworth mystery. Perhaps it was only her experience of the past few years that made her think Richard had been murdered in the first place. Murder was what she had come to expect. In Frampton Mansell an apparent suicide had soon turned out to be a killing, after all. Likewise in at least two other places. But there had also been the opposite, where a presumed murder proved to have been accidental. The police had quickly acquired a habit of consulting the inquisitive house-sitter who had few inhibitions about speaking to strangers and asking them questions that were close to rude at times. People had objected – in Cranham and Temple Guiting especially. But Thea Osborne had been undeniably helpful. An accidental sleuth in many ways, she had seldom solved the case all on her own; but now and then she had. Drew, too, had played his part, especially in Broad Campden and Snowshill.
She groaned softly, recalling all these many adventures and how gruelling some of them had been. She had forgotten the intention of making coffee, standing in the doorway, watching her fiancé.
‘What’s the matter?’ Drew asked.
‘Just thinking. Remembering. Feeling a bit tired and middle-aged about everything.’
He was instantly only an inch away from her, then pulling her close, resting his chin on the top of her head. Drew wasn’t tall, but Thea was definitely short. They fitted neatly together. He rubbed her back, and swayed her gently from side to side. ‘Poor old love,’ he crooned. ‘We can’t go on like this, can we? It has to change. Tomorrow.’ He said it with determination. ‘Tomorrow will be the first day of the rest of our lives, and we’re going to get it right. We’re going to leave this place with our heads high and our consciences clear.’
‘Huh?’ She barely heard his words, but there was something not entirely comforting in the tone.
‘We’ll go to Stratford first thing tomorrow, and after that we’ll tell your DI Higgins everything.’
‘Including our wildest guesses and groundless suspicions. We dump it all on him and go.’
‘Right,’ she said, thinking that Drew didn’t know Higgins, if he thought that was a workable plan. But just to have a plan that put her at its centre was reassuring. It told her that everything was probably all right, at least in the essentials.
Nothing else happened all evening. It wasn’t necessary to entertain Drew, she discovered. They could simply be together, cuddled on the sofa, talking sporadically about every sort of trivia. By unspoken consent they shelved the whole business of the Wilshires. The brainstorming, such as it was, could wait. They had worn themselves out, driving around the countryside meeting people and following hunches. Nobody could survive such a day without collapsing at its end.
Hepzie was on Thea’s other side, inconspicuously staking her own claim to a cuddle. It seemed to Thea that the presence of her pet was a given, just as Drew’s children were. It didn’t need to be spoken aloud. Banishing the spaniel from the bed when Drew was in it seemed to her concession enough.
Then it was Monday, and they were back to obligations and focus; Mrs Wilshire expected, and Drew was again conscientious and caring. ‘Will you say anything about Richard probably being murdered?’ Thea wondered.
‘I imagine she’ll say it herself. I’m assuming that’s what she wants to talk about.’
‘If that’s so, why us? Why not the police?’
He made his usual open-handed gesture that doubled as a shrug of ignorance. ‘Obvious reasons, I’d guess. They wouldn’t listen to her, would they? Even less than they listen to us.’
‘I woke up thinking about the family history,’ she said. ‘Those two sisters, and the cousins. Brendan’s dad, what’s his name, must be over seventy. Richard and he can’t have been much company for each other, with such a big age difference.’
‘So?’
‘Nothing, really, except I’ve been trying to imagine what it was like. And where are their fathers?’
‘Maybe the old lady will tell us. People often reminisce after a death. They have a compulsion to tell the whole story, sometimes.’ He gave a rueful sigh. ‘All part of my job to listen to it, of course. It can take hours.’
‘The home won’t be too happy to have us there right after breakfast, I bet. They’ll be trying to do cleaning and all that.’
This time Drew gave a real shrug. ‘I often think home is the wrong word for it. There’s no way the inmates can carry on as if it was really their home. It’s much more like being in prison, when you think about it.’
She shuddered. ‘Don’t spoil my illusions. I had to reassure Richard that there was a lot about it that was positive. Getting all your cooking and washing done, for example. And always being nice and warm. And the setting is gorgeous.’
Drew was suddenly alert. ‘Did you discuss it, then?’
‘I told you – he was feeling horribly guilty. I wanted to make him see it was the best thing to have done. When we found his body, my first thought was that the guilt overwhelmed him so he couldn’t bear it any more. I did think he’d killed himself.’
‘We must go over it again in the car. Leaving in five minutes, okay? We’ll take mine.’
‘So long as Hepzie can come.’
‘She’ll have to go between the baby seats, then.’
‘You don’t still call them that, do you? The kids must love that.’
‘They don’t mind,’ he said irritably. ‘They think it’s funny.’
In the car, he was acutely focused, behaving almost like a police detective on a case. ‘It makes no sense for Richard to have felt so guilty. His mother was more than ready to make the move. Her legs were letting her down and the stairs were a real hazard. She’d dropped a pan of boiling water recently and knew she couldn’t trust herself with cooking any more. And she’s such a philosophical person. She faces up to things. That’s obvious, I suppose, from the way she planned her own funeral. So Richard didn’t have anything to reproach himself with.’
‘Well, he thought he did. He was miserable with it. All sort of crumpled inside, if you see what I mean. You know how a person’s face goes when they feel guilty.’
He gave this some thought. ‘I’m not sure I do,’ he admitted.
‘I can’t describe it, but you’d recognise it if you saw it. As if there’s a lump of something you can’t bear to touch or think about, somewhere in your chest.’
‘This is getting whimsical. Especially from a woman who I have never thought of as having a troublesome conscience.’
At first she took this as an implied criticism. But before flying to her own defence, she paused. ‘I do feel a bit bad about keeping you from your responsibilities,’ she said lightly. ‘But on the whole I suppose I think guilt is rather self-indulgent. If you parade to the world how guilty you feel, that implies that you’re a good person, admitting your faults. Unselfish and all that. And it also carries a hint of control.’
‘Does it?’
‘I think so. If a person feels guilty at their mother growing old and needing more attention and help, that suggests the guilty one thinks they ought to have somehow prevented the inevitable. They believe, somewhere inside, that they can control nature.’
‘Or perhaps they’re just ashamed of how little they want to do about it. Or how poorly they manage things, getting into a situation where they haven’t got time or resources to give the old person what she needs.’
‘And you think that’s closer to how Richard was?’
‘I do. Except … I still don’t understand why he would think she was unhappy or uncomfortable, or blaming him in any way.’ He gave a little laugh. ‘In fact, in this particular instance, I have a hunch that your assessment might be closer to the truth than mine. My first impression was that they were a very devoted mother and son. Now I think that needs some modifying.’
‘Or we might both be wrong, and he had something else entirely to feel guilty about.’
He drove for another half-mile before replying. ‘Lateral thinking,’ he said then.
‘Brainstorming.’
‘You think he did something awful, and was killed for it?’
‘It’s a hypothesis,’ she said. ‘That fits the facts, as far as they go.’
‘Which isn’t very far,’ he said with a sigh.
It was ten past nine when they got to the care home. The front door was firmly closed, and the car park sparsely occupied. ‘Even the cleaners aren’t here yet,’ said Drew.
They rang the bell, and were mildly surprised when Mrs Goodison herself admitted them. Even more surprisingly, she was all smiles. ‘Oh, you’ve made good time,’ she approved. ‘Come in. It’s chilly today, isn’t it?’
She led them purposefully along a corridor and around a corner to a door on which she knocked. Without waiting for a response, she slowly opened it. ‘Rita?’ she said in a tone half-deferential and half-brisk. ‘Mr Slocombe’s here.’
Inside, the old lady was sitting in a big armchair beside the window. There was a bed and a table against one wall, with another chair, bookcase and chest of drawers distributed around the room. On the table was a laptop, with its lid up. Mrs Wilshire looked up without a smile, and said, ‘Yes, I saw them arrive.’ Her window looked across a lawn and through a fence to one side of the car parking area. She could only have glimpsed the pair before they disappeared from view. ‘It’s good of you to come,’ she added.
Drew took her hand, and then waved Thea forward. ‘I hope you don’t mind my bringing her with me? We did try to visit you yesterday, but your nephew took prior claim.’
‘So I understand. That must have been annoying for you. But I’m pleased to see you now,’ said the old lady, bowing her head. ‘It was good of you to go to the trouble. I hope you won’t feel I’m wasting your time. The thing is, you see, I suspect you might turn out to be useful.’
Thea had taken a step forward, but went no closer.
‘I’ll get another chair,’ said the matron, or whatever title she gave herself. Thea glimpsed a touch of reproach at her presence. Drew was supposed to come by himself. Perhaps her being there was a potential spanner in the works. And yet, the doorstep greeting had seemed genuine and Mrs Wilshire herself showed no sign of resenting the appearance of an extra person.
The chair was quickly supplied, and Mrs Goodison made a dignified retreat. If she had any worries or anything to hide she covered it very well. Thea felt a thrill of anticipation at the conversation to come. There could hardly fail to be revelations of some description.
‘I am really so sorry about your son,’ said Drew. ‘It was a great shock.’
‘Thank you.’ There were signs of tears in her eyelashes. She did not wear spectacles, Thea noted. Her gaze was clear and her hearing evidently more than adequate. But her hands were shaking and her ankles looked swollen inside a pair of blue socks. She wore trousers and a sweatshirt, clearly comfortable with them both. ‘I have to make a great effort to believe it.’ She looked straight at Drew. ‘The temptation to fall back on fading memory and an exaggerated senility is surprisingly strong. It would be an acceptable way of avoiding the pain, after all.’
Drew made a quick snort of understanding.
‘I suspect they thought I would do just that,’ she went on. ‘Retreat into addled wits and refuse to accept what they were telling me. That would have made it easier for us all. For perhaps an hour I almost gave in. And then I remembered you, and all you had seen of Richard and myself. I remembered how reliable and straight talking you were when we met. Added to that, you – by some extraordinary chance – found my son’s dead body. I could hardly pretend to be senile, knowing that, could I?’
People didn’t say ‘senile’ any more, Thea thought idly. She had not quite followed the logic of the last remark, but trusted that it had one. There was nothing illogical about this old lady.
‘I’d hate to think you let me influence you,’ Drew said uneasily.
‘That’s not what I mean. All I’m saying is that you gave me courage when I needed it. My reaction was all my own – a fierce refusal to believe what they were telling me and a determination to prove them wrong. That’s the part I fancy you might help me with.’
Thea felt a stab of pride hearing this, understanding better than before that Drew held a position of great privilege with newly bereaved people, never trying to divert them from the embarrassing fact of death or assuring them that everything would be all right.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ he said.
‘So please give me the whole picture, from the start.’
‘All right. Well, it was really his dogs who found him. We stopped at the barn for a look, because it was so … picturesque and the dogs got very excited.’
‘I remember it vividly. Richard used to go there with his little friends, when he was a boy. The farmer was forever chasing them away, but they always went back.’ Her eyes misted, less with grief than a sort of frustrated rage. ‘There is no way at all that he would kill himself there,’ she said with loud emphasis. ‘It has nothing but happy associations.’
‘You mean, he wouldn’t spoil that for you?’ asked Drew.
‘Or himself. Suicide is never a happy thing, is it?’
‘No.’ Drew shook his head. ‘Not unless the person was insane.’
Thea entertained a brief image of a lunatic launching delightedly into the void, arms outstretched, from the high barn platform. That most definitely was not Richard Wilshire.
‘So … you don’t believe it could have been an accident?’ Drew asked carefully.
‘Of course not. I know he wasn’t a boy any longer, but he was in good health and fit enough. No dizzy spells or wonky legs. You know,’ she went on, ‘I never had much sympathy for relatives who insisted so adamantly on knowing the exact circumstances of their loved one’s death. What did it matter? I thought. Dead is dead, however it comes about. And now I’m one of them. I can’t tell you how important it is to me that the world should have the right facts about how Richard died. I can’t allow him to be remembered as a suicide. Even his daughter doesn’t seem to fully understand how much it matters.’
To Thea, as she listened, this carried echoes of the conversation she and Drew had had the evening before.
‘We’ve met Millie several times since Friday,’ said Drew. ‘Have you seen her since they told you about Richard?’
‘She telephoned me at six o’clock last night. There didn’t seem to be much for either of us to say. We were quite unable to console each other. I have a horrid feeling we each think our loss is greater than the other’s.’ She smiled wanly. ‘And that odd Judith girl, of course. She battened onto Richard like a leech.’
The old lady’s grasp of the current situation seemed almost miraculous to Thea. She thought of another aged woman, in Blockley, whose wits had wavered alarmingly. People varied, obviously, and stereotypes were always a mistake; but for someone so very old to keep abreast of relationships and emotions in others was definitely impressive.
‘But, do you know – and I can say this to you, and nobody else – the pain is actually more bearable than you’d expect. Perhaps I’m a monstrously insensitive creature, or it could yet be too early to say, but I am a lot more concerned to have the truth revealed than I am with nursing my misery. The police tell me he didn’t suffer, which helps a lot. And I am very sad about his dogs. They were devoted to him, you know. But he had no wife. That is, he has an ex-wife, who will certainly feel shock and sentiment, but she wasn’t dependent on him. Nobody was. That makes a big difference, I find.’ Her face contracted for a moment, giving the lie to some of her brave words.
Drew leant towards her, but did not touch her. ‘I’ve heard the same sort of thing before,’ he said. ‘It’s the thing I most value in the British. No false emotion. The stiff upper lip is very underrated. And when a person genuinely is annihilated by the loss, it’s all right for them to show that, too.’
‘Authenticity,’ Mrs Wilshire nodded. ‘I’ve always liked that concept.’ She smiled again. ‘Would you believe I studied Jean-Paul Sartre in some depth, back in the sixties? I thought he was the most brilliant man alive. I still find that Existentialism is the best explanation available for the human condition.’
‘Wow!’ said Drew.
‘Well, never mind all that. I asked you here to help me discover the truth of what happened to my son.’ She looked at Thea, almost for the first time. ‘I hope you can stomach some direct remarks?’ she said. ‘I’m too old for euphemisms and evasions.’
Thea smiled. ‘I don’t think you need worry about me. This isn’t the first time I’ve been involved with violent and sudden deaths.’
‘So, please continue,’ the old lady urged Drew. He gave her a brief but honest account of finding her son’s body, his apparent injuries, and the arrival of the police.
‘It did seem from the start that they thought it was suicide,’ he concluded.
‘I thought so as well, at that point,’ offered Thea. ‘It did fit the way everything looked.’
‘I will not entertain that idea for a minute,’ said Rita Wilshire. ‘Not for a minute.’
‘No. Well …’ said Thea.
The woman regarded her for a moment. ‘What did you say your name was?’ she said then.
‘Thea Osborne.’
Mrs Wilshire’s eyes turned inward, where she searched her memory. ‘The house-sitter,’ she concluded. ‘I have a good friend in Snowshill, who spoke of you a lot last year. Such a tragic thing, that was. My friend was deeply upset by it. I must say I feel rather privileged to meet you.’
Thea felt herself flush. Her burgeoning reputation was one reason for no longer wanting to carry on as a house-sitter. It was increasingly uncomfortable, forcing her to defend herself more and more often. ‘I’m sure the stories have been exaggerated,’ she said, refraining from asking the identity of the friend. It was not relevant to the case in hand, after all. She quailed at the knowledge that Mrs Wilshire had no idea that Thea was sleeping on her feather mattress and rifling through her possessions.
‘I hope not. I’m relying on you to solve this mystery for me.’
Drew produced a small notebook and pencil. ‘We should make notes,’ he said.
‘Of course.’
He found a clean page and poised the pencil over it. ‘There are a great many questions,’ he said. ‘For example, you say Richard knew the barn, and I wonder whether that’s of crucial importance.’
‘He didn’t have the dogs with him on Friday,’ said Thea, before the old lady could speak. ‘Was that unusual? And there seems to be no sign of his car. How far is the barn from the farm where he was supposed to be testing cattle? Would he have walked from one to the other? Have the police asked all this?’ Suddenly she realised how scrappy and inadequate all their discussions had been thus far. Every time they seemed to be getting somewhere there had been an interruption or diversion. The car was a major element they had barely even considered.
‘Very good,’ Mrs Wilshire approved with a smile. ‘I can see you have a very clear mind.’
‘You don’t know the answers, do you?’ Thea said.
‘I’m afraid not. Nobody expected me to think about details like these, moments after being told my son had died.’
‘And they were right,’ said Drew. ‘Have you lain awake all night, thinking about it?’
‘Half the night,’ she admitted. ‘They gave me a pill that knocked me out until about three am.’
‘So write down what we need to ask the police,’ Thea told Drew, going over the same points again. ‘Where was his car?’ She paused. ‘The dogs were still here at his Stratford place on Thursday evening. Millie told me that. She was surprised he hadn’t taken them with him to work, as he usually did.’
Drew sighed. ‘That will have added weight to the suicide theory. They’ll think he planned it all along, which is why he didn’t take the dogs.’
‘But he might have been asked to meet somebody there,’ said Mrs Wilshire. ‘Some local farmer, perhaps, who had evil intentions. He wasn’t very popular, I know that, bringing such dreadful news about their animals.’
‘And the woman over the road from your house,’ Thea said. ‘Norah Cookham.’
‘Bloody Norah,’ smiled the old lady. ‘We all called her that. You’ve met her, then?’
‘She told me the dogs killed her cat.’
‘I’m afraid they did. One of those sudden fits of madness that can happen to any dog.’
Thea nodded. ‘Even my spaniel has had her moments. She was absolutely awful at Christmas, suddenly attacking a dog four times her size.’
‘Norah isn’t really so bad. She’s had a sad life and it’s embittered her rather. She’s done a remarkable job on herself, you know. Now she’s all alone in that great house, a bit like me. We go back a long way and we’ve always got along well enough, provided Richard kept out of her way. She wasn’t hostile to me as long as he kept the dogs away. She visits me here now and then, which I appreciate.’
Thea had a sense of a logjam shifting, the pent-up waters ready to flow freely again. The waters of explanation and information, concerning family history, village relationships and reasons why Richard Wilshire might have given someone cause to commit murder. She settled back in her plastic chair and anticipated a flood of useful disclosures. ‘So, can we get one thing straight?’ she asked. ‘Was coming to live here your own idea, or did Richard persuade you?’
‘Thea!’ Drew protested. ‘What does that have to do with anything?’
She glared at him. ‘It would settle the confusion about what was making him feel so guilty.’
‘Guilty? Richard was feeling guilty?’ Mrs Wilshire leant forward.
‘He told me he was,’ Thea confirmed. ‘And you could see it on his face.’
Drew sighed, but said nothing.
‘Well, whatever he felt guilty about, it couldn’t have been me,’ she said firmly. ‘I was quite ready to move here. I had no illusions about it. There are many disadvantages, of course, but nothing in life is ever perfect. We make the best of it. I worry about all the things left behind, I admit. They were entrusted to me, and I’ve done my best, all these years, to keep everything safe and in good condition.’ Then she frowned. ‘When did you see Richard, then?’
‘On Thursday.’ Too late, she remembered that Mrs Wilshire knew nothing about Richard’s decision to open up the various boxes and drawers in the house and list their contents. That, perhaps, was the source of his guilt feelings. Hadn’t Millie said something to that effect, on Friday? Or was that just a hunch on Thea’s part? In any case, the cat had escaped from the bag. ‘There are a lot of things,’ she said.
The old lady was quick to understand. ‘You’ve seen them?’
‘Yes I have. I’ve seen almost everything.’
‘You’ve been in my house?’
‘Yes. I’ve slept there the past few nights. Your son was employing me to make an inventory of everything that you have.’
Mrs Wilshire slumped back in her chair. ‘Why in the world would he do that? There was nothing that could interest him. And if there was, all he had to do was to ask me about it.’ She looked dazedly at Thea. ‘An inventory? Is that what he called it?’
‘I think so. A list, with descriptions of it all. I am most terribly sorry. I feel awful now.’
‘And so you should. Did it not occur to you to ask whether he had my permission to do such a thing?’
‘I’m afraid not.’ She swallowed. ‘And it gets worse.’
‘How could it get worse?’
‘Well, yesterday, your nephew – great-nephew, I mean – came to the house and asked if he could go up to the attic. We didn’t see how we could stop him, but we did go with him. He seemed to think there was something up there that would prove Richard was murdered. He said you’d got an email that Richard wrote, saying something about being worried he might be killed. We didn’t really believe him, but we still didn’t see how we could stop him going up there. He took a few things away with him.’
Mrs Wilshire’s jaw tightened alarmingly.
‘Just tell me he didn’t take the stamps,’ she said.