Gladwin was businesslike and concerned. ‘She’s so young,’ she breathed. ‘Poor thing. Now tell me everything you know.’
It turned out to be a very threadbare story, with Thea too stunned to recall details. She repeated what she had told the boy with the G5. ‘She’s called Melissa, and she keeps a lot of her possessions in a back room here. The owner is her uncle – Oliver Meadows. His brother is Fraser, and he’s her father. She comes and gets things regularly. Clothes, mostly. She’s got a flat in Oxford. She travels a lot for her work, and was due in Stoke today. Or perhaps it was tomorrow. She took a memory stick out of one of the boxes.’
‘Where is Oliver Meadows now?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Who was the woman meeting in a pub?’
‘Who’s her mother?’
‘I don’t know.’
The memory stick was nowhere in evidence; Melissa did not have a mobile phone on her; her car had not been located. Gladwin sighed.
‘At least you might have something on the camera,’ Thea offered.
‘Camera?’
‘Oh, I forgot to say. There’s a video camera in the hide. It works automatically, filming all day, until the battery runs down.’
‘Good God. And what time did it run down last night?’
‘I don’t know. I’m supposed to replace it every morning. The battery, I mean. And the little card. It might have everything you need on it.’
‘Come and show me.’
The little clearing was full of people, as well as the gazebo-style tent erected over the actual body. ‘It looks as if she was garotted,’ Gladwin confided to Thea. ‘At least it was quick. Somebody really meant business.’
Thea was not consoled. She fingered her own neck, reminded of what a very vulnerable area of the body it was. People could all too easily do themselves a fatal damage by carelessly winding a tight ligature around their throat. Suicidal prisoners did it; small children got themselves tangled in string and cord; men seeking extreme sexual thrills went too far; the heart stopped long before suffocation, if pressure was applied to a certain spot. Did the killer know that, or did they assume their victim would slowly strangle?
‘She was so blithe,’ Thea mourned. ‘Full of life. It doesn’t seem possible.’
‘Camera,’ Gladwin prompted.
Police people had been into the hide, but had not removed anything. If they saw the camera, nobody had made the obvious deduction. ‘They’d have thought it was only activated when the owner was here,’ Gladwin supposed. ‘It’s not the usual CCTV arrangement.’
To Thea’s ignorant eye, it seemed very much the same thing, but she refrained from comment. She was worrying about her mother, and Oliver’s birds and the whole miserable business of murder.
‘I can’t get hold of my mother,’ she whined. ‘She and Fraser will be here in an hour or two if I can’t avert them.’
‘Why would you try? We’ll need him to identify the body, anyway. I could accuse you of interfering in a police investigation, if you’re not careful. It seems to me it’s all rather convenient the way it’s going.’
‘You don’t know my mother,’ Thea gloomed. ‘I’m going to have to deal with her.’
‘Come on. She’ll be company for you, a distraction. Once this lot’s tidied away, you can get on with it here. At least …’
‘Precisely. You’ll have to find Oliver and probably bring him back. I won’t be needed any more.’
‘I can’t believe you let him go off without leaving any contact details. What sort of a house-sitter does that?’
‘I know. It was all such a rush. I never even managed to ask him. His brother probably knows where he is,’ she added hopefully. ‘This was all his idea, indirectly, I think. My mother thought it would be a neat solution – sort of win-win, with Oliver getting away and me getting some work. I had a sort of feeling that I was their proxy – that if I hadn’t agreed to it, they might have come here instead.’
‘So why didn’t they?’
‘Too big a commitment, I guess,’ said Thea vaguely. ‘A fortnight is quite a long time, after all.’ She swung a foot like a bored teenager, wishing herself somewhere quite else. ‘I’d better try her phone again, I suppose.’
‘Weird that Melissa didn’t have a phone on her,’ said Gladwin, watching the swinging foot. ‘Tell me again where she put that memory stick.’
Thea concentrated her mind. ‘She had a little shoulder bag,’ she recalled for the first time. ‘She put the clothes in a plastic carrier bag, that she pulled out of the shoulder bag, and dropped the stick into the first bag. Is that making sense? There might have been a phone in there as well.’
‘Car keys? Money? Where were they?’
‘In the shoulder bag, presumably.’
‘Which is nowhere to be seen.’
‘So she was mugged in a woodland garden, outside a bird hide? They garotted her and stole her bag.’
‘Looks like it. I hate to sound melodramatic, but I can’t help feeling there was something important on that memory stick. Sorry, Thea, but can we go through the whole conversation you had with her, one more time?’
Under the questioning gaze of another plain-clothes officer, who strolled towards them somewhat warily, as well as a team of white-clad forensics people, who all seemed to suddenly have nothing to do, Thea recounted everything she could remember. Very little was added to her original testimony, other than a description of Melissa as cheerful and unafraid. ‘You’ll want to look through those boxes,’ she realised, when she’d finished.
‘Right. And we need to get a look at whatever’s on this camera card, as soon as we can. And find that car. It must be out there somewhere.’
‘She didn’t seem to be coming this way,’ said Thea suddenly. ‘She went off towards Vineyard Street, and this is the opposite direction.’
‘Did you watch her go?’
‘Yes, for a little way. She must have doubled back after I’d gone into the house. There’s some sort of short cut into town through there.’ She pointed to the east, where Oliver had said something about Silk Mill Lane. ‘Or maybe she wanted to look at the birds.’
‘You got the impression she knew her way around? That she’d been here before?’ It was going over something Thea had already told her, but she was used to such repetitions when it came to police questioning.
‘Definitely. She went straight to those boxes, without any hesitation. She knew just what was in them.’
‘Would you have heard her if she’d doubled back?’
‘I doubt it. The dog didn’t bark or anything. But obviously all sorts of things must have been going on, and I had no idea.’ She sighed. ‘I hardly even thought about her, once she’d gone.’
‘You didn’t like her very much,’ said Gladwin astutely.
Thea frowned. ‘That’s putting it rather strong, but no, I didn’t take to her, I suppose. She didn’t seem to be inviting me to. She never really looked at me. I was just somebody she had to get past, in order to fetch her things.’
‘You tried to stop her?’
‘Not exactly. I tried to assure myself that she had a right to be there. That’s what I’m being paid for, basically.’
‘You got assurances from her – is that what you mean?’
‘More or less, yes.’
‘Thea – this is going to sound insane, and it is, of course. But I’m being paid to do a thorough job as well. So, I have to ask you, formally, whether you had any personal involvement in the killing of this young woman. I’ll have to order your fingerprints to be taken and an examination of your shoes made.’
Thea’s chin lifted bravely. ‘There’s no reason why I should be immune, I realise that, of course. It’s just …’
‘I know. Just answer the question, there’s a love.’
‘I did not kill her. I don’t know who did.’ It was difficult to say, especially in the hearing of the other police officers. The mere act of proclaiming her innocence made the possibility of her guilt feel bizarrely real. ‘But my fingerprints will be all over the bird feeders, and my shoeprints might well be exactly where that body now is. But I think I’m too small to have done it,’ she added lightly. ‘Melissa must be six or seven inches taller than me. Wouldn’t that rule me out?’
Gladwin smiled humourlessly and made no reply.
Fingerprints and shoeprints were taken, back in the house, and people continued to come and go. Sensations of trespass and transgression began to overwhelm Thea, as Oliver’s paths were trampled and his home invaded. ‘This is terrible,’ she muttered to her dog. She was hungry and thirsty and defeated. It was a bitter world and her own pathetic efforts to maintain order and harmony counted for nothing.
All further efforts to contact her mother proved in vain, and at eleven-fifteen a young plain-clothes police constable entered the house to tell Thea there were two visitors for her. ‘We can’t let them come down here just now,’ he apologised. ‘They’ll have to stay out in the road.’
‘Oh, God,’ Thea groaned. ‘One of them is the father of the dead girl. Am I supposed to be the one to tell him?’
‘It would probably be best,’ he said, with a faint frown. ‘Then we’ll take him for a look, probably. They’ll be moving her soon, though. Maybe he should go to the mortuary?’
‘No, no,’ came Gladwin’s voice of authority. ‘She looks okay. It’ll be kinder to get it over with here.’
Thea trudged heavily along to the road, and met her mother’s eyes. The expression was confused, but only slightly alarmed. The older woman smiled. ‘Thea? What’s happening? They said there’d be an incident in the woods. Did somebody get caught in a gin trap?’
‘Hi, Mum. I don’t think they have gin traps any more. Is this Fraser?’ She turned to a tall, colourless man standing at her mother’s side. Her heart was pounding with dread at what she had to do next. ‘Hello,’ she said, holding out a shaky hand.
He took it in a moderate grip, and smiled down at her. ‘Pleased to meet you,’ he said, in an unexpectedly deep voice. ‘Are you going to tell us what’s going on?’
‘Somebody’s died,’ said Thea. ‘Actually, they’d like you to come and identify the body. I’m terribly sorry about this, and I’m sure it’s a shockingly harsh way of telling you, but the fact is, something terrible has happened to your daughter.’
His expression barely altered, but he dropped her hand as if it had bitten him. ‘Daughter?’ he repeated. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Can you come with me? It’s down by the hide. I expect you know your way around. Mum – they’ll let you go into the house, I expect. At least …’ She looked round for assistance. ‘Is that all right?’ she asked the detective constable.
‘Better not,’ he grimaced. ‘Forensics are going to want to have a look. Just hang on here for a bit, okay?’
But Thea felt a primary obligation to the shell-shocked old man, who had made no move since dropping her hand. ‘Listen, Mum. Can you stay in the car for a bit? It’s all rather a circus at the moment. As soon as Fraser has … well, as soon as it’s over, we can go off on our own somewhere, until things have settled down. We’ll have to talk about what we do next. And they’ll want to contact Oliver …’
Her mother took a deep breath and reached for her new friend’s hand. ‘Fraser,’ she said steadily, ‘I have no idea what this is about, but I’ll wait for you here, while you go with Thea. She’s very sensible. You’ll be all right with her.’
The accolade was familiar enough to be almost funny. Thea has always been the sensible one was a family mantra that contained only a dash of truth. Emily and Damien had possessed every bit as much sense as had Thea, throughout most of their growing up. Even Jocelyn was only sporadically ditzy.
It seemed to be effective now, however, and Thea began a brisk walk down the path towards the woods. Fraser kept alongside her, his long legs betraying the early signs of shambling that overtook tall old men sooner or later. ‘I don’t really understand,’ he repeated in a low voice. ‘I can’t begin to grasp what’s happening.’
‘I’m really very sorry. It’s all been a complete shock for me as well. I only met your daughter last night, and now she’s … out here. Well, you’ll see. It isn’t too ghastly, really. Not compared to some.’ She stopped herself. This was no sort of consolation for a man who was about to set eyes on his dead daughter. She must have been the child of his declining years, if he was as old as he looked. Although she thought her mother had said he was younger than her. This man seemed closer to eighty than the seventy-five she had expected.
‘Here we are,’ she announced, superfluously. ‘This is Detective Superintendent Gladwin. She and I are friends, in a way. She’ll take over now.’
Gladwin had been talking to a pair of black-suited men by the door of the hide. She turned and smiled sympathetically at Fraser Meadows. ‘Hello, sir. I am so very sorry about this. I hope we can make it as quick as possible. It’s just for an initial identification at this stage. Of course you’ll have a chance to visit her again in the chapel at the undertakers.’ She flapped a hand at the two men, who suddenly became obvious as the men summoned to remove the body. ‘They’re from Maltby and Salmon, in Stow-on-the-Wold. You don’t have to engage them for the funeral, but they’re available if you do want them. I can give you their number in a little while.’
Fraser blinked and opened his mouth to speak. But Gladwin was ushering him towards the gazebo, where a young uniformed officer stood guard. ‘In here, sir. If you’d just tell me …’
Thea could not see what happened next, but it all seemed to be over in seconds. Fraser stooped towards the ground, only his head and shoulders inside the tent. Gladwin had disappeared from sight, presumably to lift a cover from the dead face. Then the deep voice of the old man rang loud through the clearing.
‘This is not my daughter. I’ve never seen her before in my life. This woman bears no resemblance at all to my daughter.’