Oliver Meadows had begged for a police safe house. ‘Witness protection,’ he said. ‘I need to feel safe.’ He looked out at the busy London street and shuddered. ‘I never feel safe in London.’
The reaction had not been favourable. ‘I don’t think the situation calls for that, sir,’ said the liaison officer he had been allocated. ‘We’re not dealing with drug barons, after all.’ And besides, aren’t you just an old nonentity, who nobody’s going to care about enough to offer any threat? was the subtext.
‘But my testimony is going to ruin a man’s lifelong reputation. A pillar of the community, almost literally. He won’t take it quietly.’
‘Indeed not, sir. But don’t you think that if he was going to attack you, he’d have done it before now? Just get yourself a little room in an anonymous hotel – one of those near Paddington would be ideal – and nobody’s going to find you.’
Oliver could see the sense in this, but the tariff of seventy pounds a night gave him pause. Nobody had mentioned anything about covering his expenses. He had volunteered himself as a witness almost a year earlier, and assumed this meant he’d have to pay his own way. The trial could last for two weeks, he had been told – possibly more if there were absences and delays, as very often happened in the legal system. He might be asked to remain within call for much of that time. He pined for his birds and the fresh country air. London gave him a headache. On arrival at Paddington the previous afternoon, he had booked himself into a hotel chosen at random in Norfolk Square, telling nobody at all of his whereabouts. He would hole up until Monday morning, using the time to steady his nerve.
It was Sunday afternoon, and he was due to present himself the following day. The trial had been going for three days already, with tedious introductory detail that he had not been permitted to attend. His input would be significant, but not exclusively so. There were others, of all ages, finally finding the courage to speak out. It was by far the most terrifying experience of his quiet reclusive life – that is, since the original crime against him, sixty years before.
The hotel room was very small, designed for the use of tourists who would be out all day seeing the sights. It had a bed, table, mirror, wardrobe, television and minute shower room. His suit was hanging on the rail in the wardrobe and a carrier bag of food sat on the table. He had been to the Marks & Spencer in the Paddington Station complex and bought a pork pie, two apples, mixed salad, a carton of milk and a bottle of wine. He could make tea and coffee with the tiny paper packets provided by the hotel. In the morning they would give him as big a breakfast as he could eat for no extra charge.
He turned on the television, braced for it failing to work. The night before, it had flickered and faded unbearably, the colour turning to monochrome at sporadic intervals. But today it seemed to have recovered, and he anticipated a soothing episode of Countryfile with something approaching satisfaction.
He was early. They were showing the news. The news was reporting a murder in a small town in Gloucestershire called Winchcombe. A murder of sufficient interest to find a slot on the national news, on a quiet September Sunday, it seemed. He watched with a sense of totally detached disbelief as his own front gate appeared on the screen, followed by the woman he’d employed to feed his birds. He knew it was her – he recognised the dog, as final confirmation. He had been worrying about that dog.
He also recognised his brother Fraser, at which point his detachment turned to extreme rage. He had taken consolation from the idea that he could keep his Winchcombe life quite separate from the sordid events in London. Now, it seemed, they were set to collide, thanks to his blundering brother. He should have known better, he thought furiously, than to agree to a house-sitter already known to Fraser.
The whole country, it seemed, had been watching the news that evening. The sheer caprice of it annoyed Thea the most. Some arbitrary decision by a television editor had turned what would normally have been a fleeting local story into a national headline. The fact that the victim was a pretty young woman made all the difference, of course. Thea already knew the consequences of a child being murdered and had no illusions as to the persistent power of the press, but this came as a surprise.
The stroll around Sudeley Park had taken just over an hour, spent arguing over tree identification and letting Hepzie run loose. Somewhat to Thea’s amusement, her mother had collected a pocketful of conkers from beneath a huge chestnut tree. ‘They’re for Noel,’ she said defensively.
‘I don’t think they let them play conkers any more,’ Thea said.
‘Maybe not, but he can plant them and grow new trees, can’t he? That’s what he does. He’s got a proper little copse established already, didn’t you know?’
‘Has he? Where?’ Her sister’s garden was modest in size, and her five children had ensured that nothing but the most robustly prickly plants would grow in it.
‘He keeps it a secret. It’s common land, apparently. He gets them started in pots and then puts them in the open ground. According to Jocelyn, he’s got an amazing success rate. Noel is an amazing child,’ the fond grandmother added happily.
‘You’re not supposed to have favourites,’ Thea said sternly.
‘Too late. As the youngest of six grandsons, I think it’s permissible, anyway. He’s liable to get lost in the crowd.’
There was little that Thea could say to this. In truth, young Noel was her own favourite of all the nephews and nieces, as well. Carl had similarly favoured him. ‘If we could order one like him, I’d be tempted to have a try,’ he said, with a wary smile. He had accepted that it was for Thea to decide on the size of their family, but sometimes he let slip his hope that one day it might swell to two children, rather than one.
‘Me too,’ she’d replied lightly. ‘But we’d just get a bad-tempered girl who wanted everything in her life to be pink.’
‘That would indeed be dreadful,’ her husband had laughed.
Conversation on the walk was fragmented and inconsequential. Fraser strolled slightly apart, hands clasped behind his back, eyes mostly on the ground in front of him. He seemed neither cheerful nor miserable, but content to let events swirl around him, without any active involvement on his part. The fact of a large park practically on the doorstep gave Thea a sense of obligation. Whatever happened, she ought to make the effort to enjoy it. The towering trees, with the edges of some leaves crimped with the first signs of autumn, had clearly been there for at least a century. The general layout was reminiscent of even earlier times – she had read that there had been a deer park around the castle since at least the fourteen hundreds. The usual complicated history of destruction and rebuilding made it impossible to pin down precise dates, but she could very well imagine Jane Austen’s contemporaries taking the air on these very swards of well-kept grass, pausing on the same stone bridges for brief flirtations.
Queen Elizabeth I had visited, even earlier. Then it had come to grief during the Civil War and languished until Victoria’s time. All this Thea dredged from her sporadic researches into the history of the Cotswolds, finding scraps of knowledge she had scarcely known she possessed. Whatever fate had befallen the castle, it seemed clear that the park had survived, if much diminished in size. The familiar sense of continuity struck her – the idea that human feet had walked the same spot for more than a thousand years. The fact that those feet might have belonged to Good Queen Bess, and other monumental figures, gave her a frisson of excitement.
‘Can’t we see the castle properly?’ her mother asked.
‘Apparently not. Just the roof, I think. There’s a wall round it. You have to book a tour if you want to see inside. I think it’s only weekends.’
‘Today is Sunday,’ her mother reminded her. ‘Can’t we give it a try?’
‘Feel free,’ Thea said. ‘But they won’t allow dogs. I’m not really in the mood for it, to be honest.’
‘You have to book in advance,’ said Fraser, with authority. ‘They call it a connoisseur’s day, or some such thing. I’m with Thea. We can come back some other time.’
Maureen shrugged and accepted defeat. They walked on, past even bigger and more exotic trees. By the end of an hour, Thea could see that her mother was limping slightly, one knee starting to ache. Various friends had mentioned the possibility of a replacement joint, which filled Maureen with horror. ‘It’s nothing like bad enough for that,’ she protested, and made every effort to conceal the inexorable degeneration of the bones. When she bent to collect the conkers, she did it from the hip, making an angular figure, feet apart and the effort of straightening considerable. Thea could hardly bear to watch.
When they got back, her phone had accumulated four missed calls, all of them from more or less predictable people. The realisation that she had already appeared on television and been recognised came as a shock. The callers all said it was their reason for phoning. They were, in order, her friend Celia in Witney, from whom she had drifted away in the past few years; her brother-in-law James, from whom she had also felt very distant recently; her daughter Jessica, who never watched television, but had happened to be at a friend’s flat when it was on; and her sister Jocelyn. Against her inclination, she called them all back to assure them she was fine, that the police had finished their questions, and she would remain in Winchcombe for at least another week.
One person had not phoned: a person she knew watched a lot of television with his children, who would recognise her from the most fleeting glimpse. There was no message from Drew Slocombe.
Oliver’s landline was busy, too. It rang five minutes after they got back to the house. Unsure of the protocol as to who should answer it, Thea left it to Fraser, who seemed unsurprisingly reluctant. ‘This is a nightmare,’ he groaned. ‘What am I supposed to say?’
In the event, he had no difficulty. ‘Oh … Mo,’ he said. ‘Yes, I’m afraid so … What? For heaven’s sake, don’t even think of it. There’s no space here for you to stay.’ He cast a wild look at Thea, who tried to retain a neutral expression. ‘Well, if you must but there’s absolutely no need … That would be better, I suppose … What does it have to do with him, anyway? He doesn’t even know Oliver … Yes, yes, I know you are. You’re very kind, dear. I’m sure you’re awfully busy …’ The conversation tailed off into monosyllables and he replaced the receiver. ‘That was Mo. She wants to come and see for herself what’s going on.’
‘When?’ asked Maureen. ‘Not tonight, surely?’
‘Fortunately not. First thing tomorrow. With Jason, God help us.’
Thea felt the familiar sensation of being at the mercy of whoever chose to call at her appointed house-sit. She was a captive, forced to remain at her station and endure whoever might come and harangue her. There was, however, more than a flicker of curiosity about this Mo, this child of a Spanish mother who had been named for Maureen Callaghan, as her own mother had once been called.
But before she could worry about the next day’s intrusions, there was a knock on the front door that gave her good reason to concentrate on the day in hand.