Chapter Eighteen

Gladwin sent Thea away, making a great effort to be pleasant, when it was obvious that she was deeply troubled by events of the past thirty hours. Two deaths in so short a time threw a glaring searchlight on her and her colleagues. If they had been simultaneous, that might have made more sense. But the chilling implications of a calculating killer picking off victims a day at a time were inescapably terrifying. ‘If the Jason chap turns up, hold onto him, will you?’ Gladwin asked, having elicited an account of Thea’s movements since they had parted earlier. The possibility that he had hurtled down to Silk Mill Lane, slaughtered Reuben and laid him out in the alley for the others to find, was remote, but initially the only half-baked idea they had. ‘It’s too soon, of course, for this sort of thinking,’ Gladwin admitted. ‘But we obviously have to speak to him.’

Fraser and Mo were in Oliver’s house, and they stood in a traumatised circle with Thea and her mother, all more or less stunned. There was no sign of Jason. ‘Something is going on,’ Thea challenged them. ‘This whole thing is aimed at one of us, somehow.’

They all looked at her. Mo laughed harshly. Her mother put a hand flat to her chest. ‘Not me, Thea. It can’t possibly have anything to do with me.’

Thea was inclined to agree with her, before she caught Fraser’s eye. There was profound doubt as to his actual connection to her mother, whether he really was who he said he was. Gladwin herself had registered this, promising to investigate the authenticity of his claims. Was it possible that Fraser was somehow orchestrating the murders in order to terrify Maureen into his welcoming arms? It seemed insanely melodramatic to imagine such a thing. But he could have done something of the sort. He could be using Jason as his hitman.

And Thea herself had been dragooned into the house-sitting by the Meadows brothers, with her mother liaising between them. She had been manipulated into it, not so very subtly. She had been put in position, given sight of the mysterious Melissa, and then somehow manoeuvred into finding the body in the alley. But how had that been done? Was it not her own idea to go that way? Nobody had steered her, and certainly her mother had no knowledge of the lower streets of Winchcombe.

Except nothing was certain. Her mother knew the alleys of Tewkesbury, after all. Perhaps she had explored Winchcombe, too, without mentioning the fact. Perhaps her first loyalties now lay with Fraser, and whatever he demanded was blindly acceded to. It felt deeply improbable, but not entirely out of the question.

Mo was capable of anything, if Thea was any judge. There was a strong sense of lawlessness about her, a flouting of any regulation that struck her as irrelevant. The sort of woman who would smoke in a public building and refuse to wear a seat belt. You had to respect a person like that, with such a solid sense of individual worth and natural human entitlement. Thea had moments when she was not too dissimilar herself; when the law cried out for contempt rather than obedience.

Jason was impossible to assess, but he appeared to have a good heart and an easy charm. In wartime he would have been a spiv, a cheerful chappie selling nylon stockings on the black market and stashing away a lot of cash into the bargain. Jason, too, might be capable of anything.

All these impressions were flooding her mind as she fondled her dog and tried to obliterate the image of the dead Reuben. It was not so difficult to do – she had already done it with the dead Melissa of the previous day. Any hauntings that the dead might perpetrate were rarely visual ones. They were obligations and anxieties, perpetual demands for attention and the righting of wrongs. Carl, dead for three years now, was a faceless presence somewhere in her bones, a black cloud where her future should have been. Any guilt accrued directly and solely to the driver of the vehicle that had killed him, and Thea had never found it easy to reproach him. She had driven every bit as badly in her time, as had Carl, and she was convinced that everybody had. The courts understood that, and gave leniency to dangerous drivers, which Thea saw no reason to challenge.

But murder was altogether different. Until the killer was tracked down and punished, there was no possibility of order and trust. Suspicion ran like wildfire through every relationship in the victim’s life. Rage and retribution blossomed and turned inwards, without an external object on which to vent it. You absolutely had to do everything in your power to assist the course of justice. It was unavoidable, as Thea knew already, and confirmed to herself again now.

Her mother might be expected to feel something the same, although they had never really talked in such terms. The events of the previous year in Lower Slaughter, involving Thea’s sister Emily, had strained their mother’s endurance almost to breaking point. She had been permitted to avoid direct confrontation with the truth, and only slowly, over the ensuing months, did she acquire the courage to accept what had happened in all its shame and sadness.

‘That poor young man!’ her mother sighed, as if to validate some of Thea’s chaotic thoughts. ‘I can’t stop thinking about him. It’s all the more dreadful because I can’t say I liked him, from the little I saw of him yesterday.’

‘I know what you mean,’ agreed Thea, in some surprise. She had forgotten until then that she, too, had taken a mild dislike to Reuben Hardy. It added a layer of queasy self-reproach to the other emotions, she realised. When someone you regarded with aversion was cruelly killed, it was all too horribly easy to wonder if somehow you’d brought about his death. As if you might have accidentally uttered a magic spell, and the powers of darkness had misunderstood the degree of your animosity.