‘Do you think we’d be welcome if we paid Jenny Hardy a visit?’ Thea suggested. ‘Would she think we were out of order?’
‘She might,’ her mother judged. ‘But so what? I don’t suppose anything is normal for her at the moment. We might be a welcome distraction.’
‘I’m not sure exactly where she lives.’
‘I thought we said it was that building that is a sort of conversion of the old silk mill? At the top somewhere?’
‘Yes, I think that’s right. But are they flats or maisonettes or what? It’s not obvious from looking at them.’
‘We can ask somebody when we get there. Of course she might have gone away. People do that. She’s probably got a mother she’s gone back to for consolation.’
Thea was gratified by her mother’s eager cooperation. It had never occurred to her that here might be another fellow detective. She was still feeling warm from Maggs’s capitulation, secure in the knowledge that Drew’s partner had abruptly changed allegiance, and thereby given the future a far rosier glow. Whatever happened in Winchcombe over the next few hours or days was secondary to this. She felt reckless and carefree in her approach to helping Gladwin solve her murders. A shadow had lifted and the sun was beaming down on her. The same sunbeam was favouring her mother, as well, after the flood of seaside memories featuring Fraser. They were both smiling more readily than they had for a long time.
‘Let’s go and have a look.’
It was half past eleven – not a terribly good time for a visit, if Jane Austen was anything to go by. ‘After all, we did find his body,’ Thea said, doubtfully. ‘She might want to talk to us, to be assured he didn’t look as if he’d suffered.’
‘Is your police lady going to be in favour of this?’ her mother questioned. ‘Are you allowed to go and talk to close relatives of dead men?’
‘She hasn’t objected yet. She trusts me, I think. She uses me as a sort of unofficial liaison person, now and then. I can get under the skin more easily – just being an ordinary bystander, so to speak.’
‘I doubt if people see you like that,’ smiled her mother. ‘If Reuben knew something about your reputation, his wife must have done as well. She could take against you. That’s if she’s there at all, of course.’
‘Priscilla is probably ministering to her already. She seems to be rather fond of her.’
‘I’m not so sure. That woman is not what she appears, to my way of thinking. She’s clever with words, and makes people think she’s all bluff and straightforward – but she kept a lot close to her chest, don’t you think? I keep remembering how she suddenly appeared in that alleyway yesterday. Wasn’t that a bit coincidental?’
‘Gosh – do you think she put him there? That hadn’t occurred to me.’
‘She’s strong enough.’
‘But …’ Thea tried to visualise it, with partial success. ‘Do you think that links her to Melissa as well?’
Maureen shrugged. ‘It’s all a complete mystery to me, Thea. I try to think about it, and get a few ideas, and then it all goes murky on me. I’ve never been anywhere near a murder before, and it’s been rather a shock. But in spite of myself, I do keep having these ideas.’ She frowned exaggeratedly, mocking herself.
‘That happens,’ Thea nodded. ‘It must be a sort of instinct.’
‘The search for an answer, you mean? Or seeing that justice is done?’
‘More the former, I think. Justice can get so complicated.’
‘That’s what Fraser says. He’s been trying to ignore this business with his brothers, but he can’t, of course. He knows he should be on Oliver’s side, and he hasn’t even met Cedric since he went off to Australia – but he can’t help feeling sorry for the poor old chap.’
‘Did you phone him?’ Thea remembered that this had been the plan.
‘I tried, and got Mo. Fraser went out early this morning, wearing a suit, and she’s not at all sure where he’s gone.’
‘Did Jason turn up?’
‘Not yet. She doesn’t know which one she should be more worried about.’
‘Were you going to tell me about any of this?’
‘Possibly not. I think we’ve said all we need to about Fraser, for the time being. I’d rather discuss your undertaker friend and his exotic partner.’
‘She’s not exotic,’ said Thea automatically. ‘She’s just mixed race.’
‘That’s what I said. Anyway, she seems nice. Coming all this way to tell you something to lighten your heart.’
The antiquated turn of phrase struck Thea as exactly right. ‘She did that very thing,’ she confirmed. ‘She said she had an epiphany yesterday, talking to Drew. Last time we met she was screaming at me to leave him alone.’
‘I won’t enquire,’ said her mother, with self-conscious restraint. ‘But if you’d like to tell me …’
‘Not just now. Let’s go and find that grieving widow. We might even manage to make her feel better.’
They set out with the spaniel, which Thea said would play with the golden retriever and make everything go more easily. ‘It’s my belief you’re going more to see the puppy than the widow,’ said Thea’s mother.
‘I admit it’s an attraction. I’d never have stopped to talk to Jenny if it hadn’t been for that. It really is a lovely creature.’
‘There have been times over the past three years,’ said her mother, ‘when I worried that you were going to spend the rest of your life with dogs, rather than people. I hope this Drew person is planning to change all that.’
Thea’s heart gave a lurch. ‘Don’t say that. That’s an awful thing to say.’
‘Is it? Why?’
‘Because … things aren’t like that between him and me. We just want a normal friendship, to get a chance to know each other. You probably wouldn’t like him, actually. He’s not terribly manly. He’s younger than me and only about five feet nine. Nothing like a romantic hero in the movies.’
‘He sounds perfectly all right to me. Your father was five feet nine.’
‘Carl was only five feet eight, now I come to think of it.’
Maureen sighed, as she always did when Thea’s husband was mentioned. Everybody had liked him, the family embracing him unreservedly, despite the precipitate marriage when Thea was barely twenty-one. She had to admit that her loss had been wholeheartedly shared by all her relatives.
‘I wonder whether Jenny has much family,’ she said. ‘The poor thing. She must be only thirty or so.’
‘And I wonder whether she really is pregnant. That’ll be so strange – all those confusing emotions. That poor baby.’
Immersed in oceans of sympathy, they took the short way to Silk Mill Lane, through Oliver’s woods, expecting to be there in ten minutes.
But they never got as far as Jenny’s home. The lower part of Castle Street was blocked by a very large horsebox, attached to a powerful truck. It had jackknifed spectacularly, with the trailer painfully twisted on its tow bar. Alarmed equine cries were coming from inside. A man was dancing furiously around the vehicles, clearly at a loss as to what he should do.
‘What on earth happened?’ asked Thea, trying to make sense of the scene.
‘I was trying to avoid that bloody dog,’ came the tight response.
‘Oh, Thea – look,’ cried her mother, pointing at something under the wheels.
It was literally a bloody dog. The enchantingly lovely golden retriever puppy was bleeding and whimpering and dying before their very eyes. ‘We’ve got to get her out of there,’ Thea instructed. ‘For God’s sake – why haven’t you done it already?’
‘What do you suggest?’ the man grated. ‘The wheel’s on top of her.’
Thea’s heart expanded to breaking point at the realisation that this was true. The dog’s pelvis was taking the weight of the horsebox – which contained at least two horses, from the sound of it. The truck’s nose was wedged into a wall on one side of the street. If it tried to reverse, the jackknifing would only get worse, and no progress was likely. ‘We have to do it,’ Thea repeated.
‘Get the horses out and unhitch the trailer,’ said Maureen, urgently.
‘She can’t possibly survive, can she? It would be best to call a vet and have her put down.’ Thea felt tears gathering rapidly behind her nose.
‘I’ve got a shotgun,’ the man said. ‘In the back of the truck.’
The three-way dilemma paralysed them all, until Thea knelt by the puppy’s head and gently stroked it. Above her, heavy hoofs were stamping, rocking the unstable horsebox. ‘Get out of there,’ said the man. ‘It could all tip over on you.’
‘What in hell’s name is happening?’ came a new voice. Nobody explained. The facts would quickly speak for themselves. ‘Patrick? Is that you?’
‘Cilla,’ he acknowledged. ‘We’ve got a right old mess here. Can’t decide what to do for the best.’
‘For heaven’s sake, man. Get the horses out – tie them to the gate over there, look. Then we can unhitch the trailer and get the dog free. She might not be as bad as she looks.’
‘Do you know what this thing weighs?’ grumbled the man, who Thea was beginning to understand wasn’t the brightest spark in Winchcombe.
‘Come on.’ Priscilla was already rattling at the fastenings of the ramp at the back of the horsebox. ‘Have they got bridles?’
‘Yeah. But they’re big, mind. And not happy.’
‘Who can blame them? Take a corner here, will you?’
Together, Patrick and Priscilla lowered the heavy ramp, and climbed in with the horses. Thea winced at the thought of yet more weight crushing the wretched puppy. Alarmed for herself as well, she crouched lower, half beneath the trailer. Her mother seemed to have disappeared from view.
Providentially, another man materialised from somewhere, who added further calm efficiency to that of Priscilla. He took one horse, and attached it to the gate, hurrying the lifting of the ramp with brief orders. Then the two men manipulated the twisted mechanism connecting the two vehicles, and within moments had heaved the trailer backwards and off the trapped dog.
Release made little difference, however. The flattened hips and back legs were plainly useless. Beyond pain, the eyes were filming over, and the head flopped onto Thea’s lap, as she ducked away from the slowly rolling horsebox. ‘She’s dying,’ she said.
‘Oh, darling,’ came her mother’s voice. ‘What a terrible thing.’
It was disproportionately terrible. It seemed to Thea at that moment like the greatest tragedy there could ever be. She felt a helpless rage against the dim-witted Patrick, and his useless horses, flashing him a venomous look. Tears dripped onto the yellow head, as the final breath was heaved: a long sigh of release, followed by an involuntary stretching of the front legs as the muscles fought one last time for oxygen.
‘I couldn’t help it. The stupid thing dashed right under the wheels. I was only going about twenty. They get confused by trailers, that’s what it is. I swerved as best I could.’
The truth of this was unarguable. ‘I’m sure you couldn’t help it,’ soothed Maureen. ‘It was only a puppy. Can’t have had much sense.’
Only then did Thea remember her own dog. She had dropped the lead to minister to the retriever, and left Hepzie to her own devices. Now, as she looked around, she saw the spaniel sitting patiently unconcerned, well out of the way of all the activity. The heartlessness did something to bring Thea back into balance. The spaniel was trusting everything to come right, accepting that there was nothing she could do. Even so, Thea sniffed, she might have come to offer me some sympathy. A cuddle from a warm living dog might have been consoling.
‘Who’s the owner?’ asked Patrick, of nobody in particular.
‘She’s called Jenny. Her husband’s just died,’ said Priscilla. ‘Typical, the way things always come together like this. One thing after another.’
‘That’s true,’ said Maureen. ‘She must be too distraught to watch out for her dog properly. It should never have been out on its own.’
‘Who’s going to tell her?’ Thea quailed. ‘She’s going to be absolutely flattened.’
‘She’s flattened already. There’s no further down for her to go,’ said Priscilla. ‘I’ve just come from there, as it happens. I’ll go and tell her, shall I? If somebody can move the body and wrap it up in something.’
The nameless man who had turned up to help went back to his car that nobody had noticed. He had apparently been trying to drive up to the main street, and finding his way blocked, decided the best thing to do was hasten the removal of the obstacle. ‘I’ll be off, then,’ he called over his shoulder. ‘I think I can just about get through.’
Watching him, Thea realised that several other cars were waiting for the blockage to clear, from both directions. The news of the accident would soon spread around town, she supposed. The handsome bay horses tied to the old gate added picturesque detail to the scene. The small dead dog would very likely escape notice, especially if it was quickly covered up.
‘If you’ve just come from there, why didn’t you watch out for the dog?’ asked Maureen accusingly. ‘You didn’t let it out, did you?’
Priscilla flushed, but said nothing. A scenario flitted through Thea’s mind, whereby the woman had carelessly opened the door, hardly noticing the departure of the puppy. Or perhaps it had been following her when it was hit. Perhaps she had shouted at it and pushed it away, so it had been bewildered and vulnerable to a confusingly large motor in its quiet little street.
‘She hardly suffered,’ Maureen said quietly to Thea. ‘It was all over very quickly.’
‘I know,’ choked Thea. ‘It’s just—’
‘Come on. We can go and have a drink and pull ourselves together. They don’t need us here any more.’
It was the best and obvious course of action, and Thea got to her feet clumsily, brushing at her grubby clothes. There was blood on her trousers. ‘I’m a bit dirty,’ she said childishly.
‘That doesn’t matter. You need a few quiet moments somewhere, to get over the shock.’
Slowly, Thea noted once again how competent and effective her mother could be. No distracting hysterics or helpless hand-wringing – she had been the first to spot the practical solution to the problem, even though nobody had acted on her words until Priscilla showed up and repeated them. ‘Thanks, Mum,’ she said. ‘I’m so glad you’re here.’
‘Come on, then.’
They walked up to the main street and turned left, instinctively seeking the near-familiarity of the Plaisterers Arms. ‘It’s such a waste,’ Thea burst out. ‘A waste of a beautiful dog, I mean.’
‘Yes, it is. But animals die every day, lovely animals. It’s always there, in the background, even for me. I’ve never lived on a farm or even had many pets, but I feel it, just the same. All those cows and pigs, killed for us to eat. And badgers and rabbits on the roads. You know – I think that’s the single most dreadful thing about life on this planet, the way we torture animals. It’s the one we can’t bear to face up to.’
‘Gosh, Mum,’ Thea laughed shakily. ‘Where did that come from, all of a sudden?’
‘I’ve always thought it, from a girl. Hunters shooting bears and tigers; men on boats harpooning whales; Italians shooting little birds out of the sky; it just goes on and on, an endless list of cruelty and killing. It makes me hate the whole human race.’
‘Horses in the First World War is the one that gets to me – and I don’t even like horses very much.’
‘You don’t have to like them. What about rats in laboratories, and being poisoned because they eat the cattle feed? And those poor cane toads in Australia. I don’t expect they’re very nice, but people think it’s fine to be unspeakably cruel to them.’
‘Stop it. It’s too depressing to think about.’
‘My point exactly. We can’t bear to face our own wickedness.’
The drift into philosophy had managed to divert Thea from the specific anguish over Blodwen and her surely distraught owner. ‘I don’t feel up to seeing Jenny,’ she admitted, after walking a short way in silence, Hepzibah trotting discreetly at her heel, dimly aware that she was not in her mistress’s best books, for some reason.
‘I wouldn’t think she’d want to see us, either. It perhaps wasn’t such a good idea, anyhow.’
It was a little after midday when they entered the pub, and the place was deserted. Thea looked down at herself again and flinched at the sight of her messy clothes. ‘I’m not sure …’ she began, but her mother had already started talking to the man at the bar.
‘I’ve ordered you a brandy,’ she announced. ‘And we’ll sit here in this cosy corner. Nobody’s going to care about your clothes.’
Thea was forced to concede that this was undoubtedly true – since there was nobody else in the place to care. Only when sitting down did she become fully aware of how shaken she had been. Her spaniel put both front paws on her knee, gazing into her face with large liquid eyes. ‘Down, Heps,’ said Thea feebly. ‘There’s a good dog.’
She briefly stroked the soft head, and flipped a long black ear through her fingers, in the old automatic gesture. Hepzie seemed satisfied, and slumped onto the floor with a sigh.
‘Brandy seems terribly decadent,’ she protested. ‘In the middle of the day.’
‘It’s what you need. That horsebox might easily have crashed down on you. My heart was in my mouth.’
‘So you need a brandy as well.’
‘I certainly do,’ agreed her mother. ‘Possibly two.’
‘It couldn’t have tipped over, though. Not while it was attached to the truck. I wasn’t in any danger.’
‘Fraser would call it a “ute”,’ said Maureen, with a fond smile. ‘That’s what they have in Australia. Huge great things, apparently, that cost a fortune to run. People take them into the outback, with very luxurious camping stuff. It’d be nice to see it. He says it’s incredibly beautiful down there. He showed me some slides he took when he first went out. It does look wonderful.’
‘Phil Hollis has been to Australia,’ said Thea. ‘Queensland. He didn’t like it much.’
‘Fraser says it’s much better in the west. Less conformist, apparently.’
The idle chat was soothing, and combined with the brandy was serving to settle Thea’s nerves. The sadness over the dog was already more bearable than it had been fifteen minutes earlier. But she found that any thought of food was repugnant. ‘We’re not having lunch here, are we?’ she said. ‘I don’t think I could face it.’
‘Leave it a little while, then. There’s no rush. We don’t have to be anywhere.’
It was true, and yet Thea felt uneasy at the idea of spending hours in a pub, when outside there was murder and misery swirling all around. She patted her pocket, reassured to feel her phone still in place. If anything drastic happened, somebody might phone her, she thought, pulling it out and switching it on. ‘What’s that for?’ asked her mother.
‘I just thought … Gladwin might want me.’ Or Drew, she added silently.
‘I’ve got mine as well.’ Her mother prodded the shoulder bag she’d brought with her. ‘Lucky I put my purse in, or we wouldn’t be able to pay for the drinks.’
There seemed to be nothing to say. It was like being at the eye of a hurricane, waiting for the next onslaught. Except that it was an erratic sort of storm, coming and going unpredictably. Only an hour ago, she and her mother had been so happy, never guessing that a dog was about to die and plunge them into sadness.
Maggs wouldn’t be back yet. Would she tell Drew about her meeting with Thea? What would his reaction be? Did he resent his partner’s influence over his life, needing her permission before he did anything? Or was it not like that at all? Would he collapse completely without Maggs at his side?
And Gladwin? What was she doing at that precise moment? Thea felt a sense of obligation towards the detective, a need to be available at a moment’s notice, just like any paid employee.
There was a small television behind the bar, which had been switched off when they arrived. Now the barman, apparently in an effort to add some cheery distraction to the place, turned it on. A news reporter was speaking, from in front of the Old Bailey. The name ‘Meadows’ crashed into the quiet bar like a small bomb.
‘Oh, my goodness,’ said Maureen, her hand to her mouth. ‘What’s happened now?’
It took them a few moments to decipher the story. An old man was speaking to camera, with a quiet dignity that had plainly magnetised everyone around him. ‘Whoever might have killed her, it had nothing to do with my family,’ he said.
‘He means Melissa, of course,’ said Thea. ‘But how does he know?’
Maureen slowly caught up. ‘That must be Cedric,’ she realised. ‘He doesn’t look much like the others, does he?’
‘Oliver’s collapsed – is that what they said? The trial’s been suspended. So what happens now? He’ll come home, I suppose, if he’s well enough.’
‘I must go to Fraser,’ her mother announced urgently. ‘I really must go to him right away.’ She stood up, her face pinched with worry. ‘I told him to stay away from all that nastiness. It’s got nothing whatever to do with him.’
‘That’s what Cedric just said,’ Thea remarked. ‘And yet surely it can’t be true.’
Her mother was unstoppable. Thea followed her out of the bar, into a town square that was suddenly bright with sunshine. ‘But how will you get there?’ she protested. ‘What’s the hurry? Do you want me to take you to a station? The only one I know is at Moreton. It isn’t far away.’
‘Yes, yes. A station.’
‘To London? Are you going to London?’
‘Yes. No. I suppose so. Wherever Fraser is.’
‘We don’t know where he is. He might have gone home to Mo’s by now. Calm down, Mum. Stop and think for a minute.’
But at that moment the storm came back, and there was no time for thinking.