The phone call that evening to Drew completely ruined her mood. ‘Sorry, love,’ he panted. ‘I can’t talk now. It’s utter chaos here this evening. Timmy had an accident at school, and spent all afternoon in A&E. I had a funeral, so Maggs went to sit with him. I had to call on an extra mourner to carry, which didn’t go down very well. Stephanie got sent off to a little friend’s house, and that went down even less well. You get the idea.’
‘Is Timmy okay now?’
‘Cracked his elbow. Hurts like hell, poor little chap. Not a lot to be done, other than leave it to mend. He’s got a sling, but can’t wear it in bed. Says he can’t find a way to lie that doesn’t hurt. There – hear that?’ A distant wail came down the line.
‘Just about. You must go, then. Give him some kisses from me.’
‘You’re all right, aren’t you?’
She could hear his need for an affirmative reply. ‘I’m absolutely fine. Nothing to worry about at all. Good luck with everything. I’ll call again tomorrow.’
He groaned. ‘I don’t promise it’ll be any better. If Maggs doesn’t get over being sick all the time, she’s not going to be much use at funerals.’
I need to be there, Thea wanted to say. But too much stood in the way. Not least her obligations to Mr and Mrs Foster.
‘She’ll soon be over that,’ she said confidently. ‘Any time now.’
‘Let’s hope so,’ he said gloomily.
Poor Timmy, Thea repeated to herself throughout the evening, crushing down the threads of resentment at the wretched child and his carelessness. She had an awful feeling that there had been a similar hint in Drew’s voice, too. Timmy should be seen as an innocent victim of circumstance, not a cause for irritation. From what she had gathered, his conception and birth had been unplanned and not particularly convenient. His mother’s injury, followed by a prolonged malaise and eventual death, had blighted his early years. A vulnerable male child, perpetually compared to his infinitely more robust sister, never getting his needs met, was unlikely to grow up confident and secure. He would be a withdrawn, antisocial adolescent. He would perplex his teachers and disappoint his family. A dropout, addicted to the comfort and predictability of computer games, he would become fat and unfit and sociopathic. There were plenty of examples of just such a scenario amongst people Thea knew. The raising of boys was a far more complicated and demanding task than that of girls, she was convinced. Girls recovered. They went out and met people. They found the whole business of education much easier and more congenial than boys did.
‘Poor Timmy,’ she sighed aloud. She had no relish for the prospect of becoming a substitute parent to him in his most difficult years. But love Drew, love his kids, she admitted to herself. Only the saddest of people reached the age of forty with no baggage, after all.
Meanwhile, there was Gwennie and the tortoise. It occurred to her that the creature should have a name, but it had not been disclosed to her. If it woke up and showed some character, she would have to call it ‘Torty’ or something equally unimaginative. Idly, she turned on the television in the hope of hearing a weather forecast. Watching TV news had become a slightly nerve-wracking exercise during some of her house-sits. Local events could sometimes find their way into national headlines, and although it was desirable to keep abreast of developments, there was something awful about seeing your own temporary home village on camera. It never looked right, and the people looked fatter and more tanned than they were in reality.
On this midweek evening, however, there was not a word about any crimes committed in the West Midlands. There was, however, something every bit as alarming.
‘A large police operation in Manchester got off to a bad start when a young police constable was injured early this morning during a raid on a house in Bowden. Her arm was broken, but no further information is yet available.’ Footage was shown of a generic breaking-down-the-door in a typical street, which added nothing to the story.
It wasn’t Jessica – of course it wasn’t. Somebody would have phoned to tell her. She’d checked the phone for messages and found nothing. But even so, the police activity was almost certainly connected to the operation her daughter had told her about the previous day. It had been scheduled to start early that morning, and Jess was to be part of it.
She grabbed the phone out of her bag and checked again for a text or voicemail. With nothing to see or hear, she keyed her daughter’s number.
There was no reply, and she was directed to voicemail. ‘Hey, Jess – I just saw your operation on the news. At least I assume it’s the same thing. Do you know the girl who was hurt? Can you call me sometime and let me know everything’s okay?’
It was all she could do, she told herself. There was no possible justification for calling the very senior police officer who happened to be her brother-in-law, and who also happened to be part of the same force as Jessica, thanks to a recent transfer that he insisted had not been due to Jessica at all. The fact that she had the same surname had worried them both at first, but it seemed there had been no cause for concern. After all, many families had a strong tradition for police work, with uncles and brothers, fathers and cousins popping up on all sides. James had been both sensible and conscientious, keeping an eye on his niece without ever causing her embarrassment.
And yet she very much wanted to know where her daughter was and whether she was all right. It was a little after nine o’clock, much too soon to go to bed, however early the morning start might have been. So why didn’t Jess answer her phone? Plenty of rational explanations came to mind. The operation, whatever it was, might require long hours of complete focus, with personal phones kept off for whole days at a time. There would be briefings, reports, debriefings and actual work out there in the real world. Thea could not properly imagine any of it, but she knew enough to understand there was no place for reassuring conversations with one’s mother.
The world so quickly turned hostile and dangerous. She was aware of an association between her vulnerable daughter and Drew’s injured Timmy; an association which expanded outwards to the unborn offspring of Damien and Maggs. Everybody became a hostage to every kind of disaster, once they had children.
But it wasn’t so simple, of course. Danny Compton had parents who sounded as if concern for his death was secondary to their passion for birdwatching. Jack Handy had sons who had failed to rush to his bedside. Not everybody accepted the full burden of the parent/child relationship. Even Thea herself had been less than perfectly attentive at times.
She was saved from further gloomy thoughts by her phone ringing.
‘Mum? Just got your voicemail. You’ve got it all wrong.’ Jessica sounded irritated, if not downright annoyed.
‘Have I?’
‘Yes. That thing on the news had nothing whatever to do with what I’m working on. You ought to know better.’ Her voice lowered to a hiss. ‘I should never have said anything about it. It’s covert. Do you know what that means?’
‘More or less. So – what was I meant to think?’
‘Don’t think anything. Just forget I ever said what I did. It’s going to be hard enough as it is, without you …’ She tailed off, apparently speechless with frustration.
‘Okay, okay. I get it. You’re right – I was panicking for no reason. Not like me, you have to admit.’
‘Right. Which is why I’m calling. Don’t do it again. I might have to use this phone – oh, I can’t go into all that. But just for a bit, please forget all about me. You’d soon hear if there was anything to worry about. No news is good news, remember. Now I need to get to bed. Have you got it, Mum? Don’t call me. Don’t email, either. I’m disappearing for a little while.’
Thea kept a firm grip. ‘Sounds terribly exciting,’ she said.
‘Now you just sound like Granny. Oh – what happened to that man, by the way?’
‘He came out of the coma, so he can tell the police the whole thing for himself. I met his stepmother. Everything’s still very up in the air.’
‘Well, you stay out of it. Just … you know. Walk the dogs or something.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘Must go now. Bye, Mum. I’ll let you know when things are normal again.’
‘Bye, sweetheart.’
All the legions of devoted mothers through the centuries crowded in on her. Mothers of serving soldiers; mothers of unhappy sons and daughters – wringing their hands and gaining approval from society by so doing. She did not want to be like that. Worry was not a virtue; it was a waste of time and energy. The object of the worry was burdened by it, rather than supported and reassured. She felt fierce and defiant and very slightly in the wrong, for reacting in such a way. Jessica was an adult, and had made the position very clear. This was not some back-to-front game where what was said meant the opposite. Until further notice, Thea was to remain quiet and unworried.
Okay, she promised herself. She could do that. Except she still felt concerned about little Timmy Slocombe.
And she was still eager to know who had killed Danny Compton, too. She found herself very much not wanting it to have been Jack Handy, for reasons she could not pin down. She had not especially liked his stepmother, whose story of how she came to the farm, and who else might lay claim to it in the future was not entirely trustworthy. She had married a man who had been nearly twenty years her senior and effectively ejected the woman who had been mistress of the house until then. Her account of events had been dispassionate with a small hint of complacency. She showed scant signs of distress at her stepson’s injury at the hands of local people. Rightly or wrongly, Thea had mentally fitted the woman into a pattern she was constructing to explain the people and events of Daglingworth and Bagendon and adjacent settlements. She could draw it, if requested; Danny at the centre, with Sophie, Nella and Tiffany ranged above him; Ricky and Steve joined them on one side and Jack Handy on the other. At a remove were Sheila Whiteacre and her husband. A satellite cluster comprised the Fosters and the Tanners, with the arson attack linking them. Nothing joined the two crimes, as far as she could see. The police had shown no sign of thinking there might be a connection. Even Thea herself could hardly qualify for that role, she silently insisted.
After all that thinking and patterning, the Whiteacre family persistently remained at the forefront. The house itself had appealed to her so strongly that she hated to think she might never see it again. Perhaps she would brave it the next morning, clinging to the flimsy pretext of checking that they were aware of how unhappy Nella was. Perhaps by then she would have found something persuasive to say that would allow her over the threshold, despite the repeated warnings to do no such thing.
All was well with the dogs, at least. The weather forecast predicted a mild day to come, which was encouraging news for the tortoise. There were elaborate instructions for transferring him into the much larger living space that Mr Foster had called a ‘vivarium’. It had temperature control, which was designed to avoid any confusion brought about by fickle English weather. ‘After all, it can snow in April,’ Mr Foster had said. ‘And once he’s woken up, he won’t go back into hibernation, whatever happens.’
Thea had been distracted by the notion of snow in April, at the time, and given less attention to the tortoise than she ought. The main point she registered was that Mrs Foster called the creature ‘she’ and her husband referred to it as a male. Now Thea resolved to make up for her defective attention by ensuring the transition from death-like sleep to revival and animation would go smoothly.
She went to bed early, reviewing the day with some relief. She might well decide to stay close to Daglingworth the whole of the next day, simply pottering around the lanes, or enjoying spring sunshine in the garden. Everybody from Jessica to Higgins, via Sophie and her associates, had told her to stay clear of whatever crimes and misdemeanours might be taking place. Obviously she should quell her own instinctive nosiness and do as they advised. And equally obviously, she wasn’t going to.
Her final thoughts, as usual, were of Drew. Drew was the exception. He would understand how difficult it was to just remain quietly unobtrusive in a stranger’s house. He himself was driven to question and probe into matters that were not directly his concern. He liked to set things straight and restore order, just as Thea did. It was this shared urge that had first forged the bond between them.
Drew was never going to tell her to keep away and avert her gaze when something terrible was going on.