It was midnight when she got back to Galanthus – much too late to speak to either Jessica or Drew. She had no great wish to do any further talking, anyway. There had been hours of explaining and questioning, going round and around in maddening circles. Nella’s head had consumed all official attentions for far too long, given that it was not very badly hurt. There was blood, admittedly, and the paramedics were very much insistent on taking things one at a time. The policemen who turned up were equally slow to allow any other subject past their ears. Only when DI Higgins was finally summoned, ages later, did sense slowly start to filter in.

Then there was a search of Nella’s house; concerted efforts to ensure that Carol was safe and not liable to go into premature labour; tight-lipped blushes at repeated questions concerning undercover police work – and a whole lot more. It was all utterly exhausting.

Both dogs had peed on the kitchen floor, and regarded her with full-on reproach when she finally returned to them. ‘Sorry, girls,’ she sighed. ‘Not your fault.’

Weighing her down like a stone in her chest was anxiety over Jessica. It was irrational and inconsistent, but knowing that didn’t shift it. The fact that a police officer working undercover had been killed in the Cotswolds inevitably suggested that the same thing could happen to Jess. This simple idea screamed and shouted at her unbearably – all the more so because she could do nothing about it. Even if she could reach the girl and speak to her, that wouldn’t help. Her operation, whatever it was, would probably last for weeks, with no guarantees of safety or a good outcome in all that time.

‘Serves me right,’ she muttered. What were those daft ideas of a few days ago about the uselessness of worry? Fate had taken its revenge on her for such hubris. Worry was like being trapped in a treadmill, with no way out. Jessica’s career choices were beyond her control. All she could do was wait and watch and hope.

She crawled into bed, convinced that she wouldn’t be able to sleep, after all the dramatic events of the evening. There were still a lot of unanswered questions, too. And she planned to rehearse an account of the whole business for Drew, next day.

Instead she fell into a deep oblivion fifteen seconds after switching off the light and closing her eyes.

 

When she woke up, it was half past seven and sunny. She rolled out of bed with a sense of extreme urgency that lacked all shape or plan. Her phone! She needed to find her phone, for a start. She needed to feel connected and involved. To be kept in ignorance felt like the worst possible position to be in – which was another irrational development, she realised. And anyway, who was going to contact her? Who among all those people cared tuppence whether the house-sitter knew what was going on? She ought not to have been included in the first place. None of it was remotely her business.

Gwennie brought her down to earth by whining and scratching at the back door. When Thea let her out, she began to run as fast as her little legs would permit towards a corner of the garden. Hepzie followed for a half-hearted few yards, before losing interest. A big ginger cat jumped onto the fence, leaving the corgi bouncing and yapping five feet below. ‘Stop it, Gwennie!’ Thea pleaded. ‘You’ll give yourself a heart attack.’ The dog ignored her, much as the cat was ignoring the dog.

It was all reassuringly normal. Whatever might have been going on a few miles away, with a tangle of betrayal and vengeance and ultimate violence, all was simple and predictable here at Galanthus House. It was a view she did not often entertain: that her house-sits might be seen as a series of sanctuaries, somewhere to draw breath and catch up with books and films and plans for the future. Instead, she often found them boring and repetitive. That way lay her downfall, as she had gradually become aware. ‘We can’t go on like this,’ she muttered to her spaniel.

A yap from Gwennie alerted her to a muted clatter at the front door. When she went to look, a letter was lying under the flap, face down. When she picked it up, she saw it had no stamp, and simply said ‘Thea’ on the front.

Thea wasn’t sure what to make of this. She almost termed it a billet doux to herself, given the opening lines. Sandra’s phone number was at the top of the note, suggesting she really would appreciate a call.

It was at least contact from a friendly local, which was liable to have some value over the coming week. It was proving difficult to adapt to the abrupt cessation of drama, and the inescapable isolation of the coming day.

But some of this self-pity evaporated when she found her phone. It offered her two messages. One of them was from the man in Farmington who had enquired about house-sitting. He suggested three weeks in July, caring for five Siamese cats. A well-behaved dog might just be acceptable as companion to the house-sitter. Thea suspected he had tried to find somebody else, minus dog, and failed. Thea had the advantage of not belonging to an agency, and therefore making lower charges. She smiled ruefully. Three summer weeks in yet another contender for Most Lovely Village in the Cotswolds was hard to refuse. And perhaps Drew could join her with the children, if it ran into the start of the school holidays.

The other message was from Jessica.

NO NEED TO WORRY. I’M OFF THE JOB.

She sat down on the sofa with a thump. Did Jess mean she’d been suspended? Or the job was prematurely aborted? Or what? Slowly she recognised the way her feelings were mutating from worry to curiosity. That was better! Curiosity was, after all, her default emotion. Curiosity was warm and alive and buoyant and, above all, under her own control – at least partially. She did not even try to resist the compulsion to phone for further information.

Jessica sounded sleepy, but comparatively cheerful. ‘Mum? Did you get the text?’

‘Yes. What happened?’

‘It’s a long story, but basically Uncle James had to rescue me. I was in over my head. I make a rubbish spy.’

‘They wanted you to spy for them?’

‘Not really. I had to tell a lot of lies and try to win the trust of some bad people. I knew I’d be useless and I was.’

‘You don’t sound too sorry about it.’

‘Well – Uncle James pointed out that being a good liar wasn’t exactly something to be proud of.’

‘He’s right. But are you in trouble? What happens now?’

‘Too soon to say. It’s still ongoing. What about you? How’s the murder going?’

‘All sorted. I think.’

‘Thank goodness. And what about the firebomb?’

‘Gosh, I’d forgotten about that. Apparently it was some people whose child was removed by Mrs Foster being unduly officious. That’s what the original suspect told me. Mrs Foster has just retired as a social worker, and she’s made a lot of enemies, or so I gathered.’

‘Pretty extreme revenge, though – burning her house down.’

‘True,’ said Thea, thinking of all the ways a person could be violently killed, and how dangerous life could feel at times. Then she shook herself. ‘Anyway, everything’s okay now. I’ll ring you again in a day or two, when we can have a nice long chat. I can’t say too much for now.’

‘Okay, Mum. Bye, then.’

Which left the unanswered questions concerning Nella and the Handys and the wretched Carol Compton. The way she had risen up like an avenging angel made a lingering image that Thea guessed would stay with her for a very long time. She had seemed so together, explaining what she knew and how she’d traced Sophie, until some small thing suddenly triggered the attack on Nella. Nobody could blame her, of course. And nobody did.

But nobody quite blamed Nella, either. After the protracted explanations and statements at the specially opened police station, Thea and Steve and Tiffany had gone to a pub, where they sat until nearly midnight, debriefing each other and obsessing about the whole story. Sophie went miserably home to Siddington and Sandy drove off with yet another quip. ‘What a weird woman!’ Thea had burst out, the moment she’d gone. ‘Doesn’t she take anything seriously?’

Neither of the others replied.

‘You ought to get home,’ Thea told Tiffany. ‘They’ll be missing you.’

‘Past my bedtime?’ challenged the girl.

‘No, no …’

‘They’ll be much too taken up with Ricky to bother about me. I’ve told them where I am. You can take me home when we finish here.’

They talked mainly about Nella, with Tiffany shedding tears and Steve sighing a lot. ‘She really did love him,’ Tiffany insisted. ‘Imagine how she must have felt when she discovered what he was doing. I mean – that’s betrayal on so many levels. Not just her, but the whole group.’

‘Sandy was right,’ said Steve. ‘We should have clocked him ourselves. It’s almost a cliché, isn’t it? Undercover bloke gets it together with one of the girls in the group under surveillance, to give himself even better cover. Happens all the time.’

‘But Danny,’ Tiffany wailed. ‘He was such a lovely man. Always cheerful and helpful and ready for anything. Nobody’s ever going to convince me he didn’t care about the badgers. Out there in the rain, night after night, checking on them. How could any of us ever have guessed? And he proposed to Nella. He didn’t need to do that, did he? Surely he must have loved her a bit? How could anybody pretend like that?’

Steve fidgeted. ‘You mean sex, I suppose. It’s not so difficult, actually. And Nella’s attractive.’

‘Is she?’ said Thea. ‘I’m not sure I can see it.’

‘You didn’t see her as she really is.’

‘I saw her at about three o’clock on Saturday. Had she killed him by then, I wonder? Was she putting on an act, leaning against that great big car, as if nothing was worrying her?’

‘I’ve been thinking about that too,’ said Tiffany. ‘I think she must just have come from doing it. There were probably bloodstained clothes in the car boot. If you stab someone, there’s lots of blood, right?’ She shuddered. ‘And what we all thought was grief was really guilt at what she’d done. I still can’t believe it.’

‘I think she must have gone and done it after you were together at the church,’ said Thea. ‘When did you leave her?’

‘Five minutes later. She said she’d have to go and find Danny, because she was sick of waiting. Maybe that’s more likely. I hope it is,’ she finished. ‘That sounds silly, I know.’

‘I know what you mean,’ said Thea. ‘And you’re right about the blood. She’d have had to go somewhere for a wash, and I can’t see she would have had enough time. And if it had already happened, I might have seen something. I was walking down that road, just before I caught up with you and Sophie in the woods.’

‘But how cold. And calculating. She’d have to wait until she was sure nobody was around – no traffic coming. Then just stab him and push him into the quarry.’

Steve coughed. ‘Get him into a clinch, do the business, and heave him backwards. Even if someone saw them, they wouldn’t understand what was happening.’

‘They’d remember afterwards, though. When they heard he was dead,’ said Thea.

‘What you said about grief and guilt,’ Steve said to Tiffany. ‘Don’t you think it could have been both together? Each making the other worse.’

Thea thought about the scene in the church, with Nella so clenched and inward-looking. ‘I think you’ve got that exactly right,’ she told Steve.

Much more along similar lines was voiced, the lines becoming circles and spirals of speculation and gradual acceptance.

‘But what about the people in Dubai?’ Thea asked at one point. ‘They can’t really have been his parents, can they? Or they’d have told Nella about Carol.’

‘It wouldn’t matter, though, would it, once he was dead?’

This called for some serious thinking. ‘But they’d never talk to Nella about the funeral and everything, would they? They’d want to know why it wasn’t Carol. And then they’d call Carol, right away, and she’d have known he was dead days earlier than she did.’

‘Right,’ nodded Tiffany and Steve slowly. ‘You’re right.’ Thea could tell that Steve especially was finding it an uphill struggle to follow all the implications of the story. For him, the mere fact of Danny’s betrayal was a giant boulder in the way of any further understanding.

‘Might they have been planted somehow, by the police, then? The Kent police, that is. Just voices on the end of a line, acting a part? That would be easy to arrange. If Nella asked, Danny could just let her think they really were two middle-aged people on a birdwatching project. And another thing – the Kent police must have provided him with that locksmith’s van, full of equipment, to give him a credible source of income. They really thought of everything, so that Nella had no reason to doubt him.’

‘She did doubt him, though,’ Steve insisted. ‘As I said at the house – she must have been checking up on him. That stuff about finding texts on his phone can’t be true.’

‘Doesn’t really matter, does it?’ said Tiffany. Of the three, she was drinking the most. Her third large white wine was disappearing fast.

‘Why did Ricky hit Jack, then?’ Thea asked. ‘Tell me that.’

‘Jack provoked him. No big mystery. Ricky’s furious about the muck in the river, and Jack just played with him, getting away with it.’

‘So who were the girls with him? Not you or Sophie?’

‘We told you. I expect they were Sally and Emma and Leanne. Everybody was sure he’d killed Danny. It’s as simple as that.’

‘They’ll be more careful in future, then,’ said Thea irritably.

‘It all pointed to Jack Handy,’ Tiffany persisted.

‘You know,’ said Thea haltingly, ‘the police haven’t been very diligent in their investigations, as far as I can see. They just let you all believe it was Jack, without saying anything. Admittedly, I have missed a lot of it, but even so. If they’d done the full panoply of forensic analysis, wouldn’t they have caught on right away that it was Nella who killed Danny? I doubt if they even took that big car in for a proper look. It would have had Danny’s blood in it, I imagine.’

‘They probably thought they could sew the whole thing up quickly, because Handy was clearly the killer,’ said Steve bitterly. ‘If he’d died in hospital, that would have made it all very convenient.’

‘Handy,’ murmured Thea, hoping to raise a smile.

All she got was a groan. ‘Don’t you start,’ Steve begged.

‘Sorry.’

They had stumbled wearily away, Steve and Thea both hoping their beers wouldn’t render them illegal to drive. They’d had a pint and a half each. Tiffany almost had to be carried to Thea’s car, and bundled out at the Baunton house with very little ceremony. ‘I’m not going to speak to your parents,’ Thea announced. ‘I’m far too tired for that.’

 

And now it was Friday and Jessica no longer a cause of such painful anxiety. Drew had left no message or text, which was disappointing. Also, when she let it sink in, another reason to worry. There were too many things that could go wrong in his life.

But then, at ten-thirty, he phoned. ‘Where were you?’ he started without preliminaries. ‘I called four times last night.’

‘You never left a message.’

‘No.’

‘I was having an adventure,’ she said and took a deep breath.

Five minutes later, the whole story had been told. Drew asked a few questions and made a few interested noises, and waited for her to finish. ‘Revenge,’ he said then. ‘What a complicated emotion it is.’

‘Is it?’

‘Don’t you think? You sound as if Danny had it coming, for what he did. And look at the consequences for the police! What’s the trial going to look like, if she pleads not guilty? The media will absolutely love it. The nation will back Nella, with petitions for clemency, the whole works.’

‘I suppose so.’

‘But if Handy had killed him because he was having such hassle with the protesting activities, how would that have looked? Which side would people be on, then?’

‘I don’t know.’ Drew’s habit of seeking for the philosophical meanings behind crimes such as this could be rather demanding.

‘They’d have stuck up for Danny. Dead just for defending animal rights, or highlighting pollution. The farmer would be vilified. Do you see?’

‘Yes, Drew, I see. So what?’

‘So morality’s a troublesome thing. Who was right and who was wrong here?’

‘Danny was wrong. He told lies and deceived Nella in particular. But she was wrong to kill him. And she must have told nearly as many lies afterwards, trying to get away with it. It’s all perfectly obvious, Drew. I don’t think we need get too analytical about it.’

‘The victim now is Carol, though. She didn’t do anything wrong at all. She sounds quite brave and sensible to me. And what about that poor baby, never knowing its father?’

‘He should have thought of that.’

‘They were probably paying him a huge bonus, danger money or something. He’d have used it to give his child a good start in life.’

The third pregnancy, Thea suddenly realised. So it was true that these things always went in threes. ‘How’s Maggs?’ she asked.

‘Maggs is in hospital with a threatened miscarriage. Den’s distraught.’

‘Oh, God! There really isn’t any justice, is there?’

‘We keep looking for it, though, don’t we. We can’t face the implications of a random universe, even if that’s the basic truth of it all.’

‘Give her my love. Tell her about what’s happened here – she’ll appreciate the distraction, if they’re making her lie still for weeks on end.’

‘It won’t be weeks. They think if she’s still intact by this evening, it’ll all be okay. It happened to Karen with Timmy, and she carried on perfectly easily, once the panic died down.’

‘Hard on you, then.’

‘Mmm.’

Life in general was hard on Drew, she thought with a pang. Her role was to make it better, as much as she could.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘You’re going to have a holiday. My Farmington job is on, after all. Three weeks in July with cats. You and the kids absolutely must come and join me for at least one week of it. That’s an order.’

‘Actually,’ he said slowly, ‘I’ve been having a proper think about the Broad Campden house. Whatever happens with Maggs, I’ve got to come to a decision. In fact, I think I already have.’

‘Oh?’ Thea noticed her hand had started to sweat onto her phone. Whatever Drew was about to say suddenly mattered enormously.

‘I think I’m going to move us all there. Me and the kids. I might sell this place as a going concern, and make a fresh start. I think it’s what we all need.’

‘Oh,’ said Thea weakly. ‘Gosh.’

He laughed. ‘Don’t panic. We can talk about it when I see you.’

‘Okay,’ she said and rang off. Her mood was euphoric. Already she was mentally putting her own little house on the market, and throwing in her lot with the Slocombes in Broad Campden. She could see the whole idyllic picture quite clearly. In a flash, all money worries would disappear, along with other difficulties. Then she caught up with herself, and forced her thoughts on to matters immediately in hand. There was the tortoise, for a start, needing lots of food to build up its strength after long months of starvation. There would be suggestions in the notes left by the Fosters, so she went to find them.

The list included items the animal was not to be given, such as cabbage. But dandelions and clover were okay. And, to her relief, there turned out to be a bag of special tortoise food in a small cupboard beneath the vivarium. She took considerable satisfaction from the enthusiastic reception of a small handful of this stuff.

Then she read the notes again, in their entirety, and found a line she had previously missed.

‘Feel free to do some needlepoint, if you like that sort of thing. There’s a big canvas in the box of craft stuff in the dining room. I’ll never finish it. You’d be doing me a favour!’

On investigation, she found the canvas. It was very big, and depicted a highly coloured village street, complete with hay cart, skipping children and animals. About a tenth of it had been done thus far.

‘That’s me catered for, then,’ she muttered, thinking of another week of empty evenings ahead. She looked at Gwennie, who was close to her feet, staring up with trust and affection. ‘That’s my girl,’ said Thea fondly. ‘What a nice dog you are.’

Hepzie approached jealously and nudged her hand. ‘And you,’ Thea assured her. ‘You’re a nice dog as well.’

She’d be all right for the remainder of her stay, she repeated to herself. She could visit Jim Tanner and see how he was, perhaps even offering some practical help. She could do all the things a normal house-sitter was meant to do. And at the end of the week, she would go and see Drew and they would talk endlessly and deliciously about the future.

She patted the old corgi again and counted herself lucky.