One thing about visitors, they certainly passed the time. The dogs had been neglected, Thea was hungry and still there had been no word from any of the police people. With any luck it would be teatime before she knew it. Her trauma was proving to be entirely manageable, despite dreams and sudden strange panics. All she had to do was keep her nerve and assure herself that it was all a necessary part of the process.
She played with the salukis as before, throwing toys for them and watching them run. Gina co-operated very agreeably with a few jumps over hurdles, pretending to be a greyhound in a steeplechase. It was altogether enjoyable and soothing, and Thea felt waves of love for the pretty creatures, who understood nothing of horrible human behaviour going on outside their gate. The encounters with so many of Umberto’s relatives had given rise to undercurrents of curiosity as to how they would be affected by the death of Gabriella, and what their various motives had been for turning up in Oddington – but it remained at a low level. She automatically reviewed all their names and instant assessments of their characters, reminding herself of the details. It was a lifelong habit, which had been reinforced by her frequent encounters with the police, who were often intensely interested in her observations. She found herself most intrigued by Imogen, who gave an impression of acting a part, standing tall and wary, as if expecting an attack. Prickly seemed a good word for her. And her daughter, Kirsty, following her like a watchful collie, both subservient and protective. The images that remained in Thea’s memory carried associations that she had learnt not to dismiss. If everybody in the family could be compared to a kind of dog, then Jacob was probably a Labrador, and Penny Rider a mildly mistrustful terrier. Her husband was obviously a setter with an uncertain temper, hampered by inadequate brain power, but loyal. After all, he had written that book about Penny’s family, which had no real connection to himself. That suggested a sort of selfless fidelity that was very doglike. But Imogen – what breed was she? She really wasn’t easy to pigeonhole. Intelligent, but showing signs of defeat in life’s constant struggle, probably rather brave, and yet difficult to read. Thea found herself hoping that she would meet that particular relative again.
And there were still one or two gaps. Theresa Milner, for one. And Gabriella’s boyfriend, Ramon, for another. The two people most likely to be drowning in shock and grief and in no state to come visiting the scene of the crime.
Playtime over, Thea went indoors to construct something substantial for lunch. Her dog sat beside her as she ate, looking unusually dejected. ‘What’s the matter?’ Thea asked her. It took a while to work out that Hepzie had actually enjoyed much less exercise than usual. She found the salukis intimidating and had not joined in their games. While they were left to gambol outside, and then put in their indoor room together, the spaniel had simply hovered on the sidelines, and then followed her mistress into the parts of the house from which the resident dogs were banned. The theory seemed to be that if they were glimpsed by a passer-by they might be stolen. Or if the front door was accidentally opened, they might rush through it and leap over the gate into the street. Living invisibly at the back of the house was the more secure strategy, apparently. Thea refrained from casting judgement on this, and simply made every effort to abide by the rules.
But Hepzie was accustomed to freedom, with long walks and individual attention. ‘All right, then,’ said Thea. ‘We’ll risk half an hour or so, same as yesterday.’
They had done it many times before – exploring a new village, trying to find someone to chat to, asking questions and making silent criticisms of the worst aspects of Cotswolds life. The undercurrents had become more and more visible as Thea became more experienced. House-sitting had led her into the darker realities of these picture-book settlements with their dubious histories and artificial lives. As she and her dog set out to walk the short distance from Lower to Upper Oddington, she gave close inspection to every building they passed. A reasonable grasp of local history informed her that the older houses had been built mainly by affluent merchants two centuries ago. There had been shops, thriving schools, four pubs, a malthouse and a Post Office over the years, all gone now except for the pubs and one of them did not appear to be functioning. The reasons for this exodus were connected in Thea’s mind with the abandonment of the medieval church. Large social forces, combined with poor judgements, the twists of fortune and human greed probably explained it. They thought they’d be better off somewhere else, so they had betrayed their comfortable little village and left it an empty shell of a place, where material value transcended all else, with electronic gates to prove it.
Most of the houses had substantial gardens tended by paid freelancers who mowed the grass and pruned the roses. A preliminary glance at the Oddington website a few weeks earlier had revealed a small handful of ‘local businesses’, chief of which was a garden service. She could now admire the fruits of this person’s labours at first hand. The gardens were almost all immaculate. There were occasional ornamental ponds, garden swings, even a tree house – created for children who were almost certainly at private schools in or near London, and were brought to this pseudo patch of countryside during their holidays for some fresh air.
Strolling along the pavement, Thea indulged in sour fantasies about this unnatural way of life. The harsh realities of nature would be intolerable to these people. They would spray insects and weeds with chemicals, complain of being woken by dawn chorusing, interfere with the struggling lives of hedgehogs, and shy away from any field containing cattle. They probably couldn’t distinguish blackberries from deadly nightshade, and simply believed all wild fruits to be poisonous. If an ant or two ventured into the house, they would call an exterminator.
These notions developed until quite out of control. She caught herself up at the point where she was imagining the hysterics caused by glimpsing a mouse in the house, aware that she was guilty of outrageous stereotyping, and she wasn’t especially keen on the idea of mice in her own kitchen, come to that. She was also irrationally intolerant of both spiders and earwigs. It was all part of being human, she admitted sadly. Other species were never going to get fair treatment.
As usual, there were scarcely any people to be seen. The weather was cool and cloudy, but dry. Two or three delivery vans went past, and one car. It was easy to imagine that an apocalypse had taken place overnight and almost the entire population wiped out. And yet – that poor young Gabriella Milner had been pursued and slaughtered right here in this ludicrously quiet village, one Monday afternoon in June. Thea found herself again applying the word ‘betrayal’ to that terrible deed. It had betrayed every expectation of what might possibly happen here. And if Thea’s momentary assumption that the victim knew and liked her killer was correct, then what other word could more accurately describe the act?
Treachery was inevitable, she supposed. Trust was so often misplaced, through wishful thinking or misunderstanding. Human beings were frail and corrupt and put their own interests before those of others. They lost control of themselves. They lashed out when their feelings were hurt or when their self-image was threatened. Her initial hypotheses about the reason for Gabriella’s killing returned to her, fitting comfortably with these thoughts about human behaviour and Cotswold villages.
The big gap in all this theorising was Gabriella herself. What had she really been like? You couldn’t judge by what her relatives had said in the first shock of her death. Nobody was going to cast aspersions on her character at this point, however much they might have disliked her. It was taboo to speak ill of the dead – especially the very recently dead. It was callous, unwise and probably unlucky. It reflected badly on the speaker. It was ungenerous. And if the person had been murdered, it might make the police suspicious of you.
Another gap was the boyfriend, Ramon. Whilst knowing there was very little realistic prospect of ever meeting him, Thea wished she could, if only to further flesh out the picture she had of the family. She assumed that the police would be paying close attention to him, as the person most likely to have some insight into what might explain Gabriella’s death. And experience would suggest to them that he was himself very near the top of any list of likely people to have done the deed.
She and Hepzie had reached the ‘new’ church, built sometime around the 1860s to replace the one the people of Oddington had abandoned. It was handsome enough, close to the village hall, with houses on all sides. Perhaps the lazy folk of the 1850s had merely wanted a shorter walk on Sunday mornings and decided they could afford to start again with their not inconsiderable wealth. It looked as if Upper Oddington had more actual residents than its neighbour, and it was admittedly a fair distance up to the old church. Its pub was thriving while The Fox to the east looked as if business might be rather thin or even non-existent. In short, the whole focus had shifted westwards, leaving the Lower half to slowly disintegrate. Although she suspected it was much less simple than that. The ‘new’ church did not appear to have a graveyard, which explained why there were so many recent burials at St Nicholas. It also added a further twist to the mystery of exactly why there had ever been a need for a second version.
Before she could explore this notion further, perhaps by going into this newer church for a look round, a car horn tooted discreetly at her and she located Caz Barkley sitting in the driving seat of an ordinary-looking vehicle a short distance ahead of her, watching her and her dog. She had drawn up beside the village hall in a lay-by intended for buses. Thea walked over and greeted the detective. Here was the final element in the day’s agenda as she had predicted it some hours ago. She smiled and said, ‘I was hoping you might show up.’
‘I see you don’t need much pastoral care.’ Caz eyed the spaniel. ‘Are the prize mutts all okay?’
‘Absolutely.’ She had been about to say fit as fleas when she remembered that this might not be altogether appropriate. She did not want to think about fleas. It was a problem she had pushed to a corner of her mind. ‘It’s nice to see you,’ she added. It was not the first time Barkley had tracked her down in a Cotswold village, and she wondered whether she would one day start to feel ever so slightly persecuted by the habit. After all, everybody was very readily located these days, thanks to their phones, which were essentially unceasing tracking devices, monitoring every move and every penny spent. Presumably the identity of the person who killed Gabriella Milner was sitting on a giant Big Brother computer somewhere, if only there was a clue as to where to begin to search for it.
‘What are you doing?’ Caz asked. ‘Exactly.’
‘Walking the dog. She was feeling mopey.’
‘Poor thing,’ said the detective with very little feeling. ‘Can we talk? You could get in the car.’
This too had happened before. ‘I suppose so,’ said Thea without enthusiasm. ‘Though I can’t see very much point.’
‘Don’t be like that. I’m willing to bet you’ve had visitors, and phone calls and ideas that we’d find interesting.’
‘No phone calls,’ said Thea, and got into the passenger seat with Hepzie on her lap. ‘Aren’t we a bit conspicuous here?’
‘Does that matter?’ Caz thought about it. ‘Are you scared of reprisals?’
‘Reprisals,’ Thea repeated thoughtfully. ‘That’s a good word. You mean – if the killer sees me talking to the police, they’ll worry that I’m telling you who they are, so they’ll come round in the night and kill me.’ She laughed without any humour. ‘That’s what Penny Rider said this morning, and my reply’s the same. Surely it’s a bit late for that? Didn’t we cover it days ago now?’
‘So what’s the problem about being conspicuous? And who’s Penny Rider?’
‘Umberto’s oldest sister. I don’t think it’s a problem. Just that it might make someone curious, I suppose. This place is so empty, and yet most of the houses probably have CCTV cameras, and they’ll be paranoid about strange cars parked in the street. That sort of thing.’
‘We’ve done door to door, you know. More than half the properties are empty during the week, a lot of them much more than that. If they were as paranoid as you say, the occupied ones would have the entire incident recorded in detail and our job would be simple. The law decrees that private CCTV cameras are not permitted to film beyond the boundaries of their own property. And, as it happens, there aren’t any within fifty yards or more of Positano. What a name!’ She deviated for a moment from her subject. ‘Positano. What does it even mean?’
‘It’s a place in Italy. On the side of a cliff, with a beach. They say it’s lovely.’
‘So all these gorgeous cliffs and beaches in the Cotswolds remind them of it, right?’
Thea laughed with a little more mirth than before.
‘Anyway,’ Caz proceeded, ‘we’re now trying to find the vehicle. Strenuous efforts, as the super says. Every repair shop from here to Birmingham and beyond is being questioned for broken headlights and wing mirrors. You wouldn’t believe how many there are.’
‘Needle in a haystack,’ said Thea sympathetically.
‘It’s hopeless, to be honest. Any remotely sensible killer would just shut the vehicle away in a barn somewhere and fix it themselves. We’ve checked for stolen vehicles, obviously, and there’s a reasonably short list of possible candidates – but again, if the whole thing was pre-planned, they’d have nicked it some time ago, probably two hundred miles away, and then kept it out of sight until Monday.’
‘In a barn somewhere,’ nodded Thea. ‘Or they could just have used their own car, trusting that there wouldn’t be any witnesses.’
Caz ignored this daft idea, as it deserved. ‘The trouble is, this is a perfect area for that kind of thing. Everybody’s got a garage, securely locked up, not causing any concern or curiosity. Remember those poor pangolins that were sitting in a place like that, nobody suspecting a thing? And these garages can be huge. You could house whole families of illegals inside them if you wanted to. If you ask me, there should be a law that they all have to have a big window with nothing covering it, so we can see what’s inside.’
Despite a degree of resistance, Thea found herself drawn into renewed speculation about the murder. The tiny slivers of evidence that she had been able to provide had turned out to be a large proportion of what the police had to go on. ‘Penny Rider came to visit,’ she disclosed, going back to Caz’s question. ‘She’s aunt of the deceased. I assume you’ve interviewed her, and the other two.’
‘Other two what?’
‘Sisters. Aunt and mother of the deceased. They’re Umberto’s sisters. I know even more now about the whole family than before. His mother’s interesting.’
Caz gave a small moan. ‘Here we go. Just like the super said you’d be.’
‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘No, but it’s exhausting. And yes, the whole family has been seen by the police, with no significant result. More a courtesy than anything, to be honest. It’s hard to imagine a relative doing such a horrible thing. They all say Gabriella was much loved and an integral member of the family. Stuff like that.’
Thea pulled a sceptical face. ‘They would say that, wouldn’t they? They’re not going to admit to the police that there were ferocious feuds going on.’
‘Were there?’
‘I don’t know. Victor’s book hints that there might have been. I showed it to Gladwin.’
Caz merely shook her head helplessly. ‘So what’s this about their mother? Where is she?’
‘Dead, less than a year ago. She lived here. It was her house and apparently she left it to Umberto and he was able to get his dogs, since he had plenty of space for them here. That might be a bit strange, seeing as how she’s got three daughters as well. That he got the house all to himself, that is.’
‘People still leave stuff to sons and not daughters,’ said Caz with a hint of bitterness.
‘Do they?’
‘Was she Italian?’
‘Half.’
‘There you are, then. What does this have to do with anything?’
‘Probably nothing. But actually, I think it could well explain the murder. You get more high emotion in a family than anywhere else, don’t forget. Besides, I like delving into the backgrounds of families. It’s always fascinating.’
‘You’re lucky to have one.’ Caz Barkley had grown up in the care system, apparently without anything resembling attentive parents or siblings. It was the first thing Gladwin had told Thea about her new sergeant.
‘Well, the Kinglys are remarkably close-knit, it seems to me. They all live around here, and the old mother must have been a real old-fashioned matriarch. Your friend Cliff Savage knew her. They used to go for walks together.’
‘Not so much my friend – but I did recognise him when I happened to get his door to knock on yesterday. That hair … it’s still as bright as ever.’
‘He does stand out,’ Thea agreed. ‘I wasn’t sure what to make of him. Did you ask him about his connection to the Kinglys?’
‘Obviously. He told me about the old lady and how he was here when she died.’
‘He thinks he might have been the last person to see her alive.’
‘Don’t get complicated,’ Caz said warningly. ‘That all happened last year and there was nothing a bit suspicious about it.’
‘I never said there was. Look – I know the mother’s death is not likely to be relevant, but I’ve got to have something to think about.’
‘Who says it’s not relevant?’ asked Caz, to Thea’s surprise. ‘Relevance isn’t the same thing as suspicious.’
‘Oh!’ Thea tried to fathom this observation. ‘So you think it does connect to the murder, do you? How could it?’
‘I’m hoping you’ll help us answer that,’ said Caz. ‘Now tell me about all your visitors. It sounds as if you’ve had quite a lot.’
When the detective finally let her go, Thea proceeded on her walk, feeling a need to use her legs and clear her head, despite a nagging sense of obligation to the salukis. The bus shelter had three or four shelves of cast-off books inside itself, presumably free for the taking. Beyond that there was a stretch of large houses with generous gardens, and the ubiquitous gates. She saw a stone set upright on a verge, which looked old and interesting. The house beside it was called ‘Silver Birches’ and had dragons on the corners of its roof. ‘Finials?’ she muttered to herself, uncertainly. Quirky roof decoration was something she had seen before in the area. Still there was no sign of life – not just a human silence; there were no birds singing, either. There had been a path for pedestrians for much of the way, which could be termed a pavement at a slight stretch, but it disappeared when the road narrowed. She knew there was a pub around another bend or two, but decided it was well past time for turning back. The encounter with Caz had been reassuring, for the most part, despite throwing her back into speculations about Gabriella Milner’s death. There was nothing Thea could contribute regarding the ownership of the killer vehicle, other than improbable theories. Police forensic work would be much more likely to yield evidence that would pin down the make and model, size and weight of the thing. Everything depended on the motive, as far as she could see.
The sky remained cloudy, but the afternoon was reasonably warm. The salukis should definitely be outside, with proper supervision and attention. The matter of the fleas raised its ugly head again, with no clearer solution than before. It would be rash to buy chemical remedies without consulting Umberto. Such short-haired dogs were unlikely to get seriously infested, she believed. But if Hepzibah was the culprit, there would surely be recriminations. Wild remedies occurred to her, such as acquiring a neat-fingered monkey, who would comb efficiently through the dogs’ coats and eat the offending parasites. Watching them groom each other in various zoos had been one of Thea’s favourite entertainments as a child. She remembered wondering just what a flea might taste like.
Everything at Positano seemed just as she had left it. The gate was still locked; her car still in the street outside; windows closed and no smell of burning. None of these things could be taken for granted, in Thea’s experience. There had actually been an occasion where someone tried to set fire to the house she was supposed to be guarding.
She had left her phone in the house, and did not think to check it for at least twenty minutes after she and Hepzie got in. First, she let the salukis out and then made herself a mug of tea. The information that she had missed three phone calls came as a surprise. There was something slightly hysterical about the way the device shouted the news at her, reproaching her for neglect. When she listened to the messages, she conceded that it might have a point.