Thea was outside with the dogs when Hepzie barked and she realised there was somebody at the gate. It was Higgins and the time was ten past two. He had missed Jake Milner by about seven minutes. She was shamelessly happy to see him.
‘I’ve been busy,’ she reported. ‘You can ask me anything about the Kingly family and I bet I’ll know the answer.’
‘Well, that makes you a better man than I am,’ he groaned. ‘All we seem to have discovered is what makes of car they all drive.’
‘Are you still checking up on the ferries and Shuttle and whatnot?’
He nodded. ‘You would not believe how many cars cross the Channel with cracked headlights. There should be a law against it.’
‘Cracked? I thought it was smashed to smithereens.’
‘Not really. Not past the point where you could make it look reasonably okay with a bit of effort. Even if the actual light doesn’t work – and we can’t be sure about that – it wouldn’t look especially bad. It’s June. You can drive all day without needing to use your lights.’
‘But most people have them on all the time these days.’
‘True. But a lot don’t. And Barkley keeps on talking about “hiding in plain sight.” We might be looking right at it and never realise.’
Thea had nothing further to suggest where cars were concerned. She found herself preferring not to know the number and position of every CCTV camera in the area, monitoring the movements of every living thing, including the vehicles containing them. It was certain to provoke anxiety or anger or both. Somewhere she felt a sneaking satisfaction at the sheer quantity of work required to trawl through all the footage and find one individual in the great mass of video recording.
But she had underestimated the forces of surveillance.
‘Of course, we know the exact time, and direction and general outline of the thing we’re looking for,’ Higgins went on. ‘It must have turned off the main road, probably coming from Stow, but not necessarily. There’s a camera two or three miles away that will have caught it if that’s right. Coming from Chipping Norton would be more difficult – and going off that way, as well.’ He looked at her, as if to assess how much information to disclose. ‘And that’s the more crucial part – catching it after the event, when the light would be broken.’
‘When it would be doing its best not to be spotted,’ she agreed.
‘Exactly. If it went off across country, there’ll be nothing to catch it for miles. You could probably get to Birmingham without a camera recording you, if you knew what you were doing.’
Thea tried to conceal how glad this made her feel. It was wrong of her, she supposed, to want life to be harder for the police, and she very much did want the murderer to be caught. But somehow the price would be too high, if every mile of every road was under surveillance. What had happened to good old-fashioned detective work, she wondered crossly.
Then Higgins revealed that there had been some clever findings in the endless trawl through computer-monitored movements. ‘We know that Miss Milner’s mother was on holiday in Austria last year, for example,’ he said.
‘Isn’t that where the newfound nephews live?’
‘Er …’ floundered the detective. ‘Who?’
‘You know. Christian and Stefan. Imogen’s sons. Penny’s nephews. Gabriella’s cousins. Imogen must have had them when she was very young and the family only learnt of their existence last year. They’re mentioned in the book.’ Too late she remembered that she had not let Gladwin take the book, and she might well have forgotten to include the nephews in her quickly sketched family tree.
Higgins gave her a look from under his unruly hair. He had rather thick eyebrows and a square brow, which made it easy for him to look stern when he wanted to. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘People keep mentioning them as if they might be important. You know about the phone message I found last night, don’t you? I told Gladwin and she popped in this morning to have a listen. When I went to see Imogen later on, I asked her about it, and her first reaction was that it might have been Stefan. It was about the legal ownership of this house. Apparently, Umberto doesn’t have any real right to live here. But their mother only died last year, so I suppose that’s a bit early to get everything settled.’ She was speaking her thoughts almost at random, as new implications dawned. ‘It might well not connect to Gabriella at all, but the timing … I mean, there has to have been some reason why the person called me. On my mobile,’ she remembered. ‘That’s why Imogen thought it might not be Stefan after all, because he couldn’t possibly know my number. Although it is online if you search hard enough.’ She chewed her lip thoughtfully. ‘I never did understand how people got hold of each other’s mobile numbers when there’s no proper directory.’
After a valiant effort to listen patiently, Higgins broke. ‘Please stop,’ he begged her. ‘I can’t deal with all this, the way you present it. Have you any idea how most witnesses behave? Choking out a few words at a time, needing careful prompting and persistent questions? No? Well …’ he sighed.
‘I’m not exactly a witness though, am I?’ she said reasonably. ‘I’m your spy, basically. I go where no policeman dares to tread. Today I’ve been to talk to Imogen at her work, and invited Jake Milner to lunch and let him talk about his sister. That’s the same as I always do. All you need to do is let me tell you what I’ve learnt. Although I must say it does feel a bit as if I’m doing all the work this time.’
‘And who’s on the agenda for tomorrow?’ he asked.
‘What? Oh – I don’t know. Umberto’s due back around five. I know who I really want to meet, and that’s Theresa. Gabriella’s mother. The police have the advantage of me there.’
‘Why leave her out?’
‘Delicacy, I suppose. She’s just lost her daughter. Jake did tell me quite a lot about her,’ she reflected thoughtfully. ‘I need to think it all through.’
‘You need to tell me what he said.’
She shook her head. ‘It wouldn’t make much sense. I know by now that you have to deal in facts, when it comes down to it. All these undercurrents and tangled relationships just confuse you.’
‘Wrong,’ he said sharply. ‘We are very well aware that it’s these tangles that lead to violence, more often than not. We know about simmering resentments and jealousies and damaged reputations. And you know we do.’ He scowled at her, and she realised she had taken her teasing much too far.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I got carried away. Maybe we should start back at the beginning.’
‘Draw me a diagram, if it helps,’ he said. ‘It often does when there’s a family under investigation.’
She sat back and blinked. For all her ferreting and speculating, she still had no genuine feeling that one of the Kinglys had killed Gabriella. The theories might point that way, and there was obviously no shortage of strong feeling, but that was a long way from actual murder. ‘They are under investigation, then, are they?’
‘What do you think?’ said DI Jeremy Higgins.
‘I think it’s a horrible idea. What could the poor girl have done to warrant something so horrendous? As Gladwin says, the whole thing seems to have been meticulously planned in advance – which makes it hugely much worse. Imagine that level of hatred – it’s terrifying. And then to carry it out, and manage to hide it afterwards. Acting all innocent and grief-stricken.’
Higgins was watching her intently, nodding his encouragement. ‘Have you anybody specific in mind?’ he asked.
She paused, and frowned. ‘Not Jake. Not Imogen. Penny and Kirsty and Victor all seem perfectly ordinary and genuine. Umberto wasn’t here and I haven’t met Theresa.’ She rattled off the names effortlessly, the family tree deeply imprinted on her mind. ‘Which only leaves the mysterious Christian and Stefan. If it was family at all, then I think it’s got to have been one of them. Or both of them together.’ She sat up straight. ‘What if it was a whole team of them? That would make the business with the vehicle much easier.’
Higgins kept on nodding. ‘We thought of that,’ he said, witheringly. ‘And it actually doesn’t make it that much easier. The damned thing still has to be somewhere. And if you’ve got more than one killer involved, the chances become very great that one of them will spill the beans. They’re hostages to each other for the rest of their lives.’
‘I suppose so. But they might not have understood that at the time. Only when it’s too late.’
‘And you left out the person who’s practically at the top of the list.’
‘You mean Ramon.’ She realised that the boyfriend had been given the all-clear purely because Stephanie knew and liked him. ‘He sounds too nice,’ she said pathetically.
Higgins snorted, and asked, ‘So who isn’t nice?’
‘Nobody, really. I wasn’t too keen on Penny Rider. She’s very bossy and big-sisterish. Oh – and I’ve left another person out. That man, Clifford Savage. He actually is a bit suspicious, at least in theory. The way he just turned up yesterday morning and showed off his knowledge of the family. It was a bit peculiar, I suppose, thinking about it. Although it does happen quite often – people showing up to talk to me, I mean. I thought he was just being nosy, or wanted to boast about how well he knows the Kinglys. But he could have been checking to see who was under suspicion, maybe.’
‘What did you tell him?’
‘I can’t remember. It was yesterday. I still wasn’t thinking straight. It was quite early in the morning.’
‘I assume you reported all this to somebody?’
‘I did,’ she said firmly. ‘I told Barkley the whole thing. She interviewed him when they did the house to house. She knows his sister, as it happens.’
Higgins closed his eyes and let his heavy head droop. ‘I have a nasty sensation of going round and round the same circle and not getting anywhere.’
‘Well, don’t rely on me to set you going in the right direction,’ she said tartly. ‘It looks as if your only hope is the ferries and whatnot. And even that feels a bit silly. Why would they risk taking the vehicle abroad with broken headlights, when they could simply hide it somewhere and then get it scrapped?’
‘There are things you don’t know,’ he said, to her surprise. ‘You must understand we can’t tell you every detail of the investigation.’
She digested this with some bitterness. ‘So – if it was a member of the family who did it, all you have to do is find out which of them has gone missing while they take the car out of the country.’
He grimaced. ‘If only it was that simple.’
‘You mean they could have got someone else to take it.’
It was approaching three o’clock and Thea found herself counting the hours until Umberto came back and she could leave the dreary Oddingtons and go home to her family. Admittedly, Broad Campden had its dreary side as well, but at least there were two or three reliable neighbours who would bump into her outside the church and chat for a bit. There was something depressingly lifeless about Lower Oddington, and the atmosphere was only marginally better in its Upper sister. The abandoned church had perhaps cast a pall over the entire settlement, wreaking revenge for the way it had been treated.
Higgins was still watching her, probably wondering at her sudden silence. ‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘I was getting fanciful for a minute. All I want really is to go home.’
‘Which is when?’
‘I told you – tomorrow. Umberto’s due back around five. He’s coming on the Shuttle with his van.’
Higgins grimaced again. ‘If only we could pin it on him, all our worries would be over. Are you absolutely sure it wasn’t his van you saw?’
She didn’t dignify this with a reply. It was unworthy of him and he knew it. He sighed. ‘Sorry. I think it’s all getting to me – the super’s the same. We’re all running around like decapitated hens, as Barkley would say.’
Thea laughed and showed him out.
‘Only another twenty-four hours,’ she muttered to her dog following faithfully at her heels.
She sat with a large mug of tea and reviewed the day, ignoring the pangs of conscience that told her she should be playing with the salukis. Their lack of motivation to exercise themselves was starting to annoy her. If she was Umberto, she’d be tempted to add a small flock of sheep or goats to the field and let the dogs enjoy chasing them around. Although that would probably count as gross cruelty to the ovines. Three dogs in a pack might well opt for actual slaughter.
The conversation with Imogen Peake was fading from her memory, overlaid by the meeting with Jake and the debriefing with Higgins. The whole day felt desperately short of actual facts, and too much loaded with speculation and guesses. Clever police work was doubtless going on, with hints as to some progress concerning movements in and out of the country. But there was a palpable absence of evidence, and with every passing hour the killer was going to cover his tracks more and more successfully. The headlight would be fixed, perhaps by some small Belgian outfit that kept little or no paperwork. If the plan had been to catch a ferry or train out of England on Monday evening, or early Tuesday, they could be in Greece or Poland or somewhere equally remote by now. It was, she suspected, almost entirely hopeless.
She went over what she had learnt about Gabriella, as reported by her brother. A bit of a prig, seemed to sum it up. Had she, then, wounded the sensibilities of her boyfriend? Had he fallen short of her standards and been castigated beyond endurance as a result? Was there some lurking scandal at school that had gone over Stephanie’s head? The man sounded dangerously charismatic, with hormonal schoolgirls yearning for him. Had he succumbed to the charms of a nubile sixth-former and brought Gabriella’s wrath down on his head as a result? It was a viable theory, without a single shred of supporting evidence. Never having met the man it was futile to speculate further.
Her thoughts went back to the Riders and their comprehensive family knowledge. Did they have their own suspicions, which they knew better than to voice? Were they even perhaps sure in their own minds who had done the deed but were determined not to betray the person, for reasons of family loyalty? Had they even just possibly had reason to abhor their niece, and devised a watertight plan by which they could dispose of her? Penny Rider struck Thea as a person who might summon the necessary ruthlessness to commit murder by vehicle and then drive off to finish the job by evading detection. Even perhaps doing it all on her own, without her husband knowing a thing about it. His blundering ignorance would create a perfect smokescreen.
Her phone signalled an incoming text from Stephanie, which provided a welcome distraction. ‘Mr Rodriguez would like to meet you. I said I’d introduce you. Can we come today? Same time as yesterday?’
Many thoughts ran through Thea’s mind in the two seconds after reading this. Had Ramon gone back to work, then? Was there something slightly disconcerting about the ‘we’? Who was going to drive? Did Drew know about it? And crowning it all was a sense of excitement and the possibility of real progress towards understanding Gabriella’s death better.
She did not reply by text, but made a proper phone call, hoping that Stephanie would be walking home from school and free to talk.
‘What’s all this then?’ she began, when the girl answered.
‘What do you mean?’
‘You and Mr Rodriguez. A lot seems to have happened since yesterday. Was he in school today? Does your father know what you’re planning to do?’
Stephanie’s sigh was almost palpable down the phone. ‘Actually, he went to see Dad and talked to him about you and what happened in Oddington. Then he came to school in the lunch break and found me and told me. He’s terribly upset. I said I’d ask you. Satisfied?’
It was a much sharper tone than Thea was used to in her stepdaughter. Somebody had annoyed or unsettled her, and it wasn’t clear who. ‘Okay. And why didn’t Dad call me about it, instead of leaving it up to you?’
‘He says it’s nothing to do with him. He wasn’t very happy about Mr Rodriguez turning up like that.’
‘Ah – now I see.’ Which she did, very clearly. It was far from the first time that Drew had objected to the amateur detecting that his daughter had suddenly got herself involved in. Since the end of the previous year, Stephanie had intruded into matters that her father believed to be very much too adult for her. In vain, she and Thea had reminded him that he himself had encouraged his daughter to face the realities of death and funerals. It seemed to them a small step from there to addressing the facts around crime, punishment and murder.
‘He said all the usual things,’ Stephanie went on. ‘It’s not a game. It could be dangerous. It’ll give me all the wrong ideas about human nature. You know how he is.’
Thea was torn. ‘Well, he’s right, though. You are awfully young. But I’m more concerned with what your teacher thinks he’s doing, dragging you into it.’
‘That’s not what he did. Somebody else must have told him that you were there at the house, and he just connected the name to me and Dad. It wasn’t difficult, was it? He already knew my father was an undertaker, and everybody knows you, and of course he’s desperate to find who killed Miss Milner.’ She gave an unhappy little laugh. ‘I think he might want to kill them, if he can find them. I’ve never seen him like he is today.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Thea. ‘I hope he didn’t tell your father that.’
‘No.’ The voice brightened. ‘But guess what? He says he wants us to do her funeral!! How about that?’
‘Gosh,’ said Thea faintly. ‘That should make Drew happy.’
‘It might, but not yet.’
‘So, who’s bringing you here this afternoon? That’s if your father agrees that you can come. It might turn out to be much too grown up for you.’
‘Dad won’t stop me, but he isn’t going to drive us. If you think it’s all right, Mr Rodriguez will drive. I’m nearly home now, and if you say it’s okay, he can collect me about quarter past four and we can come.’
‘Surely your father won’t let you do that?’
‘He will, though. He says if anything happens to me it’ll all be your fault. I think he must have been joking, but he is quite cross.’
‘Nothing’s going to happen to you,’ said Thea heartily. ‘But just to be sure, I’m going to call Caz and see if she can bring you both. I know this is the twenty-first century and people don’t have chaperones any more, but …’
‘That’s a very good idea,’ said Stephanie, with a startling level of relief. ‘Let me know what she says.’
‘Right. Oh, and give me Ramon’s phone number, will you? I think I ought to have it.’
‘I’ll text it to you,’ said the girl patiently. ‘Thanks.’
Thea was very impressed with her own quick thinking, when she finished the call. There were incipient transgressions threatening to take place, with a very young girl at the centre of them. There was a real possibility that Ramon Rodriguez was a murderer, who wanted to gain some sort of hold over Thea via her stepdaughter.
Even so, it would not hurt at all to have the steady influence of Caz Barkley as backup.