Before she could reach the front door of the house, across the enormous garden, her better sense caught up with her. What was she going to say to explain her presence? She was trespassing, with a dog running loose for added insult. Nobody had threatened her and she definitely did not want these unknown neighbours to call the police.
Not that they were even proper neighbours. It was nearly half a mile to Umberto’s house from here. But she could pretend to be appealing to them, as a way of deterring Savage from doing anything incriminating. She could hide away for a while, until he gave up and left. Assuming, of course, that he had not already done so. He might well be almost home by now, with absolutely no intention of chasing or harming the house-sitter and her dog. There was no hard evidence as to his state of mind, after all.
It was still quite light, except for areas overshadowed by trees. Grabbing the spaniel, who was sulking at having been dropped over a high gate into a strange garden, Thea attached the lead again and crept around the edge of the property, hoping to remain invisible. The room with the light on had its curtains closed and there was no other sign of life. If there were people downstairs, they must be at the back. When she reached the furthest corner, in what she calculated must be the most easterly point, she began to breathe more comfortably. It was even rather good fun. Even better was the moment she came to a wooden fence with a door in it that turned out to be unlocked. Either this was an oversight or the people were on good terms with next door, because she stepped into a neighbouring garden, much smaller and less securely fortified than the first. In moments she had got past this second house, through a perfectly normal little gate and out into the lane that led down to the village street.
There was no sign of Clifford Savage. A car came towards her, slowing slightly, which she took to be a welcome sign. She even waved amicably at the driver, hoping he would remember her. At times like this, a witness could be invaluable. There was no answering wave, which Thea had found to be typical of the Cotswolds, but the purpose had probably been served just the same.
She got back to Positano completely unmolested, and admitted to herself that it had been rather a disappointing little adventure, with hindsight. Her phone was out of charge, so she had to stand by the plug in the kitchen while she called Gladwin. There were, she noted, no missed calls. There were people who would think her criminally negligent not to take the thing with her on a dangerous walk through the backwaters of Lower Oddington.
The danger might have been illusory, but the overheard phone call was not. Imogen’s your mother, not mine repeated itself so insistently that much of the rest of Savage’s words were lost. There had been an obvious reference to the police investigation and a strong implication that he knew the identity of the killer, and had very probably been speaking to him. Gladwin had to know – she should have known half an hour ago.
The detective answered her phone quickly. ‘What now?’ she snapped.
‘Don’t be like that. You’re going to be extremely pleased with me when you hear what I’ve got to tell you.’
‘Go on, then.’
Thea dispensed with preliminaries about woodlands and churchyards and went directly to the phone conversation. ‘Clifford Savage knows who killed Gabriella. I’ve just heard him on the phone. It’s one of Imogen Peake’s sons.’
‘Ri-i-i-ght,’ said Gladwin slowly, but with definite energy. There was even something close to excitement. ‘Does he know you heard him?’
It was not the question Thea had expected, but it made her feel nervous. ‘Yes.’
‘I’d better come, then. Give me twenty minutes. Don’t go outside.’
She spent the next few minutes jotting down all she could remember of what Savage had said, before attending to the dogs and boiling the kettle. The salukis made it plain that this was different from their usual evening routine and were accordingly rather puzzled. Dolly took the role of spokesdog and approached Thea with slowly wagging tail. ‘I know,’ Thea said. ‘It’s all at sixes and sevens. But it’s too late now for a proper run outside. Go and have a pee and then it’ll be bedtime, okay? Daddy’s home tomorrow, and everything’ll be back to normal.’ Or would it? She worried slightly about making false promises, even if it was to a pack of dogs with minimal understanding.
She was by the gate when Gladwin arrived, in contravention of the edict not to go outside. The risk of being shot by Savage felt small enough to manage. He would have to stand where she could see him, and it would be easy to duck behind the copper beech tree. And the chance of his being in possession of a gun felt small enough to ignore. Beyond that, she could not imagine any credible physical danger.
‘We’re almost there!’ Gladwin declared girlishly, the moment they were in the kitchen, before Thea could make her report. ‘Higgins thinks we’ve cracked it, but we’re not quite at that stage yet.’ She sighed happily. ‘This is always the best part – watching the whole picture come together, and ferreting out the evidence.’
Thea felt mildly resentful that progress had been made without her. Looking back over the week, she had to acknowledge that her contribution had been minimal since Monday. All the same, she had been the one to set it all in motion. She also felt amused and affectionate towards a woman who could still relish her work and throw herself into it, after years of experience that must have shown her the very darkest aspects of humanity. ‘You’ll be the hero of the hour,’ she said.
Gladwin grimaced. ‘That’s a part I really don’t like. All the media attention. It’s been crazy already, and if we charge somebody, it’ll only get worse.’
‘So you already suspected Stefan, did you?’
Gladwin blinked, and then stared. ‘How did you know?’
‘It’s obvious when you think about it – except, you got there without me telling you about what happened this evening.’ She frowned. ‘Actually, it’s not really at all obvious. But it does confirm what I brought you here to tell you.’
‘Um … yes.’ Gladwin looked very uncertain. ‘You heard the man up the road talking on the phone to one of Imogen Peake’s sons, implying that he knew the son, whichever one it was, had killed Gabriella and was keeping it a secret from the police.’
‘More or less, yes.’
‘Meanwhile we have good reason to think it was the woman’s son, too. The one called Stefan.’
Thea stared down at the notes she had made. They suddenly seemed much less significant after Gladwin’s words. ‘Well, it all seems very neat. Did he bring the vehicle over here? Where is it now? What about his brother? And where does Clifford Savage come into it?’
‘You’re right that it isn’t obvious at all. It’s taken about a hundred hours on the computer to discover that a left-hand drive Land Rover Discovery came across on the Shuttle on Sunday and went back on Tuesday with a broken headlight and missing wing mirror. Its owner is a Mr Stefan Woltzer from Innsbruck. He is the cousin of the deceased and almost certain to be guilty of her murder.’
Thea felt a powerful sense of anticlimax. Could it possibly all be over and done with so easily? ‘What was his motive?’ she asked, in a muddled effort to undermine Gladwin’s certainty.
‘Unclear. Some family stuff, presumably.’
‘Where is he now?’
‘Back home. The Austrian police are questioning him. He says the car was “borrowed” while he was in England, and he has no idea who took it.’
‘But they returned it, with the damage?’
‘So he says. Not very credible, you’ll agree.’ She took a long swig of the coffee Thea had provided, and looked up. Thea was standing across the kitchen table from her, hands on the back of a chair. The detective met her gaze. ‘So, tell me more about this phone call.’
‘I can’t remember many of the exact words. It wouldn’t stand up in court. But I imagine you can check the records and find out who he was talking to. It must have been Stefan, surely?’
‘Tell me all you can remember.’
‘He said “You’ll have to ask Imogen. She’s your mother not mine”. And “Well, it’s done now and I feel sick about it”. Then he said he was leaving here soon and never coming back. And something about the police investigation not getting anywhere. At least, that’s what I took him to be talking about. I don’t think he said anything quite as definite as that.’
‘Right,’ said Gladwin. ‘Thanks.’
Thea tried to pin down the precise words she had heard, with little success. Gladwin’s apparent unconcern made her feel perversely determined to get it right. ‘He definitely said he felt sick.’ A thought struck her. ‘Oh – do you think he saw what happened on Monday as well – and lied about it? Because he knew the driver and wanted to protect him? It didn’t really sound as if he’d helped to plan it or anything like that. But I was scared of him. I ran away.’ Again, she felt the sinking awareness that nothing she could offer would look persuasive once dissected by a defence lawyer.
Gladwin nodded. ‘That would certainly fit. Higgins is all for hunting down a male conspiracy against Gabriella. He’s just been on some sort of awareness course about violence towards women, and now he sees sexism everywhere. Every man is a potential threat to every woman. He even wonders whether the boyfriend might be part of it. And the brother, Christian, I mean, not Jacob.’ She shook her head. ‘I thought we’d got past that sort of stuff years ago. But now it’s back with a vengeance. And of course, much of the time, it’s true. I just don’t like wholesale generalising.’
‘I hope Higgins doesn’t suspect Jake Milner,’ said Thea with a rush of sympathetic scepticism. ‘He said his sister could be annoying.’ She hesitated. ‘Nearly everyone says that, one way or another.’ A sudden flashback to events some years before in Lower Slaughter made her frown. ‘You’d have to find an awful lot of evidence to prove it was Stefan in the car.’
Gladwin raised her eyebrows. ‘It’s his car. They’ll be checking it for fingerprints and DNA and so forth as we speak, just to be sure.’
‘No, Sonia. It won’t do. It feels all wrong.’ Thea spoke before she had fully considered her words. They emerged from somewhere too deep for easy access. Something in her gut that warned against easy assumptions.
‘What do you mean? You’ve just provided a gold-plated piece of supporting evidence to what we had already more or less concluded. What’s changed your mind?’
The answer came slowly, after a real effort to dredge up the source of her suspicions. ‘I don’t know exactly. Listen – will you let me go and see the Riders first thing tomorrow? Penny and Victor – remember? I think they were trying to tell me something on Wednesday, and I was too traumatised and dim to get it. That book – I should have let you have it, really. You might have found clues in it. But it’s not at all obvious. Not the sort of thing the police could use.’
‘You’ve lost me. You don’t need my permission to go and see anybody. You’ve never bothered about that before.’
‘No – but it would help if you could give me their address.’ She smiled at her friend, who drained her coffee and got to her feet. ‘And if I give you a call, make sure you answer right away.’
‘Which takes us back to this Savage person. Higgins is there now, actually, trying to get the truth out of him. That’s assuming he went home, of course. He might even have taken him in for formal questioning.’
‘Just find out who he was talking to on the phone.’
Gladwin took a deep breath. ‘We will, but there are procedures. Sometimes it takes days.’
‘Make him hand over the phone, then. Won’t it be right there on its screen? The damned things record every move you make, for heaven’s sake.’
‘True. But don’t you think that in his position you might have hidden the damned thing in a tuft of long grass somewhere between here and wherever you heard him talking?’
‘I suppose I might,’ said Thea submissively.
Before she left, Gladwin had enquired about Drew and gleaned enough to rekindle a worry the detective had felt before. Thea’s incorrigible proclivities towards amateur detectiving had always sat awkwardly in the middle of her marriage. Drew had seldom welcomed Gladwin into the house, and yet it was a strong relationship, unusual for many reasons, and in need of consideration. ‘Whatever happens tomorrow, you have to go home and mend some fences,’ Gladwin instructed Thea. ‘Anything else would be a betrayal of his patience.’
As always, there were numerous unanswered questions and neglected areas left behind when pressure of work demanded the detective hurry away. The revelation about the car belonging to Stefan Woltzer was huge and probably conclusive, despite Thea’s reservations. But was she allowed to tell anybody about it? As she tried to rehearse what she would say to the Riders next day, it instantly became troublesome. As a general rule, what Thea Slocombe knew, everybody knew. Holding back created such complications that she could seldom sustain it for long. But Gladwin would have naturally assumed that the information was highly confidential. Even as a good friend as well as professional police officer, she ought not to have disclosed it. The fact that she had done so told Thea that, in Gladwin’s mind, the case was already solved. All that was needed was enough supporting evidence to arrest, extradite and charge the man with murder. First-degree, premeditated and carefully planned murder, at that.
She wondered what had happened to Clifford Savage, purely as a result of the very unlucky – from his point of view – coincidence of Thea overhearing his phone call. She examined her conscience, as well as her memory, in an effort to justify what she had done. Could he possibly have not said ‘Imogen’ but some other name? Could he have been speaking to somebody wholly unconnected with the Kinglys? Perhaps he had been researching a grave, consulting somebody about ancient ancestry or local history. But no – she gave herself a free pass. Nothing he could find in a country churchyard could make him feel sick, or refer to something having occupied three days and got nowhere. Could it? The final reassuring detail concerned his phone. If he claimed to have lost it, or never to have had one, he would be incriminating himself. If he relinquished it calmly, and demonstrated that he had been speaking to a professor of genealogy in Carlisle, he would be in the clear. Simple.
But he had appeared so friendly and uncomplicated on Wednesday. Given what she had now witnessed, all that must have been an act, a deliberate pretence to win her confidence. The seemingly frank disclosures about Jocasta Kingly and her family had been harmless diversions away from the main issue. He had told her nothing she could not have found out for herself, from Rider’s book or general chat with members of the family. It gave her a shaky sensation, as if nothing could be relied on. Anybody could tell outright lies, manipulate her and exploit her innate goodwill. It made her feel foolish and gullible.
And she still did not know what might have happened if he had caught her out there by the church, having realised what she had heard. He wasn’t very big and showed little sign of physical strength. But Thea was smaller and made no claim at all to powerful muscle. She could run fairly fast, but had very little idea about self-defence. Somehow, it had never been required, regardless of all her encounters with violence. In films the woman poked the attacker’s eye out, or kicked him hard in the testicles – or both. Thea could not imagine herself in such a state or terror or fury that she could do either of those things. She didn’t even think she could scream very loudly. Her voice was quite deep for a small woman, and the high notes required for a scream eluded her.
Could she assume that he had told the truth about his work and other details when he called in on Wednesday? Did it matter? Was he now in danger of being charged with conspiracy to murder and thereby losing job, self-respect and social status? What had it been about Gabriella Milner that could make such a risk worth taking, if so?
Gladwin’s apparent confidence that Savage could be made to talk was unsettling, too. If he was part of a careful plan to kill Gabriella, he would have a persuasive story oven-ready with alibis all in place. If he had driven Stefan Woltzer’s murderous vehicle himself, then Thea would never trust another human being. Or so she believed. When she analysed this reaction, she found that it applied to almost everyone she had met in the past three days. Could Jake or Ramon or Victor Rider have done it, any more credibly than Cliff? Possibly Ramon, she conceded, in spite of Stephanie’s affection for him. And if the plan had been exceptionally clever, then perhaps Umberto should be added to the list.
It was half past nine and she was still restlessly rerunning every conversation and every random idea that had come to her since Monday. The warbling of her phone took some seconds to penetrate her distracted attention.
‘Just confirming timings for tomorrow,’ came Umberto’s voice, in a jarringly hearty tone. ‘Seems I’ve been missing quite a lot. The story has even hit the headlines in Germany, would you believe?’
‘It’s been horrible,’ she said repressively. ‘I haven’t seen any news all week. I don’t think I could bear to hear what they’re saying.’
‘It’s all been quite sensitively done, actually.’ There was a hint of reproach in his voice. ‘What have you been doing, then?’
‘Looking after your dogs, of course,’ she shot back. What do you think? was swallowed before she could say it. ‘And dealing with quite a few visitors, including the police.’
‘They haven’t caught him, then?’
‘Not as far as I know.’ She felt no wish to pass on any more information than that. Umberto had removed himself and thereby very probably set the whole series of ghastly events in motion. That had been true of previous cases, at any rate. This time, when she stopped to think about it, might be different. Gabriella had presumably thought her uncle would be at home – or why else would she come calling at his house?
‘Oh well. It’ll all get sorted eventually,’ he said blandly. ‘Meanwhile I’m in France tonight, about four hours from Calais. I’m aiming for the Shuttle that goes just after one tomorrow, but I might be a bit earlier or later. They never seem to mind if you use a different one. That should mean I get home something like four or five o’clock, all being well. Can you stay till then?’
‘That was the arrangement. Thanks for confirming it all.’
‘Listen – I really am sorry you’ve had such a bad time. You’ve done a great job, I’m sure. The dogs must be fine, or you’d have told me. I can’t wait to see them again.’
‘They’ve missed you. I don’t meet all their expectations when it comes to the games. But they seem to be quite well. Eating everything I give them, anyway.’
‘I’ve missed them. I guess I’m going to have to work something out if I intend to keep on doing these trips.’
‘It went well, then?’
‘It went brilliantly. Beyond my wildest dreams. There’s a huge market over here – it’d be a waste not to exploit it. But that would involve a lot more travelling, in the UK as well as Germany.’
Thea was reminded of the fee he was paying her. If he were to sustain that level of outlay, his profits might look a lot less impressive. ‘I expect you can work something out,’ she said. Get a wife was one unspoken suggestion that she knew very well would be an outrageous idea to many people. Even so, she could see it working out pretty well, given the right woman.
‘We’ll see. I’ve got a lot to think about. It all got sidelined last year with my mother and the dogs and everything, but now I have to get my act together, big time.’
Well bully for you, thought Thea as she ended the call. The air of complacency had irritated her. On Tuesday Umberto had expressed horror and grief at the death of his niece. Now it sounded as if he regarded it as little more than a temporary glitch in his life. He had seemed utterly unconcerned as to how the investigation was going, and whether someone he knew might be found guilty of a terrible crime. Finally, having mentally gone through the call again, Thea concluded that he was being deliberately evasive. Had someone from the family alerted him to be careful in what he said? Layer upon layer of loyalty, affection, shared history and secret resentments existed in most families, one way or another. In general, such realities went unmentioned, often forgotten as a result. But Thea had a sense that Jocasta Kingly, powerful matriarch, had exerted control over all her offspring. They had not wanted to let her down and had not dared to neglect her. There were hints that one specific incident had brought a lot of stuff to the surface, and been so shocking that Jocasta had died of it.
And that incident was, as far as Thea could work out, the discovery that her second daughter had given birth to two sons and never told her mother about them.
It was still a very skeletal outline to what must have been a dense and dramatic series of events, dating back forty years, reaching a crescendo last year, and now a stunning climax outside the family home. The inevitable complexities going back so far might never be understood by an outsider. If the police did gather enough evidence for a prosecution, little or none of it would emanate from Imogen’s years in exile, which Thea had come to regard as probably the most fascinating chapter in the story.
It therefore made good sense to consult the eldest sister, and discover how much she knew and how much she was willing to divulge.