Fear in the Cotswolds (2 page)

The two hours they had together passed slowly, Thea wishing Lucy would hurry up and leave. She had already been shown the animals and the house, a list of important phone numbers taped to the door of a kitchen cupboard; it seemed a waste to have them both hanging around with nothing to do. Outside there was a sharp east wind, the sky a dense blanket of grey cloud. ‘My father always used to hate January,’ said Thea. ‘I think he got it from my grandad. He was a farmer and had to be outside in all weathers. I remember wondering how he could bear it, year after year.’

‘We’ve got soft,’ said Lucy. ‘I find myself feeling
sorry for the poor sheep and other things outside all year round. And then I remind myself how daft that is. After all, in olden times, everything had to survive on what they could find. There haven’t always been people to bring them hay and mangolds.’ The last word sounded odd and Thea repeated it.

‘Mangels?’

‘You know – mang’l’worzels, like in Worzel Gummidge.’

‘No. What are they?’

‘Vegetables. Like sugar beet. Sheep love them. The farmer down the track gives them to the sheep, even now. I walk that way sometimes to watch them at feeding time. She scatters them in an old muck spreader.’ Thea watched the woman’s animated face, wondering at the childlike pleasure she was displaying at the thought of a farmer feeding her sheep.

‘How nice,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Can people eat them?’

‘Probably. Might be a bit indigestible. But we eat swedes and parsnips, much to the horror of the French. They’d be much better than nothing in a famine, I’m sure.’ Again there was a faint air of relish in Lucy’s voice, as if the idea of a famine was secretly rather appealing.

At last it was time for her to go. ‘Look,’ she said, waving a cheque under Thea’s nose. ‘I
thought I ought to give you half the money now, and half when I come home. Is that all right?’

‘Oh! I don’t usually – I mean, people generally pay me at the end.’

‘Well, I’m not “people”. I can’t leave you destitute for a whole month, can I? You’ll need to buy some food, and fuel for your car, and presumably pay your own bills at home. Here, take it. Otherwise I might spend it all on cocktails and gambling in the sunshine.’

Thea heard this as ‘gambolling in the sunshine’, and giggled at the image. ‘Well, thanks,’ she said, trying not to show the small thrill she felt as she read the figure on the cheque. Seven hundred and fifty pounds – and that was only half the full sum. Lucy Sinclair had made no demur about paying her the fifty pounds a day that Thea had tentatively suggested was the going rate for a sitter who took up residence. It still felt like being paid for having a holiday and doing almost nothing, despite the many pitfalls she had encountered since she started the work.

Lucy leant down and kissed Jimmy, then stood up with tears in her eyes. ‘Selfish cow that I am,’ she sniffed. ‘You will take good care of him, won’t you?’

Thea drove her temporary employer to the station at Moreton-in-Marsh and waved her on her way.
Driving back down the A429, she recognised much of the road from previous sojourns in the area. She passed Lower Slaughter just a short way off the road to her right, and then Cold Aston, a few miles further west. But she knew hardly anyone in either village well enough to count them as friends. There was a woman in Cold Aston, who she had first met a year ago, and again the previous summer – their relationship had taken some knocks on both occasions, and Thea was in no hurry to risk a third bruising encounter. And there was a man in Lower Slaughter; a man who had got under her skin more than she had liked to acknowledge to herself at the time. Knowing he was going to be so close by for the next month created a small flame of interest at the back of her mind. She had persuaded herself that there could be nothing between them, that the whole idea was folly – and yet, he had taken root in her consciousness, and intruded uncomfortably often into her dreams.

She cruised unhurriedly down the hill to the crossroads, with Hampnett ahead and slightly to the right, Northleach to the left. On a whim, she turned right onto the A40, and then left into the small road leading through the hamlet, past the church and its neighbouring farm.

Old man’s beard straggled over the hedges,
adding to the general greyness of the landscape. The January light was poor, with a faint damp mist covering everything. She met no other cars, and saw no living creature until she had passed the minimal village centre and was approaching the turn for Lucy’s Barn. A few yards before the junction there was a man walking along the road, facing the oncoming traffic, so that Thea had to pull out to avoid him. He gave no sign of awareness that there was a car alongside him, although she was close enough to get a good look at his face.

He was tall and thin, and somehow the same shade of grey as the surrounding winter hedges. There were deep lines on his face, which sported a straggly grey beard, and his narrow shoulders were slumped. Something about his loose gait suggested bony knees and fragile ankles. His longish hair flopped around his face, and his beard disappeared into a grubby-looking scarf.

‘I wonder who that is,’ she said to the dog beside her. Hepzie appeared as impervious to the encounter as the man himself had been.

Preparations for the winter month in the middle of nowhere had been made carefully. For Christmas, Thea had requested DVDs, computer games and books. She had compiled a list of long lost friends and relations to whom she
would write rambling letters. She would take things slowly, reading a daily newspaper and listening to the radio. And she would teach herself lacemaking – a secret ambition she had nursed for twenty-five years. Her sister Jocelyn had given her a lace cushion, two dozen bobbins decorated with beads, a book of instructions and several reels of cotton. It was magically tantalising, in its own cotton bag with large red flowers printed on it, and she was itching to get started.

She visited the donkey when she got back to the house, stroking its long ears, burying her hand in the soft hair and mumbling daft nothings to it. The donkey was, Lucy had assured her, the easiest of all the animals. ‘He’ll patrol the paddock twice a day, whatever the weather,’ she said. ‘But apart from that he’ll mostly stay in the shed. I think he dreams a lot. Watch his face and you can see he’s remembering happy times.’

The donkey was about thirty years old, and had no cause for complaint about his lot. He had belonged to a family not far away, living with his jenny mother until she died. Then the family opted to move to Spain, initially deciding to take the donkey along. At the last minute, the expense and bother of this had changed their minds, and he had come to live with Lucy quite cheerfully. ‘He never had a name,’ Lucy said. ‘Just Donk, mostly.’

He was a big brown individual, not like the furry grey donkeys of seaside tradition. His face was on a level with Thea’s, as she talked to him. Hepzie sat tolerantly at a distance, not tempted to join in the exchange. The paddock was about three acres in size, sloping downwards away from the barn, and fenced with a new-looking wire-and-post arrangement. A metal gate led into another field at the bottom of the slope, which Lucy had explained was recently installed. ‘It’s the only way a large vehicle can get in and out of the paddock,’ she had said. ‘Although that field doesn’t belong to me. There are beef cattle in there for most of the winter.’

The lower field was an odd shape, and Thea eventually worked out that it had at one time included Lucy’s paddock. One corner had been carved out of it, leaving a narrow strip to the north, and a much larger rectangle to the west.

The cat was a slinky black female, barely a year old. ‘She’s called Spirit,’ Lucy had told her. ‘She’s very self-sufficient. The worst thing is the creatures she catches and brings into the house. There was a slow worm not long ago. I suggest you keep all the bedroom doors closed. Otherwise things die under the beds and make a dreadful smell.’

The bedrooms numbered two, and were suspended over the ground floor rooms on
a platform which ended about two thirds of the way along the length of the former barn. A gallery overlooked the living room, with a balustrade to prevent accidental falls. The stairs were open-tread, rising from the hallway, and leading to a corner of the gallery. It was, according to Thea’s inexpert judgement, very cleverly designed to make best use of the limited light. The bedrooms each had a small square window, while downstairs most of the lighting came from one large area of glass at the far end of the building, by the odd device of having the partitions between the rooms only eight feet high. Above them there was empty space. The idea of walls without ceilings was peculiar, and Thea was momentarily reminded of lavatory cubicles. The room furthest from the big window was a study, full of computer-related hardware, with only the scantiest of natural illumination.

She had, of course, been in barn conversions before, but had never properly considered the process of transformation. Lucy had been very ingenious in the way she’d conformed to the regulations restricting what was allowed. ‘Though why on earth it should matter that the thing continues to look more like a barn than a house escapes me,’ she had sighed. ‘And the real irony is that when I needed to put up two new sheds outside for the animals, there was nothing
to control what they looked like. I could have erected steel bunkers, or glass-and-concrete monstrosities, just as long as they weren’t too enormous.’

Lucy’s voice echoed in her head as she explored the house in which she was to spend the coming month. Every small remark was magnified into significance, a clue as to how that month would be. The only mention of neighbours came with a brief comment about the continuing track past the Barn. ‘That leads down to the next farm. They’re busy at this time of year – you probably won’t see anything of them.’

Thea had experienced neighbouring farmers before, and knew how reclusive they could be. On the other hand, it made sense to know something of her closest neighbours. ‘Is it a family?’ she asked.

‘Not really. Old Kate and her aged parent, that’s all. He’s not well, so she’s got her work cut out.’ She shuddered gently. ‘It tends to make her irascible, so try not to annoy her. That woman’s temper is legendary.’

‘Old Kate?’ Thea raised an eyebrow at the less-than-respectful epithet, but nothing more was forthcoming. Lucy had been in overdrive, rushing her surrogate from one part of the property to another, throwing out random pieces of information as she went.

The heating was on, the modern insulation
of the conversion efficiently keeping it where it should be. ‘Underfloor,’ Lucy had informed her. ‘It cost a fortune, but is pure luxury.’
Not luxury
enough,
thought Thea,
if you have to bolt for the
Canaries when January arrives
.

The mournful presence of Jimmy in the conservatory nagged at her through everything she did. Hepzie, too, was intrigued by the other dog, and whined at the door every few minutes. ‘Come on, then,’ said Thea. ‘Let’s go and talk to him.’

As predicted, the lurcher ignored the spaniel when they entered the room, but he raised his head to gaze enquiringly into Thea’s face. She knelt down beside him, and cupped his head in her hands. ‘You poor thing,’ she crooned. ‘It’s not much of a life, is it? What are we going to do with you?’

Jimmy sighed and laid his head back on the felt of his warm bedding. Hepzie approached cautiously and nosed him gently. He turned to look at her, and to Thea’s amazement began to lick the spaniel’s head, right between the eyes. Hepzie melted, lying down full stretch against the sparse grey hair of her new friend’s side. Thea almost cried. ‘Hey!’ she murmured, ‘well done you.’ And then she remembered that they’d be leaving again in a month, and perhaps two doggie hearts would be broken by the separation.

Outside it was already getting gloomy at half past three, and Thea was unsure what to do next. The rabbits would want to be fed, as would the donkey, but it seemed far too early to settle them down for the night. She could phone or email her daughter, to say she’d arrived and was already in harness. At the back of her mind was the thought that whatever she did today would become the routine for the next month, which meant she should give it some serious thought.

As she moved to leave the room, both dogs watched her. ‘Come on, then,’ she invited. ‘Why don’t you both come outside for a bit?’

Hepzie was at her side instantly, but Jimmy didn’t move. He was, however, quite alert to his new friend’s behaviour, and when she looked back at him, he slowly got to his feet. ‘Good dog!’ Thea applauded. ‘Come and have a bit of exercise.’

She tried in vain not to think of the sadistic treatment he might have endured at the hands of people she could not begin to envisage. The expression in his eyes spoke of hesitation, wary anticipation of pain or abuse. ‘It’s OK, Jimmy,’ she crooned. ‘I’m not going to hurt you. But you do have to go outside sometime, and it might as well be now.’

He made no move to follow her, so she took down the lead that was hanging from a hook on the wall, and fastened it to his collar. He
cooperated when she pulled him gently, but was plainly far from enthusiastic.

Outside, on the patch of grass that Lucy had identified as his toilet, he relieved himself, and then stood passively waiting for whatever might happen next. ‘Jimmy, you’re going to break my heart,’ Thea told him. She could feel tears at the back of her nose, and an accompanying annoyance with herself for being so sentimental. But hadn’t Lucy used almost the same words? Was not this the legacy of the dog’s ill-treatment – that softer souls would grieve for his hurt, for years after the event?

The day closed down, leaving hours of winter evening to be filled. Briskly, Thea got herself organised, stacking her DVDs on top of the television and plugging in her laptop where it sat on a small round table in a corner. ‘Move anything that’s in your way,’ Lucy had said. ‘It won’t bother me at all.’ And there had been things to be moved. Lucy Sinclair was not unduly tidy, with old computer magazines and other clutter on most surfaces. ‘This is nothing – you should see my workroom,’ she had laughed. When Thea went for a look, she was genuinely shocked. All four walls were shelved, the shelves groaning with an eccentric mix of discs, boxes, cables, potted plants, books, mysterious pieces of
computer hardware, large and small. Everything was dusty. It felt like a cave.