Shadows in the Cotswolds by Rebecca Tope Read Free Book Online Page B

she could just indicate the exact location of the person concerned, they would quickly have everything in hand. She contemplated her choices: she could tell him in plain English that she haddone this before, and knew exactly what the procedure was, or she could flutter her eyelashes gratefully and let him get on with it. There were temptations to both options.
    ‘I know who she is,’ she said, neutrally. ‘And I can tell you that her father is expected here later today.’
    ‘Thank you, madam. That’s very helpful. Now, this way, am I right?’
    ‘Not quite, no. She’s down that little path, about a hundred yards or so. You won’t miss her. I covered her up with a rug. There was a crow …’
    He made a peculiar sucking noise through his teeth. ‘Shouldn’t touch anything, you know.’
    ‘I didn’t. I just dropped it over her.’ Too late, she realised there would now be contaminating fibres, hairs, skin cells on the body that ought not to be there. ‘Sorry,’ she mumbled. ‘I suppose it was rather silly of me.’
    The constable spoke for the first time, giving her a supportive little smile. ‘You weren’t to know,’ he said.
    Oh, but I was
, she wanted to argue, but instead gave him the grateful flutter she had been debating. There was always the faint possibility that they would never find out who she – Thea Osborne – was. There was always the chance that Melissa had died of natural causes, or that someone was at that moment in Cheltenham police station confessing to having killed her. There might not be any sort of investigation at all.
    It might have been her lack of hysteria that gaveher away; that suggested even to these tunnel-visioned policemen that something was not as usual. A single woman in a strange house – that much they had somehow ascertained – finding a dead body in the early morning woods, should not be so calmly collected. She caught an exchanged look, a raised eyebrow that was beginning to border on suspicion. Here was something unnatural, some story well beyond the obvious, which they felt themselves unequal to. ‘This one’s for the detectives, right enough,’ she heard the sergeant mutter, before he became welded to his telephone, his expression strained.
    The constable shepherded her back to the house, and permitted her to answer the familiar questions before he had a chance to pose them. ‘Her name is Melissa, surname presumably Meadows. I saw her last night, at about five-thirty. She was cheerful and said she was meeting someone at the pub. I don’t know which pub or who the person was. This house belongs to her uncle, Oliver Meadows, who is away for a fortnight. I’m looking after the property while he’s away. His brother is expected here later this morning. He’s Melissa’s father.’
    Clumsily the constable wrote it all down, referring to the G5, which would have to be filled in as soon as the doctor had been. He thanked her, bemusedly, before gathering himself to say, ‘You’ve done this before, haven’t you?’
    ‘I’m afraid so,’ she smiled wanly. ‘It seems to happen to me very much too often.’ 
    ‘And you don’t know these people?’
    ‘I never met any of them until yesterday. But my mother knows the brother – Fraser Meadows. She knew him fifty years ago, in London. They’ve just rediscovered each other.’
    This lad was never going to make detective, she judged. He showed no sign of registering the potential oddness, the underlying possibilities in the story he had been given. He was decently bovine, striving to reassure her that she was safe, seeking to offer her sympathy and family liaison services. She was a witness, and witnesses were one step away from being victims. They would be shocked and anxious, their memories unreliable and their emotions fragile. They were to be treated with kindness, and helped to get their facts straight. Nothing from the textbook was fitting this situation and the boy was floundering.
    ‘My daughter’s a