Read Online A Grave in the Cotswolds by Rebecca Tope - Free Book Online

magnificent length of topiary hedge, which we could not properly see. It was twelve or fifteen feet high, at least. There was something medieval and forbidding about it. The contrast between the Quaker modesty and this piece of ostentation was unsettling. There were no people around. ‘Might as well get back,’ said Jessica. ‘Not much more to see here.’
    When we got back to the cottage, the sun was shining, but the wind still strong. We stood indecisively at the junction with the small side road containing the cottage. ‘That’s the road to Blockley,’ Jessica told Paul, pointing ahead and to the right.
    I tried to puzzle out the geography. ‘The grave’s down there, isn’t it?’
    Jessica gave me a withering look. ‘How can you not know?’ she demanded.
    ‘These little lanes are very confusing,’ Thea defended me. ‘It took me days to get it all straight. It’s one of those places where it can be quicker to walk across the fields than meander round the lanes by car.’
    Jessica seemed unconvinced. She actually marched across the road diagonally, to where the Blockley turn-off was. ‘There!’ she pointed. ‘It’s about half a mile down there. We drove up here only a couple of hours ago.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said, following her. ‘I realise now. I came back up there, after making my phone calls to—’
    ‘Hello,’ she interrupted. ‘Something’s going on.’ Following her gaze, I noted a couple of cars parked oddly further up the road.
    ‘Nothing that need concern you,’ said Thea, who had drifted after us, with the dog. ‘Stop being a police officer for one day, can’t you?’
    But Jessica and Paul had already loped off to investigate, and we stood watching them. It was all going on about two hundred yards away, by a wooden gate that I rather thought was the one I had used to emerge from the field into the road, after my phone calls. I saw Jessica jerk herself upright in an assertion of her professional status. I saw Detective Paul reach for a phone in his pocket, and wave instructions at the three people assembled by the gate. He called to a fourth, somewhere out of sight, who suddenly materialised as if he had been sitting or kneeling and now stood up.
    ‘Oh, my God,’ said Thea. ‘It can’t be. Damn it, it is. Something awful’s happened.’ She looked down at her dog, which met her gaze. ‘Brace yourself, Heps. Here we go again.’
    ‘What?’ I demanded. ‘What do you mean?’
    ‘I’ll go and find out,’ she said. ‘Can you hold Hepzie?’
    She trotted along to join the others, while I followed hesitantly with the spaniel. ‘There’s a dead man in there,’ said a shrill woman, waving at the patch of scrubby woodland beyond the gate. ‘I heard his phone going off, and when I looked, I could see his legs. My husband went to see. He says it’s horrible.’
    Already she was repeating words almost drained of meaning, the shock alone giving her voice its high tones. She must have recited them to the two people from the second car, and then to Jessica and Paul. The picture she painted was clear enough, though – except she and her husband must already have been parked, with the engine off and the window open, if they were to stand a chance of hearing a ringing phone. Jessica evidently had the same thought at that moment.
    ‘Had you stopped here for some reason?’ she asked.
    ‘Yes!’ The woman’s excitement was at fever pitch. ‘David thought he saw a green woodpecker in that tree, and stopped for a better look. It flew away, just as he wound his window down.’
    David was leaning against the gate, looking grey. That left me and Paul to be masterful and manly and all that stuff. Paul was looking at his phone in a dazed sort of fashion, which gave me a flicker of satisfaction. Even he couldn’t order up a signal at will, it seemed. But then he began keying in numbers and I realised he was connected after all. I handed Thea’s spaniel back to her, and strode to the gate,