Slaughter in the Cotswolds Read Online Free

alive, playing with Hepzie and laughing. But to her own shamed surprise, she woke with an urgent desire for the dream not to have been true. She had loved him, even rejoiced in him at times, and yet now he was dead, she wanted him to stay that way. The Lazarus story came to her mind, with the horror of that raised corpse stumbling through the streets, repelling everyone he encountered. The dead, she concluded, really ought to stay dead.
    All of which led to a nagging feeling of guilt towards her mother. Not only had Thea abandoned her in her grief, but she had beeninfinitely relieved to have a good reason to do so. Despite the fact that she had experienced widowhood herself and might be expected to offer empathy and consolation in abundance, she knew her mother would adopt an entirely different pattern of mourning from her own. When Carl had been killed without warning in his early forties, Thea had been numb for weeks, and then so wracked with pain that she could scarcely function at all. Only her daughter and her father had been permitted anywhere near her, and they often proved to be intolerably irritating. Even a year afterwards, she had still preferred her own company, sinking into strategies that she had finally recognised as unwholesome – inventing ways to hurt herself in order to drown the emotional anguish. The distraction of the house-sitting had saved her, she believed now. She had met people with their own crises and losses, and slowly discovered in herself a hard-won wisdom that sometimes seemed to help.
     
    Saturday morning dawned uncertainly, streaks of grey across the lower part of the sky suggesting a possible build-up of rain clouds later. Hepzie had clearly not forgotten the bat of the night before. She worked around the room, sniffing hard at skirting boards and glancing up at the ceiling every now and then.
    The room was small, furnished with a single bed, chest of drawers and a round table covered with a cloth embroidered lavishly with honeysuckle and poppies. A hand-made rug was placed beside the bed, its pile pleasantly long and warm to bare feet. Thea had left her suitcase on the floor, still packed apart from pyjamas and spongebag. There was nowhere to hang clothes, and she wasn’t tempted to use the chest of drawers. Living out of a suitcase was no great hardship.
    Phil had managed, after several months, to persuade her to make much greater use of her mobile phone. A busy senior police detective, he would often fail to answer a call, which forced her to master the art of texting. Every time she did it, she felt she had stepped into a different world from the one she had expected to inhabit for the rest of her life. Part of her felt it was pure nonsense, sending a handful of words to a friend or relative or lover, simply to remind them that you existed and had not forgotten them. It was a typical British substitute for intimacy, which only served to emphasise to her that she was more than happy to maintain her independence and spells of isolation. But part of her had grown to enjoy the link it forged between them. She composed her messages carefully, using proper spellings and punctuation. He made no remarkabout this, for fear of deterring her from making contact, but he himself would use u for ‘you’ and even l8 for ‘late’.
    So now she picked up the gadget from where it sat on the round table and thought about her mother, not Phil Hollis at all. She ought to phone and see how the new widow was feeling. Now, as never before, family unity was called for. But instead she found herself keying in her sister Emily’s number. Safer, she thought, than intruding on a huddled hopeless mother who would not respond to bracing comments down a phone line.
    Emily answered warily, sighing with relief when she recognised Thea’s voice. ‘Thank goodness,’ she breathed. ‘I thought you were Mum.’
    ‘Why? What’s she been doing?’
    ‘Oh – you know. She wouldn’t let me stay the night with her,