Slaughter in the Cotswolds Read Online Free Page A

and then spent about two hours crying down the phone at midnight. I told her to take a sleeping pill, but of course there aren’t any in the house. I can see she’s going to drive us all mad for the next twenty years.’ Maureen Johnstone was seventy-two – another twenty years was entirely feasible.
    ‘Bad luck,’ said Thea, sincerely. It was bad luck for Emily that she was the default daughter that their mother chose to cry on. Jocelyn had escaped into her own teeming demanding family, andThea had never been quite sympathetic enough for comfort. Her tendency to make logical comments highlighting the flaws in her mother’s arguments or pleas for support seldom went down well. Perhaps, she thought, it was Emily’s position in the family that had shaped her character, and really her essential nature wasn’t so uptight and controlling after all. It was an idle thought, since there seemed little that could be done about it, but it helped give her patience. ‘You ought to just take her at her word, and let her get on with it for a few days.’
    ‘I’m going to, don’t you worry. She has every right to be sad – but so do I. What about my grief?’ The last words emerged on a sob that sent chills through Thea. She hadn’t bargained for this. If she’d given it any thought at all, she’d concluded that Emily wouldn’t especially miss her father; had never seemed as close to him as Thea had been, and often found him irritating. Emily kept emotion on a tight rein. Thea couldn’t remember seeing her cry since she was thirteen.
    ‘Oh dear,’ she said feebly. ‘I suppose this is how it usually goes. We all have to retreat into our burrows and deal with it in our own way.’
    It was precisely the sort of sentiment that Emily could be relied on to agree with, in normal circumstances. But it seemed that a new normality was now in charge. ‘I’d really like to talk tosomebody about how I feel,’ came the amazing reply.
    ‘Oh. Well, I imagine Bruce is the person for that, then?’ Emily’s husband was in fact a most unlikely counsellor, a man who left the room at a brisk trot at the first hint of emotional revelations – but Thea was making no more assumptions.
    ‘Of course not, you idiot. I want to come and talk to you.’
    ‘When?’
    ‘Well, sometime between now and Monday morning. I have to be at work then.’
    ‘It isn’t very salubrious here. There’s a parrot…’
    ‘Come on, Thea. Don’t give me that. If it’s good enough for you to live in for umpteen weeks, then I can cope with it for a weekend. The people need never know.’
    ‘I’m here for two weeks,’ Thea corrected her. ‘Not umpteen.’ The prospect of a visiting relative was far from unusual. People seemed to join her at most of her house-sitting commissions, for various reasons. They thought she would be lonely; they wanted to share the adventure; and in Phil’s case, he saw it as a chance to enjoy a brief holiday with her. But Emily was the last person she had ever expected to suggest such a move.
    ‘So?’ her sister prompted. ‘Did you say it was Upper Slaughter?’
    ‘Lower. It isn’t very far away. It’ll take you just over an hour, at a guess.’ Emily lived in Aylesbury, which Thea had always found faintly comic. ‘There’s a parrot,’ she said again, as if this was a crucial detail.
    ‘I don’t mind parrots,’ said Emily. ‘Why do you keep saying that?’
    ‘I don’t know.’ Suddenly Thea remembered that she too was in grief for her father. She, as much as her sister or mother, had cause to be in a strange state, irrational and forgetful. She felt as if something would break if there was any hint of overload. She wanted peace and simplicity. The parrot, perhaps, threatened to become complicated.
    ‘Well, I’ll come after lunch then,’ said Emily as if it was all agreed. ‘I’ll bring an overnight bag, but I’m not sure I’ll stay. It depends how it goes. Tell me how to find you. What’s the