‘That’s just about the size of it,’ said Digby.
‘I’m taking the dog out,’ Ant decided. ‘I need to have a think.’
The morning was typical of December. The sun might be relatively high in the sky, but it was faint behind misty clouds. The temperature was close to freezing. The bare trees looked dead and slightly threatening where they marked the line of the Monarch’s Way, up over the hill towards Broad Campden. But their dormancy would be short-lived. Already, with the passing of the shortest day, their sap would be stirring, the buds rapidly swelling, even now, in midwinter. There would be snowdrops in another two or three weeks, and he had seen the little green daffodil shoots nosing through the grass in their scruffy garden. Beverley had planted two hundred bulbs, nearly twenty years ago now, when she had been happy to live in the cottage, tied as it was to Digby’s job. Since then it had come to feel less and less as if it was theirs – the landlord so clearly determined to dispose of them, and probably pull the whole building down the moment they were gone.
Ant spent several minutes reproaching himself for wilful blindness to the state of his parents’ marriage. Suddenly everything came into focus, and the full extent of the unravelling became impossible to ignore any longer. The separate bedrooms, the absence of anything resembling conversation. Beverley’s refusal to discuss their meals, to plan a holiday, share in any outings – it all pointed to a loss of affection – ever perhaps an active dislike. For the hundredth time he reran his mother’s Saturday phone call and came to the startling conclusion that she could have said He’s dead to me and I can’t come home. There had been a crackle on the line, a noisy street competing for his attention. Could she have been talking about Digby all along?
The only things his parents really had in common were grief for Aldebaran and animosity towards the Blackwoods. And, he supposed, his own welfare. He wondered whether he was actually doing them any good by hanging around and behaving like a teenager. He was in his thirties, for heaven’s sake! When anyone hinted that it was high time he set up home on his own, he experienced a panic that he struggled to conceal from himself. ‘Can’t afford it, mate,’ he would say lightly. But to himself he insisted that his parents could never function without him. They would be at the mercy of Rufus and Carla, trapped inside that dreadful fence, harassed and intimidated. ‘And the dog would miss me,’ he might add. The dog was mostly his, but Beverley loved it as much as he did, and Percy himself was very fond of Digby. It would be a cruel violence to either remove him, or leave home without him. He watched now as the lithe brown body cantered along the track, delighted to be having the first real freedom of the day. Percy was a most excellent dog, obedient and undemanding. His parentage was something vaguely gun dog – some retriever in there and a dash of setter, perhaps. He’d come from a rescue, a few months old, and nobody could say what his forbears were. ‘He was in a dustbin,’ the Frowses were told.
But now something drastic was happening, right under his nose, and he was at a total loss to understand it. Everything had changed. His mother had abandoned him and his father on Christmas Day, to go to a distant friend who had not been mentioned for at least ten years. The landlord was dead, and his wife was in danger of losing her wits, thanks to the bizarre games her daughters were playing. Had one of those women killed Rufus, for fairly obvious reasons to do with financial gain? He tried to think back, to remember whether he had seen a strange car arriving, or heard strange voices at any time between Wednesday and Friday. The big house was within earshot of their cottage, but with no direct line of sight. Cars came and went along their fork of the driveway, and the Frowses did their best to ignore them. Beverley had, a year or two ago, found herself obsessively monitoring all the traffic, until she realised how unhealthy that was. ‘Why should I care about his life?’ she asked herself aloud. ‘He doesn’t care about mine.’
‘Quite right,’ said Digby.
They could not ignore the airborne visitors, however. The noise of a helicopter landing a hundred yards away was enough to drown all conversation and set the dog barking wildly. The very fact of a helipad made the whole family furious. It was ostentation of the most sickening kind. It was a signal from the Blackwoods that they were not just rich, they were hugely rich. They were the aristocracy of the Cotswolds, with money to burn, and nothing could stop them.
‘We owe it to the workers of the world to bring them down to earth,’ said Digby once. And he made even more of an effort to strew messy objects around the garden, and let the grass grow shaggy. ‘We’ll be the thorn in their sides, the clouts in their coffee, the mote in their eye, if it kills us,’ he added.
‘Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,’ Ant had laughed. For himself, he could see that the Blackwoods were an outrage, but he never took it quite as personally as his parents did. But now Blackwood was dead in very mysterious circumstances, and there were police people swarming about. Everything was in flux, and Ant could not work out where solid ground might lie. The phone call from his mother had not answered any of the important
