Digby stopped his pacing and dropped his jaw. ‘You can’t be serious,’ he gasped. ‘So the careless bugger must have got himself tangled up in his own fence, then.’
Ant spoke at much the same moment. ‘That’s right − it must have been the fence. The old fool was so sure the medics had fixed his heart trouble once and for all – when all the time it just took a few volts … so why are they so sure it was murder?’
‘Something the pathologist found in this morning’s post-mortem,’ said Thea, belatedly trying not to say too much.
‘Have you spoken to the police, then?’ Ant was now the sharper of the two men, Digby still open-mouthed and speechless. ‘Are they telling you what they’re thinking?’
Thea was plainly embarrassed. ‘We’re friends, you see, me and Gladwin. And she knows I’m matey with you as well, so it seemed to make sense for her to come to me …’
‘You’re a spy,’ interrupted Digby angrily. ‘What the hell have you told her? Is it down to you that they’ve arrested Beverley?’
‘Um … well, in a way, I suppose. But they’d have found out anyway, of course.’
‘Found out what?’
‘That she’d been missing since before Christmas.’
‘How?’ Digby shouted. ‘How would they? Nobody else knew about that. Not a single soul. We don’t talk about our private business to anybody.’ He turned on his son. ‘You’ve been blabbing to this woman, haven’t you?’
‘You were right here as well,’ Thea pointed out. ‘You heard everything he said.’
‘And I knew at the time he was an idiot.’ The man’s rage, which did not come naturally to him, was rapidly subsiding. ‘Well, it’s done now,’ he groaned. He looked across the room to where Stephanie was loitering by the door. ‘And what are you doing bringing this little one into all this mess?’ he finished, with another flare of aggression.
Stephanie was unsettled by Digby’s angry words, but not especially alarmed. She trusted him to calm down quickly and return to his usual affable self. Anybody would be cross in his situation. The police thought Beverley had killed the Blackwood man and had taken her off to prison. She and Thea were wrong to be there at all – a point which Digby had been trying to make, she suspected. And he was probably right that Thea had interfered when she shouldn’t have done.
And now there was this new information about electrocution. That was the bit Thea had refrained from telling her, only a little while ago. She had an image of jagged forked lightning stabbing into the man, his hair on end and eyes staring. How could anybody deliberately arrange for that to happen?
‘We should probably go, then,’ said Thea. ‘I’m sure everything’s going to work out all right. Gladwin’s a good detective. She won’t charge Beverley without rock-solid evidence.’
‘We hope,’ said Ant. ‘If that’s right about electrocution, I still can’t see that they can be sure it wasn’t an accident.’
Thea averted her gaze, with a little shake of her head. ‘I never was much good at physics,’ she said.
‘What happened about that jewellery thing?’ Stephanie asked, out of the blue. ‘Did you tell Thea that somebody found it? Where was it?’
‘Oh, yes,’ said Ant quickly. ‘That’s got nothing to do with all this other stuff. One of Mrs B’s daughters had it all the time.’
‘Really?’ Thea was obviously intrigued. ‘They had the decency to come and tell you that, did they?’
‘Not exactly,’ said Ant uncomfortably. ‘But it’s not relevant – take my word for it.’
‘Yes, you do that,’ echoed Digby. He gave Stephanie a rueful look. ‘Best not to ask too many questions, pet. You never know where they might lead.’
‘Oh,’ said Stephanie, feeling a quiver of alarm.
‘Come on, then,’ said Thea, gathering child and dog, and opening the front door. ‘We’ll get out of your way. But I hope we can get together again soon, and patch up any differences.’
‘Differences!’ snorted Digby, waving them away.
‘What a mess this place is,’ Thea muttered, as they crossed the junk-filled garden. ‘Look at it!’ There was a rusty wheelbarrow not far from her, containing a car battery and a roll of wire. Next to it was a buckled sheet of galvanised iron and a garden fork with a broken handle. ‘It all needs to go to the tip, if you ask me.’ She kicked at a dented metal bucket that stood close to her foot. It fell over, despite being full of water, with a dirty sponge at the bottom.
Stephanie scrutinised every item, including the bucket and its spilled contents. ‘I expect some of it’s useful,’ she said vaguely.
‘I doubt it. Looks like complete rubbish to me. Engines, old lawnmowers, chunks of oily metal – you’d have to have a proper workshop to make anything of this lot.’
‘Mm,’ said Stephanie, still examining the various objects with close attention.
They trailed back along the footpath, each feeling far from cheerful. Stephanie went over the accusation that Thea was a spy, and could see how it might seem that way. In fact, it could even be true that the police would never have arrested Beverley if Thea hadn’t told the young Finch Graham about the woman being missing. She had worked out without being told that he had passed the information on to his senior officer. Very little of the whole business had been conducted out of her hearing, anyhow. Much of the time, Thea and Jessica seemed to forget that she was there, paying close attention.
‘It can’t have been Mrs Frowse who killed him, can it?’ she asked, after a few minutes.
Thea replied quite readily, apparently uttering thoughts she’d just been mulling over. ‘It’s hard to see anybody deliberately rigging up some sort of lethal device, and then connecting him to it and killing him. He wouldn’t just keep still, would he? I mean – he was outside, in his pyjamas. It might work if some maniac doctor decided to do it in his surgery
