Free Death in the Cotswolds by Rebecca Tope

acknowledgement. I found myself quivering with shock and fear and horror.
    Somebody had killed her. This detail had slipped away into a less important place as I tried to commune with the remains of my friend. Unless – I examined the weapon again, the way Gaynor was lying – unless she could have done it to herself. But no – if that had been so, she’d still have her hands on the length of steel – or whatever they make knitting needles of these days – and would be lying awkwardly, legs sprawling. Instead, she had been neatly arranged, or so it seemed to me, by other hands. Placed squarely in a space created thousandsof years ago for another dead human being, whose bones had been carried off to a museum, or excavated by rodents before the archaeologists reached them.
    Recoiling at the implications, I stared dumbly at the scene. Somebody had put Gaynor there deliberately, as some kind of Samhain message. That appeared as obvious to me as if a large announcement had been pinned to the body. Somebody who knew what was planned for the Barrow in a few days’ time and had wanted to sully it. Somebody who had a powerful animosity towards paganism perhaps. But why Gaynor ?
    I knelt there trying to understand, before I could summon assistance. I needed to have some sort of explanation for myself before I could speak of it to anybody else. Because I knew already that the police would never understand unless somebody like me talked them through it. They would hear the word pagan and get no further than that. They would think this was the work of one of my group.
    In a sort of fugue state I paraded the individual members before my mind’s eye. Pamela, with her bright smile and cheerful enthusiasm; Ursula, argumentative and frustrated; Verona, mystical and inscrutable – and Daphne, the wife abandoned for the Freemasons. The two men, Kenneth and Leslie, hovered more faintly behind these four women. Kenneth was kindly, colourless and very gentle. Ihad never heard him speak angrily or seen him make a violent gesture. I liked Kenneth in an unthinking casual sort of way. I believed everybody did. Leslie was similar in his lack of overt masculinity. Quietly intense, was Leslie. I realised I hardly knew him, or what he was capable of.
    At last I got myself out of the little gate and onto the verge at the side of the road, where I started trying to flag down a passing car. It felt over-dramatic, almost ridiculous, but I kept at it, and the traffic kept storming past me. Five minutes later somebody finally stopped. It was a local man who I knew by sight. He left his car in a layby some yards further ahead and came running back to me. When I dragged him to the concavity and showed him my discovery, he took over with admirable efficiency. He called the police on his mobile, and in no time there were uniformed men and women running about, asking questions, including whether I knew the dead woman, taking photographs and notes, speaking into phones, tying yellow tape across the Barrow. The trauma of all this activity was greater than that of finding Gaynor – or if not greater, then different and barely tolerable. They trampled the Barrow, not knowing what it was. They shouted and moved jerkily in their excitement at having a full-scale murder on their hands. I hated them so much I could hardly hear or see or speak. Somebody put me into the back of a car and drove me home.
    I was shaking as they walked me to my house, unable to properly understand what was being said to me. There was a constant muttering going on, with glances at me that seemed to contain suspicion, concern, kindness, wariness, impatience in a dreadful kaleidoscope. I wondered whether they thought I might have killed Gaynor, and would shout at me until I confessed. And then I remembered Phil Hollis.
    I had a friend in a high place. This thought was briefly reassuring, something to hold on to in a world that had gone insane. I kept feeling Gaynor’s shoulder under my