Free Death in the Cotswolds by Rebecca Tope Page A

fingers, stiff and cold. I kept rerunning the previous day when she had been alive, walking, talking, knitting, breathing. She might have been annoying at times, demanding an uncomfortable level of sensitivity from me, but I couldn’t grasp that she was dead.
    Somebody joined me and the police officer on my doorstep, as I groped for my key. I looked at her blankly, unable to remember who she was. Then it came to me. It was Thea, Phil’s new girlfriend, the woman with the dog.
    ‘I’ll sit with you, if you’ll let me,’ she said. Her voice was pitched low, but sounded full and sweet, a voice you could rely on.
    ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled. ‘I’ll be all right soon.’
    There was more muttering and then the two of us were in my living room, sitting at the table. Iglanced at the sofa, wondering why we hadn’t gone to it first. I’d crammed a lot into this main room to leave space in the small back room for all the wool stuff. This was where sitting and eating and talking all happened.
    ‘I know I shouldn’t say this,’ Thea ventured, when the police people had all finally gone. ‘But I do know what it’s like. It’s happened to me twice this year.’
    I wasn’t interested. Her experience meant nothing to me. I was struggling to escape from all the sights and sensations and smells of Gaynor dead. It all reran, over and over, making anything else seem distant and insignificant.
    She went into the kitchen, the tiny area where there was a sink and a couple of cupboards and a place for chopping things. I heard mugs clinking and then the electric kettle starting to boil.
    ‘I never use the electric,’ I said confusedly. ‘There’s hot water on the Rayburn already.’ It annoyed me that she hadn’t the sense to see this for herself.
    ‘Does it matter?’ She side-stepped into the doorway so she could look at me.
    ‘Not really.’ I held my hands out in front of me, wondering at the shaking. ‘Look at me! Isn’t it weird.’ I laughed raggedly. ‘I’m supposed to be the one who’s all right with death. I give talks on it.’
    ‘I don’t think anybody’s all right with death,’ shesaid quietly. ‘I’m going to put sugar in this tea, if I can find some.’
    ‘That’s all right. I take sugar anyway.’ And for some reason this seemed immensely funny and I began to laugh. Then I found I couldn’t stop and there were tears everywhere and Thea was cradling me against her front.
       
    We talked after that for an hour or more. I told Thea all about Gaynor, her shyness, her fabulous knitting skills, her inoffensiveness. ‘Just a timid little Welsh girl, out of her natural environment,’ I summed up. ‘How could anybody possibly want to kill her?’
    Thea asked very few questions and supplied no answer to this one of mine. She just shook her head and glanced at her watch.
    But my own words were echoing in my head. Who? I stared at the blank screen of my television across the room. There was nobody. ‘It must have been a total stranger,’ I decided. ‘Somebody up to no good at the Barrow and Gaynor saw them.’
    ‘Did she often go to the Barrow?’
    How was I to explain? I looked at her helplessly. ‘It’s Samhain,’ I said.
    ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what that means.’ She did look genuinely sorry, as if she’d put me to a dreadful lot of bother.
    ‘The old pagan festival to mark the end ofsummer. Bonfires, slaughtering the livestock, all that. It’s around November the first, but it really gets going from the middle of October.’
    ‘Hallowe’en,’ she said.
    ‘Sort of,’ I sighed.
    ‘So – Gaynor was a pagan?’ she prompted.
    ‘No. But she liked Samhain. Ghosts and divinations. She thought it was exciting, I think. Took her out of herself.’ Speaking about Gaynor had acquired a horrible significance. For the first time I had to really think hard about every word I said. I couldn’t simply wheel out all the usual unexamined phrases as if they were pure truth. ‘I’m not