Free Revenge in the Cotswolds by Rebecca Tope

before her, feel his warm hugs and hear his hearty laugh. But Sundays were his sacred time with the children, and she seldom found herself included as part of the family. She was
not
part of the family, with Karen dead so short a time. There had been a few wintry walks since Christmas, and a dozen or more evenings together, which extended into the night, but not to the following morning. She had driven all the way back to Witney in the small hours, feeling both lucky and unlucky, blessed by Drew but thwarted by his children, with whom things were still liable to be awkward and difficult. Stephanie had a way of looking at her that made her itch with embarrassment.
    So, not for the first time, she found herself with no choice but to speculate on local happenings. The people she’d met were interesting, to say the least.Sheila Whiteacre was a delight, while Sophie and Nella were intriguing. There were loose ends in abundance, now the identity of the dead man was established. Jessica’s immediate suggestion that foul play might be involved was an added ingredient to the story, raising a host of possible motives even amongst the handful of people Thea had met so far. There would be others, if she cared to go out and find them: Ricky Whiteacre, for one, and people she still knew nothing about.
    The obvious scenario was that Danny had been prominent in a group intent on forcing a number of issues that locals might prefer left just as they were. Most people grumbled gently about change, but adapted to it well enough when it came. A large proportion of the residents of Cotswold villages were rich and powerful enough to organise life as they wanted it to be and ensure that they kept well clear of any nuisance. A wind farm on the top of Cleeve Hill was never going to happen. Fracking was unlikely. The landscape itself was relatively safe from predation, other than the erection of new houses in large numbers. Nobody liked new houses, however loudly the need for them might be asserted. It was always a need more acute somewhere else. All those neglected, weedy sites in the scruffy end of town – towns such as Reading, Croydon, even perhaps Guildford, but definitely not Cirencester or Winchcombe. They weren’t towns at all in that sense. They were oases of history, impervious to the vagaries of population and politics.
    Danny would inevitably have fallen foul of Farmer Handy and his intention of selling his field for building, along with the rest of the activists. But it was a big stretch from that to suspecting Handy of deliberately killing the man. Why Danny, when there were so many other protesters who would rise up to take his place? Besides, the house would or wouldn’t get built, regardless of who died amongst those who opposed it.
    Maybe it was the badgers, then. Dairy farmers wanted the animals dead and gone. The government was cautiously on their side, but very conscious of the opposite view. The whole question of what to do with annoying wildlife – foxes, badgers, squirrels, rabbits – never really went away, and was never properly understood by politicians. It wasn’t altogether understood by Thea, either. She just knew that it was very far from simple, with whole new layers involved when it came to badgers and foxes.
    The speculating occupied about half an hour, as she sat in the living room with both dogs on the sofa beside her. Gwennie leant a tentative snout on her thigh, and sighed. Hepzie rolled her eyes and fidgeted. Outside it was dry and reasonably bright, with almost no passing traffic. Lower End was apparently in the universal shutdown mode that was the norm for the Cotswolds. Whatever activity there might be at the quarry was quite out of sight and earshot. In any case, it would surely all be over by this time.
    Restlessly, she extracted herself from the dogs and went to the door into the hallway. It was a more characterful house than the one in Bagendon, but much less so than the one inhabited by the