Free Revenge in the Cotswolds by Rebecca Tope Page A

Whiteacres. Mr and Mrs Foster were not obsessively tidy; not ashamed to let the stair carpet get frayed or the occasional spider to set up home over a window. Curious for more information about them, she went into the dining room and in a heap of papers on one corner of the table she found an opened letter from an estate agent, enclosing details of a house in Frome, Somerset, priced at something very much lower than Galanthus House must have been worth. So they were downsizing, or at least moving to a cheaper area – which happened to be not far from Drew and his green cemetery. It was none of her business, not relevant to her commission, but it aroused her interest. Mr Foster must be retiring, she supposed. Perhaps they knew people in Somerset. Perhaps Drew knew somebody they knew.
    Poor Gwennie, she thought. Such an old dog would be dreadfully traumatised by a change of environment. She’d never find her way around. Were the Fosters planning to have her put down before they moved? Or was it all just a tentative plan for the future, scheduled for two or three years’ hence, and simply getting a feel for prices and facilities in other parts of the country?
    And wasn’t it a bit peculiar to have the details sent on paper in a letter? Didn’t people do it all onlinethese days? She remembered that her dealings with the Fosters had all been by phone from their first approach about house-sitting. A friend of a friend had passed them her name. She had not come across a computer in the house – but then people used iPads and even smaller gadgets to send their emails these days. And they took them along on holiday, leaving nothing in the house. Even so, Thea began to suspect that here was a highly unusual couple, not so very old, who did not engage in any online activity. It made her smile to think such people still existed.
    And so the afternoon drifted by, with no sense of urgency or obligation. At five she turned on the TV, and caught some local news, which made much of the discovery of a body in the Daglingworth quarry, but did not name the victim or the manner of his death. A little while later, a national news summary headlined a police raid on a nursing home in Somerset, which was suspected of either neglecting or actively killing a number of inmates. A whistleblower had drawn attention to the fact of a spate of deaths in a short time, with associated elements that might suggest all was not well.
    Thea knew instantly that the whistleblower was Drew. He had been taken seriously, to the extent that within hours the police had descended on the establishment. How did you ‘raid’ a nursing home? Did they batter down the door and dash down corridors shouting ‘Police!’? Almost certainly not. There’d bea quiet approach to the matron, or whatever the top person was called, and a request to see every scrap of documentation, with names of doctors and relatives and medications. But the media had got hold of it from the start. Probably listening in to police radio, she thought wryly.
    She broke the rule and phoned him.
     
    Drew was still agonising about his reckless reporting of the suspicious nursing home. The police had reacted quickly, and the place was already being investigated. ‘If they don’t find anything wrong, my career will be over,’ he wailed, plainly suffering from panic and regret. ‘They’ll know it was me – who else could it be? I’ll be blacklisted and scorned. I don’t know what made me do it.’
    ‘Conscience,’ she said.
    ‘I suppose so. It sounds horribly pretentious when you put it like that.’
    ‘Come on. You wouldn’t want your poor old mother starved to death in such a place – or whatever it is they did to them.’
    ‘No,’ he said doubtfully. ‘But it’s not so simple, is it? I mean – a lot of them probably
want
to get it all over with. They might be refusing food. You’re not allowed to force feed anybody, after all.’
    ‘That makes it worse,’ she said decisively.