Trouble in the Cotswolds (The Cotswold Mysteries) by Rebecca Tope Page B

neighbour. Apparently there’s a giant hogweed by the shed.’
    ‘Wow. I love giant hogweed.’
    ‘So do I.’ He spoke with a boyish wonder, which made her laugh. ‘But most people regard it as the spawn of the devil.’
    ‘So what are you saying? About the house?’
    ‘I don’t know. But let me get breakfast sorted, and the hospice visited, and I’ll phone you back. Midday sometime, I expect. I’ll have to find out how Maggs is before I decide anything.’
    Her spirits leapt at the implications. Already her headache seemed to be fading. ‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Nice to talk to you.’
    ‘And you.’
     
    She felt so much better after that conversation that she wondered whether the whole flu thing was psychosomatic after all. Had she been so full of self-pity at spending a solitary Christmas that she had made herself ill with it? Of course not, she decided – but perhaps there was an
element
of that, all the same. The pleasure at hearing Drew’s voice had quelled the activities of the sneaky virus for a while, at the very least.
    It was Sunday, December 23rd, she reminded herself.Before long the church bells were sure to start ringing. Outside, the sky was brighter than the past few days. When she opened the back door to let the dogs out, the air was crisper. A perfect day for a walk on the wolds, if she’d been up to it. The shortest day had passed, and slowly the year would turn. It was a moment for pagan reflections about the reliability of the seasons and the timelessness that came with their predictable repetitions. A day for musing on the human condition and what it all meant. Drew would be good at that – and Damien would be hopeless. The undertaker trumped the fundamentalist Christian when it came to facing the eternal verities. Drew had freely stated that he didn’t really believe in God, that he couldn’t see a place for that whole layer of additional explanation and power that went with the idea of a deity. ‘I prefer to think of everything just getting along by itself,’ he said. ‘No need for a higher intelligence controlling it all.’
    Thea hadn’t argued with him, but somewhere deep down she still wondered whether they might be missing something, and in due course would choose after all to embrace an extra dimension involving interactions between people that somehow weren’t covered by Drew’s scenario. She found she was rather looking forward to a future in which matters spiritual might take a larger role.
    So she did not phone Damien after all. She forced herself to eat two Weetabix and drink a large mug of coffee. When the headache came back in full force, shetook two more painkillers. They were half gone already, and there was only one sachet of Lemsip left. Only then did she remember her car, and how she was stranded in a village with no shop on a Sunday.
    There were two police cars outside, and sounds of activity in the house next door. Plenty of scope for a whole team of SOCOs, she supposed. Who would be the senior investigating officer this time, she wondered? Most likely Sonia Gladwin, who would not want to give up Christmas with her twin sons and long-suffering husband. Thea had a confused picture of people like the detective superintendent and Drew Slocombe wading through a morass of obligations and distractions, determined to give their children the attention that other people’s had. Her sister Jocelyn was married to a civil servant who took the full complement of bank holidays without a second thought. He would throw himself into games with the children and abandon all thought of the outside world. The fact that he had once meted out violence to his wife had tainted him, admittedly, but as a father he was irreproachable.
    And Jeremy Higgins was another thwarted family man, she supposed. He had referred briefly to kids once or twice, and gave every sign of being ordinarily married. He would have to interview and question a range of witnesses and suspects in this