A Cotswold Christmas Mystery

left him exhausted. It was several minutes before he remembered his absent mother. Her car had not been there when he returned home, which had bothered him at the time, but not enough to prevent him from slipping into a deep sleep the moment he lay down.
But now he was pierced by a feeling of acute concern. Where was his mother? While she was undeniably a woman of fierce independence, and even fiercer obstinacy, she would never leave for such a long time without explanation. He tried to think of reasons why she might so abruptly disappear. Something to do with Christmas seemed the most persuasive idea. An enforced two days of sitting around the house eating too much and bickering might have struck her as unbearable. Or perhaps the lurking presence of Carla Blackwood’s two daughters, just over the fence, had felt insupportable. There was, after all, no absolute requirement for Beverley to remain at home and understandable reasons why she might choose not to.
But where would she go and why wouldn’t she tell her husband and son?
For several years now, she had gone her own way, treating the bonds of marriage as of diminishing significance. Digby had been forced to accommodate himself to it until he discovered that he was himself liberated by this loose arrangement. Beverley had been an entirely adequate mother to her two children, until they finished school. Then she had swiped her hands together, given them beaming smiles and told them she intended to devote the rest of her life to pleasing herself. ‘In the nicest possible way,’ she had added with a laugh.
But she had been civilised about it. She mounted a large cork board on the wall and embellished it with dozens of drawing pins, several of them holding clean white sheets of paper. ‘Just write your movements up here,’ she instructed. ‘Dates and places.’
‘Wouldn’t a simple calendar suffice?’ asked her husband. ‘Or one of those boards you can wipe clean?’
‘Or stick notes onto the fridge with magnets?’ suggested Ant.
‘This way’s best,’ his mother insisted. ‘Work from left to right, see. There’s space for all kinds of information, and we can refer back if necessary.’
Two years after that, Aldebaran had grabbed a felt tip, and written ‘I’m off to America. See y’all. Deb.’
And she had gone, a month later, never to be seen again. Her note was still on the board, after ten years’ absence. Ant peered at it now. Cluttered, dusty scraps of paper curling at the edges, they still used it once in a while. Nothing recent, though. Nothing from Beverley to explain where she’d gone so suddenly.
The approach of Christmas had seen all three of them scrambling to take advantage of the increased commerce that came with the festival. Digby had been running his stalls at a dozen different village hall sales, offering poinsettias, hyacinths, wreaths, mistletoe, holly, as well as keeping his regular market stall going, selling bric-a-brac and general junk. The van was permanently crammed with plants, packaging and fancy pots. Beverley went with him now and then, but her own activities centred more around textiles. She made rugs and wall hangings, blankets and bags, which she sold to pretentious emporiums all around the Cotswolds. She spun and dyed the wool herself, as well as running classes in a whole range of handicrafts. The Frowses were always busy.
‘Didn’t she have a row with old Blackwood a couple of days ago?’ Ant said slowly. ‘Was that Wednesday? She was upset about it that evening.’
‘Bloody swine,’ said Digby, automatically. He was a heavy man, whose past life had been full of incident, if his stories could be believed. Now in his late sixties, he had once been the manager of the whole estate, when it had been a fruit farm. Four hundred acres of apples, pears, plums, apricots and cherries had been grown there. The gates had been open to the public, who came to pick their own, or buy in bulk. But then it had failed, largely thanks to EU regulations and various social changes, and Digby had been out of work. Not, however, out of a home. The cottage was ‘tied’ and the family had a perfect right to stay in it for the rest of their lives. The entire estate had been sold, eighteen years earlier, to a millionaire who fancied a rural Cotswold lifestyle, but was appalled at the presence of a ramshackle cottage only yards from his own handsome Georgian home.
The landlord’s name was Rufus Blackwood, and he was the owner of the whole Crossfield Estate, now amounting to six hundred acres on the edge of Broad Campden. It had ceased to function as a fruit farm years before, and all the apple and plum trees had been rooted out. Now it was grazing land, maintained more as a decorative park than a working farm. Alpacas and Highland cattle strolled over the close-cropped acres, a few fields were given over to growing lavender, a few more to fast-growing willows intended for biofuel. Blackwood was exceedingly rich, but he still enjoyed exploiting whatever government subsidies might be there for the taking. The Old Stables were a perpetual thorn in his side, the very sight of which enraged him. He and his Russian-born wife had decided to try to persuade the Frowses to leave by a campaign of harassment that had Beverley especially in a constant state of vigilance. She wrote down every detail of every underhand act, preparing herself for a legal defence that might never be needed.
The electrified fence around the whole property, with the gates and the keypads that had to be operated to open them, were several steps too far, as anybody would agree. Even though Digby had so cleverly circumvented the need for a code, the outrage persisted. The moment anyone lifted the phone, they were automatically connected, and the gate would swing open as if by magic. It was immensely satisfying, and a very good joke against the Blackwoods –