A Cotswold Christmas Mystery

plain-speaking fashion.
Drew flinched, and forced a smile. ‘What? Oh – nothing. Worrying about whether everyone’s going to like the presents I’ve got them. Families and all that sort of thing.’
Andrew gave this some thought. He was nearly twenty years older than Drew, a lifelong farmer driven out of business by TB in his cattle, and a fatal loss of hope for the future of agriculture. He and Fiona had sold their farm near Chedworth and accepted Drew’s offer of low-paid sporadic work as his assistant in the undertaking business. Fiona had remained in her job at the council, increasing her hours and enjoying the absence of livestock. ‘Everyone said we would miss the cows and sheep, but they were wrong,’ she repeated regularly, with a liberated laugh. The money they had managed to salvage from the sale would see them through to old age, even after buying a small bungalow on a new estate in the area.
‘You’ve got your family right here in front of you,’ said Andrew.
‘The most important ones, yes,’ said Drew. Only Stephanie overheard this remark, and wondered what it meant. She found herself sliding into a meditation about herself and Timmy and how they were Drew’s real family, more than Thea and Jessica were. And that brought her to the subject of Drew and Timmy, and their clumsy attempts to love each other. Because Timmy really wasn’t an irritating person. He was thin and small for his age, but he wasn’t stupid or mean or fussy about food. His very existence seemed to be the problem – a conclusion that Thea had once accidentally confirmed, when Stephanie heard her say, ‘You can’t blame him for being born, Drew. You’ve really got to try harder with him, you know you have.’ They’d been in their bedroom, and hadn’t seen Stephanie outside on the landing. Drew had groaned and agreed, saying, ‘Yes, I know.’ Nothing much had changed, though.
Except it had got better in the past week or so, because of Christmas. Timmy made a modest list of the presents he would like, all very serious stuff, and Drew had gone over it with him and told him he was very advanced in his grasp of history and maps and that sort of thing. He even said Timmy’s mother would have been proud of him, which was particularly kind, because Karen dying had probably been worse for Timmy than for anyone else.
Jessica was being kind to him now, as well. She let him go on about Pokémon for ages, and then said she’d read to him when he went to bed. Two more sleeps till Christmas Eve and she suggested a whole lot of things to do that would please him most. ‘Stephanie and Thea can see to the food, and we’ll go out for a walk,’ she said. ‘With the dog.’
‘That sounds great,’ Thea had said with a smile. ‘It’ll be good to have you out of the house for a bit. It’s all going to be terribly busy, with school breaking up so close to Christmas. I don’t know what they were thinking – the poor teachers must have hated it.’
Nobody cared about the teachers, and Stephanie was of the opinion that it was quite a good idea to jump straight from school to the main business of the holiday, without lots of boring days to wait for something to happen. She shook herself, and returned her attention to Andrew, who was watching her face.
‘No new funerals, then?’ he asked Drew. ‘Or have you turned the phone off?’
‘Just the one that came through yesterday. Luckily, the hospital’s keeping him for me until Wednesday, which is very decent of them. And the phone stays on. Anything that happens from now till Wednesday will have to wait, but at least they can call and tell us about it. Although we could do a removal on Tuesday, I suppose, if we absolutely had to.’
‘No problem,’ Andrew nodded. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’
‘We could do a burial Thursday or Friday, at a push,’ Drew went on. ‘But I have a feeling we’re not going to have any new business before the end of the week.’
‘People aren’t allowed to die at Christmas, are they, Dad?’ said Stephanie, pushing up under his arm, and gazing into his face. She wanted him to remember she was there, at his side, on his side, if it came to a disagreement. She was acting like a much younger child, clinging to the magic of Christmas in the face of a threat that growing up meant losing her grasp of all that part of it.
‘Right,’ said Drew, with a sigh. ‘Although not everybody sticks to that particular rule, sad to say.’
‘Anybody you know?’ asked Andrew astutely.
Drew made a gesture that meant Hush! and quickly changed the subject. ‘Timmy’s counting the minutes till Christmas. It’s still quite a lot, eh, Tim?’
The child was not far away, sitting next to Jessica on the sofa. Fiona Emerson was leaning over the back of the couch, joining in a three-way conversation about the various animals you could keep as pets. ‘My sister’s got rats,’ said Fiona. ‘She absolutely adores them.’
Timmy heard his father and looked across at him. ‘What?’ he said.
‘Counting the minutes,’ Stephanie explained. ‘Dad’s telling Andrew about it.’
‘Oh.’ Even Timmy understood that his father had just been making conversation for the sake of it. The pet rats were a lot more interesting.
Andrew came to the rescue. ‘I gather there’s been some bother up at Crossfield,’ he said. ‘Some priceless bit of jewellery’s gone missing. We heard about it yesterday.’
Drew seized on this with alacrity. ‘Really? No, haven’t heard anything. Thea – did you know there’s some ructions at Crossfield? You were there a few days ago, weren’t you?’
Thea had been circulating with bowls of crisps and peanuts. ‘What sort of ructions?’
Andrew shrugged. ‘The Blackwood bloke was in the post office in Chipping Campden, shouting about a mislaid package that had been sent special delivery from London, and never turned