by Rebecca Tope
‘All right,’ she snapped. ‘I get the message. Though I think you might be overestimating her a trifle. Nobody’s above telling a few lies – even to the police.’
‘True,’ he smiled, hoping to appease her, before wondering just where that left him.
The soup finished, she produced two pots of homemade yoghurt, flavoured with something she said were her own cherries, frozen from last year. Den would never have guessed, but then he didn’t think he’d tried frozen cherries before.
‘Well, one final thing, and then I must let you get on,’ she said. ‘It’s to do with my husband.’
Who was dead, Den recalled. He gave her a politely expectant expression.
‘When he was married to his first wife, he worked at Porton Down. You know, where they do secret government scientific experiments. I always thought, actually, that he was somehow contaminated by some ghastly virus, which is why he died so young. But that’s beside the point. He had a colleague there who became his best friend, and kept in touch right up to when Michael died. He still keeps in touch with me. He works in genetics now. Plant genetics.’ She paused meaningfully. Den pushed out his lips to show he grasped the point. ‘He has some very ambivalent feelings about the whole business,’ she went on carefully.
‘You mean he’s a mole? A spy?’
‘Something like that. He’s very worried that he’ll be implicated in any direct action, if his association with me is ever traced. So we never do meet directly. We don’t even email each other. We use go-betweens, you see.’
‘Is this another job for me?’
‘Clever boy!’ She clapped her hands satirically.
‘Let me think about it first,’ he said. ‘I’m not sure I like what I’d be getting into here. And it doesn’t feel as if it’s getting anybody any closer to sorting out who killed Peter Grafton.’
‘Of course it is, you idiot,’ she scoffed. ‘Of course it bloody is.’
Maggs’s mobile phone sang its little song at her, to indicate she had a text message. Drew widened his eyes in warning when he heard it. ‘I thought you kept that thing switched off when you were at work,’ he said.
‘I do. It’s only a text message.’
‘But it played a tune. I hate them doing that. It’s crass.’
‘Drew, you are the most old-fashioned thirty-five-year-old in the world. What’s the matter with you?’
‘So you think it’d be OK if it did that in the middle of a funeral, do you? At the graveside, when we were having a minute’s silent reflection?’
She sighed. ‘No, of course not. I don’t even take it out there with me. And I didn’t mean to leave the sound on. It doesn’t usually do that.’ She peered at the tiny screen. ‘It’s Den. He’s been to see Mary Thomas, and she has work for him.’
‘What? Who?’ Drew shook his head crossly. ‘How can he say all that in thirty characters or whatever it is?’
‘Ah! You’re interested really, aren’t you? You’d love to get into texting – go on, admit it.’
‘Absolutely not. It’s horrible. All those stupid abbreviations.’
‘Well, don’t get worked up about it. I’m switching it off, look. Satisfied?’ She made a show of silencing the phone and putting it on a shelf. ‘Just don’t let me go home without it.’
‘What is Den doing, exactly?’ Drew went on to ask, risking Maggs’s flicker of triumph at having his interest.
‘I don’t know. Last I heard, he was going to try and see his friend Danny again. I’ve no idea what’s been going on since, except he’s been talking to the Thomas woman.’
‘Do you get the feeling we’re not keeping up too well on this one?’ he suggested.
‘Hmm. I know what you mean. But we are keeping up, really,’ she decided. ‘We’ve got the victim’s funeral, for heaven’s sake. We’ve talked to his wife and his girlfriend. We’re just following a different path …’
‘Speaking of paths,’ Drew interrupted, ‘don’t you think …’
‘Drew Slocombe, if you say another word about those damned paths, I’ll … I’ll …’
‘All right.’ He put his hands up in surrender. ‘But if anyone slips, or starts walking on somebody’s grave, you’ll be responsible.’
The paths in the burial ground were a constant worry to Drew. They were little more than mown strips between the complicated grid of burial plots, which were under Maggs’s charge. They’d discussed laying decking or gravel or wood chippings, but always concluded that plain grass was best. After a busy spell, with several visitors, and a few burials, most of the paths were sufficiently well trodden to remain clearly visible, but with the lush spring grass and a few weeks of relative inactivity, Drew worried.
‘Visitor!’ Maggs announced. Her hearing seemed uncannily acute to Drew, who hadn’t noticed a thing. When he looked out of the window he saw a red Citroën parked by the road gate, and a woman coming towards the office.
‘It’s Sally Dabb again,’ he observed.
‘So it is,’ Maggs agreed.
‘Must have come to view Grafton.’
‘Very likely. And I thought we decided nobody could see him until tomorrow. I haven’t got him presentable yet.’
‘I’ll put her off if I can.’
‘You won’t be able to,’ she said glumly.
Maggs was right about Sally’s reason for turning up. She was calmer than on her first visit, but no easier to deal with.
‘I’ve got to see him,’ she urged. ‘And I have something I want to put in with him. Just a letter – nothing you could object to. Is he in his coffin yet?’
‘Well,’ Drew said. ‘The thing is …’
‘He is here, isn’t he?’ she demanded.
‘Oh, yes, he’s here. But you have to understand … I mean, we’re not like other undertakers. We haven’t got the same facilities. And there are two other funerals this week, which is unusually busy for us.’
‘So?’
‘Well, it’s a bit difficult to let you see him this afternoon.’
‘Why?’
Drew clenched his jaw, badly tempted to give it to her straight, all about the post-mortem and the smell and the crowded cool room, and the unfinished, almost disrespectful, way Peter Grafton’s body was simply plonked into the cardboard coffin. Worst of all, the fact that there was an uncoffined body currently lying on the floor, because the trolleys were both already occupied.
‘Because it’ll upset you,’ he said.
‘Upset me? Do you think I’m not already as upset as anybody can be?’ She stared wildly at him, her eyes swimming. ‘I was there when he died. I got his blood on me. I saw that bolt in his neck, heard the way he gurgled and gasped for air. I can’t sleep, because every time I shut my eyes, I see it all over again.’
‘OK,’ Drew decided. ‘Come on through.’ She was right, of course. Nothing she saw now would be as bad as the experience she’d already had.
‘But he’s on the floor!’ she shrieked. Maggs was in the room, trying her best to give Drew unobtrusively vicious glances.
‘No, no, that isn’t him,’ said Maggs, washing her hands with strong green soap. ‘But I know it looks bad. Can’t be helped, I’m afraid. And it truly doesn’t imply any lack of respect.’
Sally subsided, literally as well as emotionally. She drooped over the plain lidless coffin, and reached into it. ‘Hi, Pete,’ she whispered. ‘What have they done to you, eh?’
She stroked his hair, which looked perfectly normal, but which Drew and Maggs knew hid a lot of crude stitching just below the surface. They both clenched their jaws with apprehension, watching her.
Sally looked up at them, her face completely serene. ‘It’s so strange, isn’t it,’ she murmured. ‘It’s him, and yet it absolutely isn’t. He can’t hear me or feel me. He doesn’t care about anything at all. He’s like a block of wood.’ She lightly fingered the skin of the dead man’s cheeks. ‘Hard and cold. I loved him, you know, even though we never did anything to feel guilty about. He was
a very loveable man.’
Drew realised he hadn’t given much thought until then as to what Grafton had been like as a person. The various facts he’d gleaned from Karen and Julie, and now Sally hadn’t added up to a complete personality. And nobody to date had described him as loveable.
‘We were getting into a mess, weren’t we Pete?’ the woman went on, unselfconsciously. ‘Are you glad to be out of it? Saved us a lot of damaged feelings later on, you could say. Fancy getting yourself murdered, though! We’d never expected that, had we?’
She leant over, one arm completely inside the coffin. It was a moving tableau, to Drew’s eyes, but he could feel Maggs impatient and disapproving beside him. Aware of being surplus to requirements, he removed himself from the room, leaving his colleague to deal with the visitor as best she could.
‘You’ll get cold in here,’ Maggs burst out, after a few minutes.
‘It doesn’t matter.’
‘And – well – I need to get on, I’m afraid. Sorry.’
Sally Dabb did not take the hint. ‘Don’t mind me,’ she said. ‘I’m happy for you to carry on. It’s rather nice in here, isn’t it. You’ve got a lovely view of the field.’ The cool room, comprising the end section of the single building that was the Slocombes’ home and Drew’s office, had a good-sized window overlooking the burial ground. Built of breeze blocks and painted a stark white, it contained aluminium trolleys, and a wall of deep shelves for the paraphernalia required for the disposal of bodies. Despite their simple alternative style of doing things, there was still a need for wrappings, and paddings and name labels and washing materials. Flat-packed cardboard coffins were bought in tens, and stacked on the bottom shelf. Even flat, they took up a lot of space. Maggs felt there was never enough room, and with three bodies and a visitor in there, it was difficult to move around. She sighed, and went back to brushing Mr Lancaster’s hair.
‘Has Julie been in to see him?’ Sally suddenly asked. Maggs felt a further stab of disapproval. The question seemed to be lacking in taste.
‘Well,’ she began, the undertaker’s natural reticence overtaking her. ‘I think she said tomorrow.’
‘It doesn’t matter, you know,’ Sally said, with a sad smile. ‘Julie knew all about me and Peter. I mean, she knew we were great friends, and that we had something special. She didn’t mind.’ She looked at Maggs, recognising the frosty manner. ‘We weren’t lovers, as I keep telling you. It might have come to that, eventually – though I doubt it. We were just really good friends. You do believe me, don’t you? You were so nice about it when I came here last week.’
‘I believe you,’ Maggs admitted. ‘But it still sounds as if it was a bit of a mess.’
‘It was getting complicated,’ Sally admitted. ‘In a whole lot of different ways.’
‘That’s obvious,’ said Maggs.
‘Why? What do you mean?’
‘He got himself murdered, didn’t he? And nobody seems to have any idea why. You can’t really get more complicated than that, as far as I can see.’
Sally’s wide lips curved in an involuntary smile. ‘No,’ she agreed. ‘I suppose you can’t.’
Both women acknowledged the moment of warmth; the intimacy that arises in the presence of a dead body. Maggs had felt it a hundred times before. The mere fact of being alive when the person lying there so cold between you was not, made for extraordinary alliances. A shared mystery, a shared relief; whatever it was, it had a persistent power.
Sally turned back to her drooping-over-the-coffin posture. ‘It’s tragic that he’s dead, so young. He would have done all kinds of things.’
‘It’s a waste,’ Maggs agreed with all sincerity.
‘Will they catch who did it, do you think?’
‘Bound to.’ Maggs gave Sally a robust look. ‘They won’t rest until they do.’
‘No,’ said Sally vaguely.
Drew described the visit to Karen that evening, remembering how little consideration he’d given to the character of the deceased. ‘What was he actually like?’ he asked her. ‘Maggs seems to think we’ve missed something.’
‘Very good looking – you’ll have worked that out for yourself. One of those really beautiful men, I suppose. Nice skin, thick hair, and a lovely voice. It had a kind of richness to it, that made you want to listen hard to anything he said. And he always met your eye when he was talking to you. And he smiled a lot.’
‘This is all very superficial,’ Drew objected. ‘What about his character?’
Karen nibbled her lower lip thoughtfully. ‘Pleasant. Sociable. Charming, even.’ She heard her own words. ‘I’m just saying the same things again, aren’t I? The fact is, all I knew of him was that superficial charm. I’ve no idea where his real passions lay, or what he was thinking.’
Drew smiled. ‘All the women seem to have adored him. Reminds me of Jim Lapsford.’ Lapsford had been Drew’s baptism of fire into the murky world of suspicious deaths and hastily prepared cremation papers. He and Karen had investigated the truth of Lapsford’s death together.
‘Oh, no,’ she said emphatically. ‘Not the least bit like Jim Lapsford.’
‘But you were convinced he was having an affair with Sally Dabb. So he must have been rather more than pleasant towards her?’
She chewed the lip more frenziedly. ‘No, not really. They laughed a lot together, and touched each other. Hands on shoulders, that sort of thing. Peter didn’t do that with everybody. It was obvious how much she liked him. She gave him moony looks, all big eyes and girly smiles. And he liked that.’
‘She told me and Maggs there was no sex going on between them, remember.’
‘So you say. She wants you to be her PR people, and squash all the rumours about them.’
‘Don’t you believe her?’
Karen considered for a minute. ‘I did believe her, when you told me what she’d said. I was absolutely on her side.’
‘But now?’
‘I don’t know,’ she admitted. ‘She’s obviously lost without him. If they weren’t lovers, then they were very, very good friends. I don’t see that it matters much whether or not they went to bed together.’
‘It does though,’ Drew assured her earnestly. ‘It matters a lot.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t think I need to explain that to you, do I?’ She met his gaze. ‘I see what you mean,’ she said.
Later, he had a very similar exchange with Maggs, when she described Sally’s behaviour in the cool room. ‘It makes them rather noble, keeping it all platonic,’ she said. ‘Don’t you think?’
‘It’s nice not to have to disapprove,’ he agreed. ‘To credit her with a clear conscience. If you commit adultery, you cross a line and can never entirely claim the moral high ground.’
Maggs gave him a penetrating glance. ‘Drew – are you talking about you and Genevieve Slater?’
He flushed, and shook his head, wishing he could tell her to mind her own business. ‘No, not really. At least, perhaps I am a bit. I’m eternally relieved that we never …’
Maggs held up her hands. ‘Sorry. Out of order,’ she said. ‘You should be saying all this to Karen, not me.’
‘Precisely,’ he said.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Den and Maggs also discussed Peter Grafton later that day, along very much the same lines. ‘We don’t have much idea of what he was really like,’ Den complained. ‘And now I’ve got myself into this weird business with Mary Thomas, it all feels like a diversion from the main issue.’
‘Weird is right,’ she said. ‘You’re being as bad as Drew, getting sucked into some woman’s personal campaign. I thought you’d have had more sense.’
‘She seems to know who killed Grafton,’ he mused. ‘Something about this bloke her husband used to work with. And a son who’s deeply into environmental activism. But she wouldn’t say anything more. I came away thinking the whole conversation had just been a sort of game to her. She was playing with me.’
‘Yo
u said she had work for you,’ Maggs prompted.
‘Something and nothing,’ he dismissed. ‘I wouldn’t touch it. I don’t think she ever really thought I would. She’s a very odd woman.’ He shook himself like a dog. ‘I felt as if I’d been dragged into something rather yucky.’
‘But she must have been trying to tell you something,’ Maggs said. ‘She was making some kind of connection.’
‘So why not just tell me straight?’
‘Scared, probably. After all, she was taken in for questioning at the weekend. She wouldn’t dare tell you anything that would incriminate her, after that.’
Den nodded grudgingly. ‘That could be it,’ he agreed. ‘But the fact remains she didn’t say anything useful.’
Maggs became brisk. ‘Let’s summarise,’ she said. ‘Suspects, alibis. Means, motives, opportunity. Isn’t that the professional way to tackle it?’
He sighed.
‘What’s the matter?’ She glared at him. ‘Am I boring you?’
He reached for her, wrapping his long arms round her. ‘Don’t be stupid. I’m as involved as you are. But it’s all muddled up with last weekend, and my job, and where-do-we-go-from-here. I can’t concentrate on any one thing, because there are so many others waiting for my attention. Do you understand?’
‘Perfectly,’ she cooed, snuggling into his chest. ‘You don’t have to get in a state about it, you know. You can forget the whole thing. It’s not your job any more. I think you keep forgetting that.’
‘But …’ he sighed again. ‘I actually quite want to do my bit for justice. It’s not OK to fire crossbow bolts through a chap’s throat in broad daylight. I’d feel bad if I just dropped it.’
‘Course you would. So let’s get it sorted, and then we can think about some of those other things. Right?’
‘Right.’
‘Means, motive and opportunity. I love that list. It covers everything, doesn’t it.’
‘Yes and no,’ he said cautiously. ‘You hardly ever work out all three. It’s just a rule of thumb, you know, not a formula for instant success.’ He tried to suppress the tremor of recognition at the line Maggs was taking. His previous serious girlfriend, Lilah Beardon, had helped him with one or two murder investigations, and she, like Maggs, had dwelt obsessively on means, motive and opportunity. It seemed to appeal to women, for some reason.
