Shallow Grave (Bill Slider Mystery)

by Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia

  That touched more than vanity. It was dangerous to be dependent on someone else in that way, and Slider had always thought of himself as self-sufficient. In a long career as a policeman he had made many working alliances and had had some very good partnerships, but he had never allowed himself to become attached to any colleague as he had to Atherton in the past few years. Atherton’s wounding and long sick-leave had forced him to realise how strong that attachment had become, and it scared him a little. He had coped with losing his wife and children to Ernie Newman, a man who could have bored for England; had coped – just – with losing his new love, Joanna, before he got her back again. But those traumas were in the social side of his life, and early in his career he had learned to keep the two sides separate. The Job was much the larger part of his existence.

  It was not just that Atherton was a good bagman – anyone competent could learn his ways and fill those shoes; it was that he helped him to keep a sense of proportion about it all, something that got harder as time went on. Oh, he could do the job without Atherton, of course he could; it was just that, when he thought about it, really got down to it and looked it in the face, he felt an enormous disinclination to bother. Perhaps he was war-weary; or perhaps it was just the fleeting years. They were none of them, the Boy Wonder included, what they had been. But he had felt that if Atherton didn’t come back, it would be time to empty his Post Office savings book and go for that chicken-farm in Norfolk.

  Well, the boy was back; but looking fragile. Only yesterday Porson, the new detective superintendent who had taken over from Little Eric Honeyman, had stopped him on the stairs and asked him how Atherton was ‘shaking out’. It was one of those maddening Porsonisms: it was obvious what he meant, but how did he get there? Did he think he was saying shaping up, shaking down, or working out? Or had he in mind even some more obscure metaphor for settling down, like Atherton shaking dusters out of the window, or shaking a pebble out of his shoe? Porson used language with the neatness and efficiency of a one-armed blind man eating spaghetti.

  Slider had answered him optimistically; things were quiet and there was nothing even a fragile Atherton, given his gargantuan intellect, couldn’t cope with. But now here they were with a murder shout, and who knew where that might lead? If there was any likelihood of rough stuff, Slider had already determined, he would make sure Atherton was kept well away from it. But the trouble was, these days, you couldn’t necessarily predict the direction the rough stuff would come from. You might knock on any ordinary door and meet Mr G. Reaper in the shape of some crazed crack-head with half a Sabatier set clutched in his germans. And that was the worry, of course, that would wear you down. It was one thing to go into a known dangerous situation, with your body-armour, back-up and adrenaline all in place. But the creeping anxiety that any closed door and street corner, any routine roust, sus or enquiry, could suddenly turn bad and go for your throat, was unmanning. Slider wished he knew how Atherton was feeling about that; but Atherton had not brought up the subject, and Slider would not touch on it uninvited.

  Atherton had noted his hesitation, and now said, with dangerous patience, ‘I don’t think he’ll turn nasty, but if he does, I’m sure Willans will protect me.’

  Now the pressure was on Slider not to seem to be coddling Atherton, so he agreed. And then, of course, because Atherton had put the thought in his head, he started wondering whether Andrews would turn violent after all. This friendship business was a minefield, he thought resentfully, and went to meet the doc.

  It was not, however, the duty police surgeon, but Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, in all his splendour.

  ‘What’s this – short of work?’ Slider asked.

  ‘I’m actually nearer than Dr Prawalha,’ Cameron explained. ‘I don’t mind, anyway: if I’m going to be doing the doings, I’d just as soon see everything for myself while it’s untouched.’

  ‘You don’t need to apologise to me,’ Slider said, ‘except for looking so disgustingly brown.’

  ‘It was only Dorset,’ Cameron protested. ‘The Madam’s got a sister in Cerne Abbas. Lovely place, as long as you don’t suffer from an inferiority complex. What have you got for me?’

  Slider took him to the trench. In accordance with procedure Cameron pronounced life extinct, but offered no suggestion as to the cause of death. ‘There’s nothing at all to see. Could be drugs of some sort, or even natural causes – heart, or a stroke. Can’t tell until I get her on the table. Presumably she died elsewhere and was transported here?’

  ‘Unless it was suicide and she took the precaution of lying down neatly in her grave first. And then covered herself with the tarpaulin.’

  ‘Those questions I leave to you, old dear,’ Freddie said, and shook his head. ‘Don’t like this sort of case. Too much room for error.’

  ‘Dead men don’t sue,’ Slider comforted him. ‘Can you give me an approximate time to be working on?’

  ‘Well, she’s cold to the touch and stiff, but there’s still some warmth in the axilla. It was a warm night, wasn’t it? And she’s been sheltered down this hole. Could be six to eight hours. Could be more. Probably not less than six.’

  ‘Late last night, early this morning, then?’ Slider said.

  ‘Is that enough to be going on with? I’ll have a better idea from the temperature, but I don’t want to do a stick here when I’ve no idea of the cause of death. You never know what evidence you might be destroying. Do you know who she is?’

  ‘She’s Jennifer Andrews, wife of local builder Edward Andrews.’

  ‘He the one who dug the hole?’ Freddie asked. ‘Ah, well, there you are, then.’

  ‘Here I am then where?’ Slider asked, resisting the obvious.

  ‘Whoever put her in here took the trouble to lay her out nicely,’ Freddie said. ‘So presumably it was someone who cared about her.’

  ‘Could be remorse,’ Slider pointed out.

  ‘Comes out the same.’ Freddie shrugged.

  ‘Get on with your own job, Sawbones, and leave the brainy stuff to me.’

  Cameron chuckled. ‘You’re welcome to it.’

  A small door from the terrace let Slider into a coats lobby sporting an array of wax jackets, waterproofs, overcoats, shapeless hats, walking sticks, a gardening trug, a fishing basket, rods in a canvas carrying sheath, green wellies, muddy shoes and an extra long canvas-webbing dog-lead. A narrow door with opaque glazed panels gave onto a loo, an old-fashioned one with a high seat and a stout pipe going up the wall behind it to the overhead cistern. That would give you a healthy flush, he thought. A third door passed him into the house. Here was proof that the Georgian elevation was only skin deep: he was in the beamed hall of a fifteenth-century house, going right up into the roof-space. Some Victorian, during the Gothic revival, had added a massive oak staircase going round three sides of it, and an open gallery on the fourth providing access to the rooms on the upper floor, giving it a sort of baronial-hall look; but the wood of the beams was silvery and lovely, and it worked all right.

  He could hear a dog barking somewhere. On his left, the Victorian extension to the house, there were two doors. The first he tried revealed a large, high-ceilinged room, empty of life and smelling pungently of damp. It was furnished with massive, heavy pieces, partly as a dining room and partly as a study or office: a vast mahogany desk with a typewriter and books and papers stacked untidily on it, and a rank of ugly steel filing cabinets occupied the far end. There were two tall windows overlooking the terrace, and one to the side of the house, looking onto the gravel parking space.

  The second door opened on the room at the front of the house, a drawing-room, equally huge, with a Turkish carpet over the fitted oatmeal Berber, one whole wall covered floor to ceiling with books, and the sort of heavy, dark furniture usually associated with gentlemen’s clubs. Here and there about the room were framed black-and-white photographs. Slider noted amongst them one of a man in climbing gear against a background of mountain peaks, a group o
f men ditto, the front row crouching like footballers, and another of a climber with his arm across the shoulder of a well muffled-up sherpa, both grinning snow-smiles at the camera.

  The room also contained WDC Swilley, an old man in a wheelchair, and a large woman struggling with a dog. The dog was one of those big, heavy-coated, dark Alsatians, and it was barking with a deep resonance that was making the chandelier vibrate.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman, let her go!’ the old man said irritably. ‘Why must you always make such a fuss? Stand quite still,’ he commanded Slider, ‘and she won’t hurt you.’

  The dog, released, sprang unnervingly forward, but stopped short of Slider, sniffed his shoes and his trousers, then looked up into his face and barked again, just once, its eyes wary and suspicious.

  ‘Good girl, Sheba,’ the woman said nervously. ‘Good girl, then. She won’t hurt you.’

  Slider had known a good many dogs in his time, and wouldn’t have wagered the hole in his trousers’ pocket on the temper of this one. He offered his hand to be sniffed, but the dog flinched away from it, and then he saw that its ears were bald and red and scabbed with some skin complaint, which made him both wince and itch in instant sympathy.

  ‘Poor girl,’ he said quietly, ‘poor old girl,’ and the dog waved her tail uncertainly.

  But the old man snapped, ‘Sheba, come here!’ and the bitch turned away, padded over to the wheelchair, and flopped down, near but just out of reach.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ the woman fluffed, blushing awkwardly. ‘She’s a bit upset, you see. She wouldn’t hurt a soul, really.’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, Frances, shut up!’ the old man snapped. ‘You don’t need to apologise to him. And what’s the point of having a guard dog if you tell everyone she’s harmless?’ He looked at Slider with a kind of weary disgust. ‘I despair of women’s intellect. They have no capacity for logical thought. The Germans had the right idea: confine them to kinder, küche, and kirche. Trouble is, this one’s no bloody use for the first two, and the last is no bloody use to me. Who are you, anyway? Another of these damned policemen, I suppose.’

  Slider passed from Swilley’s rigid expression – was she suppressing fury or laughter? – to look at the old man. He had a tartan rug over his legs, and his upper half was clad in a black roll-neck sweater and a crimson velvet smoking jacket: very sprauncy, but that jacket, with the scarlet of the Royal Stuart plaid, was an act of sartorial vandalism. He sat very upright, and Slider thought he would have been tall once; now he was thin, cadaverously so, with that greyish sheen to his skin and the bluish tint to his lips that spoke of extreme illness. He had a full head of white hair, though that, too, had thinned until the pink of the scalp showed through, like the canvas on a threadbare carpet. His hands, all knuckles and veins, were clenched in his lap, and he stared at Slider with eyes that were surprisingly, almost shockingly dark in that corpse-white face, eyes that burned with some desperate rage, though the thin, petunia lips were turned down in mere, sheer contempt. Some poem or other, about a caged eagle, nagged at the back of Slider’s mind. There was nothing really aquiline about this old man’s appearance. A caged something, though. If he was the climber in the photographs, it must be a bitter thing to be confined to a wheelchair now.

  ‘I’m Detective Inspector Slider, Shepherd’s Bush CID,’ he said, showing his brief. ‘May I know your name, sir?’

  The old man straightened a fraction more. ‘I am Cyril Dacre,’ he said superbly.

  The woman shot a swift, nervous look first at the old man and then at Slider. That, combined with the annunciatory tone of voice gave Slider the hint, and he was saying in suitably impressed tones, ‘The Cyril Dacre?’ even while his brain was still searching the old mental card index to see why the name sounded familiar.

  ‘You’ve heard of me?’ the old man said suspiciously.

  The woman crackled with apprehension, and Swilley, trying to help, swivelled her eyes semaphore-style towards the bookcase and back, and, concealed from Dacre by her body, made the unfolding gesture with her hands that in charades signifies ‘book’. But – and fortunately – Slider really had heard of him and remembered just in time why, so he was able to say with obvious sincerity, ‘Not the Cyril Dacre who wrote all those history books I learned from in school?’ How many times had he opened one of those fat green tomes and seen that name on the title page? A Cambridge History of England by Cyril Dacre. Volume VII, The Early Tudors, 1485–1558. A name so well known it had become generic, like Fowler or Roget: ‘All right, settle down now, and open your Dacres at chapter seven …’

  ‘I am indeed Cyril Dacre the historian,’ Dacre said, and there was no mistaking the pleasure in his voice. ‘Why does it surprise you?’

  ‘Your name was such a part of my schooldays, it’s like meeting – oh, I don’t know – a legend,’ Slider said. For some reason, when he was at school he had always assumed that the authors of all textbooks were long dead, so it was even more unexpected to come across a live one all these years later. But Dacre didn’t look as if he had too tight a grip on life, so Slider didn’t think that it would be tactful to put it that way.

  Dacre waved a skeletal hand towards the bookcase. ‘Of course, my Cambridge History series is only a small part of my oeuvre.’ In his head, Slider heard a ghostly Atherton voice saying, ‘An oeuvre’s enough,’ and resisted it. ‘Though perhaps when the account is totted up, it may prove to have been the most influential part.’

  ‘It’s an honour to meet you, sir,’ Slider said, and looked pointedly at the woman, so that Dacre was obliged to introduce her.

  ‘My daughter Frances. Frances Hammond.’ The woman made a little woolly movement, as though unsure whether to step forward and shake hands or not, caught her toe in the carpet and stumbled. Dacre glared at her and made a sound of exasperation. ‘Clumsy!’ he said, not quite under his breath.

  Slider stepped in to rescue her. ‘And there are just the two of you living here?’

  ‘Yes, that’s all – now,’ she said, in a failing voice. ‘Now the boys are gone. Left. Grown up, I mean. My two sons, who used to live here.’

  Slider sensed another for God’s sake, woman just under the horizon and turned to the glowering historian to say, ‘I should like to talk to you later, sir, but I’d like to take your daughter’s statement first, if you’ll excuse me.’

  Dacre’s eyebrows snapped down. ‘Excuse you? Where are you going?’

  ‘I’d like to speak to Mrs Hammond alone.’

  ‘Oh? And what do you think she’ll have to say that I mayn’t hear?’

  ‘We have rules of procedure which we have to follow, sir,’ Slider said smoothly, ‘and one of them is that witnesses must make their statements alone and unprompted.’

  He snorted. ‘Statement? The woman can’t string two words together without prompting. You’d better talk to her here where I can help her.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Mr Dacre, but I must stick to the rules,’ Slider said firmly. ‘Mrs Hammond, if you’d be so kind?’

  She fluttered again and started towards the door, hesitated, and glanced uncertainly back towards her father. Dacre looked irritated. ‘Yes, go, go! I don’t need you. Take the dog with you – and for God’s sake try to look as though you remember how to walk. Why I wasted all that money on ballet and deportment lessons when you were a child I don’t know—’

  While he carped, Mrs Hammond called the dog, but it didn’t move, only looked up at Dacre, which seemed to please the old man, but made Mrs Hammond blush again. She had to go back and take hold of the dog’s collar. Slider held the door open for her, but Mrs Hammond, bent over to tow the dog – for she was a tall woman – misjudged the opening and hit her head on the edge of the door.

  Dacre roared, ‘You are the clumsiest moron of a female it has ever been my misfortune to—’

  She passed Slider in an agony of confusion, and he shut the door on the dragon, feeling desperately sorry for her. She had a red mark on her forehead, and he
r eyes were bright and moist. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered disjointedly. ‘My father – all this is so upsetting. He’s in a lot of pain, you see. He has pain-killers, but they don’t stop it completely, of course. It makes him rather – cross.’

  The childish, inadequate word was somehow the more effective for that. ‘Is he ill?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Cancer,’ she said. She met his eyes starkly. ‘He’s dying.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Slider said. She looked away. She had let go of Sheba’s collar: the dog was trotting rapidly round the enormous hall, tracking the smell of police feet back and forth across the carpet. ‘Is there somewhere we can go to talk?’ Slider asked.

  She gestured limply across the hall. ‘The kitchen – we could – if that’s all right?’ she said. ‘It’s where I usually …’ Slider had to stand aside and make a courtly gesture to get her to lead the way. He could see how her constant ineffectual wobbling would get on Dacre’s nerves; on the other hand, maybe Dacre’s roaring and snapping was what had made her that way. If tyrants proverbially make liars, surely bullies make faffers?

  CHAPTER TWO

  It Takes Two To Hombre

  The kitchen was on the far side of the hall, in the third section of the house. Mrs Hammond opened the door onto a room as different as could be from the drawing-room – about twenty feet square, low-ceilinged and stone-floored. Its long casement window facing onto the road was set deep into a wall two feet thick, and there were beams overhead and a stunning arched stone fireplace with a delicately carved surround, which now housed a rather beat-up looking cream Rayburn. Judging by the quality of its stonework, this must have been one of the main rooms of the original house, Slider thought, reduced to the status of kitchen when the house was enlarged.