Shallow Grave (Bill Slider Mystery)

by Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia

  ‘And that’s where your wife worked?’

  He hesitated, and Atherton saw his hands, resting on the table, clench slightly. ‘Mostly. Sometimes David would ask her to man the other office, when he couldn’t get anyone else. But not often.’

  ‘She was working at the Chiswick office yesterday?’

  ‘In the morning.’

  ‘You saw her off to work, did you?’

  ‘We left at the same time. Half past eight – just before. I was only going round the corner, to St Michael Square. She had to get to the office for nine. Nine to one, she did.’

  Atherton nodded encouragingly. ‘And you got to work at the Old Rectory at about half past eight? And stayed there all day?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Where did you go for lunch?’

  ‘I—’ He stopped himself, looking at Atherton suspiciously. ‘I didn’t go anywhere. I don’t stop for lunch. I just worked through.’

  ‘All alone all day? Did Mrs Hammond come out and chat to you?’

  ‘No, why should she? Anyway, I like to get on when I’m working.’

  ‘And what time did you finish?’

  ‘Six. I started packing up when the church clock struck six.’

  ‘And then you went—?’

  Andrews paused, his eyes still but his mind apparently busy. ‘I went for a drink.’

  ‘At the Goat?’

  ‘Not in working clothes. They don’t like it. I went for one at the Mimpriss. Then I went home.’

  ‘What time did you get home?’

  ‘It would be – about half past seven, I suppose.’

  ‘Your wife was there?’

  ‘No. It was her night on at the Goat.’

  ‘Ah, I see. So what did you do?’

  ‘Got some supper. Watched telly. Went to bed.’

  ‘And what time did your wife come home?’

  Andrews looked away. ‘She didn’t come home,’ he said sullenly.

  Atherton laid his hands slowly on the table in front of him. They were large, open, relaxed, handsome hands; strong contrast to Andrews’ battered and whited fists, bunched and wary opposite them. ‘Now that’s interesting. She didn’t come home at all, and yet you weren’t worried about her?’

  ‘Course I was worried!’ Andrews flashed. ‘Who says I wasn’t?’

  ‘But you didn’t call the police and report her missing.’

  ‘You don’t report someone missing when they’ve not come home just one night.’

  ‘She’d done it before, had she, stayed out all night?’

  ‘No! But – well, a person might go and see a friend and get talking and so forth, and, you know, forget the time. You know what women are like, yackety-yack all day and all night when they get together.’ He appealed weakly to Atherton, hombre à hombre.

  Atherton remained stony, hombre-proof. ‘But she didn’t telephone to say where she was, and you didn’t phone around to check? I find that very remarkable.’

  ‘How do you know I didn’t?’

  ‘Because you’d have said so. No, you just said you watched television and went to bed.’

  ‘Well, I did phone round,’ Andrews said defiantly.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Lots of people. I don’t remember,’ Andrews muttered.

  ‘Give me some names.’ Atherton cocked his pen at dictation angle.

  ‘I can’t remember them all.’

  ‘Give me just one name, then, that I can check.’ No answer. ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, we can get the numbers from BT,’ Atherton said cheerfully. ‘They’re all recorded by computer now, did you know that? Every phone call you make, it’s all logged.’

  Andrews looked at him resentfully. ‘Oh, leave me alone!’ he cried. ‘Why are you going on at me? I didn’t do anything!’

  ‘That was rather the point,’ Atherton said, with a sinuous smile. ‘Your wife, whom you loved, didn’t come home as expected and you didn’t do anything. It just struck me as strange.’ Andrews said nothing. ‘Well, let’s move on, shall we? You got up the next morning and went to work again – rather early, I understand. Why was that?’

  ‘Why was what?’ Andrews seemed confused by the question.

  ‘Why did you go to work so early?’

  ‘I – I hadn’t slept well. Worried about Jen, you see,’ he added, on a happy thought.

  ‘Do you usually wash and shave when you get up in the morning?’

  ‘Course I do. What d’you mean?’ He caught the purport of the question. ‘Well, I usually do, but I was upset this morning. Worried.’

  ‘Of course you were. You tossed and turned all night, woke up early, and thought as you were up you might as well go and make a start at Mrs Hammond’s?’

  ‘That’s right,’ Andrews said. ‘Get on with the job, get it finished.’

  ‘Get on with the job of mixing up the concrete to pour into the nice hole you’d dug, perhaps? Filling it in before anyone could discover what was lying in the bottom?’

  ‘No!’

  ‘Only, bad luck for you, Mrs Hammond got there first, eh? Pity you didn’t start a bit earlier. But I suppose the sound of a concrete mixer at dawn would have been a bit much, wouldn’t it? A bit suspicious. Wake up the neighbours, bring them round to complain. And then they’d see what you were up to—’

  ‘No! I tell you, no!’ Andrews was on his feet, his face congested with emotion – fear, anger, what? ‘It wasn’t like that! I didn’t kill her! It wasn’t me!’

  ‘Sit down,’ Atherton said icily, and Andrews subsided, trembling. Atherton stared at him impassively for long enough to get him really nervous, and then said, ‘It wasn’t you that murdered her, eh? Well, you see, when I came in here, I didn’t even know she’d been murdered. I thought it might possibly have been death from natural causes, or even an accident. But you seem to know more than me, Mr Andrews. So suppose you tell me how you did it? What did you use? And where did it happen? You know, if you get it off your chest, you’ll feel a lot better.’

  But Andrews laid his head down on his arms, moaning, and seeing it was not going to stop soon, Atherton decided to leave him to stew for a bit.

  Emerging again into the great hall of the Old Rectory, Slider bumped into a bit of a frackarse. PC Renker, newly arrived, was standing at the open door of the drawing-room, from within which Cyril Dacre was concluding a long and fluent tirade.

  ‘—outrageous overreaction! Coming in here mob-handed – bursting into a private residence like a gang of storm troopers! And don’t think I can’t see you smirk,’ he added furiously, as Renker made a face at Swilley. ‘Opening doors without knocking – are we living in a fascist state? Yes, you look like a Hun! Pure Nordic type. Love the uniform, too, don’t you? What did you say your name was – Reinke? I knew a Reinke in Berlin before the war, ended up as a top-echelon SS man. Complete fanatic. Well, you can get out of here! I insist on my privacy. Yes, and you can take this nursemaid away, too,’ he added furiously, gesturing towards Swilley. ‘I don’t need watching in case I fall out of my chair. I may be old but I’m not senile!’

  Slider jerked Swilley out with his head, apologised tersely, and shoved Renker gently out of Dacre’s line of vision. Renker, tall, broad-shouldered, fair-haired and blue-eyed, looked at Slider with a hurt quirk of the mouth. ‘I just opened the door looking for you, sir,’ he murmured. ‘Didn’t get a chance to say more than my name, and he was off.’

  ‘He’s had a trying morning,’ Slider said. ‘Go outside and help McLaren. Swilley, wait here in case I need you.’ He inserted himself politely into the doorway and faced the smouldering historian. ‘I’m sorry to have to disturb you, sir, but I would like to talk to you about what’s happened here,’ he said firmly.

  Dacre looked out from under his eyebrows. ‘Well, if you must, you must. I shall have to do my civic duty, I suppose. You’re not quite such a fool as some of the others, at any rate.’ Slider accepted the compliment gracefully and came in. ‘Shut the door,’ Dacre commanded. ‘I see you’ve
left the Rhinemaiden on guard. I called her a nursemaid, but I rather guessed she was meant as a gaoler.’

  ‘WDC Swilley was just making sure you weren’t disturbed,’ Slider said smoothly.

  ‘Didn’t work, did it? That bloody Hun still came bursting in.’

  ‘There are quite a few reporters outside, sir,’ Slider mentioned.

  ‘Ha! The vultures gather. Where there’s a corpse …’

  ‘We’ll try to keep them away from you.’

  Dacre shrugged. ‘I’ve nothing to tell them – or you. I slept rather soundly last night, for a change, so I knew nothing about it until Frances came in this morning with her incoherent babble about Andrews having murdered his wife. My daughter,’ he added severely, ‘falls into a flap at the sight of a spider, so you can imagine the state of what serves her for a mind when she came across a real human corpse on the premises. It is rather hard, by the way,’ he pursued, ‘to be cooped up in here with your Amazon looming over me – to make sure I don’t destroy any evidence, no doubt – when I wanted to see the body.’

  Slider, seeing a gleam in the dark eyes, began to suspect he was being teased, and relaxed cautiously. ‘It’s gone now,’ he said.

  ‘Yes, I saw the undertaker’s vehicle go past. “Meat wagon” – isn’t that what you fellows call it? But if one is to be embroiled in a sordid case of murder, it’s hard not to be allowed any of the fun.’

  ‘Why do you think it’s a case of murder?’ Slider asked mildly.

  ‘I hardly think Jennifer Andrews lay down in the hole of her own accord, quietly died, and then covered herself up with a tarpaulin. Please, Inspector, don’t patronise my intelligence.’

  ‘Someone put the body there, of course,’ Slider said, ‘but she may have died by accident.’

  ‘No, no, my money’s on murder. She was a vulgar, unpleasant woman, ripe for the plucking,’ he said largely.

  ‘Someone is dead, sir,’ Slider reminded him.

  Dacre threw a sharp glance under his eyebrows. ‘At my age, and in my situation, death loses its semi-religious glamour. You can’t expect me to feign a pious reverence for a mere biological process, and one, moreover, that I am already in the early stages of.’

  Slider made no comment on that. Instead he said, ‘Tell me what you know about Jennifer Andrews. You said she was unpleasant. In what way?’

  ‘Loud-mouthed, brash and vulgar. The sort of woman who always has to be the centre of attention and doesn’t mind how she achieves it. She liked to organise everything that happened around here so that she could manipulate people and situations to her own advantage. She hadn’t a scintilla of proper feeling or sensitivity. She flirted with every man over the age of sixteen and even treated me with an appalling kind of coy roguishness.’ His wrath mounted to a peak as the final, horrible revelation burst from his lips. ‘She called me a “dear old boy” and referred to me as her “sweetheart”! If ever a woman deserved to die it was her!’

  ‘Yes, I see.’

  ‘Oh, well …’ Dacre looked a little shaken by his own vehemence. ‘I don’t suffer fools gladly.’

  Or at all, Slider thought. ‘How well did she know your daughter? Did she call here often?’

  ‘She called here from time to time in the course of organising things. And she and Frances were both involved in activities at the church. She’s a neighbour: not quite of us, but with aspirations. There is a species of, if I may call it so, village life on the Mimpriss Estate, of which Mrs Andrews longed to be part. Whatever activity there was, she wormed her way into it. Socially ambitious, you see – the worst type. I think she viewed this house as the local manor, and myself as lord of it, so she was always eager to ingratiate herself. She couldn’t get anywhere with me, so she attached herself to Frances.’

  ‘Would you say she and your daughter were friends?’

  His lip curled. ‘Frances hasn’t the knack of making friends. Never had. She and Jennifer Andrews had acquaintances in common and sat on the same committees. And, of course, the husband did quite a few jobs for us. You took him away, I see.’ He nodded towards the windows that looked out on the street. ‘Poor devil. Driven to it by that frightful woman. The man should be decorated for performing a public service, not hanged.’

  ‘We’re not allowed to hang anyone nowadays,’ Slider reminded him.

  ‘More’s the pity.’

  ‘You seem to be very sure it was Andrews who killed her.’

  ‘Oh, please, Inspector, play your parlour games with someone else! The body turns up in a hole in my terrace, which by complete chance was dug by the victim’s husband – with whom she was on famously bad terms! It’s hardly a challenge to the intellect!’

  ‘Why were they on bad terms?’

  Dacre seemed to lose interest quite abruptly. ‘I have no idea,’ he said, and turned his face away with a stony expression. ‘I don’t interest myself in other people’s domestic affairs.’

  ‘Do you remember when you last saw Mrs Andrews?’

  He seemed to consider not answering, and then said, ‘On Sunday morning. She called on Frances briefly. Something about arranging the flowers for the church, I believe. I didn’t see her – Frances went out to her, in the hall. She didn’t stay long.’

  ‘Did she come to see her husband here, while he was working?’

  ‘I sincerely doubt it. But how would I know? I can’t see the terrace from here.’

  ‘Do you always sit in this room, then? I noticed there is a desk and typewriter in the other room, which looks out on the terrace and garden. Is that where you write?’

  ‘I don’t write any more,’ he said irritably. ‘In case it has escaped your notice, I am a dying man.’

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. I do have to ask questions—’

  ‘About the protagonists in this sordid affair, perhaps. You do not have the right to interrogate me about my own activities!’ He put a hand rather theatrically to his forehead. ‘I must ask you to leave me now. I tire easily these days.’

  Slider stood up patiently. ‘I shall probably want to ask you some more questions later.’

  Dacre snorted. ‘If you insist on wasting my time in this way, you must take the consequences. However, since Jennifer Andrews was obviously not killed on these premises, you would be better advised to find out where she died and how she was brought here. Why don’t you try to find out who put her body into the hole?’

  Slider felt his hackles rising. ‘Thank you for the valuable advice. I would never have thought of that for myself.’

  Dacre’s face darkened. ‘How dare you display your insolence to me! You are a public servant! I pay your wages!’

  ‘And my parents paid yours!’ Slider went cold all over as he heard himself say it. In the brief silence that followed Dacre’s eyes opened very wide; and then, surprisingly, his face cleared and he began to chuckle.

  ‘Yes, I dare say they did! I am justly rebuked. You must forgive me my occasional self-indulgence, Inspector. At my time of life, being rude to people is the only kind of bad behaviour one is still capable of.’

  CHAPTER THREE

  Char Grilled

  To the right of the Old Rectory, beyond the gravel parking space and hard by the overweening hedge, was St Michael House, which had presumably been named by someone who had never shopped at Marks and Spencer. It was one of those 1920s joke Tudor houses, stucco above and herringbone brick below, with so many pitch-covered beams, horizontal and vertical, it looked as though it had been scribbled out by a child in a temper. It had an oak front door studded and bedecked with extraneous pieces of iron, hysterically quaint diamond-pane casements, and cylindrical chimneys so tall and elaborate they looked like confectionery. If you could have snapped them off, they would undoubtedly have been lettered Merrie Englande all through.

  Not that WDC Kathleen ‘Norma’ Swilley, owner of the most fantasised-about legs in the Met, thought in those terms. Walking up the brick front path to start the house-to-house, her verdict was, ‘What a junky old d
ump!’ She lived in a brand new flat in a brand new block in West Kensington, and had no use for things antique, false or genuine. The newer the better, was her motto; and if whatever it was could function on its own by means of electricity, so much the better. She’d have had electric food that ate itself if she could.

  When she reached the front door, there were so many bits of old iron attached to it that it took her a while to work out that the bell was operated by a pull-down handle on a shaft. The instant it rang, however, the door was opened by the householders, who must have been crouched behind it waiting, and she was glad-handed and whisked into the lounge with the avidity of an Amway induction. Defreitas had been right about that, it seemed: the Mimpriss residents were aching to be in on the act.

  The inside of the house was at one with its exterior. The lounge had cast-iron wall lights in the shape of flaming torches, a wheel-shaped iron chandelier supporting electric candles, and a vast herringbone-brick inglenook containing a very small gas log fire. Perhaps to foster illusion, a log basket sat on the brick hearth, filled with real logs and pine-cones: Norma bet the old dame dusted them daily, probably with the Hoover attachment. The furniture was all fumed oak and chintz-covered; there were display cabinets full of the sort of limited-edition figurines that are advertised in the Sunday Times magazine, Vernon Ward framed prints on the walls, dried flower arrangements everywhere, and a row of royal-commemorative plates around the picture rail.

  Mr and Mrs Vanhurst Bright – Desmond and Mavis, they assured Swilley eagerly and watched until she wrote it down – were in their sixties and gave the same impression of careful prosperity as the house. His face had the over-soft look of a man who has been thin all his life and only put on fat in retirement, and he wore the willing but slightly tense expression of a very intelligent dog trying to understand human speech. She was thin, brittle and ramrod straight, and looked as though her whole life had been a battle against importunate door-to-door salesmen. She had evidently gone to the same hairdresser as Mrs Hammond, though her arrangement was tinted a fetching shade of mauve; with her chalky-pink face-powder and rather bluish shade of lipstick it made her look as though she were slightly dead. She was dressed in a pink cashmere twinset and heather tweed kilt complete with grouse-claw kilt-pin, pearl earrings, two rows of pearls round her neck, more diamond hoop rings than perhaps the strictest of good taste would think necessary, lisle stockings, and well-polished brogues as brown and shiny as a racehorse’s bum. He was wearing a lovat tweed jacket over a cad’s yellow waistcoat, khaki shirt and green knitted tie, grey flannel trousers, and a beautiful pair of expensive brown Oxfords, which were so unexpectedly large compared with the rest of him that he looked as though he had been inserted into them as a preliminary to being tied up and dropped into the harbour.