Shallow Grave (Bill Slider Mystery)

by Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia

  ‘I’ve got to go out to Denham to interview a bloke, and there’s a really nice pub in Denham village – the Kestrel – where they do toasted bacon and tomato sandwiches. I thought we could meet there for lunch.’

  ‘What beer do they do?’

  ‘Marston’s and Brakspear’s, if memory serves.’

  ‘You’re on.’

  ‘You’re not working today, are you?’

  ‘Just that committee meeting at six.’

  ‘Hedonist!’ he said.

  The Denham office of David Meacher Estate Agents turned out to be a wooden hut standing all alone beside the bypass between a garden centre and a timber yard. Traffic thundered past, bypassing for all it was worth, and four lanes and a central reservation divided the hut from the pavement on the other side where there was a row of shops, a pillar-box, houses, and pedestrians. However cheap the hut was in terms of rent and rates, it was unlikely to pay its way in walk-in trade, Slider thought, as he parked in the lay-by. The hut had two shop windows and a door in between. The windows were filled with cards advertising houses for sale, but half of them had ‘sold’ stickers across them, and they all looked very yellow. A hecatomb of dead flies lay inside on the window-sill, and the door had its blind pulled down and a ‘closed’ notice hanging from a suction hook. There was a hand-written notice stuck to the inside of the glass of the door, instructing interested parties to contact the Chiswick office; but this, too, Slider noticed, was yellowed with age and exposure to sunlight. Without any hope, he banged on the door, but there was, as he expected, no answer.

  He returned to his car. The lay-by was tenanted by a flower-seller, a young man in cut-offs and teeshirt perched on a camp stool reading a paperback, guarding a green-painted barrow displaying the indestructible flowers of the roadside: long-stemmed rosebuds that would never open, multi-headed chrysanthemums whose petals would fall off in one shattering lump ten minutes after you bought them, and the sort of scentless carnations that looked exactly the same whether they were alive or dead. The lad looked up as Slider approached, but not with any expectation of making a sale. Slider wondered how he – or whoever employed him – could possibly make a living. Who bought these joyless objects, which could not merit so exuberant a title as ‘blooms’? Someone going to the funeral of an office colleague, perhaps, cramming it into a working day between meetings? A businessman with sweat rings under the arms of his striped shirt and fear of discovery in his heart, hurrying to a clandestine lunch with his mistress in one of those tomb-like exurban Italian restaurants, where the food is frozen in individual dishes for ease of microwaving, and the coffee is reheated from day to day?

  ‘Know anything about the estate agents there?’ Slider asked. The young man shook his head. ‘Has anyone been in there this morning?’

  ‘Never seen anyone go in there,’ he said.

  ‘You here every day?’

  ‘Mostly.’

  ‘What time is it usually open?’

  He shook his head again. ‘Never seen it open.’ He eyed Slider keenly. ‘Police?’

  Am I that obvious? Slider thought. ‘I’m looking for the owner,’ he said.

  ‘I think they’ve closed down,’ the young man said. ‘It’s been shut up like that since I been coming here. Never seen anyone go near it. You only got to look at the weeds.’

  Slider looked back, and noticed, sure enough, the ragwort and dandelions growing up between the cracks in the pavement and between the pavement and the hut’s wall. This was a pavement that never knew the touch of human foot. People drove into the garden centre and the woodyard, or parked briefly in the lay-by for the flower-seller’s wares and then drove off again.

  ‘Thanks,’ Slider said. It was all Hatton Garden to a hatful of mice that this man had no trader’s licence, but Slider had no wish to appear ungrateful, and besides, he reckoned the lad had already devised his own punishment. He got into his car, thought for a moment, looked at his watch, and then in his notebook for Meacher’s home address. If he wasn’t there, at least there might be someone who knew where he was.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Babes and Suckers

  Meacher’s house was as irritating as the man: a large and lovely 1930s mansion, built in the Lutyens-Jekyll vernacular, with cottage casements, elaborate tile-hanging, mossy paths, and a garden of full-blown, tangled beauty whose natural, untended look was the ultimate in artifice and must have taken endless work to achieve. It was down a quiet lane on the outskirts of Denham, and when Slider climbed out of his car, only the distant waterfall-roar of the M40 spoiled the rural idyll.

  Slider had more than half expected to find no-one home, but after a long delay, the door was flung open to reveal a woman holding a black Labrador by the collar. ‘Can you just come inside,’ she said, without waiting for him to speak, ‘so I can shut the door? Bessie’s on heat and I don’t want her to get out.’

  Slider obeyed and stepped into a large vestibule full of beautiful old furniture covered in clutter, terracotta walls covered in watercolours and prints, the woodblock floor covered in an old Turkish carpet and muddy paw-marks. A tall Chinese vase of obvious antiquity was filled with blue and white delphiniums spitting their petals everywhere. Coats hung over the newel post of the stairs, a heap of books and papers sat on the third step waiting to go up, a George III side table was littered with opened and unopened mail, dog-leads and a tin of saddle-soap, and the air smelt of furniture polish, dogs, earth and damp. Slider soaked it all in. He was in the presence, he knew, of genuine Old Money. None of your Chiswick-and-Islington, upper-middle-class, fresh-painted spotlessness here: this was how the real nobs lived, the sort of country gentry his father had worked for and whose houses Slider as a child had occasionally entered. There had always seemed to him an effortlessness about everything they did, which he as a struggling mediocrity to whom nothing came easily had deeply admired; but with later wisdom he supposed that, like the garden, it looked effortless because someone behind the scenes had put in a great deal of hard work – in the case of his childhood icons, probably a grim-faced, uniformed nanny.

  The present example released the dog, which instantly danced smiling up to Slider to bash his legs with its black rudder of a tail and invite him to play. He stroked the big, domed head and the dog instantly reared up and placed huge paws on his stomach to make the stroking easier. Over its head, he looked at the woman.

  She was tall and thin, probably in her late fifties, tanned, with a mane of streaked grey hair, which seemed to grow naturally back from her face like Tenniel’s illustrations of Alice. She was dressed in black leggings and a body-hugging sleeveless pink top, something like a leotard, over which she wore a loose, baggy white shirt, hanging open and with the sleeves rolled up. Her feet were bare and her toe-nails were painted. Her large-featured face must once have been staggeringly beautiful, and even now, though her skin was tired, her neck crêpy, and the veins on her hands like jungle creepers, she was still stunning.

  ‘Mrs Meacher?’ he asked.

  ‘Lady Diana Meacher,’ she corrected, though not as if it mattered very much.

  ‘I beg your pardon, ma’am. Detective Inspector Slider of Shepherd’s Bush CID.’ He removed one hand from the dog’s head to reach for his ID, but she waved the formality away.

  ‘I suppose you’ve come about this wretched Andrews woman? You’d better come through. Do you mind the kitchen? I was potting some fuchsia cuttings. You won’t mind if I carry on?’

  He followed her down the passage beside the stairs, glimpsing through open doors rooms that were larger performances of what the hall had rehearsed. The dog trotted after them, nails clicking on the parquet, but when they reached the kitchen it turned and went away again, back the way they had come. The kitchen had an Aga under the mantelpiece instead of a range, and fitted cabinets round two walls, but otherwise was pretty much unchanged from the 1930s, with the original tiles, quarry floor, wooden dresser and shelves. A huge deal table stood in the middle of the room cover
ed in newspaper on which stood a potting tray full of earth, ranks of small plastic flower-pots and jam-jars full of rooted cuttings. An ancient yellow Labrador with filmy eyes and a nose the colour of milk chocolate lay in a basket by the Aga and did not get up, and there were three vast dozing cats, two sitting on the top of the Aga and the other on the window-sill by the open window onto the garden. Out on the lawn another three Labradors, two black and a yellow, were racing about, ears flapping, having a glorious game with a stick. Slider felt sorry for poor Bessie, gynaecologically excluded from the fun. Wasn’t that just a woman’s lot?

  Lady Diana followed the direction of his eyes. ‘Rusty, Leo and Bob. The chap in the basket’s Billie, who’s too old to bother with miscegenation. Bessie’s the only girl, poor bitch. I’ll take her out later for a run round the garden, but she has to stay on the lead when she’s in purdah, and I just haven’t time now.’

  ‘I don’t want to disturb you,’ Slider said. ‘I was really looking for your husband.’

  She looked at him with large, intelligent, beautiful eyes, whose tired orbits had been delicately shaded with grey eyeshadow, the lashes darkened with violet mascara: even when not expecting to be seen, he noted, she tended her garden. ‘He’s not here,’ she said abruptly. ‘I don’t know where he is. Probably looking at some property. Or he may be at his health club, or propping up a bar somewhere, who knows? Look here, I suspect this is going to turn into a long session. Why don’t you make us some coffee, while I carry on with these cuttings? I’ve promised two hundred for the church bazaar tomorrow, and they’re still in water. I don’t know why I do these things. The coffee machine’s over there, and the coffee’s in the blue tin on the shelf above it. Can you manage that?’

  ‘I can manage that,’ he said. While he was managing, the black Labrador reappeared with a small, much-chewed rag doll in her mouth, which she laid at his feet, smiling and waving her tail. He thanked her gravely, and she trotted off again.

  ‘That’s Lucy, her baby,’ Lady Diana explained. ‘Bessie’s frightfully maternal and won’t be parted from the thing, except when she’s on heat, and then she gives it away to all and sundry. So, you were looking for David?’

  ‘I tried his Chiswick office, and they said he was at the Denham office, but when I went there—’

  She snorted. ‘Oh, that! David’s alibi. Some men have a potting shed, some men have the club. David has a hut on the A40. They all serve the same purpose. What do you do when you don’t want anyone to be able to contact you?’

  ‘I’m a police officer. We don’t need any other excuse,’ Slider said, smiling. ‘So the Denham office doesn’t actually do any business?’

  ‘It did once, back in the eighties when estate agency was flourishing. David opened branches – the hut and another office in Chalfont St Peter – took on extra staff, planned to conquer the world. But the recession and the property crash ended all that. He closed the branches and sold the building at Chalfont, but he kept the hut.’

  Bessie reappeared with a dog-lead in her mouth. She ran up to Slider but when he put his hand out she jumped away and carried the lead to her mistress. Lady Diana took it absently and put it on the table. The bitch gazed at her hopefully for a while, and then pattered away again.

  ‘Why did he keep the hut?’ Slider asked.

  She filled a pot with compost and shook a cutting free of its companions. ‘Male pride, partly. He couldn’t bear to think that his days as a business mogul were over. He loved having three branches and six employees, driving from one to the other and being paged in between. He doesn’t really like business, you see, just the trappings of it. For instance, I thought it would break his heart to part with the Aston, but I think he actually likes the BMW better because it’s got more gadgets.’

  Slider nodded, watching her long fingers dive into the soil like fish getting back into the water. ‘What was the other reason?’

  ‘For keeping the hut? Oh, for his affairs, of course,’ she said brutally. ‘He has a sofa in there that turns into a bed. There’s nothing else in there now, except for the answering-machine – equally useful for genuine enquiries or messages from his tarts. He changes the call-in code all the time so that I can’t collect them before he does. As if,’ she gave him a burning look, ‘I care any longer what he does.’

  Slider nodded. The machine was making a noise now like an advert for instant coffee. ‘You cared once, then?’

  ‘I married him for love, strange though that seems now,’ she said. ‘My family were against it. They saw him for what he was – a hollow man. But to me he seemed so sophisticated, charming, urbane. And he told me he loved me. Women are fools where words are concerned. A man can behave as badly as he likes, as long as he tells you he loves you.’

  ‘Perhaps he did love you,’ Slider said. ‘Why wouldn’t he?’

  ‘I was beautiful when I was a girl,’ she said, reaching for another cutting.

  ‘You’re beautiful now.’

  She paused, and then looked up, and gave a puzzled laugh. ‘You’re a strange sort of policeman.’

  ‘Are policemen all the same, then? Like women are all the same?’

  She shook her head wonderingly. ‘You can’t go round saying that sort of thing, you know. Talking to people as if they were human beings. As if you knew them.’

  Bessie came trotting in at that delicate moment with another gift for Slider. When he disengaged it from her jaws it proved to be a pair of white cotton knickers. Slider held them up to Lady Diana with a look of innocent enquiry, and she blushed.

  ‘That wretched dog! She’s been in my chest of drawers again. She’s worked out how to open a drawer by gripping the knob in her teeth, but she can only open the small ones, so it’s always something embarrassing she brings out.’

  ‘Perfectly decent, respectable knickers,’ Slider said blandly. ‘Nothing to be ashamed of. Marks and Sparks finest.’

  ‘ Oh, throw the wretched things away!’ she protested, laughing. ‘Bessie, you bad bitch, I shall have to lock you out of the bedrooms next. Go and lie down. Lie down! Is the coffee ready? You’re very handy about the kitchen, I must say.’

  By the time Slider had poured two mugs, and drawn up a high stool to perch on at the other side of the table, his hostess seemed to have accepted him completely. Bessie was lying down with the old dog, rolling about and play-biting its ears and paws; the cats were fast in sleep, a clock ticked peacefully somewhere deep in the house, and the coffee aroma mingled with the smell of warm compost. Everything was set for confidences.

  ‘Would you like to hear the whole story?’ Lady Diana asked. ‘I suppose you only came to enquire about David and the Andrews woman, but it might help to place it in context.’

  Slider exuded comfort and being settled here for the morning. ‘I want to hear everything you want to tell me,’ he said, with perfect truth.

  She sighed just discernibly. ‘You have a wonderful – what’s the police equivalent of a bedside manner? Do people always end up by telling you absolutely everything?’

  ‘I wish I knew,’ said Slider.

  She was born Lady Diana Seldon, youngest daughter of an old family with a new earldom. ‘Grandpa was created by Edward VII, but we’d been at Old Warden for five hundred years. I think that’s what attracted David in the first place. Property – real estate – is his passion.’

  ‘I’m interested in architecture myself,’ Slider mentioned.

  ‘Architecture!’ She gave him a humorous look. ‘Oh, David hasn’t any artistic sense. What he loves about houses is their size, age, extent and value. Their saleability. It’s a purely commercial passion. He may have the body of a demi-god, but he has the heart and mind of a grocer.’

  ‘Cruel,’ Slider said.

  ‘Not at all. Praise where praise is due. David has the uncanny ability to put a price on any property after the briefest inspection. He can balance location, bedrooms, condition and come up with exactly the figure the market will bear. And he has an incredib
le memory for what’s on his books: he can match a client to a house without even looking in his filing system. He just loves selling houses. He was born to be an estate agent.’

  It sounded like the ultimate insult. ‘They also serve?’ Slider suggested.

  ‘Oh, don’t worry, he doesn’t need defending. He loves his calling. His other ambition was to be an MP, so you see popularity doesn’t figure in his calculations.’

  Slider smiled at the jest, but not too much. There was a great deal of pain here somewhere and he had no wish to press on a bruise. ‘How did you meet him in the first place?’

  She took another seedling and slipped it into the ready earth like a Norland nanny slipping a baby into its cot. ‘Daddy was selling some property – a couple of Victorian houses in the village. He contacted Jackson Stops, and they sent round David.’

  Her fingers stopped firming the earth for a moment and she stared at nothing. ‘He was very handsome, and so fresh and eager. Nothing like the men I’d been used to seeing who were bored with everything, or pretended to be. He was rapturous about the house – it was rather touching. I thought he was loving it, the way I’d always loved it, almost as a person—’ She glanced at him to see if he understood, and he nodded. ‘Of course, I didn’t realise until a long time later that all he wanted to do was to sell it.’ She gave a little snorting sigh. ‘That’s what turned Daddy against him in the end – David kept urging him to sell up and move somewhere more convenient. Daddy had never liked him, but he put up with him for my sake, and he thought it was rather touching that David should worry so much about his health and welfare, even if he did show it in an inappropriate way. But he finally understood that David wasn’t concerned for him at all: he just wanted to handle the sale.’

  There, in the peaceful kitchen, Slider heard the whole story. Lady Diana had fallen in love with David Meacher more or less at first sight. As the youngest of the family and everyone’s pet, she had remained at home long after the others had married and/or moved away. Even her eldest brother, the heir, was living in a flat in Chelsea and running an interior-design shop jointly with a schoolfriend from Eton.