Shallow Grave (Bill Slider Mystery)

by Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia

  CHAPTER TEN

  Fresh Words And Bastards New

  ‘She thinks he did it,’ Slider said to Joanna as they sat thigh to thigh in a quiet corner of the Kestrel. ‘Or at least, not to put it too strongly, she’s afraid he might have.’

  Joanna lowered the level of her pint of Marston’s by a quarter and put the glass down in the beam of sunshine that came in through the crooked, ancient casement window for the express purpose of turning it to liquid gold. ‘But if she did, wouldn’t she be sure to give him an alibi? Or do you think she’s so friendishly cunning she’s trying a double bluff on you?’

  ‘Good God, no! That sort of thing only happens in books. But there are people who just tell the truth, you know, because it’s the right thing to do. Not many of them, granted.’

  ‘She really impressed you, didn’t she?’ Joanna looked at him curiously. ‘The way you’ve described her to me, stunningly beautiful, intelligent, noble, good – it’s enough to make a person chuck.’

  ‘Don’t be silly,’ he said comfortably, nudging her knee. ‘But if Meacher was out all night—’

  ‘If. She didn’t say he was.’

  ‘Quite. But he didn’t tell me he had an assignation with the Andrews woman that evening. He didn’t tell me he’d been having an affair with her—’

  ‘Would you, in his position? It doesn’t mean he bumped her off.’

  ‘Why are you so keen on him?’ he asked resentfully.

  ‘My darling dingbat, you’ve just had a thorough job done on you by a master – or should one say mistress? – of the art. You loathed Meacher on sight and you adored Mrs ditto, so it hasn’t occurred to you that if he was out all night, she hasn’t got an alibi either. Why shouldn’t she have killed this ghastly woman?’

  ‘Ridiculous!’

  ‘Is it? Maybe she didn’t know before that the affair was going on. Bleach-bag comes to her door and spills the beans, demands where Meacher is as if she’s got a right to know, and brags that she’s done it on the marital premises. Who has a better motive now?’

  ‘I hate it when you’re reasonable.’

  ‘Maybe Jennifer never left the house again. Maybe Mrs M. did her right there and then on the doorstep in a fit of righteous, wifely rage.’

  ‘Lady Diana, not Mrs M. And anyway, Jennifer wasn’t killed violently, remember. Freddie thinks she was drugged to helplessness.’

  ‘Even better. Lady Diana got her inside, gave her a drink, and drugged her.’

  ‘With?’

  ‘I don’t know. I can’t do everything for you.’

  ‘She says she does have sleeping pills,’ he said reluctantly.

  ‘There you are then! She did her, bunged her in the pantry, then late at night drove her to the Rectory and shoved her down the hole, knowing that everyone would suspect Eddie Andrews, and that there was nothing to connect the deed with her.’

  ‘It holds together—’

  ‘Of course it does. I’m brilliant!’

  ‘—so far, I was going to say. But why didn’t Eddie see Jennifer’s car when he arrived? And how did it get back to Fourways?’

  ‘Lady D. hid the car temporarily, and took Jennifer home in it so as not to leave any traces in her own, of course.’

  ‘And got back home—?’

  ‘Somehow. Bus, train, taxi, shanks’s pony. Aeroplane.’

  ‘I see. And if she did it, why did she tell me about the visits of the Andrewses at all?’

  ‘She didn’t know how much you knew. The fact that you were there was a worry. She had to think fast.’

  ‘She did?’

  ‘Notice,’ Joanna pursued, ‘how she cunningly deflected suspicion away from Eddie Andrews, by telling you she felt sorry for him and gave him a cup of coffee. That was so that she could plant the seed about her husband in your mind.’

  ‘Why should she do that?’

  ‘Because hubby is a much better smokescreen. If he’s guilty, she’s innocent. You have to be innocent to be someone’s alibi.’

  ‘But she wasn’t his alibi.’

  ‘Which makes her even more innocent – too good even to lie for her own husband.’

  ‘I love it when you’re unreasonable,’ he grinned, glad to discover she wasn’t serious. They stopped talking while their toasted sandwiches were put in front of them. When they were alone again, he said, ‘Joking apart, what we’ve got now is a much better motive for Eddie. If Jack Potter was right, Eddie didn’t really believe, deep down, that Jennifer was straying; after his visit to Lady Di, he knew for certain that his worst fears were founded. I’m afraid he’s still the front runner. We’ll have to check up on Meacher, though.’

  Joanna said, ‘Poor thing, you so wanted it to be him instead of Eddie, didn’t you?’

  ‘It still might be. The thing that puzzles me about him is, why didn’t he call Mrs Hammond when he heard about the body being found on her premises? If he was such an old friend, and was sorry for her … It’s as if he’s trying to distance himself from the whole thing.’

  ‘Could be any number of reasons,’ Joanna shrugged. ‘People don’t phone each other like anything, every day of the week. Especially when they ought to.’

  ‘True,’ he sighed. ‘Well, it looks as though we know where Jennifer was going, anyway, when she left the Goat and told Jack Potter she was going to meet someone. But why didn’t he keep the appointment?’

  ‘Probably he was finished with her and that was his noble way of letting her know.’

  ‘Unnecessarily cruel. I know restaurants like that. Lady Di said she went there once and had rubber lasagne that smelt like sweat.’

  ‘Very graphic. I can see why you liked her.’ Joanna grinned suddenly. ‘It reminds me of the story of the man who went to a very bad Chinese restaurant. When he’d eaten his main dish the waiter came and asked him if everything was all right. He said, “Well, the duck was rubbery,” and the waiter said, “Thank you, sir. We have bery nice rychees, too.”’

  When they emerged into the sunlight and walked towards their cars, he said, ‘What time do you think your meeting will be finished?’

  ‘I expect it’ll last a couple of hours. Why?’

  ‘I thought if I could get away early enough I ought to go and see Irene and try and sort things out.’

  ‘I thought she said don’t ring us, we’ll ring you?’

  ‘Yes, well she can’t expect to make all the rules,’ he said irritably. ‘Besides, it’s my house as much as it’s hers, and if I can’t stop her going there, she can’t stop me.’

  ‘It’s rather more yours than hers, I would have thought, since you pay the mortgage and everything.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Joanna blinked. ‘Sorry, which bit of the sentence are you having difficulty with?’

  ‘I thought the subject would come up sooner or later. It all comes down to money, doesn’t it?’ he said angrily. ‘These things always do.’

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Divorce, first wives versus second wives, the whole palaver! Mortgages and maintenance and who gets the pension! The next thing you’ll be complaining that we live in penury while she swans about in a big house, and that I never spend any money on you.’

  She whipped round on him like a cobra striking. ‘Hold it right there! In the first place I’m not your wife, second or any other sort. In the second place I haven’t the slightest interest in your money or what you do with it. All I want is for this business to be sorted out so that people can stop hurting each other, and you and I can have a little life together, and I can stop having to watch you turn grey and wrinkled as you wonder what the next ghastly cock-up will be. And in the third place,’ she went on, forestalling his attempt to break in, ‘if you ever speak to me like that again I shall smack you round the ear with a wet fish.’

  ‘You’d assault a police officer?’ he said feebly.

  ‘In a second.’

  They looked at each other for a moment. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘
Abject grovel. I get so strung up about it all.’

  ‘I know. Just don’t take it out on me.’

  ‘I’m really sorry.’ He kissed her contritely and she kissed him back. ‘I don’t deserve you.’

  ‘I know,’ she said.

  ‘I miss my children.’ It burst out of him without his meaning it to.

  ‘I know,’ she said again, in a different voice.

  ‘Matthew sounded so sad on the phone the other night. And if I can’t get her to agree to a settlement and the lawyers come between us, there’ll be a contentious divorce and she’ll get custody, and I’ll be just another weekend father. I’ll have to spend every Saturday of my life in McDonald’s.’

  She stepped close. ‘Don’t cry outside a pub, it looks bad.’ He put his arms round her. ‘It will come out all right,’ she said. ‘Go and see her, talk to her. Who could resist you? You’ll work it out.’

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘I know,’ she said for the third time, and he felt her smile against his chest.

  Atherton suspected Slider had sent him off to interview the priest on the assumption that it would keep him safe, and resented it. Of course, he mused, many priests through the ages had been seriously bonkers, so it didn’t mean a thing – which Slider must know as well as he did, so it rather spoilt his argument, but he went on feeling resentful for as long as it suited him anyway.

  The priest’s house was across the road from the church with which St Michael and All Angels shared him. Atherton needed Slider to tell him the vintage of the church – St Melitus – though he put it down tentatively as (?) late Victorian, or at least not very old (?); but his own eye was enough to tell him that St Melitus Church House and Community Hall had been built, if that was the right word, within the last twenty years. To judge from its neighbours, a large Edwardian house had been knocked down to accommodate it, and it stuck out like a baboon’s bottom: a flat-faced, ugly building of pale yellow brick with a roof too shallow and metal-framed windows too large for it. It had a porch, which was just a square slab of concrete meanly supported on two metal poles, and some unnecessary panels of barge-boarding by way of ornament, from which the paint was peeling like an unmentionable skin disease. The Community Hall was a single-storey extension to the side, with a flat roof and wire-cast windows. Bountiful Nature was represented by a plant-pot in the shape of a giant boot made of something grey, which looked almost entirely but not quite unlike stone. It stood beside the Church House porch and contained the leggy ghosts of some dead pansies and a flourishing crop of chickweed. The whole complex was surrounded by a liberally stained concrete apron for parking, and had all the warm invitation and spiritually uplifting charm of one of the less popular stalags.

  Atherton thought of the aspiring beauty of St Michael’s and the solid harmony of the Old Rectory, and wondered when it was that the church had completely lost its marbles; and what God thought of an organisation that so passionately promoted ugliness. He rang the Church House doorbell, and it was answered by a tall man in khaki chinos, and a black teeshirt inscribed in white letters If Jesus is your Saviour CLAP YOUR HANDS!.

  ‘Mr Tennyson?’ Atherton enquired politely.

  ‘Yes – are you from the police?’

  ‘Detective Sergeant Atherton. I spoke to you earlier.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. Come in.’

  Inside, the house smelt like a school, Atherton discovered: dusty, with a faint combined odour of socks and disinfectant. ‘Come through,’ Tennyson said, leading the way to the back of the house. Here there was an open door labelled ‘Waiting Room’, a narrow room facing onto what would have been the garden if it hadn’t been concreted over. It had french doors and two large picture windows – metal framed with wired glass – and since it was on the sunny side of the house it was as hot and dry as the cactus house at Kew. The low window-sills were of chipped quarry tile – as if the room had once been meant to be a conservatory – and along them lay a weary row of dead flies and wasps, desiccated corpses that Atherton could almost hear crackle in the sunshine beating in. The room contained a beat-up sofa and two ‘office’ armchairs, a coffee-table bearing a sordid array of ancient, coverless magazines and a tin ashtray, the whole underpinned by a cherry-red cut-pile carpet pocked with cigarette burns, and spillings of something that had turned into that strange black toffee you find on carpeted pub floors.

  ‘Nice place,’ Atherton said. ‘It must cut down on time-wasters.’ Five minutes alone with your troubles in this room, he thought, and you’d slit your wrists – except, of course, that the window glass was unbreakable. On the whole, he’d sooner spend a night in the pokey.

  Fortunately, Tennyson didn’t understand his comment. ‘It’s a bit warm, but I’m afraid the windows don’t open. They’ve warped, I think. Probably just as well,’ he added, with unexpected bluntness. ‘Nobody thinks twice these days about stealing from the Church.’

  Tennyson was an interestingly gaunt man in his forties, with thick, bushy grey hair and deep-set brown eyes, handsome except that his skin had the dull pallor of the lifelong costive. He had a good, resonant voice, with a faint trace of an accent Atherton couldn’t pin down – somewhere north of Watford Gap, anyway. Tennyson sat in one of the chairs and Atherton, after one dilating glance at the sofa, perched gingerly on the other. Somewhere in the room was a smell of babies, and he was rather fond of the trousers he had on.

  He couldn’t resist asking, ‘Don’t you sometimes long to exchange this for the Old Rectory?’

  Tennyson shook his head. ‘Couldn’t afford it. I dread to think what their heating bills are like with those high ceilings. And the rooms here are better suited for our purposes. Besides,’ he added, ‘it just wouldn’t be secure. Anyone could break in with those old windows, leave alone the fact that the garage doors don’t lock.’

  ‘How do you know that?’ Atherton asked with interest.

  ‘Frances Hammond’s one of our stalwarts. I know the house very well. The oil man delivers through the end doors, and our sexton uses the tap in there, to get water for the flowers on the graves. Mrs Hammond doesn’t mind. She’s only too eager to help. Our best helpers are usually lonely women,’ he added, not entirely as if he were glad about it.

  ‘And talking of lonely women,’ Atherton suggested.

  ‘You want to know about Jennifer Andrews,’ Tennyson picked him up. ‘I wouldn’t have said “lonely” was the best adjective in her case.’

  ‘No? What would you have said, then?’

  ‘Predatory.’ Tennyson clasped his hands between his knees and stared broodingly at the carpet. Don’t do that, Atherton wanted to warn him, you’ll go blind. ‘She was one of my flock, a member of the PC, she was on the flower rota, the bazaar committee, the coffee rota, the Happy Club, the Refugees Aid – she was into everything that was going. A valuable helper – but I didn’t like her.’

  ‘Are you allowed to say that?’

  He glanced up with a bitter look. ‘I’m a clergyman, not a saint. I’d sooner have Mrs Hammond’s wool-gathering than Jennifer Andrews’ help, for all her energy. Frances Hammond has the same urges, but at least she knows how to behave herself.’

  ‘Urges?’

  He paused, as if selecting the appropriate words, but when he spoke, it came out with the fluency of an old and oft-rehearsed complaint. ‘There is a certain type of woman who is just attracted to priests. Altar babes, we call them. Something about the dog-collar turns them on – it doesn’t matter who’s wearing it. Young, old, married or single. Sometimes they just gaze at you from afar and sublimate it by helping; but sometimes they make a nuisance of themselves. The worst sort throw themselves at you, always hanging around, trying to touch you, wangling ways of being alone with you.’

  ‘Jennifer Andrews was one of those?’

  ‘The worst. The sort that, when they finally get the message that you don’t want them, make trouble out of spite. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t with women like tha
t. Have you ever wondered why there are so many stories about priests messing around with parishioners? Sometimes the only way to avoid being falsely accused is to go ahead and do it.’

  ‘It happens to coppers too,’ Atherton said. ‘The glamour of the uniform. Are you married?’

  ‘No,’ said Tennyson, ‘but don’t think that would stop them. My married colleagues get pestered to death just the same.’

  ‘Did Jennifer Andrews falsely accuse you?’

  Tennyson gave him a horrible look. ‘What are you implying?’

  Atherton spread his hands. ‘I wasn’t implying anything. It was a straight question.’

  ‘What you’re really asking,’ Tennyson contradicted, ‘is whether I slept with her. And the answer’s no.’

  ‘But she wanted you to?’

  ‘What do you think?’ Tennyson said morosely, staring at the floor again.

  Atherton summoned reserves of patience. This interview was not without peril after all. If the hideous surroundings didn’t drive him to suicide, he could be bored to death, or choke on the smog of the vicar’s gloom. He decided to try a direct question of fact.

  ‘When did you last see Jennifer?’

  ‘Tuesday afternoon,’ he said promptly. ‘I thought you knew that. Isn’t that why you’re here?’

  Atherton adjusted smoothly. ‘I want to hear it in your own words. Where did you see her?’

  ‘She came here, of course. It was about six o’clock, or just before. She rang up earlier to ask if she could come and see me and I said no, it wasn’t convenient, but she came anyway. She knew I’d be here, preparing for the mid-week service at seven. The woman knows my schedule better than I do. If there was any justice in law, clergy could get these women taken up as stalkers. Anyway,’ he responding to Atherton’s prompting expression, ‘she turned up here, smelling of drink, and said she needed to talk to me. I brought her in here.’