‘It’s none of your damn’ business where I was. I don’t have to answer to you,’ Meacher said impatiently.
Slider sighed. ‘This is just time-wasting. I thought you were in a hurry?’
‘I’m not in a hurry to tell you my private business.’
‘Not as private as all that,’ Atherton said, in a tone calculated to annoy. ‘The Target Motel hardly counts as private property within the meaning of the act. Rather a hackneyed choice for a man of your sophistication, I thought, by the way. Or did you think that was all she merited?’ Meacher stared. Atherton added kindly, ‘The “she” I’m referring to is Jennifer Andrews, just in case you were going to waste more time by asking.’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ Meacher said, while his mind worked frantically behind his fixed eyes.
‘Yes, you do,’ Slider said. ‘You and Jennifer Andrews spent Tuesday afternoon together at the Target Motel.’ Meacher’s confidence had been such that he hadn’t even bothered to use a false name. ‘The registration clerk has identified Jennifer from her photograph, and he says you’ve been there several times before and he’s quite willing to pick you out from a line-up if necessary. And,’ he added a body blow to the reeling Meacher, ‘the post-mortem found semen in Mrs Andrews’ vagina. Fortunately the sample is good enough to get a DNA fingerprint from.’
Slider was punting on this last, since until they had a sample from Meacher to compare with, they couldn’t know the semen was his; but it was a fair guess that they hadn’t gone to the motel to play bridge. Meacher seemed to sag as the confidence trickled out of him into a little heap of sawdust at his feet.
‘What intrigues us most, you see,’ Atherton followed up with a smart left hook, ‘is that you didn’t tell us this before. You spent the afternoon engaging in social intercourse with Mrs Andrews – the last afternoon of her life – and didn’t think to mention it. Does that seem like the behaviour of an innocent man to you?’
Meacher rallied enough to get his gloves up. ‘Why should I mention it? I didn’t want my private life pawed over by a pack of prurient policemen.’ That wasn’t easy to say, and Atherton gave him grudging admiration. Meacher even looked surprised at himself, but followed up his advantage quickly. ‘Anyone could guess that as soon as you knew about that you’d start imagining all sorts of other things – just as you are doing, it seems. Yes, I saw her in the afternoon, but that’s the last time I saw her, and I know nothing about her death. Now are you satisfied?’
Slider pulled his chin judiciously. ‘Well,’ he said slowly, ‘there is just one other little matter. You agreed to meet her in Romano’s restaurant at eight fifteen that evening, but you didn’t show up. After waiting for three-quarters of an hour she went round to your house in a state of agitation, looking for you. She spoke to your wife, and told her all about it.’
Meacher started at that. So, Slider thought, Lady Diana still hasn’t told him. Now, was that odd of her, or not?
‘After leaving your house, Mrs Andrews disappears from view – and so do you,’ Slider went on. ‘So when I discover you’ve concealed information from me about your relationship with her, I can’t help wondering if she didn’t find you after all, when she went looking for you. If perhaps you and she were together for those vital hours. You do see my problem, don’t you?’
Meacher made a few silent passes before he managed to strike speech. ‘It’s preposterous. You can’t march in here accusing me of murder—’
‘I didn’t hear you say murder,’ Atherton said quickly, looking at Slider. ‘Did you say murder, sir?’
‘No, it was Mr Meacher who said murder.’
‘Don’t play your infantile games with me!’ Meacher spluttered. ‘I know a great many influential people. If you think you can come in here making these ridiculous accusations—’
‘Not so ridiculous from where I’m standing,’ Slider said. ‘If you were innocently engaged all night, the night she died, tell me all about it, and then I can cross you off the list. You won’t get rid of me otherwise.’
Silence fell in the little room. Beyond the door to the shop, the gentle murmur of Victoria’s voice could be heard answering a telephone enquiry, interspersed with the flat clacking of the keyboard as she typed in information. The tap behind Meacher dripped softly into the stainless-steel sink, heartbeat slow, clock steady. Beside him, Slider felt Atherton almost quivering with eagerness restrained, like a sheepdog at the beginning of the trials who has just seen the ewes released at the far end of the field.
‘Very well,’ Meacher said at last, trying to sound stern and condescending and not quite managing it. ‘I’ll tell you about it, but only so that I don’t have you hanging around here ruining my business day after day. I had been seeing Jennifer, but it was all over. She’d been seeing someone else – she didn’t tell me who – and she was obviously more interested in him than me. I told her when we met at the Target that I didn’t care to share her favours. She said very well, in that case we had better call it a day.’
‘Did this genial conversation take place before or after sex?’ Atherton asked.
Meacher’s face darkened. ‘How dare you? It’s none of your damned business whether—’
‘We’ve been over this already,’ Slider said patiently. ‘The only way out of this situation is to tell me the truth. If Jennifer was happy to split up with you, why did she arrange another meeting with you later that night? And why didn’t you turn up?’
‘Oh, all right!’ Meacher cried petulantly, and then remembered Victoria and lowered his voice. ‘All right, if you must know I was getting tired of her. She was getting more and more demanding, wanting to see me every day, being ridiculously possessive. It was becoming unpleasant – and dangerous: she was starting to get careless, and I was afraid any minute her husband was going to find out about it. I didn’t fancy having him after me. He didn’t strike me as the understanding sort. So I told her when we met at the Target that it had to end. She didn’t like it. In fact, she got quite hysterical. I had to take her to bed to calm her down.’ He intercepted an expression of distaste on Atherton’s face and said angrily, ‘Do you want the facts or don’t you? Because if you’re going to stand in judgement over me like some—’
‘Go on,’ Slider said. ‘What time did she leave the motel?’
‘About half past three, I suppose. I didn’t notice exactly.’
‘And where was she going?’
He shrugged. ‘She didn’t say. Home, I imagine.’
‘How was she when she left? What was her mood?’
‘She was all right – quite calm. She seemed to have accepted the situation: I was surprised when she rang me again.’
‘This was at half past six?’ Atherton put in.
‘That’s right.’ He didn’t question how they knew. ‘She said she must talk to me. I said couldn’t it wait? She said no, there were important things we had to sort out. Then she started crying and begging. The last thing I wanted was to see her again, but I had to promise to, to stop her crying. So I said Romano’s at eight fifteen.’
‘But you weren’t intending to keep the appointment?’
He hesitated. ‘I hadn’t decided. I thought I would. But as the time approached I couldn’t bear the thought of sitting in a restaurant with her making a scene. So I didn’t go.’ He looked from Slider to Atherton and back. ‘You say she went to my house?’ he asked thoughtfully.
‘Your wife told her she didn’t know where you were. Quite an elusive character, aren’t you?’ Meacher said nothing. ‘Would you like to tell us where you were between nine p.m. Tuesday night and nine a.m. Wednesday morning?’
‘I was with someone.’ They both waited, looking at him. ‘I was with a woman,’ he said impatiently.
‘All night?’ Slider asked.
‘All evening and all night. I went to her flat at around eight thirty, and I stayed with her until I left to come to the office in the morning.’
‘Name and address?
’
‘I’m certainly not going to tell you that,’ Meacher said, loftily as a gentleman whose honour has been impugned. ‘What do you take me for?’
At the moment, I wouldn’t take you on a bet, Slider thought, but he said patiently, ‘Mr Meacher, unless we can speak to this person and ask her to verify your whereabouts, you remain unaccounted for. I can’t cross you off the list.’ He stopped there, and maintained an insistent silence, while Meacher stared at the floor, apparently weighing things up.
‘All right,’ he said eventually, and with a show of reluctance. ‘I was with Caroline Barnes – my assistant, whom you saw last time you came harassing me here. But I don’t want her upset. Her relationship with me is our private business. If you have to ask her questions, for God’s sake be tactful. She’s very young and very sensitive.’
Slider took down her name, address and telephone number, with weariness at his heart. This was going to be nothing but an added complication. Neither Meacher’s reluctance nor his capitulation rang true.
‘Oh, there is just one other thing, sir,’ he said, as they were turning to go. ‘We have a set of fingermarks on Mrs Andrews’ handbag which don’t belong to her or her husband, and we would like to eliminate anyone who might have touched it during the last day. Would you be so kind as to come along to the station and give us your fingerprints for comparison purposes?’
Meacher stared long and hard, trying to work out if it was a trap, but Slider looked steadily and blandly back, and eventually he agreed. ‘I can’t come right away – I have some things to clear up here first.’
‘Very well, sir, but as soon as you can, if you wouldn’t mind.’
‘Things to clear up!’ Atherton said, when they were out on the street again. ‘You can bet your last banana he’s ringing up his alibi. He’ll write the script and she’ll read it out when we come asking.’
Slider didn’t disagree. ‘We’ll have to go through the motions, but it’ll be one of those alibis you can’t prove or disprove. It just leaves us with the same questions. Why should he want to kill Jennifer? If it was him, how did he do it, and where, and how did he transport the body? And if he didn’t kill her, where was he, and why all the subterfuge?’
‘You really did hope to cross him off,’ Atherton discovered.
‘Of course. One suspect at a time is enough for me.’
‘But you quite like Eddie and don’t like Meacher,’ Atherton pointed out.
‘Right. I hoped if he wasn’t cross-offable, he’d be definitely suspect. One or the other. Look, why don’t you get over to this Caroline sort right away, and get her story? Even if you can’t get to her before he does, you might unsettle her by turning up so soon. Or wear her down with your charm and finesse.’
‘Or warn her she’s next in line, after Jennifer, when he’s tired of her,’ Atherton suggested.
‘You’re devious!’
‘Maybe I am, and maybe I’m not,’ Atherton said mysteriously. ‘Where are you off to?’
Slider looked at his watch. Just after half past four: at that moment, someone somewhere in the country was saying, ‘I think she’s really clever, that Carol Vorderman.’
‘I think I’ll go and have another look at the Old Rectory,’ he said. ‘I’d like to see if what Mr Tennyson told you about the garage doors is right.’
As Slider had remarked before, there were two sets of wooden double doors in the left-hand third of the Old Rectory’s façade. The far left pair were older, of tongue-and-groove with a simple brown Bakelite doorknob, the wood uneven, shrunk with age and split at the bottom, the black paint generations thick, so that it was cracking down the grooves where it was unsupported. There was an old-fashioned keyhole, heavily bunged up with paint. The other pair of doors had a Yale lock and a newish brass mortice-type keyhole below, so it was easy to tell which pair the vicar had meant. Slider tried the Bakelite handle, and it turned, the door opening towards him effortlessly: Tennyson was right. But the moment he opened the door a fusillade of barking smote his ear and made him jump, and he closed it hastily and stepped back. A moment later the open kitchen window was pushed wider and Mrs Hammond looked out, her soft face creased with anxious enquiry. From the simultaneous boost in volume, Slider guessed that Sheba was in the kitchen with her.
‘It’s all right, it was only me,’ Slider said. ‘Detective Inspector Slider,’ he added, in case she had forgotten him.
‘Oh! I see,’ she said, like a willing-to-please child asked an incomprehensibly difficult question.
‘I wonder if I could have a look at your garage and storerooms? Would that be all right? May I?’
Mrs Hammond bit her lip, thinking it through. ‘You’d better come in,’ she said. Yes, Slider thought, that would be a good start. She withdrew her head, and he walked down to the front door. She had some difficulty in opening it, and when eventually she confronted him, she said, ‘It’s a bit stiff,’ and gave a placatory laugh, not with amusement but as a threatened cat purrs. ‘Warped, I’m afraid. Mostly people go round the back – those who know.’
She looked at him anxiously, neat in her middle-aged print frock with matching fabric belt. Marks and Sparks: he recognised the one-size-fits-all style of it. Apart from the anxious expression, her face was a smooth indeterminacy framed by her amorphous, middle-aged waved hair. There were thousands of women like her, millions, he thought, up and down the country, going about their dull, useful routines: women who defined themselves by their men, as daughters, wives, mothers; whose time had been used up with cooking, washing-up, fetching, listening, agreeing. Their lives had been lived always at one remove, on the dry shore above the high-tide mark of passions, in a sheltered place out of the stinging wind, out of the swing of the sea. Great events did not happen to women like her. They did not rub shoulders with murder. How bewildering it must all be to her.
‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he began politely, and she jumped in with, ‘Oh, it’s all right, Father’s having his physiotherapy at the moment.’ Her being disturbed was not in question with her, it was her father who mattered. ‘That’s why Sheba’s in with me, to keep her out of the way. She’s been rather upset since all this …’ She led the way back to the kitchen. The dog barked once behind the door at their approach, and as Mrs Hammond opened it, backed away, looking at Slider and growling, but with the tail swinging hesitantly, just in case. ‘It’s all right, Sheba. Be quiet, there’s a good girl,’ Mrs Hammond said, catching hold of the collar. ‘Just let her sniff your hand, and she’ll be all right.’ The dog sniffed his offered hand briefly, and then, released, smelt his shoes extensively, with embarrassing canine frankness. Then, apparently satisfied, she went back to her basket in the corner and curled down. Slider noted she was chewing the piece of rag again. Obsessive behaviour. That dog must be an animal psychiatrist’s dream.
Mrs Hammond asked. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’
‘No, no tea, thank you. I’d just like to see what’s beyond the kitchen door, here, if I may. You have storerooms, I believe?’
‘Yes, and the boiler-room, and the garage. Is there something wrong?’
‘No, not at all. Nothing to worry about,’ he said, with his most reassuring smile. ‘I’d just like to get the geography straight in my head, if you wouldn’t mind.’
She looked unreassured, but opened the further door and stepped back to let him through. He found himself in a stone-floored passage about four feet wide, the whitewashed walls of rough stone, like the outside of the house. There were two doors on either side, of solid tongue and groove, painted dark green, and the only light came through the glass panel of the door at the far end.
‘This is the oldest part of the house,’ Mrs Hammond said. ‘This and the kitchen. It probably goes back to the fourteenth century, or even earlier. A friend of ours who knows about houses told us.’
‘Is that Mr Meacher?’ Slider hazarded.
She flushed. ‘Oh! Yes – yes, it is. Do you know him?’
‘Yes,
I’ve met him,’ Slider said. ‘What’s in these rooms?’
‘Nothing in particular,’ she said. ‘They’re just storerooms.’
‘May I have a look?’
‘Oh. Well, if you want. They’re not locked.’
He could see that. They had only country latches, and no keyholes, though the doors to the left – the street side of the house – had bolts on the outside. When Slider opened the first left-hand door he found that the room was quite empty except for a bundle of torn hessian sacks in the corner. It was about eight feet long by six wide, and windowless. The walls were whitewashed, and the door was rather battered and splintery at the bottom, with grooves down to the pale wood under the paint as if it had been gouged with a garden fork.
‘We used to keep the gardener’s tools in here,’ Mrs Hammond said, ‘but there’s a shed outside now, which is more convenient. So we don’t use it for anything, really.’
Slider thought of his house at Ruislip, which assumed no-one had more belongings than could dance on the head of a pin, and wondered at having so much storage space you could leave a whole room empty. Glorious waste!
The first room on the right was the same size, but had a small, high window, and smelt strongly of apples. There were boxes of them stacked around the walls, a sack of carrots, strings of onions on hooks on the walls, and jars of jams and fruit on a long shelf along one wall. There were other boxes too, of tins of dog food and tomatoes and so on, and various bits of junk lying around – a jumble of empty flower-pots, a child’s cot mattress, a set of pram wheels with the handle still attached, an ancient vacuum cleaner, a stack of books. ‘The dry store,’ she said, waving a nervous hand round it. ‘Nothing here, you see. Nothing important, anyway.’
The second door on the left gave onto another windowless room, which was furnished with self-assembly wine racks, about a quarter full with bottles of wine, some looking authentically dusty. The second room on the right housed nothing but the smell of oil and a massive boiler, its tin chimney bending precariously before disappearing through the wall, with the fine carelessness of earlier, uninspected days.
Shallow Grave (Bill Slider Mystery) Page 19
