Shallow Grave (Bill Slider Mystery)

by Harrod-Eagles, Cynthia

  ‘Maybe that’s why it was done clumsily,’ Atherton said.

  ‘It wasn’t that clumsy. Most men couldn’t do it that well in a barber’s chair under a spotlight.’

  ‘Well, what about in someone’s car? You know that most drugs are bought, sold and ingested in cars: it’s the new privacy. So why not murder? You’d have interior light to do the making-up by.’

  ‘Well, it’s a possibility,’ Slider said.

  ‘A bare one, by the tone of your voice,’ Atherton complained. ‘Here I am thinking my heart out for you—’

  ‘Well, look, if she was smothered without a struggle, she must have been drugged in some way, and how was that to be done? You don’t suddenly produce a pill when you’re out for a walk in the country and say, “Here, swallow this.” Or even,’ he anticipated Atherton’s rider, ‘sitting in a car.’

  ‘All right, then, maybe it was done indoors,’ Atherton said. ‘There are other houses in the world than Eddie’s. And we don’t actually know it wasn’t at Eddie’s. It’s just that we’ve no evidence it was.’

  ‘But then you’ve got the problem – which applies to any house – of hauling the body out and getting it across to the Rectory, and I can’t believe no-one would notice.’

  ‘People don’t notice things like anything, all the time, every day of the week,’ Atherton pointed out.

  Slider shook his head. ‘The thing that’s really bugging me, I suppose, is that even if no-one noticed at the loading-up end, and even if the Rectory neighbours didn’t notice the vehicle driving up and the crunching feet over the gravel, I can’t believe all that activity went on on the terrace in the dead of night without the dog barking. That dog’s on a hair-trigger.’

  Atherton pulled out the grill pan to inspect progress, and pushed it back in to bubble some more. The kitchen was filling with the delicious aroma of roasting cheese, and he kept expecting to feel Oedipus’s solid body pressing against his legs in the ritual food gyration. Oedipus was particularly fond of cheese: quite a Cheshire cat, he thought.

  ‘And yet,’ Slider continued with a frown, ‘that’s precisely what did happen. Whoever put the body into the hole, the dog didn’t bark in the night.’

  ‘Don’t go all Sherlock Holmes on me,’ Atherton said. ‘Maybe they just didn’t hear it. People with yappy dogs can learn to shut out the noise – like people living by a railway not hearing the trains.’

  ‘It isn’t exactly a yappy dog. And it’s supposed to be a guard dog: would anyone ignore the barking of a guard dog, especially in the night?’

  ‘It’s possible they simply didn’t hear it,’ Atherton said reasonably. ‘Mr Dacre said he slept well that night for a change, so presumably he needed the sleep. Maybe he even took something to help him.’

  ‘Mrs Hammond says she’s a light sleeper. And she said she didn’t sleep well that night. If the dog had barked, surely she would have heard it?’

  ‘People who say they don’t sleep actually sleep a lot more than they think – it’s a proven fact. It’s a peculiar form of vanity, to claim not to sleep,’ he diverged. ‘As though sleeping were something rather gross and common. Like those nineteenth-century ladies who prided themselves on never eating, and fainted all the time to show how refined they were. In any case,’ he reverted robustly, pulling out the grill pan again, ‘que voulez vous? There are only two possibilities, aren’t there? Either the dog didn’t bark, or they didn’t hear it.’

  ‘Some help you are,’ Slider said.

  They carried the supper through to the sitting room to eat. Atherton made free with Joanna’s sound system and put on Brahms’ fourth symphony, because that’s what the women were playing at Milton Keynes that evening, and he thought it might give them sympathetic vibrations and improve his chances for later.

  Slider said, ‘If it was Meacher, or anybody else come to that, why would he put the body in the hole? It doesn’t make sense for anyone other than Eddie Andrews. It’s got to be Eddie, even if it can’t be.’

  Atherton sat with his plate and glass and stretched out his legs. ‘Let it go, now. You’ve got to learn to switch off, or you’ll burn yourself out.’

  ‘That’s what I’ve always told you, about women,’ Slider said, with a slow smile.

  ‘That’s better,’ Atherton said approvingly. ‘Just forget about it for a few hours. We’ve probably missed something glaringly obvious, and the subconscious will chuck it out if we leave it alone. You’ll wake up in the morning knowing everything from aardvark to zymosis.’

  ‘Tomorrow,’ Slider said. ‘Oh, Nora, Joanna’s going to take my car again.’

  Atherton raised his eyebrows. ‘Bad move,’ he said. ‘You know there’s a tube strike tomorrow? And some of the buses are probably coming out in sympathy.’

  ‘Bloody Nora.’ Slider upped the stakes. Of course, that would be why she had to have the car. Why hadn’t he remembered?

  ‘There you are,’ Atherton said, watching his face, ‘counter-irritant. A nice go of toothache to take your mind off your headache.’

  The solution to the transport problem turned out to be an early call to the AA while Joanna, having inspected the breadless kitchen cupboards, departed in Slider’s car for Henry Wood Hall near enough to the crack of dawn to be able to stop for breakfast somewhere on the way. Slider made a few phone calls and tried to let his mind lie fallow so as to let the back-burner syndrome take effect. He had woken no closer to making sense of the senseless than he had gone to sleep.

  The AA man arrived unexpectedly soon, and Slider hurried out to unlock the car for him. He was a young, burly and immensely cheerful man, who when Slider apologised for the early call, said, ‘No worries, mate, I’d sooner this than the middle of the night trying to work in the dark.’ But his demeanour suggested he’d have been just as cheerful at midnight in December. Slider envied him such a robust disposition.

  He tried it first and checked the fuel gauge. ‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘How are you for petrol? Quarter full, that’s okay. You’d be surprised how often I get called out and all it is, there’s no petrol in the tank. Not just women, either.’

  He put up the bonnet of Joanna’s Alfa and dived in with enthusiasm, while Slider hung about and looked over his shoulder like an auntie in the kitchen. They were watched through the window of the van by a large mongrel that plainly featured collie and Dobermann amongst its varied ancestors.

  ‘The wife feels happier if I’ve got him with me, the lonely stretches of road we get called to sometimes,’ the patrolman said, in answer to Slider’s conversational query. ‘He loves it, out and about all the time. I don’t approve of leaving a dog shut up in the house all day. It’s not fair on them.’

  Slider agreed absently. ‘Good guard dog, is he?’

  ‘If anyone tried to mess with me or the motor,’ the man said elliptically, looking back over his shoulder at the intent face at the window. ‘One-man dog, that one,’ he added proudly. ‘I’m the only person who can do anything with him.’

  ‘Oh?’ Slider said, and grew very still, thought taking hold of him. Further conversation went over his head, and he barely even noticed when the engine jumped at last to life, following a delicate mechanical operation, involving a judicious whack on the starter-motor with a hammer.

  The AA man slammed the bonnet down and said, ‘Well, that’ll tide you over for a bit, but I don’t promise anything. It could go again any time. You really want to get that starter-motor replaced.’

  ‘I will. Thanks. Thanks a lot. I’ve really got to dash now, but I’m very grateful to you.’

  ‘S’all right. All part of the job, squire,’ the AA man said easily.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Alf The Sacred

  He drove to St Michael Square, deep in thought. The square was quiet, basking in the young sunshine at the innocent time of day when workers have departed, non-workers are still indoors, and intentions, good and bad, are only just waking up. He parked round at the end of the church and stepped ou
t to stand leaning on the railings, hoping inspiration would strike. It was cool in the shadow of the tower, but across from the churchyard, the odd but mellow façade of the Old Rectory was warm with sunlight. Squint up a bit, he thought, and you could be in a village. A brisk dog, trotting on its rounds, smiled up at him as it passed; all that was wanted was the schoolmistress on a bicycle and the village bobby on his beat. Not that that was how he remembered his own village life as a child. Perhaps he had grown up through a rainy decade, but his images of childhood in Essex were chiefly of mud: lanes, yards, fields of it, as far as the eye could see; cows plastered with it, hens sodden with it, wellies clogged with it; football boots weighted with it, welding tired junior legs to a school pitch like the Somme; passing tractors on the road chucking great homicidal gouts of the stuff at your head from between the lugs of their tyres. His mother had waged a lifelong, losing battle to keep the tide of mud from invading the house. Her life, he thought, was the microcosm of the struggle of civilisation: an endless fight to keep out the forces of chaos. It was why he had become a policeman, really – that and the recruiting-sergeant’s promise of all the women he could eat.

  The evocative clang of a heavy wrought-iron gate was transmitted through the railings to his hand, and he roused himself to see an old man in a flat cap, collarless white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, elderly grey flannel trousers and stout army-surplus boots, just leaving the churchyard from the gate on the side that faced the old Rectory. He held a large metal ring on which a number and variety of keys were hung, and now fumbled for one with which to lock the churchyard gate. Slider went round and accosted him.

  The old man turned sharply, but seemed reassured by the look of Slider, and said pleasantly, ‘Hello! Where did you pop up from?’ while he went on locking the gate.

  ‘I’ve just parked over there. Detective Inspector Slider.’ Slider showed his brief, and the old man inspected it with watery blue eyes, nodded, and then slowly dragged out a handkerchief and blew his nose thoroughly, ending up with several wipes, exploratory sniffs, and a general polishing of the end, before restoring the handkerchief to his trousers.

  ‘I suppose you’re looking into this business about Mrs Andrews,’ he concluded. ‘Shocking! Is that right she was done away with?’

  ‘It seems that way,’ Slider said. ‘I see you have the keys to the church.’

  ‘Who else should have ’em?’ he said, straightening up as though coming to attention. ‘Sexton, me. Alf Whitton’s the name.’ He inspected his palm to see if it was fit for the task, and then offered it to Slider. Slider usually avoided shaking hands with the public, but there was something beguiling about the man and the gesture, and he took the dry, horny palm and shook it briefly. ‘Just been sweeping up,’ Whitton added, jerking his head towards the church. ‘She don’t get so dirty this dry weather, but she do get get dusty. Mondays I sweep, even when there’s not been a service the Sunday; Tuesdays I does the woodwork – dust and polish.’

  ‘There must be a lot of work in keeping a church like this nice,’ Slider said sympathetically.

  ‘Oh, there is, there is,’ he said eagerly, ‘but I don’t mind it. I learned all about spit an’ polish in the army, and there’s a kind of rhythm to cleaning, a knack, if you like. Satisfying, it is, seeing things come up. Brass and silver especially: it’s ’ard work, but the results are lovely. There’s a brass lectern in there, shape of an eagle. All feathers! Cuh!’ He jerked his head and lifted his eyes to demonstrate the difficulties of cleaning brazen birds of prey. ‘But it comes up a treat when it’s done. I been looking after this ’ere church for forty years, give or take,’ he went on, casting an affectionate eye over his shoulder at the grave, grey tower.

  ‘I should think they’re lucky to have you,’ Slider said warmly.

  He looked pleased. ‘Sexton of her and St Melitus’s, but it’s her I like best. Otherwise I wouldn’t’ve taken on the cleaning, not at my age. Used to have a cleaner, up till five year ago, then they said they couldn’t afford to pay for one any more. Couldn’t justify it, they said,’ he added, as though it were a particularly nauseating weasel-word – which perhaps it was. ‘Well, I couldn’t stand to see her get grubby and sad, like I seen so many churches, so I said I’d do it. Keep her lovely, I do, though I says it as shouldn’t. But I wouldn’t do it for no-one else. I don’t clean St Melitus’s,’ he said sternly, in case Slider got the wrong idea.

  ‘You seem to keep very fit on it,’ Slider said.

  Whitton jutted his white-bristled chin and slapped himself in the chest. ‘Eighty-two come September. How about that?’

  ‘Marvellous!’

  ‘And I still keep the graves, and stoke the boiler in winter. Not that that’s a job I like. Messy stuff, coke, and I never did like being down the crypt. Reminds me too much of air-raid shelters. Don’t like cellars and tunnels and such.’

  Where Alf the sacred cleaner ran, through caverns measureless to man, thought Slider. Eighty-two and still shovelling it – they bred ’em tough before the war.

  ‘Wouldn’t mind someone younger taking over the boiler, but where you going to find one?’ Alf went on. ‘Young people today weren’t brought up to service like you and me was. Never think of nothing but themselves.’

  ‘If you’ve been sexton here all that time, you must know a lot of people hereabouts.’

  ‘Course I do,’ he said smartly. ‘Know everyone in the square, and the church, all the congregation, the council. Seen ’em come and go. Eight vicars we’ve had here since I been sexton. It’s the trufe! And everyone knows me, what’s more. Knew Jennifer Andrews, if that’s what you’re working up to. Want to have a little chat with me about it, do you?’

  ‘Yes, if you don’t mind.’

  He smacked his lips. ‘Can’t talk with a dry mouth. Want to come in and have a cup of tea?’

  ‘In?’ Slider queried. In the church, did he mean?

  ‘My house,’ Whitton said, gesturing across the road.

  Slider looked blank. ‘You live nearby, do you?’

  ‘Church Cottage, next to the Rectory,’ he said patiently, gesturing again.

  Now Slider twigged. He meant the small cottage next door on the left of the Old Rectory. ‘You’re the missing householder!’

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘We tried to interview everyone in the square, but we never got a reply from your house, so we thought you were away, on holiday or something.’

  ‘Away? I don’t go away. Prob’ly wasn’t in. I’m not in much – here and there, doing little jobs.’

  ‘We tried in the evening, too.’

  ‘I like to go to the pub of an evening. And even if I’m in, I don’t answer the door. Not at night. Never know who it might be.’

  ‘And you don’t have a telephone.’

  ‘Never have had,’ Whitton said triumphantly. ‘Never felt the need.’

  ‘So how do people ever manage to get hold of you?’ Slider asked in frustration. ‘Suppose someone had an urgent message?’

  ‘Oh, I’m here and there and round about. People know where to find me. You managed all right,’ he pointed out.

  Slider gave it up, and followed the old man across the road to the cottage. In contrast to the baking day outside, it was dark and cold inside Church Cottage, and smelt strongly of damp and faintly of dog. The door opened directly onto the sitting room, which was dominated by a large fireplace with a fire of logs and paper in it made up ready to light. There was a massive beam over the fireplace, which supported a mess of ornaments, knick-knacks, letters, bills, photographs and assorted small junk, and a door beside it which Slider guessed would conceal the stairs to the upper floor. The low ceiling was also beamed, the plaster between them stained richly ochre by years of smoke – an effect refurbished pubs paid decorators large sums to replicate. For the rest there was a thin and ancient carpet on the floor, two old armchairs covered in imitation leather from the fifties flanking the fire, and a portable television on an aspidistra st
and. Under the window was a small table covered by a lace cloth on which stood a birdcage containing a blue budgie. It whistled as they came in, but then fell silent, looking rather depressed. The window was small and heavily draped in nets which kept out most of the light, so Slider was not surprised.

  ‘That’s Billy,’ Whitton said, noting Slider’s look. ‘He’s company for me, since my old dog died. I’d like another dog, but I haven’t got the time to train a puppy, and I don’t fancy someone else’s leavings.’ He chirruped at the bird, but it just sat there glumly, shoulders hunched, like someone waiting for a bus in the rain.

  Whitton led the way through the open door on the other side of the fireplace to the kitchen, evidently the only other downstairs room. It was a narrow room, lino-floored and defiantly unreconstructed: an earthenware sink with an enamel drainer and a cold tap, a geyser on the wall above for hot water, one of those 1950s cupboards with the flap in the middle that lets down to make a work surface, and on a home-made shelf beside it an electric kettle and a double gas-ring.

  There was also a wooden kitchen table and two chairs, drawn up under the window. Whitton gestured Slider towards it. ‘Have a seat, while I put the kettle on. I mostly sit in here in the summer, when I don’t have the fire going. It’s brighter.’

  It was. Slider sat as requested, and looked out through the window at a neat square of garden, gay with flowers. Where the Rectory’s plot went all the way down to the railway, Whitton’s extended a mere twenty feet, ending in a high fence over the top of which could be seen the walls and roofs of some natty new little one-size-fits-all houses. ‘Your bedders look very nice. Are you a keen gardener?’ Slider asked, convensationally.

  Whitton turned from his kettle activities with a bitter look. ‘Used to be. Nothing to be keen with, now. Used to go all the way down to the bottom, my garden. Fruit, vegetables, apple and pear trees. Lovely chrysanthemums, I used to grow. Potting shed down the bottom. Greenhouse. And a little bit of a wall I grew figs against. You like figs?’