Grave Concerns

by Rebecca Tope

  As if sensing a softening, the man pressed home his point. ‘If I’m right, then there’s no need to take it any further. She can be laid to rest again, and nobody’s going to be harmed by her remaining anonymous. Nobody but me – knowing I was more or less the one who drove her to it.’

  Drew’s scepticism became mixed with curiosity. Damn it, he thought. Why do I always have to know the full story? It makes everything so much more complicated.

  ‘But it wasn’t you who buried her here?’ he demanded. ‘Because that’s the way it’s beginning to sound.’

  ‘No, it wasn’t me. I almost wish it was – at least then, I’d know for sure that it was her. Anyway – let me give you a bit more of the background. I was her doctor, you see, have been for thirty years or more. But I retired eighteen months ago – no, not under any kind of a cloud,’ he added, noticing Drew’s expression. ‘I was sixty, and felt I’d done it for long enough, that’s all.’

  ‘Go on,’ Drew invited him, leaning forward over the edge of the desk.

  The visitor squirmed restlessly on his chair. ‘I hope it’ll explain why I’d much rather keep away from the police. They have an unfortunate habit of digging into the past – especially where a medical practitioner is concerned. Any shadow of suspicion and they start believing they’ve got a serial killer on their hands. There’s no character so unredeemable as an untrustworthy doctor. They would make my life unbearable.’

  ‘Are you sure you want to tell me this?’ Drew interrupted. ‘It’s quite possible that I’ll feel forced to pass your story directly to the Coroner.’

  ‘I’m taking that risk. I hope I can convince you that there’s nothing to be gained by doing that.’

  ‘Well, it’s up to you,’ Drew said, leaning back in his chair.

  The doctor fiddled with a button on his coat, as he spoke, but showed no sign of emotion as he told his story.

  ‘This woman had a badly handicapped son,’ he said, following the bald statement with a torrent of explanation that felt to Drew like a kind of confession. ‘He had severe deformation of the spine, resulting in diminished lung capacity, chronic joint pain and susceptibility to infection. He also had poor hearing and eyesight. She wasn’t the sort of woman to sacrifice herself to caring for him, especially when he got into his teens. But she had no choice. He was a difficult person, in many ways. Peevish, self-absorbed. She never pretended to love him, and tried several times to get him into long-term residential care. Unfortunately, he wasn’t quite handicapped enough to qualify under the NHS and she couldn’t hope to pay for it. She had two other children, much older, and was no chicken herself. Well, in the end, she cracked. I had to choose whether to see her completely destroyed by the burden or to help her out of it. I won’t go into details, but between us we brought the whole thing to a somewhat speedier conclusion than nature would have done, left to its own devices. Nathan had a chest infection, which turned to pneumonia. He was in severe distress, and was developing a new set of spinal problems as he grew to adult size. There was no quality of life for anyone concerned.’

  ‘I’m with you so far,’ said Drew, glancing at his little daughter and wondering at how things might have been in his own family circle. It didn’t occur to him to doubt the man’s medical credentials; as a former nurse himself, he recognised the language, the oddly brisk detachment from a painful emotional situation. And he found himself almost as drawn into this tale as he had been into Genevieve’s.

  ‘How long ago did this happen?’ Drew asked, as the man paused.

  ‘Oh, five or six years. I’d almost forgotten the whole thing, until early last year.’

  ‘So what happened?’

  ‘She came to me in great distress. Someone had accused her of killing her son and she was frightened.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I – I sent her away. I told her to stop making a fool of herself.’

  ‘At last!’ breathed Drew.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘It sounds as if you’ve finally got to the point. You don’t think she committed suicide at all, do you? The idea’s completely ludicrous, given the circumstances. You’re trying to get confirmation that this is your fellow conspirator and that someone murdered her, just to ease your own conscience – and allay your own fears. If she’s dead, you don’t have to worry about being caught for what you did to her son.’ His raised voice alarmed Stephanie, who gave an anxious bleat. Drew fell silent, looking crossly from one face to the other, wondering why he’d been so rash.

  But the man was surprisingly unperturbed by Drew’s accusations. ‘You’ve got the wrong end of the stick, you know. I can understand your doubting my story, but you’ve jumped to completely the wrong conclusion.’

  Drew was distracted by Stephanie, who, distressed, had crawled to him and pulled herself up until she was wobbling unsteadily against his leg. He swung her up onto his lap. ‘Sorry,’ he muttered. He wasn’t sure to whom he was apologising. ‘You’d better tell me the rest of it.’

  ‘They were just an ordinary family when I first knew them,’ Dr Jarvis recalled, sitting back in his chair, and smiling thoughtfully at Stephanie as she played with Drew’s fingers. ‘Mum, Dad and two little girls. Then they fell for a third baby, quite unplanned, and it all went wrong from there. If ever there was a good case for a termination, that was it. But she wouldn’t hear of it. Anyway, there was a terrible car accident. The father was killed, Gwen was five months pregnant, and was trapped in the wreckage. When the baby was born, it was obvious he’d been damaged in utero. Nobody was ever really sure whether it was the psychological trauma or something more physiological that did it. She wasn’t badly injured, apart from bruises and cuts—’

  Drew couldn’t suppress a groan. At the man’s quizzical look, he explained, ‘My wife was hit by a car when she was first pregnant with this one.’ He nodded at Stephanie. ‘We were terribly lucky, from the sound of it.’

  Jarvis shook his head. ‘My patient was unlucky,’ he said. ‘The baby wasn’t really wanted. Her husband wasn’t happy about it. They were having a blazing fight in the car, just before the crash. It was a disaster waiting to happen, looking back on it. The whole family was crushed by that accident. They were like walking wounded for years afterwards. Still are, in Genevieve’s case.’

  Drew’s heart pounded, his head hummed with the sudden surge of pressure. ‘Not Genevieve Slater?’ he said faintly.

  ‘That’s right,’ agreed Dr Jarvis in surprise. ‘Do you know her?’

  CHAPTER SIX

  The time had come, Drew told himself sternly, to tell Karen what had been happening. Above all, he should tell her that Genevieve Slater had turned up again. He should have done it days ago. He knew only too well why he hadn’t.

  Karen had been overjoyed when they’d triumphed over the Slaters and been accepted as purchasers of the Bradbourne house. ‘I wonder why she chose us?’ she’d mused.

  ‘Because we’re so nice,’ Drew had quipped. He never told her what he’d done, never disclosed his brief intimacy with Genevieve. Karen had never even known her Christian name. He tried to, in the early days, but the moment was never quite right, and before long, it became much too late to confess. It would turn a rather small piece of dishonesty into something much bigger, if he gave the impression that it had weighed heavy on his conscience. Much easier to try and forget the whole thing and simply enjoy the new house.

  He had worried at first that Genevieve would find a way to tell Karen about it. But remembering how she’d forgiven him despite her anger, he had convinced himself that she would have nothing to gain by doing that. ‘Well, good luck to you then,’ had been her parting shot to him. ‘It’s been a pleasure knowing you, Drew Slocombe. Your wife’s a very lucky girl.’

  The shame at how tempted he’d been, the self-disgust, the horrified realisation when he awoke from dreaming about Genevieve, all came back to him now. If he mentioned her name, linking her to the Mrs Slater from the past, wouldn’t Karen k
now by some wifely instinct how Genevieve made him feel? Better, then, to keep her identity undisclosed, at least for the time being.

  Karen’s good sense had helped him before, when events had threatened to overwhelm him and his inconvenient sense of justice and overactive curiosity had led him into deep waters. But she was a lot less receptive now than she would have been a year earlier. After a day in front of thirty six-year-olds, followed by collecting Stephanie and giving her a meal, then preparing for the coming week’s schedule, she was tired and cross. Drew made a point of closing the office promptly at five every day and joining his wife and daughter in the cottage. Karen then frequently sent him out for some shopping, four miles away, and expected him to cook their evening meal. How did life get to be so frantic? he wondered.

  ‘I had a very peculiar visitor today,’ he began, when Stephanie was at last in bed and the meal over and done with. ‘About that body we found.’

  ‘Oh yes?’ Karen was slumped in an armchair with her feet up, a hand across her eyes.

  ‘He thinks he knows who she is.’

  ‘Why come to you about it? Hasn’t he been to the police?’

  ‘He claims to think she committed suicide because of a threat he made to her. The police wouldn’t be very sympathetic. He’s a doctor, you see. He might find himself under an uncomfortably close scrutiny—’

  ‘What was the threat?’ she asked, focusing on the central point, despite her exhaustion.

  ‘Oh – something that happened a few years ago. Euthanasia, I suppose. He says they did it together.’

  ‘Makes sense.’ She frowned and ran her fingers through her hair. Drew observed that it could do with a wash. It looked lank and greasy. ‘But why come to you? Why rock the boat when there’s practically no danger of the body being identified? Sounds rather a stupid move to me.’

  ‘Well – that’s where it gets complicated,’ Drew began, leaning towards her, over the arm of the chair. ‘I think it could be a double bluff—’

  ‘Oh!’ Karen stiffened and put a hand to her middle.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he demanded, in alarm.

  She laughed unsteadily. ‘Well, if I didn’t know better, I’d say I was just kicked from inside. That’s exactly what it felt like.’

  ‘Wind,’ he said. ‘Must be.’ But in that three or four seconds, all had become clear to them both, and suddenly Drew lost all interest in murders and bodies and seductive older women.

  The weekend came as a relief out of all proportion. Drew and Karen lay in bed until eight-thirty on Saturday morning, Stephanie dozing between them. Drew pretended to be asleep for the half hour after he woke, trying to sift through the tangle of dilemmas he was faced with. He suspected Karen was doing exactly the same.

  ‘It must have been before Christmas,’ she said eventually, into the silence. ‘I must be at least four months gone. God, I feel so stupid.’

  ‘It’s still not certain. You’ll have to have it confirmed. Can you buy a test?’

  ‘If I’m four months, a test won’t be reliable. The hormones all switch around at twelve or thirteen weeks. It’ll have to be a scan, or a Sonicaid.’ She laughed weakly. ‘It certainly explains why I’ve been feeling so peculiar.’

  It’s a disaster, Drew thought despairingly. All the more despairing because he couldn’t ever utter the words. These things happened to other people, didn’t they? Stephanie had taken more than two years to get started – it had never occurred to him that conception could be so easy. ‘All that breastfeeding,’ he said. ‘I thought it worked as a contraceptive.’

  ‘It does,’ she said. ‘Usually. I assumed that’s why I hadn’t started periods again. But it’s not a hundred per cent. I thought – well, you know. I thought we were subfertile—’

  ‘Yeah,’ Drew sympathised ruefully. ‘I thought so too.’

  ‘I can’t believe we’ve been so stupid! I was going to go to the clinic next week and get a diaphragm or something. I really was. I knew I shouldn’t have left it this long. I can just see Dr Harrison’s face – you remember he asked me what we were going to use, before Steph was a week old?’

  Always quick to read cosmic meaning into events, Drew had already concluded that he was being punished in some way. It wasn’t difficult to identify the relevant misdemeanour, either. He should never have permitted himself to feel as he did about Genevieve Slater – although how it would have been possible to feel differently, he had no idea. He should have told Karen about the woman’s recent reappearance in his life straight away. He had no idea how he was going to extricate himself from the inevitable second meeting; the involvement in her family’s murky past; the acquiescence to her request that he play detective on her behalf. He was helpless flotsam, sucked in both by illicit desire and the fact of his field having been chosen as the mystery woman’s burial place. He seemed to have no free will of his own in the matter.

  ‘It might all be your imagination,’ he repeated doggedly. ‘Let’s not get carried away. Just your system settling down again after Stephanie. Anyway, wouldn’t you have felt sick – gone off coffee – all that stuff that happened last time.’

  ‘I was too busy,’ she said. ‘If I had felt sick, I probably wouldn’t have had time to dwell on it. It’s not like ordinary nausea – and you don’t get it every time, in any case. It never even occurred to me.’ She sighed heavily, and turned to look at him. ‘Oh Drew. How on earth are we going to manage?’

  Valiantly he strove to be strong. ‘It’ll be fine,’ he said. ‘We wanted more babies, anyway. We should know by now you can’t control these things. The trick is to just take it a day at a time.’

  ‘And starve in the process,’ she groaned.

  They didn’t return to the subject of the dead woman in the field throughout the weekend. Stephanie was fractious and demanding. Although they pretended to believe it was a new tooth coming through, both her parents knew it was a direct reaction to the tension between them. The woman who’d run their antenatal classes had made an unforgettable remark: Babies are highly sensitive emotional barometers. When you’re frazzled or worried, they’ll start whingeing and clinging. Once you realise that, it gets much easier to deal with. Drew wasn’t entirely convinced by the last part, as his daughter clutched his hair painfully when he tried to lay her down in her cot for the fifteenth time that evening, but he couldn’t deny the truth of the basic assertion.

  At the back of his mind, he could already hear Karen saying, I’m sorry, Drew, but you’re going to have to get a proper job. One with a guaranteed income. We can’t possibly manage otherwise. I can’t go back to work with two babies. It’ll be too complicated.

  A proper job meant abandoning Peaceful Repose, selling out to someone else. It meant going back to nursing, or starting again in something new. The idea sickened him. It took the bottom out of everything he felt was important. But it galvanised him into searching for a solution, no matter how bizarre it might be.

  And the next day, it was handed to him on a plate, tied up with red ribbon and ticking like a cartoon time bomb. On Monday afternoon, three things happened within half an hour, and by the end of that time a great deal had changed.

  Firstly, at three-fifteen, another phonecall from Genevieve came through. Drew snatched up the phone, partly in anticipation that it would be her and partly to avoid disturbing Stephanie, who was lying quietly on her side, tootling her toy train along the skirting board of the office.

  ‘I gather Malcolm Jarvis came to see you,’ she said, faintly accusing. ‘And you told him you’d met me.’

  ‘I mentioned you, yes. Was that a problem?’

  ‘Not really. Although I don’t understand what his motive is. He hadn’t seen my mother for years, as far as I know. I think he had a bit of a thing about her, when my brother was alive. She was always rather rapacious, where men were concerned. They did spend a lot of time together. I assume he told you about my brother?’

  ‘He did, yes. It sounded very sad.’

  ‘
Nathan was a monster,’ she said flatly. ‘Self-pitying, attention-seeking. You see these angelic handicapped people on the telly, making the best of their situation, writing fantastic poetry or using computers with their toes. Well, Nathan was nothing like that. He wasn’t brain damaged – just an emotional tyrant. He never even tried to do anything for himself. Mum was his unwilling slave. He ruined her life in a big way. You could see she was over the moon when he died.’

  Drew spluttered slightly at that. He was yet to hear any of his funeral customers go so far as to say such a thing. She heard him, but made no apology. ‘It’s true,’ she insisted. ‘She was like a cork out of a bottle – zipping all over the place, making up for so much lost time. Went overboard of course, being the selfish person she was. Never gave a thought to anybody else. I should have mentioned that Nathan wasn’t altogether a misfit. He took after his mother in a great many ways.’

  Drew cut the tirade short, feeling deeply uneasy. ‘Er – where does all this leave us now? Do you still want me to help?’

  ‘Definitely. But I know I’m asking an awful lot of you, and I’ll obviously have to make it worth your while. Would two thousand pounds make a difference?’

  Drew had never been offered a bribe before, but he recognised it for what it was. Conflict raged within him. For the first time he felt a real pang of fear that this whole business was going to get him into big trouble. Genevieve herself seemed to be suggesting that, with this sudden offer of money.

  But two thousand pounds would oil a great many wheels. It would smooth things with Karen, and even mollify Maggs, who was beginning to cast doubts on the viability of what they were trying to do. He found himself wondering which bank account he’d put it into, and how he’d explain it to the Inland Revenue.

  ‘Well?’ came the voice, and he realised he’d left a long silence.