Grave Concerns

by Rebecca Tope

  ‘Inner censor!’ Genevieve echoed, still giggling. ‘Oh!’ she added abruptly. ‘Something’s happening.’

  The muscles of her now flaccid belly had visibly contracted, and she involuntarily held her breath. ‘Oooh,’ she sighed. ‘This sofa’s never going to be the same again, is it?’ The placenta, huge and purple, glistened between her legs. A substantial amount of watery blood came with it.

  ‘I’ll have to clean the baby up – and get her something to wear. You ought really to go up to bed.’

  ‘I will in a minute,’ she said. ‘Put that coat thing over us for now. You’d better see to Willard. Sorry, Drew,’ she added. ‘This must be a hell of a lot more than you bargained for.’

  Forcing himself to be methodical, Drew quickly established a degree of order. The baby was obviously in good condition, opening her eyes and staring with interest at Genevieve’s face. Willard stared at the baby with a similar fixed attention. He was now sitting up on the floor, long thin legs sticking out in front of him, his face an entertaining mixture of a score of emotions. Suddenly he said, ‘She’s got my ears. Look!’

  Drew collected bowls, buckets, water and a knife from the kitchen. Then he ran upstairs and found a warming cupboard well stocked with towels and blankets. He told Genevieve he was going to dial 999, so she could be taken to hospital for a proper examination, and lifted the receiver.

  ‘No!’ she said loudly. ‘Absolutely not. Try Dr Jarvis again, if you like, but I’m not going to hospital.’

  ‘She’s phobic,’ said Willard conversationally. ‘Hasn’t been near a hospital since she was twelve.’

  ‘So I gather,’ said Drew, too busy to consider the full import of this information, but he hesitated, the phone in his hand. Then he pressed the Redial button, hoping Dr Jarvis would answer this time. As he did so, he glanced at his watch. It took several seconds for the hands and numbers to make sense. ‘Half past seven?’ he said stupidly, listening to the ringing tone in his ear. ‘It can’t be.’

  ‘It is,’ Willard confirmed. ‘It’s nearly dark outside, look.’

  Dr Jarvis answered the phone, just as Drew was about to put it down. He promised to be there in fifteen minutes. Drew phoned Karen, who was almost hysterical with worry about him.

  Genevieve embarked on a struggle to attach her daughter to a nipple, and when it finally worked, shed tears of belated emotion. She rummaged clumsily in the pocket of the dressing gown for a hanky, and brought out a handful of objects. A crumpled tissue, a tampon and two ticket stubs were scattered on the floor beside her. ‘Oh look,’ she said to Willard. ‘These are our tickets for West Side Story. We went to see it in London and stayed the night in the Regent Palace Hotel. I can’t have worn this thing since then. Remember us complaining about it being freezing cold in August?’ She squinted at one of the scraps of card. ‘Twelfth of August,’ she read. ‘Why does that date ring a bell?’

  ‘Glorious twelfth,’ said Willard inanely.

  Drew closed his eyes for a moment. ‘I think you’ve just given your husband a cast iron alibi for the murder of your mother,’ he said. After what he’d been through, he no longer cared about betraying any secrets.

  Dr Jarvis arrived as promised, and Drew handed over to him with minimal ceremony. They’d broken practically every rule in the medical handbook anyway – let the doctor, retired or not, sort it out. There was obviously no cause for medical concern, apart from Willard, who continued to look very grey and shaky. Mercifully he’d been so preoccupied by events in his living room that he hadn’t even looked at Drew long enough to recognise him as the rival housebuyer encountered on the Bradbourne doorstep two years previously.

  Drew himself was shaking as he drove home in the van. His sexual stirrings at the climax of the birth continued to cause him severe pangs of guilt and self-disgust. Although his lust had physically abated, he still felt hot all over at the memory of Genevieve half-naked in front of him. He reran the whole experience, savouring the various thrills and shocks, finding moments to chuckle over, alongside the feeling that he’d disgraced himself. He hoped he’d be able to convey to Karen just how hilarious the returning husband had been. That, he decided, was going to be the most prudent angle on which to focus. She’d understand why he’d forgotten to phone her, how he’d managed to lose three hours in the whirl of activity. She’d laugh when he described Willard’s faint and his creative curses when he was coming round. She’d be moved by the easy birth, in the face of Genevieve’s terror of the medical aspects of becoming a mother. Wouldn’t she?

  Genevieve’s hospital phobia was something Drew still hadn’t fully taken on board, and he gave it some belated consideration. He was appalled that she had never intended to present herself to the Maternity department when the time came. It was one thing for a terrified teenager to deny her pregnancy to herself and the world, but for an educated woman in her forties to behave in such a way seemed incredible. Presumably she had lied to everyone concerned, going through the motions, listening to instructions, while all along planning to sit tight and let things happen, to go it more or less alone. Was such a thing possible in the present day? An elderly primagravida such as she was would never have been allowed to arrange for a home birth. And if she had been strong – or stupid – enough to simply let all the best advice go over her head, what did that imply about other areas of her life?

  What, above all, did it imply about the things she had told Drew concerning her mother?

  He tried to put himself in Genevieve’s place, assessing what her priorities must have been. Her evasions and sly looks, the childishness and petulance – they could all be attributed to the pregnancy. Strange behaviour on Willard’s part was hardly surprising, being on the verge of retirement and then landed with a first baby whose mother was prepared to risk the lives of both herself and her child.

  The wretched woman must have been tormented by conflicting needs: to discover the truth about Gwen; to keep her marriage intact; and to get through the ordeal of childbirth, which was very likely to result in her being taken to hospital however horrifying the prospect might be. Drew shivered with compassion. No wonder Genevieve had seemed half crazy at times.

  He remembered the couple as they had seemed two years earlier. Willard so ruthless and determined to get his way, Genevieve placatory, maintaining a veneer of good behaviour, befriending Drew as her softer strategy for getting the house. It hadn’t worked, because he’d put Karen’s wishes above Genevieve’s – but she’d got to know him in the process. She must have felt a sudden surge of hope when she realised that he had a connection with the disappearance of her mother. It must have felt like a gift from heaven.

  She hadn’t been trying to seduce him, or destroy Willard, or obscure a murky undiscovered truth. She hadn’t been in cahoots with Dr Jarvis. Genevieve, lost, lonely and more than a little unbalanced, had simply offered him payment for services rendered. Seeing her and Willard together in that living room, the new baby throwing their pretence of normal married life into turmoil, had convinced Drew of that. Having him investigate the circumstances surrounding Gwen’s death had been a way of convincing herself that she really cared – and a way of giving her life purpose as she waited in limbo for the birth of her child.

  ‘She’s mad,’ said Karen emphatically, later that night, having heard the story. ‘There’s no other explanation.’ She was in bed, and Drew was about to join her; but her manner was so uninviting, he hesitated, wandering barefoot around the bedroom, tidying clothes and putting socks in the dirty washing basket.

  He resisted the urge to defend Genevieve.

  But he thought again of the teenage girls who somehow hoped that if they didn’t say anything their pregnancy would just go away. That the whole thing must be some ghastly delusion, because the reality would be too much to deal with. He wondered, belatedly, whether there was any baby equipment in the Slaters’ house. Surely Willard would have had the sense to see that at least some basics were standing by? Otherwise, it would inv
olve poor old Dr Jarvis in some hasty summoning of district nurses and social workers to provide the necessities. And wouldn’t that be appallingly humiliating for two professional people more than old enough to cope with parenthood?

  ‘We all have moments of madness,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose she can help it.’

  ‘All I can say is – trust you to get involved,’ Karen grumbled. ‘If you hadn’t been there, what would have happened?’

  ‘It would have been pretty much the same. It was the easiest delivery you can imagine. She never even realised she was in labour. It proves a point – they say labour hurts so much because women expect it to. If she’d known what was going on, she’d probably have rolled around in agony all day. And yet she said she was totally terrified of the whole thing, beforehand.’

  Karen pulled a face, envy, disapproval and grudging admiration all evident. ‘You can’t help worrying about the baby, can you?’ she said, in a more mellow tone.

  ‘She’s a nice little thing,’ Drew said, a trifle wistfully.

  ‘Oh, you!’ Karen burst out. ‘You’re too good to be true, aren’t you? Birth, death, it all comes so easily to you. All in a day’s work. It’s sickening sometimes.’

  ‘But—’ he began, with no idea at all how to react to her sudden attack ‘I don’t—’

  A noise outside interrupted him. An outburst of high-pitched screeching that set his nerves on edge seemed to be coming from the field at the back of the house. ‘Good God! What’s that?’ he said.

  ‘Sounded like animals,’ she said, clutching the duvet to her chest. ‘You’d better go and see.’ The noise came again, as harsh and jangling as before.

  ‘Are they fighting or what? I’ve never heard anything like it.’

  ‘We haven’t lived through a mating season in the country before,’ she said, more calmly. ‘That’s probably all it is. Just so long as the foxes aren’t digging up your bodies. That would be embarrassing.’

  ‘I’ll have a look,’ he said, fishing for his shoes. ‘Maybe I can see something from the spare room.’

  It was a moonlit night, and dark shapes were visible in the field. The scattering of trees threw shadows across the grass, and the new fence around the pets’ cemetery made a neat pattern of light and shade. Movement caught his eye as he tried to find the source of the noise. He was right – it was animals. Slowly he made sense of the scene. A rounded creature, silvery in the moonlight was engaged in a tug of war with something slighter and more agile. They were at the place where he had flung down the grim crucifix that he and Maggs had found the previous morning. Fighting over the body of the hare he realised. Again the shrill screech emerged from one of the combatants. As they shifted and struggled, he could see they were a badger and a fox, each determined to seize the carcase. If he hadn’t known otherwise, he might have thought it was the hapless subject of the battle that was screaming.

  Before he could decide what to do, the badger suddenly broke loose, the prey in its mouth, and began scuttling towards the railway line at the top of the field. The fox pursued, in aggressive bounds, but it was clearly defeated. No further sounds emerged, and Drew tiptoed back to bed.

  ‘Nothing to worry about,’ he whispered. ‘Just nature, red in tooth and claw.’

  Karen had snuggled down under the duvet, with her back to Drew’s side of the bed. She was no longer interested. ‘Should be just up your street, then,’ she muttered, without turning over.

  Drew decided he should update Maggs after the events of the previous day. He told her about the ticket stub in the coat pocket. ‘If the Kennett woman was right about the date when she saw the body being buried, from the train – then it wasn’t Willard doing it,’ he concluded.

  ‘You mean it wasn’t him who buried her,’ she said pedantically. ‘He might still have killed her, sometime earlier.’

  ‘In that case, there’d be at least three people involved in her murder. Possible, but somehow it doesn’t seem very likely. And where would he have kept the body?’

  Maggs pouted. ‘Are you sure a theatre ticket is proper evidence? They could have booked seats and then never gone to the show.’

  ‘That’s true,’ Drew admitted. ‘But we can check with the hotel. She told me its name. A famous one. Um—’

  ‘Hilton? Savoy? Waldorf?’

  Drew shook his head. ‘No, not so expensive. Two words. It’ll come in a minute.’

  Maggs waited impatiently for thirty seconds, and then said, ‘Never mind. Assuming they are off the hook, and assuming it was only two people, where does that leave us?’

  ‘Good question. It might mean that Genevieve won’t want me to investigate any further, if she’s convinced Willard had nothing to do with it. She’s got her baby now, and that was a kind of deadline all along.’

  Maggs watched him closely. ‘You don’t want to stop, though, do you? It’s got too many loose ends. You don’t want to leave that grave without a name. It’ll niggle you for years. People will remember the mystery. It’s a hobby with some nerdy blokes – great unsolved murders. You’ll get visits from people who think it just might be their long lost cousin.’

  Drew ignored this typical Maggsian flight of fancy. ‘Besides, we owe it to Gwen Absolon,’ he said. He gave a deep sigh, and looked thoughtfully out of the window, remembering the scene of the previous night. ‘Regent Palace!’ he said brightly. ‘Regent Palace Hotel. That was where they stayed.’

  ‘Congratulations. That should be easy to check. Now – that horrible cross. It seems we didn’t pull it down quickly enough. There was a chap at the gate just now, when I arrived. Said he’d seen it. Said he’d told the blokes in the pub about it last night, and they all decided they weren’t happy “for that sort of thing to be going on round here”.’ She mimicked the west country accent. ‘’Tis master queer, that ’tis. There’s been no such business as ’e, till that Slocombe turns up.’ Reverting to her normal speech, she added, ‘It could lead to real trouble if anything like that happens again.’

  ‘Trouble?’ Drew echoed, trying to pay attention. He’d been reliving the events of the day before, remembering Genevieve naked and vulnerable, scarcely listening to what Maggs was saying.

  ‘If people think we’ve got weird goings-on like that, they’ll think twice before burying their relations here,’ she spelt out. ‘Won’t they? It’ll be bad for business. We’ve got to do something about it.’ She spoke deliberately, slightly louder and more slowly than necessary.

  ‘OK,’ he nodded irritably. ‘I get the drift. I just don’t see what we can do about it.’

  Before she could offer him any suggestions, there was a small crash and a wail from Stephanie’s corner. The child had crawled over to a metal wastepaper bin and tried to use it to pull herself up. It topped over and sent her tumbling onto the floor.

  ‘She’s going to start walking soon,’ Maggs observed coolly. ‘She won’t stay in that corner, then.’

  ‘She doesn’t stay in it now,’ he remarked.

  ‘No,’ said Maggs, putting a wealth of meaning into the single word.

  Drew sighed. ‘All right. I know what you think about having her in here. It won’t be for much longer. Karen will have her when term finishes.’

  ‘Which is the end of July. More than two months away. Look – I think you should find a minder. An au pair or something. They don’t cost much. You’re not giving the business enough attention, Drew. You know you’re not.’

  As always, he felt an uneasy mixture of adult affront and boyish humiliation when told off by someone so much younger. Her words were so obviously concerned, so deeply sincere, that the affront quickly evaporated. They were partners, after all. And in recent weeks, she had demonstrated all the good sense and commitment he could have asked for.

  The phone took things off in yet another direction. It was Olga, the office assistant at Plant & Sons Funeral Directors. Drew listened to her with a sense of being saved.

  ‘Daphne asked me to ring you,’ Olga began. ‘We�
�ve got a family here who’d like an alternative officiant. The deceased is a woman of fifty-four. Breast cancer, I think. They want cremation, but nothing religious. Somebody’s mentioned your name to them. They’re wondering about an ashes plot in your field.’

  ‘Great!’ he said, hardly able to credit what he was hearing. ‘When?’

  ‘They’d like to meet you first. Can I send them round when they leave here? They’re in a bit of a rush.’

  ‘Absolutely. Can you give them directions?’

  ‘Daphne can. Thanks, Drew. I was just checking that you’ll be there, really. Looks as if things are taking off for you, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Maybe they are,’ he agreed, not sure he believed it himself. ‘Let’s hope they like me.’

  Olga murmured something he didn’t catch, and he wondered what she thought of his new role as officiant. At least it wasn’t threatening any competition for Plant’s, unlike his burials. The persistent preference for cremations amongst the population was a cause for regret, but this latest development promised to do a lot to reduce the frustration. ‘Thanks, anyway,’ he said. ‘I’d better do a bit of tidying up before they get here.’

  She laughed politely and rang off. Drew looked round the office, at the dozing Stephanie in her cluttered play corner, at the suspicious lack of papers on the desk, and wondered what the approaching people would make of it. They’ll just have to take us as they find us, he decided.

  Maggs was surprisingly worried by the impression they were going to make. ‘Steph’s sure to wake up and want a drink or something,’ she warned him. ‘And she’ll fill her nappy or throw a wobbly. It’ll look so unprofessional.’

  ‘We’ve done it before,’ he reminded her. ‘She usually rises to the occasion very well.’

  Maggs ran a hand through her dense hair, and scowled at Drew. ‘But – has it occurred to you that she might have put people off? That she’s the reason we haven’t had more business?’