Grave Concerns (13 page)

‘And the pets’ area. We’ve got to publicise that. Draft an ad for the paper, and I’ll look at it this afternoon. I should be back about three. I’ll phone in every couple of hours to see if there’s
been any news. Pity we can’t afford a mobile, but there it is.’

‘Can’t afford anything, mate.’ For a girl of eighteen, Maggs had a remarkable grasp of financial matters. ‘The Smithers haven’t paid up yet.’

‘Pity. That’d keep us going for a bit. It’s so galling,’ he burst out. ‘There’s Daphne Plant swimming in money. Makes about four hundred pounds clear profit on every funeral. And we’re counting every penny.’

‘Give us time,’ she said. ‘You’ve gotta have faith.’

‘Maggs, you’re a marvel,’ he said for the thousandth time. ‘Now I’m off. See you.’

His first visit was to Gwen Absolon’s basement bedsit. ‘I don’t expect you’ll find anything,’ Genevieve had warned him. ‘All her stuff will have been chucked in the dump by now.’

He found the house quite easily in a small side street in Shepton Mallet. The basement rooms had their own entrance down a flight of steps. A very large woman who appeared to be in her early sixties answered his knock. Her girth filled the doorframe, so he could see almost nothing of the passage behind her. ‘Oh, hello,’ he said. ‘I’m looking for a Mrs Absolon. This was the last address we had for her. That was around
July or August last year.’ He raised his eyebrows and waited, knowing his boyish looks almost invariably charmed women of this sort of age. Regrettably, they didn’t seem to be having much effect on this one.

‘Never heard of her,’ said the woman. She wore an iron grey two-piece outfit, her hair a similar shade. Drew couldn’t help thinking of a battleship. Something about the jut of her breast, the solid stance as well as the colour tones.

‘Could I ask how long you’ve been here?’ He treated her to his most charming smile.

She pushed out her lips in an unselfconscious pout of indecision. ‘Almost eighteen months,’ she said grudgingly, going on to reveal further detail almost in spite of herself. Drew thought he recognised the signs of loneliness. ‘Heard about it in the corner shop,’ the woman confided, ‘and snapped it up. Suits me very nicely, too.’

‘And you don’t know anything about the person who was here last summer?’

‘I know quite a lot about her, as it happens. If we’re talking about the same woman. And one thing I know is that her name was not Gwen Absolon.’

‘Forrester!’ Drew remembered. ‘She sometimes called herself Forrester.’

‘Well, that’s different,’ said the woman comfortably. ‘Wendy – Gwendoline – Forrester
occupied the room behind mine – at the back. Not there very much, though. And what business might it be of yours?’ There was little of challenge or suspicion in her voice. She seemed in no hurry to move, either to admit or to exclude him.

‘Gwendoline!’ Drew murmured. ‘I’m sure it’s the same person. But I don’t know anyone who calls her Wendy.’

‘Oh, that’s just me. I’m funny about the name Gwen, that’s all. Long story. And my question still stands.’ She fixed him with small sharp eyes, and he began to wonder whether she was somehow well ahead of him in the direction their exchange was taking. He wished he’d made more time to prepare a convincing cover story. As it was, he’d got no further than a faint hope that he’d find some of Gwen’s possessions left behind in the room. He struggled to be inventive.

‘You see, I’m her only living relative. She’s my aunt, and we haven’t heard from her for a long time. She sent us this address, and nothing since then. My wife insisted I come in person, to try and find out what’s going on. We didn’t have a phone number or anything.’

The woman made herself even bigger, puffing out like a toad. ‘Left it long enough, haven’t you,’ she accused, with implacably folded arms. ‘The room’s been relet long since. There’s a Mr
Lawson in there now. He works nights, so we can’t disturb him.’

‘Can I just ask – did my aunt leave suddenly?’

She considered for a full minute. ‘Well, as it happens, she did disappear rather abruptly. I assumed she’d gone away on one of her trips, but then the landlady came to me in September, asking if I knew why no rent had been paid for the back room. We went in together, and found it left neat and tidy, but with quite a lot of things still there – as if she’d intended to come back. Now don’t you go thinking we’ve helped ourselves,’ she continued, pointing a stubby finger at Drew’s chest. ‘It’s all in a cupboard out in the back passage. We were going to keep it for a full year before taking it to a charity shop.’

‘I wonder if I could have a look at it?’ he said.

Again the extended finger. ‘Can you prove you’re a relative?’ she demanded.

‘Not really. My name’s different from hers. I could describe her. That would prove I knew her. I wouldn’t want to take the things away – just have a quick look through them, in case there’s a hint as to where she is now.’

The huge woman eyed him closely. ‘Couldn’t you just show me?’ he cajoled.

She melted without warning, shuffling backwards to allow him ingress. ‘Come on, then,’ she said. ‘I don’t see any harm in it. Everyone’s
so suspicious these days, expecting the worst. If you turn out to be a burglar or a conman, the laugh’ll be on me won’t it. Fat lot I’ll care about it, either.’

‘I’m harmless, I promise,’ he laughed. ‘My name’s Peter Stafford. My grandmother was Gwen Absolon’s sister.’

‘Great-nephew, then,’ she remarked, giving him no time to regret the dishonesty he had just perpetrated. ‘A bit remote, isn’t it? I wouldn’t know any of my great-nephews from Father Christmas.’

‘How
did
you come to be living here?’ he asked, before he could stop himself. Her change of manner was seductive, her warm intelligence a sudden surprise that only fuelled his curiosity. ‘If it isn’t a rude question. I mean – how did you come to be looking for something like this?’

‘No harm in asking,’ she replied calmly. ‘It’s a sorry tale of bad planning, in essence, combined with bad luck. What happened to me could have happened to anybody, at least in theory. My husband and I bought a large house with a huge mortgage, at the wrong moment. With hindsight it’s obvious we were too old to take on such a loan. He fell ill, the value of the property plummeted. We had to sell at a massive loss, abandoning life insurance in the process. When he died, I found I’d got virtually nothing. If I’m
careful and don’t live too long, the residue will see me through here. It’s surprisingly comfortable, actually. Very liberating, in a strange way. Do you know what keeps me going?’

Drew shook his head, guessing she’d say something banal like television or stamp collecting.

‘The internet,’ came her astonishing reply. ‘I bought myself a computer, and made sure I rented a place with its own phone – and now I’m in touch with the whole world. There are wonderful newsgroups and special interest forums. You interrupted me, as it happened, just as I was talking to a man in Zimbabwe.’

‘But isn’t it very expensive?’ Drew wondered. ‘Like being on the phone all day long?’

She smiled, her broad face oddly impish. ‘It pays for itself,’ she said. ‘I’ve always been a quick learner, and now I can create websites better than a lot of people. Never judge by appearances,’ she added tartly, noticing Drew’s expression. ‘The internet is the great leveller, in case you didn’t know.’

‘But it doesn’t earn enough to get you out of this—’

‘Hovel?’ she supplied. ‘Because I’m not stupid enough to think it’s going to last. I’ve a nice little niche at the moment, but people are quickly realising they don’t need someone like me. It
gets easier all the time, and they can do it for themselves. But we’re digressing. The cupboard’s there, look. It isn’t locked. I think I’m going to leave you to it.’

‘I really appreciate your help,’ said Drew. ‘And it’s been very nice to meet you. I didn’t catch your name. Mrs –?’

‘Henrietta Fielding. Good luck finding your aunt. Personally, I think she’s probably dead.’ Before Drew could react to that, she had gone into her room, through a door halfway down the passage, and closed it firmly behind her.
Why did she say that
? he thought.

In the cupboard were three Sainsbury’s carrier bags, two pairs of shoes and a small pile of loose books. One bag contained clothes, neatly folded and rammed down hard; another held papers, mostly letters, but also including brochures for Nile cruises and a reporter’s notebook. The third was heavier and more angular, the sharp corners of the contents threatening to break through the plastic. Emptying it carefully in the shadowy passage, Drew found a framed photograph; an alarm clock; a prickly tropical seashell; two pebbles; a bag of small stones with runic symbols engraved on them; a carved wooden box containing a few pieces of cheap jewellery; a sterile medical pack containing syringes, needles, dressings and swabs; and an impressive
Swiss army knife. It took him a few moments of inexplicable joy before he understood that the act of unpacking the bag was powerfully reminiscent of opening his Christmas stocking as a child. Every item seemed to glow with a kind of magic. The runestones carried an atavistic thrill, the pebbles might have come from the most enchanted spots on earth. The photograph was of a teenage boy, head flopped oddly to one side and a hostile look in his eyes, despite the half smile on his lips. The unfortunate Nathan, Drew presumed.

Amongst the papers were letters from the Inland Revenue, an old passport, confirming her identity as Gwendoline Absolon, and two folded newspaper cuttings. Both described a shooting a short distance from the Great Pyramid in Giza, near Cairo on 12
^th
April of the previous year. A young married woman had been killed. Her name was Sarah Gliddon and she had been pregnant. She was twenty-seven, and had been the youngest member of a tour party led by an independent British guide specialising in such tours. The party in question had spent two weeks visiting the oases of Egypt, and were on the last day before flying home. The shooting had been the work of a single terrorist, suicidally foolish, given the presence of a dozen or more armed tourist police. The gunman had been killed before he could do any
further damage. Mrs Gliddon had been the only casualty. The Egyptian Government claimed it as a vindication of their policy of high security, even though desperately regretting the death of the young woman. They pointed out that on the same day a tourist had fallen off a Nile cruiser and drowned, and another had suffered a fatal dose of sunstroke in Luxor. Drew snorted at this strange logic, while sympathising with the authorities plagued by such determined acts of destruction.

There were two hand-written letters, which Drew unfolded, and read, as he sat back on his heels in the gloomy corridor. The first was from a man called Trevor. 

If it hadn’t been for the postmark smudgily showing the date as less than a year previously, Drew would have assumed this was a letter from Gwen’s distant past. Knowing the recipient to be seventy, he read it carefully again; then with a glance over his shoulder, he slid it into his pocket. It didn’t take a detective of unusual powers to work out that here was another candidate for involvement in the woman’s death. A recent lover had to be included in the equation. And who was the mysterious ‘bloke’?

The second letter was still in its envelope, bearing a second-class stamp, but the postmark
was illegible. Inside, however, was a crisply lucid communication, dated early January of the previous year.

The return address was in Salisbury.

Drew held the sheet of paper in his hand for some moments. This was from the girl who’d died in the terrorist attack. Her stilted use of English, the strange references to ‘both our needs’ and ‘without any anxiety’, made him wonder if there was a hidden subtext. He tucked it into his pocket with the first one.

He felt he was getting to know Gwen Absolon, little by little. He wished he could have met
her; she sounded quite something. The bag of runestones intrigued him, and he fingered them curiously. ‘Telling the runes’ could, of course, have been a cynical little party trick, designed to break the ice in her tour groups, or to give herself an aura of mystery. The reference to them in the letter from Trevor did at least tell him that she used them, and usually carried them with her when she travelled.

He flipped quickly through the reporter’s notebook from the second bag, noticing that it was half full of jottings: lists, mostly, with a few addresses and odd lines of description. One page contained a list of six names, amongst which was that of Sarah Gliddon, headed by the dates 31 March to 13 April. Beside Sarah Gliddon’s name, the word
Free
was inserted, in brackets.