Grave Concerns (21 page)

‘That’s all right then,’ he groaned.

Karen was late collecting Stephanie, and Drew’s frame of mind was beginning to degenerate as his daughter whined and clung to him. She had just dropped into a light doze when Karen arrived. ‘I can smell that body,’ Karen said, as she came into the office. ‘Haven’t you got it sealed up?’

‘Two thick layers of hessian, the coffin packed with newspapers and the top taped on,’ he said. ‘But sealed, no, not really. You know the routine. We believe in biodegradability here. No plastic, no zinc linings or inch-thick solid oak. I can’t smell anything.’

Karen’s upper lip twitched and her nostrils flared. ‘Well, I can,’ she repeated. ‘And it’s revolting.’

‘It’ll be gone soon,’ he told her. ‘And about time too. I think that woman’s been a jinx on me, ever since we found her.’

Karen tried to scoop up her daughter without waking her, but she got the balance wrong, and Stephanie’s head flopped back with a jerk. Focusing on her mother as she woke up, she scowled and began to whimper. ‘Come on, you pest,’ Karen said grumpily.

Drew wanted to tell her about the officiating job, and his progress with the detective work, as well as asking her what sort of day she’d had, but Stephanie’s wails prevented any of that. He hadn’t liked hearing his daughter called a pest,
either. Even as a joke, it jarred on him. ‘She’s not a pest,’ he protested mildly. ‘She’s been as good as gold all day, until we got back here. Especially considering her head probably still hurts.’

Karen glanced swiftly at him, not letting her eyes meet his. ‘I wanted a cup of tea, and a rest,’ she said. ‘Now I’ll have to entertain her, as well as trying to do lesson plans, and phoning the parents of one of the kids at school who wrote
fuck off
all over his reading book. He’s only six – I suppose I should applaud his spelling skills. I don’t need it, in any case. I don’t really need any of this.’

‘Leave her here then,’ said Drew sharply. ‘I’m not going anywhere.’

‘And let her breathe in the gases from a dead body? It’s probably poisoned her already. It’s really making
me
feel sick.’

He gave a scornful laugh. ‘That’s what they used to think in the Middle Ages. You know perfectly well you can’t catch anything from a body – unless it’s got anthrax or one or two other rare things. You’re just being hysterical.’

Without another word, she leant Stephanie against her shoulder and marched out.

Drew clenched his fists and screwed his face up as if expecting some great blow to fall. The dislocation of his mood of self-satisfaction was exasperating. He and Karen had been cross with each other before, had disagreed and sulked – but
this was different. She didn’t look like the same woman. And he didn’t feel like her husband. Restlessly he went to the small window at the back of the room and looked out over the burial field. Maggs was there with a spade in her hand, pushing back encroaching grass from the path they’d made from the car park to the first graves. This had been a topic of much discussion, as had most elements of the new business. Drew had wanted to leave natural grass throughout, just cut some of it shorter, to provide pathways. Maggs and Karen had both demurred, reminding him how wet and slippery grass could be. They had persuaded him to lay a triple row of bricks in a curving diagonal from one corner to its opposite, with a few side branches off it. Generously, he admitted he’d been wrong; not only did the path make walking easier, but it helped immensely in the necessarily precise recording of where each grave was. The effect was unobtrusive, but even after a few weeks of spring growth, the path was threatening to disappear entirely.

He went out to talk to her. ‘Jeffrey ought to be doing that,’ he said.

She shrugged. ‘He’s gone. I suppose he thinks marking the position of a grave is enough for one day. I like doing it, anyway. If people can’t see the paths, they’ll trample any-old-where and kill all the little flowers.’

‘Good thinking,’ he nodded.

‘What’s going on?’ she burst out suddenly. ‘Are we just going to bury the woman and forget about her? Have you been to see the daughter again today?’

‘I’m still supposed to be investigating it,’ he said, uncomfortably. ‘But I don’t think she cares very much. Her baby’s due in a few weeks, and she’s a bit distracted by that.’

‘Is that boy still there? The nephew?’

Drew nodded. ‘Bit scruffy. But quite friendly, I suppose. It might be nice for Genevieve to have him around.’

‘What – as an unpaid nanny, d’you mean?’ Maggs was confrontational, and Drew hesitated before answering.

‘I didn’t mean that. And I really should be trying to think it all through again. I wish I could just dump it all on the police, to be honest. Especially now I’ve got to do this officiating. If that works out, I can stop being a private detective.’

‘Before you even start,’ she said with a thread of contempt he couldn’t ignore.

‘Hey! That’s not fair. I think I’ve done pretty well for an amateur.’

‘So who killed her?’ demanded Maggs with her youthful directness.

‘Right. Let’s see now.’ He met her challenging
gaze with a little smile. Somehow talking to Maggs, with her gusts of unpredictable emotion and bold lack of deference was always refreshing. ‘First choice has to be Willard, even though Genevieve seems to have changed her mind on that. She’s worried about the police thinking it was him, though.’

‘What if she’s protecting someone else – a lover, maybe – and pretending it’s Willard because she wouldn’t mind getting shot of him? Willard didn’t look much like a murderer to me, when I saw him through their front window.’

Drew laughed. ‘You know what a murderer looks like then, do you? If she’d really wanted to set Willard up as a suspect, wouldn’t informing the police anonymously have been a better option?’

Maggs scowled. ‘’Spose so. But Willard just looked too ordinary to me.’

‘Just bear in mind that practically anybody can commit murder,’ he said didactically. ‘Ask any prison officer. They usually say the murderers are the most ordinary and pleasant of all their charges.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘So what other suspects are there?’

Drew looked around his field, savouring the serenity, the sense of rightness. ‘I’m not going to get into it all now,’ he decided. ‘But it seems to
be coming a bit more clear. I feel as if I’m getting closer to the truth.’

Maggs clearly felt she was being shut out. ‘Good for you,’ she muttered.

Twenty minutes later, she came bouncing into the office, her mood restored. ‘Tell you what,’ she said brightly. ‘I’ll go and see the nephew at the weekend, if he’s still there. I’ll hang about outside and try and get a chance to talk to him. He’s a biker, like me, so that’ll give me an excuse. I can get some background stuff on the family. And I think you should give it a bit of a rest. If you think about something else all sorts of new ideas will pop into your head when you’re not expecting them.’

‘You’re a wise woman, Maggs,’ he said. ‘But I can’t ease up now. I know exactly what I’ve got to do next. Now try your best to keep out of Genevieve’s sight. She’ll recognise you, and I doubt if she’d approve of me confiding in you. And don’t go falling for that boy’s big brown eyes.’

‘As if I would,’ she said innocently.

Karen wasn’t happy about Drew going to see Marjorie Hankey on Saturday morning. She sulkily crashed her way through some tidying up in the main bedroom after he’d told her that evening, then ran the vacuum cleaner around the room like
a weapon while he was trying to undress Stephanie ready for bed. The child lay on the duvet, sucking her thumb and looking uneasily from one parent to the other.

‘I’ll do the garden in the afternoon,’ he promised. ‘Or anything else you want me to. And we’ve got all day Sunday free. We could go out somewhere – you’d like that.’

Hearing himself, he winced. Platitudes were the fallback position when feelings were taboo. He knew only too well what Karen wanted from him, but his arms refused to obey her silent plea for a hug. Karen’s need for warmth and consolation was like a wind in the room – a sucking sort of wind, tugging at him insistently, like Stephanie pulling on her thumb. But the thumb put up no resistance, unlike Drew. The more needy Karen became, the less capable was he of responding. He reproached himself fiercely, but it did no good. Silently popping shut the fastenings on Stephanie’s sleepsuit, he gave up the attempt.
Can’t be the perfect husband all the time
he thought defensively. Everything would work out in the end. It always did.

But he could not deny the quivering fear in the pit of his stomach. Karen and he had always been more than just ‘husband and wife’. They were – or had been – something much more powerful than that. Her happiness had been his, her choices
and judgements always the best for him as well. It had all been so natural, so effortless until now. Except the move to Bradbourne, when he risked the lie to get Karen what she wanted. Risked a fate-tempting dishonesty that made him shiver to recall. Any other falsehood might have been buried long before in the general impedimenta of daily life. But that one had been special. He had evoked a child where none yet was, after almost two years of trying to conceive. How had he dared, he wondered now? No wonder he was being forced to pay for it.

The expected punishment would obviously have been perpetual childlessness. Instead, he was to have two babies, when all he wanted was one. A much more cunning and potentially lethal revenge. And there was absolutely nobody to blame but himself.

‘No point in arguing about it,’ he said lamely, when the vacuum cleaner eventually fell silent.

‘Who’s arguing?’ said Karen frostily. ‘You’ll do what you want to, as always. You never take any notice of what I say.’

He recognised how far from grace they had fallen, then. When words like
always
and
never
, spoken with anger or resentment, were conscripted into the conversation, stereotypes began to take over. They would soon cease to be Drew and Karen, friends and lovers, and
become instead a pair of faceless puppets going through the motions of a marriage, where nothing was real. Until they could no longer keep the façade intact.
I won’t let that happen
, he promised himself.
As soon as I find out what happened to Gwen Absolon I’ll make things right with Karen
.

Thursday was less like spring than summer. May was with them and the world was green and golden. Drew woke with his thoughts like crystal droplets, his worries all firmly locked away. Today he was going to get to the bottom of the mystery of Gwen Absolon.

He had already asked Directory Enquiries for the telephone number of the lesbian couple from the Egyptian tour, and the first thing he did, having opened the office, was to dial it. From what Habergas had told him, the women were both over sixty and unlikely to be out at work. And indeed, a friendly voice answered on the fifth ring. ‘Janet Harrison,’ it said.

‘Oh, hello,’ Drew said, equally friendly. ‘I’m very sorry to disturb you, but I wondered if you could help me. You don’t know me – my name is David Spencer, and I work for one of the main overland travel companies. I understand you were on a trip with a Mrs Gwen Absolon last year?’

The voice changed tone dramatically. ‘How did you get my name?’ she asked, immediately on her guard.

‘From a Mr Karl Habergas, as it happens. He was on the same trip. You probably remember him.’ A nasty moment, Drew realised. What if she went on to ask where he’d got
his
name from?

‘So what do you want?’

‘Well—’ he laughed as naturally as he could. ‘It’s just that we can’t seem to locate Mrs Absolon. We’d hoped to persuade her to fill in for us on one or our upcoming tours. It’s designed for older people, and she seems to have all the right skills for the job. You don’t happen to know where we might find her, do you?’

‘I last saw Gwen in Egypt, last April,’ said the woman crisply. ‘Since then I have spoken to her once on the telephone, and that’s all. I have absolutely no idea where she might be now.’

‘Do you have an address for her? Even an old one?’

‘I’m sure it would be of no help to you now. She used an address in London for bookings and so forth. I’m sure you’ll have something much more up to date than that. Frankly, whoever you are, this all sounds slightly iffy to me.’

Drew laughed again, with even less conviction. ‘I expect it does,’ he said. ‘I knew it was a long
shot – but we’ve been badly let down, you see, and it’s a case of panic stations this end—’

‘You’ll never find her,’ the woman said, unexpectedly. ‘She’ll be long gone by now.’

‘Gone?’ echoed Drew.

‘Out of the country. When that shooting happened, she said, there and then, that she wouldn’t be doing the guiding job any more. It sounded as if she meant it. She and that boyfriend of hers – Trevor something – are probably backpacking in Thailand as we speak.’

Drew managed one final laugh. ‘Lucky lady,’ he said.

‘Whether she is or not, I think you’d better give it up. You’ll never find her,’ Janet Harrison reiterated.

He rang off thoughtfully. The woman’s efforts to throw him off the track had been just that bit too earnest. Gwen, he concluded, had asked Maggie and Janet – and perhaps Habergas and the Fletchers too – to divert anybody who might come looking for her. ‘I’ll be uncontactable,’ she would have said. ‘I never stay in one place for long.’ And because of the bond of the catastrophe that had struck in Egypt, because they had no reason not to help Gwen, they would have agreed.

But why mention Trevor? Why drag his name into the conversation? Was it because they
mistrusted him, and wanted to make this clear? Was it just extra padding on a flimsy story? Or was it some kind of test or password? If the questioner reacted with recognition to the name, further information would be disclosed.

Drew hummed with energy. This was something he could do. Whether or not he could wrap it all up before tomorrow’s burial no longer seemed to matter so much. He was like a bloodhound with the scent clear before him; like a crossword addict with enough clues filled in to feel he’d broken the back of the puzzle. He just needed to be patient for a little while longer. But – he had to admit – there was at least one whole blank corner yet to be completed. For that he needed another word with Stanley Sharples, Coroner’s Officer.