Grave Concerns (33 page)

‘Out of the way!’ he said impatiently. ‘I’ve got to go out.’

‘But I’ve got something to tell you,’ Maggs protested. ‘It’s important.’

‘So is this,’ he flung back. Then he looked at Stuart. ‘I’ve got to go and see your uncle and aunt,’ he said. ‘There’s a witness who’s convinced Willard killed Genevieve’s mother and she’s talking about going to the police’

‘Wait a minute,’ Maggs ordered him. ‘If there is good evidence and somebody else supplies it to the police, that lets you off the hook, doesn’t it? And if it turns out to be nothing, there’s no harm done.’

‘He didn’t do it.’ Drew stared her in the eye. ‘We’ve got the alibi from the hotel. Genevieve got the whole thing upside down. If the police get hold of Willard’s name now, it’ll ruin everything.’

‘So how are you going to stop them?’

He shook his head in frustration. ‘I don’t know. I just have to be there. One last time.’

He hurriedly strapped the sleepy Stephanie into her seat in the van, and was driving off before Stuart or Maggs could reply. 

There was a familiar car outside the Slaters’ house. Drew hoiked Stephanie hurriedly out of her seat and charged up the path to the side door. His intemperate knocking was answered by Dr Jarvis. The baby’s crying was clearly audible. ‘Saw your car,’ said Drew curtly. ‘It looks as if we can all be in at the kill.’

The older man blinked, and blew out his cheeks. ‘Steady on, my friend,’ he warned. ‘You’re walking into something of a disaster here. I’m not even sure I should let you in.’

Drew shouldered past him, using Stephanie as a lever. In order to stop him, Doctor Jarvis would be forced to lay hands on the child.
‘Too late,’ Drew said. ‘You already have.’

Williard and Genevieve were standing in the living room. The besmirched sofa was obviously still uncleaned, although a large blue blanket had been thrown over it. The baby lay on the armchair, red-faced and noisy. Even its bunched fists were red, and Drew could see it had worked itself into a paroxysm of enraged misery. Stephanie twitched in alarmed sympathy.

‘What’s the matter with her?’ Drew asked. All his instincts screamed to gather the baby up and do what he could to pacify it, but with his own daughter already ensconced in his arms, there was little he could do.

‘Genevieve’s taken against it,’ said Willard bleakly. ‘Says she doesn’t want to keep it.’

‘More to the point, she’s stopped feeding it,’ added Doctor Jarvis. ‘I’ve just been phoning the domiciliary midwife, trying to get hold of some formula, with bottles and so forth. The poor child’s starving. The nephew’s gone missing just when we need him.’

‘But—’ Drew stared around the three faces, wondering once again what sort of madhouse this was. ‘But, hasn’t there been somebody visiting every day? Somebody who could have seen this coming?’

Nobody bothered to reply. The baby’s wails made conversation difficult. Stephanie wriggled,
and Drew decided that her need was less than the baby’s. He put her down on the floor and scooped up the little one, all in one rapid movement.

The wails diminished instantly, but did not abate entirely. He felt the universal male helplessness inherent in the situation. Without a bottle and some substitute milk, there was little he could do to satisfy the suffering infant. But he couldn’t endure the noise, and instinctively thrust his little finger into the rigid little mouth. With pitiful desperation, it clamped down and began to suck feverishly. It hurt. He could feel the hunger and the fear. But at least the child stopped crying. Relief settled on the room like sunshine flooding through the window. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ said Genevieve. Drew noticed for the first time that she was wearing the same knitted coat he’d found for her as the baby was being born. Williard looked tired and distracted. Doctor Jarvis was flushed with anxiety.

‘What you do with your baby is none of my business,’ Drew began. ‘I came about the death of Gwen Absolon. I can see this is a bad time, but now I’m here, I might as well say my piece.’ He looked at Willard, forcing the man to meet his gaze. ‘I’ve just been told that you were overheard threatening her shortly before she went missing,’ he said. ‘And that there’s a strong chance that the story will be passed to
the police, later this week. Whether or not it’s true, whether or not you killed your mother-in-law – you’ll be questioned, investigated and possibly charged. I came to give you a chance to do something about it.’

‘But the tickets!’ said Genevieve, indignantly. ‘We’ve got those tickets! The hotel will have a record of our being there that night. And you said there was someone who knows the exact date it all happened.’

‘By a strange coincidence, that witness is the same person who’s planning to go to the police,’ Drew told her. ‘I suspect there are quite a few people out there who think they know who the mystery body is. It would only be a matter of time before they come forward. But yes – your best hope is the Regent Palace Hotel. They’ve got a full record of your stay there, and there’s a chance they’ll be able to identify you. But Genevieve—’ he struggled to keep all emotion out of his voice. ‘I’d like a truthful answer from you, just for my own satisfaction. Do you really know who killed your mother?’

Afterwards, he wondered whether she would have answered him. As it was, the doorbell rang and the appearance of a health visitor laden down with equipment for feeding the baby interrupted proceedings entirely. She took the hungry infant from Drew’s arms, leaving his
finger throbbing and swollen. Stephanie began to grizzle.

Doctor Jarvis hovered around the newcomer, assisting her in the task of preparing a feed, muttering to her about the trouble he’d walked into. ‘I’m not even her doctor, you know,’ Drew heard him say. ‘Just a friend of the family.’ They threw questioning glances at Genevieve, who had hardly moved since Drew’s arrival.

‘Puerperal psychosis,’ said the health visitor, quite audibly. Drew wondered if that could be the explanation for the way Genevieve was acting.

But ‘No,’ she said loudly, as if in reply to his thought. ‘It goes back a lot further than that.’ She dropped into the armchair, and rubbed her knuckles across her mouth, mirroring her baby’s frantic search for nourishment.

‘I was twelve,’ she said, gazing up at Drew. Slowly he sank onto the floor at her feet, Stephanie on his lap, cuddled against his chest. He rested his chin gently on the top of her soft head, not entirely sure which was protector and which the protected.

‘I was the only one who remembered afterwards, exactly what had happened. My mother and father were fighting. He said she should have aborted the baby, that there was no space in their lives for another one. She said it was his fault in the first place, and how dare
he expect her to live with the guilt and trauma of an abortion. He said he didn’t think she was capable of feeling guilt. She hit him. She punched the side of his head, while he was driving. The car swerved, just as a huge lorry was coming towards us. It was going downhill, so fast. I still see it in my dreams – like a dragon, rushing at us. It caught the front corner of our car, pulling us along with it.’ She hugged her arms around herself, her face white. ‘The noise!’ she moaned. ‘Tearing metal and breaking glass, and my mother screaming, the lorry hooting its horn on and on. Like the end of the world. Then, ages later, complete silence.’ She was silent herself for several seconds.

‘I had a fractured skull, broken scapula, torn ligaments. I was sitting behind Daddy, you see. Mummy and Brigid were just bruised. I spent a month in hospital. They were afraid I’d be brain damaged if I didn’t keep still and let my head mend. My father died.
Nobody
came to visit me.’ She fixed Drew with a glittering gaze. ‘She never once came to visit me. Can you believe that?’

‘She was pregnant, in shock, newly widowed. I advised her not to risk upsetting herself,’ said Doctor Jarvis from the kitchen doorway. ‘You were all bandaged up, your hair shaved off – they didn’t know whether you’d ever fully
recover. I told her it was better not to see you.’

‘Then perhaps all this is your fault,’ said Genevieve flatly, with the shadow of a bitter smile.

‘Perhaps it is,’ he agreed.

When he got back to the van, Drew found Maggs sitting in the passenger seat. ‘Stuart had to go to work,’ she said. ‘I hitched a ride on his pillion. I didn’t know when you might be coming back, and I don’t think we should waste any more time.’

Drew sighed, and slowly strapped Stephanie into her seat. ‘She’s hungry,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to give her some lunch. I should have brought something with me.’

‘Haven’t they got anything in the house?’

He glared at her angrily. ‘In that house they’ve got a starving baby, a mentally disturbed woman and two useless men who between them have turned this whole mess into a grotesque tragedy. It didn’t seem appropriate to start searching the kitchen for a snack for Stephanie.’

‘OK,’ she placated. ‘Let’s go home, then, quick as we can. Steph doesn’t look too desperate to me.’

‘Comparatively speaking, she isn’t. But after what I’ve just witnessed, I’ve got no intention of neglecting her needs – not for a minute.’ He was already starting the van, as he spoke.

‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ she ventured, after a few minutes. ‘I think you ought to listen.’

‘Go on then,’ he invited. ‘But I don’t know how much attention I’ll give you. If you only
knew
what it was like—’

‘Sarah Gliddon was
definitely
the same Sarah who was Nathan Slater’s girlfriend. No doubt about it. She kept in touch with Gwen after Nathan died, and she was very keen on Egypt. She even named her dog after some old Pharoah.’ She dropped the last remark carelessly, watching him out of the corner of her eye for a reaction. ‘It took me at least a minute to see how
that
fitted in,’ she added.

It took Drew rather longer than that. In fact, Maggs accused him later of being so uncharacteristically slow-witted he’d never have got there without some help.

‘I asked him, while we were on the bike, what sort of dog Sarah had,’ she prompted. ‘Guess what he said?’

Drew took his eyes off the road for an instant, staring at her in disbelief. ‘Surely not a labrador? What did the Graingers say theirs was called?’

‘Seti. I thought it was S-E-T-T-Y, but I finally worked out that it must be S-E-T-I. And he was one of the Pharoahs. I remember a school project about him. He’s one they still have the mummy of, in a museum in Cairo. I remember being
fascinated by the pictures of him.
Egypt
, Drew. It always comes back to Egypt.’

‘But—’ Drew protested. ‘But—’

‘They said they had another sad loss last year. Another tragedy. It must have been their daughter. Don’t you think? Maybe they took the dog on when she died or left home to get married. Drew – don’t you think –?’

‘I think we’ve still got to give Stephanie some lunch. After that, I don’t know
what
I’m going to think.’

Maggs chafed impatiently all afternoon, while Drew sat on the floor playing with Stephanie and pleading with her to calm down. He could hardly listen to what she was saying; his head was still full of the Slater tragedy. In the end, Maggs decided she’d do best by letting him get it out of his system.

‘Gwen ruined Genevieve’s life, you know. It was Gwen’s fault that Nathan was born with such defects - and that the father was killed. I reckon, subconsciously, that’s why she came to me in the first place.’ He punched the table lightly to mark the dawning insight.

‘Explain,’ invited Maggs.

‘To satisfy herself that the woman really was dead. She told herself she was doing it to ease her conscience – but the idea that someone
might have murdered her mother didn’t horrify her half as much as it should have done. Even if it was Willard she’d have forgiven him. It might even have endeared him to her. That’s why she wouldn’t go to the police, and why she lost interest in the investigation after we’d pretty much ascertained the body was Gwen’s. She hated her mother enough to want her dead. It would be easily worth two thousand quid to have it confirmed. She could never forgive her mother, you see.’ He shuddered. ‘I could
feel
the hatred. She isn’t fit to bring up that baby and she knows it. She’d do best to give it up for adoption. There are thousands of couples who’d give it a loving home.’

Maggs folded her arms on the desk, and rested her chin on them, eyeing him critically. ‘It isn’t that easy,’ she said in a muffled voice. ‘Adoption, I mean.’

He met her eye uneasily.

‘It’s all very logical, I know,’ she said. ‘On the one hand you’ve got people with such messy lives they can’t cope with their own baby. They’d forget to feed it, or spend half the time dead drunk, or knock it about. So the nice social workers step in, saying,
We’ve got this lovely young childless couple in the better part of town. She’s got infected tubes – or he’s got sluggish sperm – they’d be the perfect parents for the poor 
little thing
. I know about this, Drew. It happened to me.’

‘But it
worked
for you. You get on brilliantly with the people who adopted you.’

She sighed. ‘Yes, I do. I did more or less from the start. That’s not the point.’

‘Of course it’s the point,’ he told her crossly. ‘Don’t tell me you’d rather be knocked about, neglected, resented. And worse – much worse than that can happen, you know.’

‘You don’t understand,’ she said regretfully. ‘You wouldn’t – you’re the sort of person the social workers would call the perfect parent.’

He absorbed that without response, ‘So – you think Genevieve should keep the baby, do you?’

‘I didn’t say that. It’s not for me to say what anybody should do. I only said, it’s not that easy.’

He let her have the last word.

‘Can we talk about Sarah now?’ she asked, after a few minutes. ‘Have we got Genevieve Slater out of the way for today?’

‘All right then,’ he sighed. ‘Run it past me again.’

She repeated what Stuart had told her about Sarah Gliddon, her dog and the glaring implications. Or some of them – Drew wasn’t quite sure why she wanted to go rushing through the countryside so urgently.

‘Nobody’s going anywhere,’ he said. ‘They can’t possibly know we’ve made the connection.
We’ll have to wait for Karen to come home, and even then—’

‘We are going to see them,’ she ordered sternly. ‘And see what they’ve got to say for themselves.’

‘You mean we march in and demand to know why they never told us their daughter knew Gwen Absolon. That’s the only thing we can accuse them of and that wouldn’t make any sense. It’s amazing to think they might have run slap bang into Genevieve, when they first came about the dog. She was right here, just the other side of the door. Imagine how that would have changed things.’

‘How would it?’

‘If she’d realised who they were—’ Drew spoke slowly, ‘–she would have wondered what they were doing here. How they knew about this place.’

‘They said they saw it in the papers, like everyone else,’ Maggs put in impatiently. ‘What else?’

‘Well, if
they’d
recognised
her
– and it’s very likely they met when Nathan was alive – they’d have known that she knew about Sarah being killed. Because they knew she was Gwen’s daughter, Nathan’s sister.’