Shallow Grave (26 page)

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he began politely, and she jumped in with, ‘Oh, it’s all right, Father’s having his physiotherapy at the moment.’ Her being disturbed was not in question with her, it was her father who mattered. ‘That’s why Sheba’s in with me, to keep her out of the way. She’s been rather upset since all this …’ She led the way back to the kitchen. The dog barked once behind the door at their approach, and as Mrs Hammond opened it, backed away, looking at Slider and growling, but with the tail swinging hesitantly, just in case. ‘It’s all right, Sheba. Be quiet, there’s a good girl,’ Mrs Hammond said, catching hold of the collar. ‘Just let her sniff your hand, and she’ll be all right.’ The dog sniffed his offered hand briefly, and then, released, smelt his shoes extensively, with embarrassing canine frankness. Then, apparently satisfied, she went back to her basket in the corner and curled down. Slider noted she was chewing the piece of rag again. Obsessive behaviour. That dog must be an animal psychiatrist’s dream.

Mrs Hammond asked. ‘Can I get you a cup of tea?’

‘No, no tea, thank you. I’d just like to see what’s beyond the kitchen door, here, if I may. You have storerooms, I believe?’

‘Yes, and the boiler-room, and the garage. Is there something wrong?’

‘No, not at all. Nothing to worry about,’ he said, with his most reassuring smile. ‘I’d just like to get the geography straight in my head, if you wouldn’t mind.’

She looked unreassured, but opened the further door and stepped back to let him through. He found himself in a stone-floored passage about four feet wide, the whitewashed walls of rough stone, like the outside of the house. There were two doors on either side, of solid tongue and groove, painted dark green, and the only light came through the glass panel of the door at the far end.

‘This is the oldest part of the house,’ Mrs Hammond said. ‘This and the kitchen. It probably goes back to the fourteenth century, or even earlier. A friend of ours who knows about houses told us.’

‘Is that Mr Meacher?’ Slider hazarded.

She flushed. ‘Oh! Yes – yes, it is. Do you know him?’

‘Yes, I’ve met him,’ Slider said. ‘What’s in these rooms?’

‘Nothing in particular,’ she said. ‘They’re just storerooms.’

‘May I have a look?’

‘Oh. Well, if you want. They’re not locked.’

He could see that. They had only country latches, and no keyholes, though the doors to the left – the street side of the house – had bolts on the outside. When Slider opened the first left-hand door he found that the room was quite empty except for a bundle of torn hessian sacks in the corner. It was about eight feet long by six wide, and windowless. The walls were whitewashed, and the door was rather battered and splintery at the bottom, with grooves down to the pale wood under the paint as if it had been gouged with a garden fork.

‘We used to keep the gardener’s tools in here,’ Mrs Hammond said, ‘but there’s a shed outside now, which is more convenient. So we don’t use it for anything, really.’

Slider thought of his house at Ruislip, which assumed no-one had more belongings than could dance on the head of a pin, and wondered at having so much storage space you could leave a whole room empty. Glorious waste!

The first room on the right was the same size, but had a small, high window, and smelt strongly of apples. There were boxes
of them stacked around the walls, a sack of carrots, strings of onions on hooks on the walls, and jars of jams and fruit on a long shelf along one wall. There were other boxes too, of tins of dog food and tomatoes and so on, and various bits of junk lying around – a jumble of empty flower-pots, a child’s cot mattress, a set of pram wheels with the handle still attached, an ancient vacuum cleaner, a stack of books. ‘The dry store,’ she said, waving a nervous hand round it. ‘Nothing here, you see. Nothing important, anyway.’

The second door on the left gave onto another windowless room, which was furnished with self-assembly wine racks, about a quarter full with bottles of wine, some looking authentically dusty. The second room on the right housed nothing but the smell of oil and a massive boiler, its tin chimney bending precariously before disappearing through the wall, with the fine carelessness of earlier, uninspected days.

The door at the end of the corridor was locked, but the key was in it. It gave onto a garage in which the Range Rover now stood. On the far side again was another half-glass door, unlocked, beyond which was the empty garage whose doors he had tried earlier. There was a cold-water tap in the middle of the far wall, and in the wall at the back of the garage was another door. Slider opened it, and found a tiny yard, walled in all round, containing what was obviously the filling-cock to an underground oil tank.

Slider closed the door again and turned to Mrs Hammond, who was waiting at his elbow nervously, as if expecting to be ticked off about something.

‘When I tried those doors just now,’ Slider said, nodding to the pair, whose cracks and chips and missing chunks were cruelly revealed by the bright sunshine outside, ‘they weren’t locked.’

She moved her hands anxiously. ‘Oh, well, no, they don’t lock, you see. At least, I think there was a key once, but I don’t know where it is now.’

‘So those doors are always unlocked?’

‘Well, yes.’ She searched his face for clues as to where the rebuke would come from. ‘You see, the oil man brings his pipe in through here and out to the back yard.’ She gestured towards the rear door. ‘For the central heating. It means I don’t have to be in for him. He can just come when he likes.’

‘Aren’t you worried about people breaking in?’ Slider asked.

She looked mildly surprised. ‘But why should they? There’s nothing here they could steal.’

‘The Range Rover?’

‘Oh, but they couldn’t get it out, could they? I
never
leave the keys in it. And the doors to that garage
are
locked.’

‘Someone might go through into the passage – there’s all your father’s wine, for instance. That must be valuable. And they could get through the kitchen to the rest of the house.’

She shook her head. ‘I lock the door at night – I mean the door from the garage into the passage. And Sheba’s in the kitchen at night. She’d bark if anyone broke in.’

‘And on the night in question, the Tuesday night, she didn’t bark?’

‘Oh, no. I’d have heard her. I always wake if she barks.’ She seemed to falter. ‘Is there something wrong? Did you – were you—?’

‘It occurred to me to wonder,’ he said, ‘whether Mrs Andrews was left in your garage during that night, the Tuesday night. Or perhaps in one of your storerooms. I don’t like to upset you by the thought, but—’

She still seemed puzzled. ‘Oh, no, she couldn’t have been,’ she said. ‘I’m sure she was never in any of the storerooms, or the garage, except when I was there. Why should you think so?’

He tried to find a gentle way of making her understand. ‘You see, we know that she was moved at some point – that she wasn’t laid straight in the hole where you found her. She was put somewhere else first, for some hours and then moved later.’ Mrs Hammond seemed to pale, and put her fingers to her mouth as she understood him at last. ‘And it occurred to me that perhaps whoever killed her used your garage at first—’

‘That’s horrible!’ she said, through her fingers. ‘No, I don’t believe it. I’m sure she never was – not there! Oh dear, I can’t—’ She turned away, and with her back to him, fumbled a handkerchief out of her pocket and blew her nose. ‘No, it’s not possible,’ she said, muffled but for once definite. ‘Sheba would have barked.’

They returned to the kitchen. The dog looked up briefly at them and then down again, resting her nose on her paws, her sore red ears twitching.

‘Your bedroom is above here?’ Slider asked.

Mrs Hammond turned to him. Her eyes looked a little pink and frightened. He had upset her by talk of the body, he saw, but how could it be helped?

‘My bedroom and the boys’ rooms and our bathroom. Do you want to see?’

‘No, thank you, not now. Your father’s bedroom is at the other end of the house?’

‘Over the dining-room; and Mother’s was over the drawing-room, with their bathroom in between.’ She searched his face again. ‘But he has a bell by his bedside to call me, if he wants me. I’m a light sleeper.’

It was sad how anxious she was to avoid blame, he thought. ‘And in fact your father didn’t call you on Tuesday night?’

‘No, he had a good night. He slept through.’

‘Yes, so he told me. Does he take sleeping pills?’

‘No, but he does have pain-killers. He was offered sleeping pills, but he wouldn’t have them. He doesn’t like the idea.’

Slider left no further on than when he had arrived. All the same questions remained to be answered. It had to be Eddie, didn’t it? But if he did it,
where
did he do it? And where did Meacher come in? There was a hole in the story somewhere, and he was running out of leads. He had to hope that Porson’s appeal to the Great British Public would turn something up.

He was on his way back to his car when something that Lady Diana had said came back to him, and he diverted to the Goat In Boots. Mrs Potter was ‘upstairs, resting’, according to her husband. ‘This business with Jennifer has knocked her bandy,’ he confided. ‘Well, it’s got to all of us, really. One minute someone’s with you, and the next—’ He shook his head dolefully. ‘I could go and wake her for you,’ he offered doubtfully.

‘No, it’s all right, I’ve just got one question, and you can answer it just as well. You’ve told me that when Jennifer left for her meeting on Tuesday night, she was wearing a navy dress with a red belt?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Can you remember whether she had a red scarf as well?’

‘What, on her head, you mean?’

‘On her head, round her neck – anywhere.’

Jack pondered weightily. ‘I dunno,’ he said at last. ‘I can’t say I remember really. She could have had, but—’

Karen, the barmaid, who was polishing glasses nearby with her ears on stalks, interrupted these musings impatiently. ‘But she did, don’t you remember? A red silk scarf. It was tied to the strap of her handbag.’

Oh, very seventies, Slider thought. ‘You’re sure about that?’ he asked Karen.

‘Yes, course I am,’ she said.
‘You
remember, Jack?’

‘Can’t say I do. But she could have. I wouldn’t swear one way or the other.’

‘That’s all right,’ Slider said. ‘Thank you,’ to Karen. ‘It’s just a small point, but I wanted to clear it up.’ So the scarf was real, he thought as he walked across the square; and sometime during the evening she had lost it. Somewhere between the Meacher house and the grave. It was something to file away at the back of the mind. Probably it wasn’t important – not important unless it turned up in an interesting place, that is.

The CID room was crowded again: the troops, together with various hangers-on who had nothing better to do, were waiting around the television for the appeal to come on. It would be Porson’s first television appearance since he came to Shepherd’s Bush, and the excitement was as palpable, and probably of the same kind, as among spectators at a Grand Prix hoping for an accident.

Anderson and Mackay were playing the Porson game. ‘What’s the Syrup’s favourite part of north London?’ Mackay asked.

‘Barnet, of course. Too easy.’

‘What’s his favourite place in Leicestershire?’

Anderson looked blank. ‘
I
don’t know. I’ve never been to Leicestershire.’

‘Wigston,’ Mackay said triumphantly.

‘Never heard of it. You can’t have that one.’

‘All right, how does he like to travel, then?’

‘Dunno,’ Anderson said, after some thought.

‘By hairyplane,’ Mackay said triumphantly.

‘Hairyplane?’

‘For God’s sake, shut up, you two imbeciles,’ Swilley said impatiently. ‘Here’s the boss.’

Slider squeezed through to the front. ‘Where’s McLaren?’

‘Gone home, guv. Sick as a parrot,’ Mackay said.

‘About time, after he’s infected all of us,’ Anderson put in.

‘Atherton back yet?’

‘He’s just coming in,’ Swilley said, gesturing towards the door.

Atherton slithered through to them, looking glum but resigned. ‘Caroline Barnes confirms the alibi,’ he told Slider, without preamble. ‘I tried to shake her, but she stuck to it, though she looks nervous as hell. She says he came round, they had supper and went to bed.’

‘A simple story.’

‘And none the less incredible for that. So there we are.’

‘Yes, there we are,’ Slider said. He pondered. ‘It could be true.’

‘But then again …’ Atherton sighed.

‘Maybe someone will have seen Meacher’s car parked outside,’ Slider suggested.

‘Yes, that would be handy. But of course if no-one remembers seeing it, that doesn’t prove it wasn’t there. And knowing our luck—’

‘Shh, here it comes,’ Swilley said. There was a chorus of hoots and wolf-whistles, which Slider silenced in the interests of discipline. However odd Porson was in his mannerisms, he was still the boss, and Slider could not let them mock him in front of him. But in fact, Porson was surprisingly good on the screen. The portentous, trade-unionist delivery did very well on television, and under the unnatural lighting everyone looked as if he could be wearing a wig; the regional news presenter, indeed, looked as if he was breaking in a face for a friend. And the Super only slipped in one Porsonism, when he affirmed that anyone calling with information would have their unanimity respected – and even then you had to be alert to catch it.