Shallow Grave (34 page)

‘Spot of irony,’ Slider said. ‘As it happens, I think she probably is exciting. I mean, look at Joanna.’

‘Yes,’ Atherton said, accepting the shorthand. There was a silence while he eased round a right-turner who wanted to occupy the whole road, and then he went on. ‘When I was wounded, I lost a sort of – integrity. That maniac made a hole in me – literally and figuratively. My shell wasn’t whole and perfect any more.’

‘Yes,’ Slider said. He couldn’t have put it into words, but he knew what he meant.

‘I’m afraid,’ Atherton admitted starkly, ‘and I hate it.
Hate
it!
I feel as if something’s been taken away from me, and I resent it like hell.’ He paused, and went on in a different voice, ‘And then, I missed her, and I can’t afford to cope with that as well as everything else.’ He glanced sideways again. ‘These days I see you looking at me, wondering if I’m going to make it.’

‘I don’t—’ Slider began, but Atherton stopped him.

‘You do, but it’s all right; I wonder too.’

‘You’ll make it,’ Slider said, with a great deal more certainty than he felt. He wasn’t always sure about himself, let alone his damaged companion.

‘But I don’t think I can do it on my own. Not any more.’

‘Well,’ Slider said again, ‘she’s a nice person.’

Atherton smiled privately at this concluding benediction. His boss might just as well have said, ‘You have my blessing to proceed.’ Bill had never had much facility in expressing emotions, and with Joanna was having painfully to learn a whole new language. Atherton, on the other hand, had always had all the words, an easy, sparkling stream of them; now he was going to have to learn to put his money where his mouth was.

‘But nothing worth having was ever achieved without effort,’ he concluded aloud. Slider grunted agreement without questioning of what the comment was apropos.

When they reached the flat, Slider invited Atherton in for a drink, and finding that they were both hungry, rummaged through the kitchen and offered the old standby bread and cheese. Atherton looked at the bread and the cheese and quickly offered to make them both Welsh rarebit, which he did the proper, painstaking way, melting the cheese in a pan and adding mustard and Worcestershire sauce before pouring it over the toast and grilling it. While all this was going on and Slider sat on the edge of the kitchen table watching, they both sipped a handsome-looking Glenmorangie with a beer chaser, and talked about the case.

‘Now that Defreitas has made a complete Jackson Pollock of the evidence,’ Atherton said, ‘and Eddie’s turned out to have an alibi, I suppose it puts Meacher up as prime suspect. There’s this story about him chasing some other woman, a rich one. But if Jennifer was about to queer his pitch with some serious money, that’s a good enough motive to kill her, if he’s really the creep you think he is.’

‘But he’s got an alibi.’

‘Not much of one. The girl would obviously say anything she was told to, but a little judicious – or even judicial – pressure might change that. Effectively, he’s not accountable for most of the evening and all of the night.’

Slider shifted restlessly. ‘But most of the same objections apply to Meacher as suspect as to anyone else. We’re not just trying to find someone to nail this to, we’re trying to find out what really happened.’

‘Hey,’ Atherton said, wounded, ‘it’s me.’

Slider made a gesture of acknowledgement, and went on thinking aloud. ‘There’s the problem of the makeup. How would the murderer do the retouching out of doors and in the dark?’

‘Maybe that’s why it was done clumsily,’ Atherton said.

‘It wasn’t
that
clumsy. Most men couldn’t do it that well in a barber’s chair under a spotlight.’

‘Well, what about in someone’s car? You know that most drugs are bought, sold and ingested in cars: it’s the new privacy. So why not murder? You’d have interior light to do the making-up by.’

‘Well, it’s a possibility,’ Slider said.

‘A bare one, by the tone of your voice,’ Atherton complained. ‘Here I am thinking my heart out for you—’

‘Well, look, if she was smothered without a struggle, she must have been drugged in some way, and how was that to be done? You don’t suddenly produce a pill when you’re out for a walk in the country and say, “Here, swallow this.” Or even,’ he anticipated Atherton’s rider, ‘sitting in a car.’

‘All right, then, maybe it was done indoors,’ Atherton said. ‘There are other houses in the world than Eddie’s. And we don’t actually
know
it wasn’t at Eddie’s. It’s just that we’ve no evidence it was.’

‘But then you’ve got the problem – which applies to any house – of hauling the body out and getting it across to the Rectory, and I can’t believe no-one would notice.’

‘People don’t notice things like anything, all the time, every day of the week,’ Atherton pointed out.

Slider shook his head. ‘The thing that’s really bugging me, I suppose, is that even if no-one noticed at the loading-up end, and even if the Rectory neighbours didn’t notice the vehicle driving
up and the crunching feet over the gravel, I can’t believe all that activity went on on the terrace in the dead of night without the dog barking. That dog’s on a hair-trigger.’

Atherton pulled out the grill pan to inspect progress, and pushed it back in to bubble some more. The kitchen was filling with the delicious aroma of roasting cheese, and he kept expecting to feel Oedipus’s solid body pressing against his legs in the ritual food gyration. Oedipus was particularly fond of cheese: quite a Cheshire cat, he thought.

‘And yet,’ Slider continued with a frown, ‘that’s precisely what did happen. Whoever put the body into the hole, the dog didn’t bark in the night.’

‘Don’t go all Sherlock Holmes on me,’ Atherton said. ‘Maybe they just didn’t hear it. People with yappy dogs can learn to shut out the noise – like people living by a railway not hearing the trains.’

‘It isn’t exactly a yappy dog. And it’s supposed to be a guard dog: would anyone ignore the barking of a guard dog, especially in the night?’

‘It’s possible they simply didn’t hear it,’ Atherton said reasonably. ‘Mr Dacre said he slept well that night for a change, so presumably he needed the sleep. Maybe he even took something to help him.’

‘Mrs Hammond says she’s a light sleeper. And she said she didn’t sleep well that night. If the dog had barked, surely she would have heard it?’

‘People who say they don’t sleep actually sleep a lot more than they think – it’s a proven fact. It’s a peculiar form of vanity, to claim not to sleep,’ he diverged. ‘As though sleeping were something rather gross and common. Like those nineteenth-century ladies who prided themselves on never eating, and fainted all the time to show how refined they were. In any case,’ he reverted robustly, pulling out the grill pan again,
‘que voulez vous?
There are only two possibilities, aren’t there? Either the dog didn’t bark, or they didn’t hear it.’

‘Some help you are,’ Slider said.

They carried the supper through to the sitting room to eat. Atherton made free with Joanna’s sound system and put on Brahms’ fourth symphony, because that’s what the women were playing at Milton Keynes that evening, and he thought
it might give them sympathetic vibrations and improve his chances for later.

Slider said, ‘If it was Meacher, or anybody else come to that,
why
would he put the body in the hole? It doesn’t make sense for anyone other than Eddie Andrews. It’s
got
to be Eddie, even if it can’t be.’

Atherton sat with his plate and glass and stretched out his legs. ‘Let it go, now. You’ve got to learn to switch off, or you’ll burn yourself out.’

‘That’s what I’ve always told you, about women,’ Slider said, with a slow smile.

‘That’s better,’ Atherton said approvingly. ‘Just forget about it for a few hours. We’ve probably missed something glaringly obvious, and the subconscious will chuck it out if we leave it alone. You’ll wake up in the morning knowing everything from aardvark to zymosis.’

‘Tomorrow,’ Slider said. ‘Oh, Nora, Joanna’s going to take my car again.’

Atherton raised his eyebrows. ‘Bad move,’ he said. ‘You know there’s a tube strike tomorrow? And some of the buses are probably coming out in sympathy.’

‘Bloody
Nora.’ Slider upped the stakes. Of course, that would be why she had to have the car. Why hadn’t he remembered?

‘There you are,’ Atherton said, watching his face, ‘counter-irritant. A nice go of toothache to take your mind off your headache.’

The solution to the transport problem turned out to be an early call to the AA while Joanna, having inspected the breadless kitchen cupboards, departed in Slider’s car for Henry Wood Hall near enough to the crack of dawn to be able to stop for breakfast somewhere on the way. Slider made a few phone calls and tried to let his mind lie fallow so as to let the back-burner syndrome take effect. He had woken no closer to making sense of the senseless than he had gone to sleep.

The AA man arrived unexpectedly soon, and Slider hurried out to unlock the car for him. He was a young, burly and immensely cheerful man, who when Slider apologised for the early call, said, ‘No worries, mate, I’d sooner this than the middle of the night trying to work in the dark.’ But his demeanour suggested
he’d have been just as cheerful at midnight in December. Slider envied him such a robust disposition.

He tried it first and checked the fuel gauge. ‘Just in case,’ he said. ‘How are you for petrol? Quarter full, that’s okay. You’d be surprised how often I get called out and all it is, there’s no petrol in the tank. Not just women, either.’

He put up the bonnet of Joanna’s Alfa and dived in with enthusiasm, while Slider hung about and looked over his shoulder like an auntie in the kitchen. They were watched through the window of the van by a large mongrel that plainly featured collie and Dobermann amongst its varied ancestors.

‘The wife feels happier if I’ve got him with me, the lonely stretches of road we get called to sometimes,’ the patrolman said, in answer to Slider’s conversational query. ‘He loves it, out and about all the time. I don’t approve of leaving a dog shut up in the house all day. It’s not fair on them.’

Slider agreed absently. ‘Good guard dog, is he?’

‘If anyone tried to mess with me or the motor,’ the man said elliptically, looking back over his shoulder at the intent face at the window. ‘One-man dog, that one,’ he added proudly. ‘I’m the only person who can do anything with him.’

‘Oh?’ Slider said, and grew very still, thought taking hold of him. Further conversation went over his head, and he barely even noticed when the engine jumped at last to life, following a delicate mechanical operation, involving a judicious whack on the starter-motor with a hammer.

The AA man slammed the bonnet down and said, ‘Well, that’ll tide you over for a bit, but I don’t promise anything. It could go again any time. You really want to get that starter-motor replaced.’

‘I will. Thanks. Thanks a lot. I’ve really got to dash now, but I’m very grateful to you.’

‘S’all right. All part of the job, squire,’ the AA man said easily.

He drove to St Michael Square, deep in thought. The square was quiet, basking in the young sunshine at the innocent time of day when workers have departed, non-workers are still indoors, and intentions, good and bad, are only just waking up. He parked round at the end of the church and stepped out to stand leaning on the railings, hoping inspiration would strike. It was cool in the shadow of the tower, but across from the churchyard, the odd but mellow façade of the Old Rectory was warm with sunlight. Squint up a bit, he thought, and you could be in a village. A brisk dog, trotting on its rounds, smiled up at him as it passed; all that was wanted was the schoolmistress on a bicycle and the village bobby on his beat. Not that that was how he remembered his own village life as a child. Perhaps he had grown up through a rainy decade, but his images of childhood in Essex were chiefly of mud: lanes, yards, fields of it, as far as the eye could see; cows plastered with it, hens sodden with it, wellies clogged with it; football boots weighted with it, welding tired junior legs to a school pitch like the Somme; passing tractors on the road chucking great homicidal gouts of the stuff at your head from between the lugs of their tyres. His mother had waged a lifelong, losing battle to keep the tide of mud from invading the house. Her life, he thought, was the microcosm of the struggle of civilisation: an endless fight to keep out the forces of chaos. It was why he had become a policeman, really – that and the recruiting-sergeant’s promise of all the women he could eat.

The evocative clang of a heavy wrought-iron gate was transmitted through the railings to his hand, and he roused himself to see an old man in a flat cap, collarless white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, elderly grey flannel trousers and stout
army-surplus boots, just leaving the churchyard from the gate on the side that faced the old Rectory. He held a large metal ring on which a number and variety of keys were hung, and now fumbled for one with which to lock the churchyard gate. Slider went round and accosted him.

The old man turned sharply, but seemed reassured by the look of Slider, and said pleasantly, ‘Hello! Where did you pop up from?’ while he went on locking the gate.

‘I’ve just parked over there. Detective Inspector Slider.’ Slider showed his brief, and the old man inspected it with watery blue eyes, nodded, and then slowly dragged out a handkerchief and blew his nose thoroughly, ending up with several wipes, exploratory sniffs, and a general polishing of the end, before restoring the handkerchief to his trousers.