by Rebecca Tope
The front door was imposing, with a porch almost worthy of a church and a clanging bell to be handled with authority if it was to attract attention from the bowels of the house. Nothing happened for a full two minutes after Karen had done her worst with it. She was turning to leave when a voice called from a distant point away to the left, where the orchard was.
Mary Thomas came quickly towards her, wading through high grass and fallen blossom. She wore a long skirt, which made her seem old-fashioned and eccentric. Not a flowing Indian cotton skirt, but a heavy straight one, too warm for the time of year and entirely wrong for a rainy day. It did not, however, appear to encumber her progress.
‘Hello?’ she said, from the wrought-iron gate that separated her front garden from the orchard. ‘What can I do for you?’ The tone was cool, the expression unsmiling. Karen thought again what a distinctive face it was: the eyes so deeply sunk that it seemed they’d have difficulty in seeing out from beneath the thick brows.
‘Well …’ Karen felt suddenly self-conscious. ‘I brought the kids. Um, you did say, any time we fancied a change of scene …’ It was true: Mary Thomas had definitely given an open-ended invitation to call in. But that had been nearly a year ago.
‘Did I? Well, yes, maybe I did. I’m sorry Mrs Slocombe, but it isn’t really a very good day for it. I’m trying to get the raspberry canes in, and I see the peach tree is threatening to blow over again. It keeps coming away from the wall. You know how it is.’ She didn’t seem to care whether Karen knew or not; she was clearly not going to be diverted from her plans.
‘Oh. Right. Sorry to have bothered you then.’ Karen backed away, trying not to feel offended. She might have succeeded if it hadn’t been for the Mrs Slocombe. That had been uncalled for, surely. They’d had plenty of companionable chats in the village shop, in recent months, in addition to Karen’s occasional visits.
‘Oh!’ she remembered, turning back. ‘I wanted to ask you …’ But the woman had already covered a considerable distance and was apparently no longer even aware of her visitor. With gritted teeth, Karen accepted defeat. Getting back into the car, she threw a glance at the children.
‘Can we get out, Mummy?’ Stephanie asked carefully.
‘Sorry, pet, no. We’re going home again. But the rain’s stopping, look. There’s a bit of blue sky – see?’ She neglected to mention that they wouldn’t be able to play outside until Miss Lincoln’s funeral was over. Drew had stipulated that there should be no chirruping children in the garden while a burial was taking place just beyond the fence. ‘It’s not good for them, or the mourners,’ he’d insisted. ‘Sorry, but that’s final.’ Karen sometimes thought he’d got that part of things badly wrong. She wanted her children to feel natural about funerals and death, to regard it as just another part of their normal experience. But now was not the moment to worry about that.
She sat in the driving seat for a moment, wrestling with her emotions after the encounter she had just undergone. Not only offence but a kind of humiliation was seething within her. And, threading through all that, there was a strong sense of something amiss. Mary Thomas had not been quick enough to suppress the flash of anxiety that crossed her face when she recognised Karen. Nor the flurried movement of one hand, plunging deep into the pocket of that ridiculous skirt.
Drew and Maggs need not have worried about getting the Grafton funeral. At three on Wednesday afternoon, as the last of the handful of mourners for Miss Lincoln were departing, Drew took a phone call.
‘Is that the natural burial place?’ came a subdued voice. Drew recognised the tones of a person in shock. ‘That’s right,’ he said. ‘Can I help you?’
‘This is Julie Grafton.’
‘Oh, yes. Hello. I’m very sorry about your husband.’ Drew was practised at pitching the condolences at the precise point between gushingly overdone sympathy and callously single-minded attention to the practicalities. The aim, basically, was to avoid eliciting the onset of tears. Undertakers were there to deal with the disposal of the body, and although there were ways and ways of doing this, the essential purpose remained.
‘Yes, well, he’d have wanted to be buried in your … place. He knew your wife.’
‘Indeed.’ Drew refrained from mentioning Karen’s close involvement with Mr Grafton’s death. ‘Has the Coroner’s Officer seen you?’ he asked.
‘He telephoned me a little while ago. I told him I wanted you to do the funeral. He said you’d understand the procedure – that we couldn’t make any firm arrangements for some time yet.’
‘They’ll have to open an inquest,’ Drew agreed. ‘And that isn’t likely to be for a few days yet. There is a police investigation to be taken into consideration, of course. It’s all very difficult for you, I know.’
‘It hasn’t really sunk in yet,’ she confided, and although Drew understood that this was partly true, he also knew that people adapted with astonishing speed to a new and unexpected situation. Even being told that your perfectly fit young husband had been murdered in a small country town was a piece of information the average woman could get to grips with within twenty-four hours or so.
‘I was in Yorkshire, you know – when it happened,’ she went on. ‘I had to be with my father. He’s very ill, you see. My mother’s at her wits’ end with it all.’
‘That must have made things difficult.’
‘I feel as if I have to be in two places at once. And we daren’t tell Dad what’s happened to Peter. It would probably be the final straw.’
Drew suppressed the urge to tell her otherwise; to force his own view upon her: that it was always better to tell the whole truth. It wasn’t his place to tell people how to manage their own families. Poor woman, he thought. Sounds as if she’ll have another funeral to go to before long.
‘So, we have to be patient, until the Coroner’s Officer lets us know when the inquest is opened and then adjourned,’ Drew said. ‘It probably won’t be too long. When it’s to be a burial, rather than a cremation, the rules are more relaxed. They’ll very likely release the body to us within a few days, and we can have the funeral whenever we like after that. I just need you to understand that we can’t fix a date yet.’
‘No, I didn’t expect to.’ Her voice was softly musical, a slight Devon accent giving it a friendly, almost intimate, resonance. But Drew was never again going to be seduced into getting too emotionally close to a client. That had happened once, and once was more than enough.
Having noted some necessary details – full name, address, age – he left it that Julie Grafton would come and see him when notification came through that the body was being released. ‘Phone me any time if there’s anything you’d like to know,’ he offered.
His sympathy for her was genuine as he put the phone down. Not only had her husband just been killed, but the gossip about his relationship with Sally Dabb was sure to be flying around the neighbourhood at that very moment. When a person died, their secrets instantly became common currency, despite injunctions about not speaking ill of the dead. It seemed to be a simple matter of the person no longer being there to keep the lid tightly closed on facts that were generally private. And in the case of a sudden death, this was even more true. Emails went undeleted, diaries undestroyed. Letters, jottings, even observed behaviour, all acquired greater significance when their author or object was no longer present.
Unless, Drew supposed, there was a wholesale and determined conspiracy to maintain the silence. If Sally Dabb behaved herself, and if there were no letters or emails or recorded phone messages, then perhaps the secret was safe. He found himself hoping this was the case.
CHAPTER FIVE
Karen’s heart spasmed uncomfortably at the sight of the same two police officers on the doorstep again, that evening. She let them in unwillingly, then kept them standing in the hall, with the excuse that her husband and daughter were engaged finishing a jigsaw in the final few minutes before Stephanie went to bed. ‘I don’t want my daughter disturbed by your visit
,’ she said firmly.
‘Mrs Slocombe, I expect you know why we’re here,’ said the heavier of the two. A man with very little neck and the largest ears Karen had ever seen. His colleague was hardly slim, either, but seemed rather more in proportion.
‘I assume it’s about Peter Grafton,’ she said.
‘That’s right. We’d just like to run through the sequence of events with you again. And perhaps go back a bit further in time than in your statement yesterday.’ He produced a sheet of paper and consulted it. ‘That is, before you went for coffee with Mrs Beech. How was Mr Grafton behaving at that time?’
‘He was … he seemed quite relaxed. Happy, even. Chatting, and so forth.’ She found it tremendously difficult to avoid mentioning Sally Dabb, and wondered why she was bothering, anyway.
‘Who was he chatting to?’ came the next inevitable question. So much for discretion, Karen thought.
‘Well, mainly to Sally, I suppose. Her stall was next to his.’
‘Sally?’
‘Mrs Dabb. She sells pickles.’
‘Ah, yes. The lady who was so upset, according to most of our witnesses.’
‘Anybody would be upset,’ Karen affirmed. ‘Blood everywhere and the whole thing so completely unexpected.’
‘Did you notice anybody watching him, earlier in the day?’
Karen shook her head. ‘I was too busy for anything like that. And it was crowded. I wouldn’t have been able to see anybody beyond the row of customers at his stall.’
‘He sold apple juice, is that right?’ The burly officer seemed to have a clear logic in his own head, directing the course of his questions, but Karen wasn’t following it very well.
‘Apple, peach, raspberry, blackcurrant,’ she ticked them off on her fingers. ‘And combinations, of course. Whatever he could find, really. I mean, he made it all himself, from local fruits. It must have been hard work …’ she tailed off.
‘Yes, we’ve seen his premises,’ interrupted the slighter man. ‘Very impressive.’
‘Is it?’ Karen spoke without thinking.
‘You’ve never been there?’
She shook her head again. ‘No. I’ve never had reason to. I suppose it must be interesting.’
‘We thought it was quite hi-tech,’ the same man confided. ‘Considering everything’s supposed to be so natural and small scale and so forth. He doesn’t exactly squeeze the juice out by hand.’
‘Didn’t, Ricky – didn’t,’ the larger man corrected him.
‘Didn’t,’ his colleague nodded. ‘There’s even a machine for putting the foil tops on the bottles.’
Karen shrugged. Peter Grafton’s juicing arrangements hadn’t concerned her when he was alive, and were even less relevant now he was dead.
‘Anyway,’ pressed the big man, more urgently, ‘we’d like you to have a think about what we’ve been asking you. And then we’d like you to drop into the Incident Room in Bradbourne tomorrow and let us have anything you’ve remembered.’
‘Incident Room?’ Karen frowned.
‘It’s in the Town Hall. The old Town Hall. Because the police station’s been moved to Garnstone, and it isn’t convenient for our purposes.’
‘Ah,’ Karen nodded, as if she understood. The old Town Hall in Bradbourne was a strange square building, used for jumble sales and one-off sales of oriental carpets or remaindered books. It was indeed convenient, however, for the scene of Peter Grafton’s murder, being about twenty yards away.
‘So you’ll be there? Tomorrow morning?’
‘Well, it’ll be difficult. I’ve got four small children here tomorrow.’
‘Oh dear,’ came the unsympathetic response. ‘Well, I’m afraid this is important.’
‘So I’ll bring them all with me, shall I? And you’ll find a friendly police officer to take charge of them while I answer questions?’
‘If necessary,’ he said stiffly.
‘Well, I’ll try,’ she said. ‘But I don’t think I’ll remember anything. I’m sure I’ve told you everything I saw.’
‘We can take you outside and get you to run through the angles and things, as well,’ the policeman added, with a certain vagueness. ‘It would be helpful.’
The smaller man spoke suddenly. ‘Is there any connection, do you think, with the supermarket bomb?’ he said, as if the idea had dropped into his head from the sky. ‘Last time we were here, we were asking about that.’
‘Connection?’ Karen echoed. ‘Like what?’
‘Well, Mrs Slocombe,’ said the heavier man, ‘for a start, you seem to have been at the scene of both incidents. Don’t you?’
No sooner had she shut the door on the policemen than Drew appeared from the living room, with Stephanie close behind. ‘All clear?’ he asked.
Karen wished he’d been slightly earlier, so she could have slammed the front door. It would have alerted him to her mood. Instead she merely nodded.
‘You kept them out here all that time?’ he marvelled. ‘Poor blokes.’
‘You knew who they were then?’
‘I saw the car outside. Thought I should keep a low profile, as they say. It’s made Steph awfully late for bed though.’
‘Drew, it was horrible,’ Karen burst out. ‘Stop making it sound as if the vicar just dropped by.’ She watched him bite back a quip about vicars, before adding, ‘And I’ve got to go to their Incident Room tomorrow morning. With all the kids.’
‘You can’t. It’ll be bedlam. And you can’t get them all into the car.’
‘So I’ll leave them here for you to watch, shall I?’
He frowned.
‘How long will you be?’
‘An hour or so, I imagine. Don’t worry – I can ask Della. She probably isn’t doing anything.’
Drew glanced down at the little girl at his side. ‘Well, I’ll do bedtime then, shall I? I’ll be down again in a bit.’ And he led Stephanie upstairs, where her little brother was almost certainly already fast asleep.
When he came down again, Karen was on the sofa with a brimming glass of white wine. ‘I need this,’ she said, as his eyebrows rose. ‘You can get yourself one too, if you want.’
When he’d settled in an armchair at right angles to her, without any wine of his own, he leant his head back and gazed at the ceiling. ‘Mrs Grafton phoned today,’ he said. ‘I haven’t had a chance to tell you. We’ve got the funeral.’
‘Congratulations,’ she said, half sincerely. ‘When?’
‘Don’t know yet. Still lots to do.’
Karen laughed abruptly, a harsh sound without humour. ‘Maybe they think I killed him, to bring you some business.’
‘What?’
‘Why do I seem to be slap bang in the middle of it all, that’s what I want to know? It’s horrible, having the police pestering me, and Geraldine making scary hints, and Mary telling me to get lost. I feel as if I’m falling down a long dark hole, and every day takes me deeper. It’s got nothing to do with me, and yet I’m reminded of it at every turn.’
‘What exactly is it?’
‘That’s the trouble – I don’t know. It must have something to do with the farmers’ markets, or the Food Chain people, I suppose. Something’s been going on that I must have missed out on. There’s a meeting tomorrow evening; I suppose I’ll find out a bit more then.’
‘Assuming you want to,’ he murmured.
‘Oh yes, Drew,’ she said with feeling. ‘After having my little girl almost blown up, I do most definitely want to.’
Karen was distracted and short-tempered even before Della arrived with her boys on Thursday morning, ten minutes earlier than usual. Karen had phoned her, and asked if she could stay at Karen’s with all four, while Karen went to do her duty as a police witness.
The reply had been unenthusiastic. ‘Well, try not to be long,’ Della had said. ‘I’ve got plans for the day.’
When she turned up, she seemed to have forgotten all about her fainting fit of two days earlier. ‘Sorry I’m a bit a
head of myself,’ she breezed. ‘I thought you could get this police stuff over with quickly and let me get going.’
‘Oh?’ Karen was unsure what to make of this.
‘I thought I’d go to Taunton and find some things for the summer. Is there anything you want?’
‘Like what?’ Karen had a bizarre vision of Della buying a swimsuit or pair of shorts on her behalf.
‘Oh, I don’t know.’ Della waved a careless hand.
‘So you’re quite recovered then?’ Karen asked coolly. ‘After Tuesday?’
‘Gosh – sorry. I should have thanked you, shouldn’t I. It seems ages ago now. I was back to normal right away. It wasn’t like me at all. I suppose it was just the shock.’ She eyed Karen accusingly. ‘You did tell it rather, well, baldly.’
‘We’re doing the funeral,’ Karen said, watching the other woman for a response.
It was less than gratifying. ‘Oh. Right. I imagine you would be. They’ll have a church service first, will they?’ One of Drew’s long-term plans, initially resisted but eventually agreed to because of Maggs’s persistent nagging, was to erect a small chapel of his own, in a corner of the field, for funeral services. Until then, they either used the village church, or held the whole funeral at the graveside.
‘I have no idea,’ Karen admitted. ‘It won’t be for a while yet.’
‘Poor Peter,’ Della murmured, with a sigh that looked contrived to Karen. ‘Well, off you go. We’ll be fine here. Stephanie can show me where things are.’ She paused. ‘It’ll mean you owe me an hour or so sometime, won’t it?’
Karen knew the question was fair, that this sort of arrangement only worked if everything was kept strictly level, turn for turn about, but she still resented the remark. It wasn’t her fault there’d been a murder before her very eyes.
‘Fine,’ she replied, wondering just why she felt so frosty.
There was no sign of the two policemen from the previous evening at the Town Hall when she went in. There were people sitting at four or five tables, with computer monitors in front of them and telephones at their elbows. Cables ran carelessly in all directions, and there was a big white flip chart on an easel in the middle of the room. It was strange and intimidating. Nobody came forward to meet her as she stood gazing around. Eventually she noticed a desk close by, with a hand-written card saying ‘Public’ on it. There was nobody sitting behind it.