‘What?’ Atherton demanded, but he got no answer.
Slider led the way across the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen door was open, the room was empty, cool in shadow, the window a dazzling rectangle of white light. A cup of tea, half drunk, stood on the table, and a library book lay open and face down on the sagging sofa where Mrs Hammond must have abandoned it when she heard the dog bark. Under the scarred polythene protective, the dust jacket showed a passionate embrace, a woman in red, a man with dark hair and huge shoulders. Here it was: love – authentic, romantic, unfailing, marriage guaranteed; every woman’s birthright. What Irene had been promised as a little girl. No, not Irene, this was not the time for that. Frances, woman turned monster, still feeding on the poison, the white refined sugar that warped and rotted.
He crossed the kitchen to the darkest corner and bent over the dog’s basket, probing down amongst the hairy blankets. In a moment he straightened up, with the shredded strip of red silk dangling from his fingers, damp with dog saliva. He felt as though, with a very little encouragement, he would be able to cry.
He turned to Atherton. ‘Jennifer’s scarf,’ he said, in a dead voice. ‘The one she was wearing the last day, that got lost somewhere between the Meacher house and the grave. I saw the dog chewing it in its basket, but, God help me, I never made the connection until just now.’
Atherton came close and looked. ‘Her scarf?’
Slider was looking round. ‘Here. She did it here, on this sofa, where she always sits – where she was going to go on sitting, drinking tea and reading romances. My God, what a monster!’
‘That pathetic nothing of a woman?’
‘She didn’t take the dog out that morning, as she said she did. I should have realised from the beginning. I did know something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t know what, and of course I never suspected her – a pathetic nothing of a woman, as you say.’
‘But what—?’
‘Don’t you see? If she’d taken the dog out with her on the terrace that morning, it would have found the body! It would have gone straight to it and barked its head off. But she never said a word about the dog’s reaction to the corpse, and neither did Eddie. And the next-door neighbours, who heard her cry out or shout when Eddie arrived, heard no barking. Because the dog wasn’t there.’
‘But where does that get us? When you said the dog was the key, I thought you meant about the barking in the night.’
‘Yes, I did. I was wrong there, too. My God, I made such a stupid, elementary mistake!’ he said fretfully. ‘And after I’d been warning everyone else – and referring to the Christie case. Timothy Evans hanged because no-one entertained for a moment the notion that he might be telling the truth and Christie lying. It was the same with Eddie Andrews and Mrs Hammond. I thought Andrews was trying to distance himself from the trench by saying the work was her idea, but in fact he was telling the truth and she was trying to distance herself. I should have known the corner of the tarpaulin couldn’t have blown back. It was a still night, and the ropes on the corners showed that he was in the habit of tying it down. It was she who turned the tarpaulin back, because she knew what was under it. But from the very beginning I took her as the standard, and everything had to be measured by her truth. Stupid, stupid!’
‘Don’t beat yourself up. Who would have thought—?’
‘I should have thought.’ He looked at Atherton. ‘There weren’t two possibilities, but three. Either the dog didn’t bark, or they didn’t hear it – or it did bark, and she was lying.’
‘Yes,’ said Atherton.
‘Mrs Hammond had the same access to the Rohypnol as her father. Jennifer went to see her that night. Mr Dacre must have been already tucked up asleep in his bed, and he slept soundly all night. She gave Jennifer a spiked drink here in the kitchen, and smothered her, probably with one of the cushions from this sofa. At some point in the – not exactly struggle, but let’s say transaction – Jennifer’s scarf came off and I suspect got lost amongst the cushions. In her distracted state, Mrs Hammond didn’t notice it, or its absence; but later the dog nosed it out – she was wearing quite a lot of scent, you remember – and carried it to its basket, where I saw it chewing it. Saw, but didn’t see.’
‘But what did Mrs H. do about the dog? If Dacre was already in bed, it must have been in the kitchen with her while she was murdering.’
‘Yes, of course. The dog was upset, and she couldn’t deal with the corpse with it barking and growling, maybe even trying to attack her. She had to drag it out into the passage; but she knew it could get the kitchen door open by lifting the latch – I saw it do it – so she dragged it into the empty storeroom, the first on the left, which had a bolt on the outside. The dog went mad trying to get out – I saw the gouges on the inside of the door, and the empty sacks were ripped where it worried them in its frenzy. But no-one could hear it in there. The room has no window, and those walls are two feet thick.’
‘My God, yes. It’s the perfect cell.’
‘And there the dog stayed all night. It was still in there in the morning when she went out on the terrace to do whatever she meant to do.’
‘And what was that?’
‘I don’t know. There are some things I shall have to ask her, little as I want to. But I think I’ve worked most of it out.’
‘You might let me in on it, then,’ Atherton said. ‘What did she do with the body? Leave it on the sofa?’
‘No, I think she moved it straight away, started dragging or carrying it out as soon as she’d shut the dog in. I don’t know what she meant to do with it in the long run, but I think she got it as far as the back lobby and then decided to hide it temporarily in the downstairs loo, perhaps because that was the one room she knew her father would never go in – the door’s too narrow for his wheelchair.’
‘Oh, my God, and she sat the body on the loo?’
‘On the closed seat, and kept it in place by tying it to the down-pipe. Freddie said the ligature had a broad, flat section like a luggage strap, and I saw a long webbing dog-lead in the lobby she could have used.’
‘I expect the dog was very much on her mind,’ Atherton remarked.
‘Later, when the Mimpriss Estate had gone to bed and there was less chance of anyone passing in the street, she took the body out to the terrace and laid it in the trench. Early in the morning she went back out to do something else with or to the body—’
‘What?’
‘God, I don’t know. Maybe she didn’t either. Eddie said she was just standing staring at it, didn’t he? Maybe she was frozen with horror and simply couldn’t think. But anyway, he interrupted her. He made her call the police, and then sat down with his head in his hands, desperately upset, and that was when she took the chance—’
‘To throw Jennifer’s bag into the pickup!’ Atherton finished triumphantly.
‘Yes. Then she had to hurry indoors, because she knew the police were coming and she didn’t have long to cover her tracks. She had to let the dog out of the storeroom—’
‘Sooner her than me. I don’t suppose it was pleased.’
‘It was probably exhausted by then. And she had to go and check on her father and make sure he hadn’t heard anything.’
‘Yes, and wait a minute,’ Atherton said, frowning, ‘what was all that with the old man? Why did he confess?’
‘To save her, of course,’ Slider said miserably. ‘I think maybe he’d had a suspicion all along. He’s an intelligent man, with a trained, academic mind and plenty of time to think; and I remember how quick he was from the beginning to suggest it must have been Eddie who did it, and to tell me Eddie and Jennifer were on bad terms.’
And Slider remembered, too, how he had abruptly stopped himself on that same subject – not happy to be incriminating an innocent man, even though he felt he had to do it. But his suspecting must surely at that point have been only back-of-the-mind stuff, for how could he really, consciously have believed his daughter a murderess?
Atherto
n said, ‘When Mrs Hammond came in, he said he’d been proving a point to you.’
‘Yes, proving that he could stand, that he was capable of moving the body. But did you see his legs?’
‘Like knitting needles,’ Atherton agreed. ‘It was a terrible effort for him to get upright.’
‘He’s got very little time to live. He wants to take the blame to save her, because it can’t matter to him.’
‘I thought he had nothing but contempt for her?’
‘Perhaps he thought that too, until he saw her in danger. It’s surprising how deep the instinct of fatherhood goes.’
He thought of Dacre’s burning eyes, and the appeal in them at the end. Caged in his failing body, raging at life – and perhaps suddenly guilty at the way he had always treated his daughter, the one thing left to him that mattered, wealth and repute having proved no barrier to encroaching chaos. That last, furious, noble gesture saddened Slider immeasurably because it was futile. It would not save her, for truth was stronger than the devices of men, as Cyril Dacre, historian, ought above all to have known. The writers of history may lie for their own purposes or of their prejudice, but the truth has a life of its own, in stones and bricks, in the earth, in artefacts, in the marks it makes on the fabric of the world. An historian, if he is a scholar, and a detective, if he cares about his craft, are very much akin: both study the traces men leave behind them, in order to reveal their actions.
Atherton brought him back from his thoughts. ‘So he struck the manly chest and said, I cannot tell a lie, I did it with my little hatchet. I wish you had taken his statement now. It would have been interesting to see exactly how much he had worked out.’
‘He’ll have to give a statement anyway. I want you to take that. Now that you know what to look out for, he can’t lie to you. But I think probably he won’t try, now.’
‘No endgame,’ Atherton said, remembering his earlier thought.
‘Eh?’
‘Never mind. What about you? Mrs Hammond?’
‘Yes,’ Slider sighed. ‘I’ll do a preliminary here, because we can’t take her away until something’s been arranged about her father. He can hardly stay here alone. And if he goes, something will have to be done about the dog. It’s the devil of a mess,’ he concluded gloomily.
‘Not your fault, guv. People shouldn’t murder people. I wonder why she did it, by the way?’
‘Only she can tell us that. But I have an idea,’ said Slider, turning back reluctantly towards the place where duty lay.
In Atherton’s little bijou back yard – he called it a garden by virtue of a square of grass so small it didn’t even merit a lawnmower and was cut with shears – Slider and Joanna sat on canvas folding chairs and looked at the jasmine climbing over the wall opposite, beyond which the upper windows of the next row of houses peeped Chad-like, only two ten-foot plots away. Everyone was out in their back gardens this evening, and a muted composite of conversation and cutlery noises rose into the air, along with the inevitable barbecue smoke, to mingle with the sound and smell of traffic to which they were so accustomed it was actually an effort to notice it.
‘Did you read that bit in the paper,’ Joanna said, on the thought, ‘about the new research they’ve done in America on tinnitus? They reckon it’s not physical damage that causes it but mental damage. There’s background white noise all the time that our brains automatically filter out, but the brains of tinnitus sufferers have forgotten how to edit.’
‘Makes sense,’ Slider said. ‘After all, every copper knows that what you see is not what goes into the eye but what the brain registers. It’s the great forensic myth, the infallibility of the eye witness. And then there are the other forms of blindness – like blind prejudice.’
Joanna laid a hand on his knee. ‘You got there in the end.’ ‘By machete-ing my way through Eddie Andrews’ life.’ Along the A40 for quite a stretch, between Savoy Circus and Gypsy Corner, the houses had been pulled down to make way for road widening. But the widening had never happened – the scheme shelved, perhaps for ever – and the gardens of the houses remained, isolated, untended, the sad ghosts of a settlement which had come and gone and would soon be forgotten. Eddie Andrews reminded Slider of those gardens, when he had gone to tell him he was no longer suspected of the murder – unkempt and overgrown, not with any temporary absence of care, but with the desperate neglect of the ending of everything. No-one was ever coming back to prune the bare, ten-foot-high roses, trim the privet, pull up the rosebay willowherb flourishing impudently amongst the grasses of the lawn. Eddie’s hollow cheeks were sprouting, his hair was a thicket, there were seeds in his eyes, and his clothes seemed ready to migrate from his hunched and shambling shoulders. His world had been destroyed and he would never be put back together again.
‘Bill, you’ve got to stop picking at yourself,’ Joanna said reasonably. ‘You know you’re always low at times like this. In the balance of things it probably didn’t make any difference to the man. He might even have been glad of the counter-irritant.’
‘You sound like Atherton,’ he said, with a grudging smile.
Atherton came out at that moment with two tumblers. ‘Nobody sounds like me. I’m unique. A little drinkie for the memsahib?’ He handed a man-sized gin and tonic to Joanna. ‘And one for my dear old guv’nor, what is covered with laurels.’
‘Privet’s the highest I rate on this one,’ Slider said.
‘Do I detect the chafe of sackcloth?’ Atherton enquired.
‘Are you coming out?’ Joanna asked him. ‘I want to hear all the details.’
‘Not if you want to eat tonight. Bill can tell you. I’ve heard it.’
‘What about Sue?’
‘I’ll tell her while we stir.’
‘Oy!’ came a bellow from the kitchen. ‘Should it be boiling like this?’
‘Coming, Mother!’ Atherton trilled.
Joanna tried her drink. ‘Crikey, this is strong!’ she spluttered.
‘Matches the strength of my character,’ Atherton said modestly.
She dimpled at him. ‘I think you’re cute.’
He dimpled back. ‘So do I, but what do we know?’ And disappeared.
‘Now,’ said Joanna, turning to her lover. The westering sun lit up the tired lines in his face and the shadows under his eyes. He hadn’t been home at all last night. The rest of Monday and the whole of Tuesday had been taken up with interviews, new forensic examinations, writing reports, and sorting out the Dacre-Hammond équipe. Joanna had had a call this afternoon to meet Slider and Atherton at the latter’s house at around seven for a celebration meal. She had arrived to find Sue already there, but the men hadn’t arrived until half past – in Atherton’s car. Joanna’s beloved wreck was still sitting in St Michael Square: when Atherton had driven Slider there to pick it up, it wouldn’t start.
‘So, tell me all,’ Joanna invited. ‘Why did she do it?’
‘Love,’ Slider said. ‘Jealousy. Desperation. All the old candidates. I’d begun to suspect – not the detail, but the general direction. I knew David Meacher had to be involved in some way – he kept popping up everywhere I looked. Jennifer Andrews told her friend that Meacher was dropping her for another woman, a rich woman, who mustn’t find out about his other affairs.’
‘And that woman was Mrs Hammond?’
‘Cyril Dacre’s a wealthy man, and he’s dying. A few months ago he told Mrs Hammond that he was going to leave her the house and half of everything else, the other half to be divided between her sons. She’d looked after him so long it was only justice – and maybe he’d begun to realise what a rotten life she’d always had. Anyway, at about the same time David Meacher, the good old family friend, started to take a more romantic interest in her.’
‘She’d told him about the legacy?’
‘It’s conjecture. I doubt whether Dacre would have said anything, but Mrs Hammond might easily have let it out. Or Meacher might just have assumed: there was no-one else, after all. The house
alone would have been enough to fill him with lust: he had a thing about beautiful real estate; but I gather Dacre was otherwise rich as well. But Mrs Hammond didn’t make the connection. When the swine started making love to her, he told her that he’d always admired her and it just happened to be now that his admiration had ripened into love, and she believed him.’
‘The need being father to the thought?’ Joanna said.
‘Perhaps. Probably. However difficult her father was to live with, she must have been frightened at the thought of being left all alone by his death. And Meacher is a smooth, plausible man, and apparently,’ he put the word in with a large air, ‘attractive to women. Anyway, when Meacher started to make delicate approaches to her, she responded with eagerness and gratitude.’
‘And most things twinkled after that,’ Atherton said, reemerging. ‘Something to soak up the alcohol, children, and stave off the pangs of thingummy.’ He put down an ashet bearing slices of French bread toasted and spread with pâté. ‘I suspect – though Bill doesn’t agree with me – that she’d been in love with him for years, probably ever since her husband left her and Meacher was nice to her.’
‘It was Meacher who introduced her rotten husband to her in the first place,’ Slider reminded him.
‘All the more reason to be grateful. She’d never have been married at all, otherwise.’
‘And marriage is every woman’s dream and salvation, is it?’ Joanna said indignantly. ‘Go away, you horrible, sexist, patronising beast. Get back in the kitchen where you belong.’ Atherton smiled at his most sphingine and went away. ‘Go on,’ she said to Slider. ‘More about Meacher.’
‘His wife was finally getting fed up with him. All the money in the marriage was hers, and her father had sensibly tied it up so that Meacher couldn’t touch it. If she was threatening to pull the plug on him – as she hinted to me – and divorce him, it was going to leave him right up a close.’
‘Hence the urgency to woo Mrs Hammond, and shuffle off Mrs Andrews?’
‘Quite. Of course, he might have been fed up with Jennifer anyway. I imagine a little of her went a long way. Jennifer, however, wasn’t ready to be shuffled. She was desperate to get away from Eddie and wasn’t going to be thwarted by a flabby middle-aged nonentity like Mrs Hammond. She tried desperately to get Meacher back, and when he proved adamant, and all her other options failed, she decided to tackle the problem from the other end and put Mrs Hammond off him.’
Shallow Grave (Bill Slider Mystery) Page 30