Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  George decided it was time to join in. ‘Those Gilchrists are bad news, Glory. Live in the council flats behind here. He has two brothers who’ve done time – one’s still in, if my memory serves me.’

  ‘Yes, well,’ Daphne said, ‘that didn’t help him very much when it all happened.’

  Despite the feeling that her insides were being stirred with a stick, Cleo managed to ask, ‘What was he supposed to have done, then?’

  Daphne picked up another mint, but this time put it back.

  ‘Come on, out with it, Daph.’

  George sounded impatient, and Daphne looked pleadingly at him. ‘You tell her.’

  He shook his head. ‘It’ll come better from you, love.’

  ‘Well, the truth is, Cleo,’ she began reluctantly, ‘he took the Bursar’s car for a joyride and smashed it up. It was a write-off.’

  ‘Is that all?’

  ‘All? Good heavens, don’t you think it’s enough?’

  ‘Yes, of course, it’s awful. But it’s not –’ She broke off. She didn’t really know what it wasn’t, only what it was. Youthful high spirits? Done for a dare?

  ‘It wasn’t like that,’ Daphne said, reading her thoughts. ‘He really hated Charles Wetherby. Everybody knew he’d done it on purpose.’

  ‘You are joking, aren’t you? Nobody totals a car on purpose. He might have written himself off, as well!’

  ‘He very nearly did, Cleo. He was lucky to be alive.’

  Yes, he’d been left with physical scars that would be with him for the rest of his life. And an attitude. Which probably included a lifelong hatred of the Bursar, too … How deep would such hatred go? ‘What are you saying? Your police pals surely aren’t suspecting him of shooting that man, Dad? That’s bloody unfair!’

  ‘Cleo.’

  ‘It is, Mum, it’s –’

  It was at this point that the telephone rang.

  After supper, Mayo sat with his curtains undrawn, too, the lamps reflected in the darkened windows, the trees in the garden darker shapes against a sky that was never quite black, that always held something of the light from the urban sprawl below. Under Moses’s opportunistic gaze, he had eaten the last, thank God, of those solitary, oven-ready meals. Salmon – en croûte this time, admittedly very tasty. But the cat was unlucky – Mayo was hungry and besides, he’d forgotten to shut Moses out of the sitting-room that morning and had arrived home to find a subdued Bert huddled on the topmost perch in his cage, several feathers on the floor and the cat looking smug. ‘Hard luck!’ he told him as he rinsed his plate and didn’t forget to put it in the dishwasher. ‘It’s Whiskas tonight, mate, and thank your lucky stars for that.’

  Alex was due home the next day and life would return to normal, or what passed for normal during a murder enquiry. But whenever he was available, she’d be here, providing, apart from other more obvious home comforts, opportunities for intelligent, objective discussion with someone not directly involved in the case. This talking things over with someone who knew where he was coming from had turned into a habit that Mayo – and perhaps Alex, who missed the police more than she’d ever admit – was finding addictive, too.

  Tonight, however, he’d have to do without her. He sipped his Laphroaig in the post-Elgar, melancholic silence the composer invariably induced in him – that majestic music, grandly Edwardian, but triste, which, however, had chimed in with his pensive mood tonight.

  The cat settled, heavily forgiving, on his right foot, as he switched to Radio 3 for more music. Schoenberg. Atonal music that well repaid the close attention it needed. But after a while he turned it off. John Riach’s face kept coming between him and his concentration. John Riach as he’d talked to him in the Bursar’s office that morning: a man permanently on the defensive, Mayo guessed, a buttoned-up individual who rarely gave direct answers to questions but nevertheless had provided more interesting information than anyone else who’d been interviewed so far.

  Why? Mayo had asked himself, meaning what was he being so uptight about? And then had seen why, as soon as Hannah Wetherby’s name was mentioned. He watched Riach even more closely after that. Apart from carrying some sort of torch for Wetherby’s wife, it was evident that Riach had also disliked the man himself pretty conclusively, perhaps for the same reason. Every defensive answer he gave provided more proof of this.

  He sat stiffly upright on the straight office chair that had replaced Wetherby’s large, status-symbol, intended-to-impress one, sticking firmly with Hannah Wetherby’s statement that they had been having a sandwich together from twelve fifteen to one. To specific questions regarding Wetherby, he gave scrupulously fair answers, while managing to convey that the deceased Bursar’s reputation as an excellent administrator hadn’t been entirely unconnected with having Riach as his deputy. And that still rankled, Mayo could see, despite the fact that he was presumably now all set to take Wetherby’s place.

  Mayo decided to press this advantage. ‘Tell me, what sort of man was Wetherby?’

  Riach examined his well-kept fingernails. ‘He wasn’t always popular. He didn’t go out of his way to make himself so. He was a stickler for rules and regulations and that doesn’t always go down very well with young people, as you can imagine.’

  ‘Did he have much to do with the boys, then?’

  ‘Not really, but there were occasions …’ He seemed about to expand but what followed sounded unconnected. ‘He was also inclined to take too much on himself.’

  ‘In what way?’

  After a momentary hesitation, he said, ‘There’s some controversy about a new entrance to the school.’

  Mayo decided that he didn’t need to mention he already knew about that, since Riach looked poised to tell him anyway, and he might learn something new. Then he thought of something else. ‘He was writing a report on that when he died.’

  Riach’s face was a mask, his thin nostrils drawn together. He said carefully, not quite able to hide some smouldering resentment, despite his flat, unemotional tone, ‘So I understand.’

  ‘You know that the top sheet of this report was stuffed into his mouth?’

  ‘Someone with a macabre sense of humour, obviously.’

  Rules you out, then, old chum, Mayo thought, guessing there wasn’t much humour there, macabre or otherwise. He studied the other man, and wondered. He saw distaste, dislike, and looked for fear, but didn’t find it. He said, ‘How exactly did this new entrance concern the Bursar?’

  Riach seemed to relax a little. ‘We don’t have strictly defined limits in so far as duties go. Geoffrey Conyngham is school Secretary and Chief Administrator, and he’d agreed to let Charles deal with the negotiations for buying the property in order to resite the main entrance to the school on Kelsey Road. If you’ll bear with me a moment, I’ll show you.’ He crossed to a cupboard and took out a large, rolled-up plan of the school grounds which he spread out across his desk, weighting it at the top corners with a paperweight and a puncher. He held the third, and Mayo the fourth corner. ‘He’d completed the purchase of three of the four houses, there. There was just one more he thought we needed. This is the one, here, number 16, belonging to Miss Dorrie Lockett. And when I say this is the proposed entrance, or would be if Miss Lockett would agree to sell, you’ll see what I mean.’

  ‘Yes, I do see. Bang in the middle – and she’s not inclined to let you buy it?’

  ‘If Charles had handled her better in the first place, yes, perhaps. But she adamantly refuses to – now aided and abetted by her nephew, Sam Leadbetter, I might say.’

  ‘I’ve already made his acquaintance.’

  ‘No doubt. He’s doing a good job at providing a consoling shoulder for Mrs Wetherby to cry on.’ The acid comment escaped him without him seeming aware of it. His lips thinned. The rider that his should have been the shoulder was left unsaid. But it was there, hanging almost visibly in the air. Riach might, Mayo thought, be a very good hater.

  He watched him carefully begin to roll up the plan, then c
hange his mind, hesitating for a moment before speaking. ‘Miss Lockett’s refusal might not be so important, not now. Originally, some time ago, the idea was that the new entrance to the school, albeit a less pretentious one, should be sited here, below the hospital,’ he said, pointing to the school boundary along Vanson Hill, ‘rather than demolish the Kelsey Road houses which could well be used as dormitory overspill. Wetherby was adamantly against the idea, he was wedded to the notion of a grand entrance. I’m afraid he could never brook the slightest opposition, and it was his baby, as they say. He managed to sway the vote – just – in his favour. But now … well, it’s not too late to go back to the original plan.’

  ‘Which one were you in favour of?’

  ‘Oh, it’s no secret that I voted for Vanson Hill, and that I think it’s vandalism to pull this side of the quad down rather than spruce up the interiors, which it shouldn’t be beyond the wit of man to do.’ He waved his hand at the dingy walls and outdated furniture. Mayo, reminded of his own outrage at the idea of the old buildings being pulled down, had some sympathy with Riach’s feelings, though he couldn’t feel any warmer towards him. ‘The science blocks could always go up on the Kelsey Road side,’ he was saying. ‘But my opinion isn’t likely to count one way or the other. Charles was very … persuasive.’

  Mayo had met ‘persuasive’ people like that. Not a few of them in his own organisation. And also people like Riach himself, who beavered away secretly behind the scenes. He thought Riach was now deliberately playing himself down, and made a mental note not to overlook the fact that the disagreement over the entrance might conceivably have blown up into a major row.

  He steered Riach back towards Wetherby’s personal life, and it gradually emerged (though not by accident – Mayo was already aware that Riach was not a man to let anything slip) that Wetherby had been a womaniser. Well, three women, when it came down to it, but that had evidently been three too many for Riach to stomach. And quite enough for Mayo, to be going on with.

  ‘We’ll need to talk to them,’ Mayo said. ‘Can you give me details?’

  ‘I can’t tell you anything about Marie Holden, except that she was a peripatetic music teacher who worked here for a while, but no doubt the Secretary’s office will know how to get in touch. Angela Hunnicliffe’s an American whose husband has been working here at the school for about twelve months, but he left and they both returned to the States a week or two back. Beverley Harriman actually works here in the office – that’s her with the long black hair all over the place and the long skirt.’

  She seemed an odd type for Wetherby to have taken up, but when he suggested this to Riach, he was met with a shrug. ‘He liked adoration.’

  ‘And she was working here on the day Mr Wetherby was killed.’

  ‘Yes, but I wouldn’t lay too much store by that. She’s not the violent type. Unless she accidentally killed him with a cup of her herbal tea.’

  It took Mayo a moment to realise Riach was making a joke. Riach himself looked surprised, and rather embarrassed. His arrow, high-cheekboned face flushed slightly. He took off his rimless specs and polished them with a silk handkerchief he took from his top pocket.

  ‘And that’s about it,’ he said, refolding and replacing the handkerchief with the deft precision that characterised all his movements.

  ‘Yes, that’ll do for now,’ Mayo said, standing up and looking out over the quadrangle where several boys were passing through, dressed for rugby. ‘Sports feature largely in the curriculum, I gather,’ he remarked. ‘What about after-school activities – music, chess … boxing, army cadet corps?’

  ‘Music and chess, yes,’ Riach answered, knowing exactly what Mayo was getting at. ‘Practising for blood sports is not encouraged.’

  ‘And you don’t possess any firearms yourself?’

  He smiled faintly. ‘Guns are objects of violence, and I’m not a violent man.’

  It wasn’t an answer, but Mayo had decided to let it ride for the moment.

  The interview with Marie Holden had revealed nothing that might throw light on Wetherby’s murder. She knew very little of his personal circumstances, she told Jenny Platt, her affair with him had been brief, and she was terrified it might come to her husband’s ears. The day Wetherby had been murdered, she and her husband had been on the Isle of Wight, visiting Osborne House with their children, looking at the grizzly sight of Prince Albert’s photograph on the pillow next to Queen Victoria’s, where it had slept next to his widow every night after he died

  Angela Hunnicliffe was similarly out of the picture, having left the country before Wetherby was shot. Which left only Beverley Harriman – for the moment. Those three were the ones Riach had known about – but if three, so quickly, one after the other, or possibly even running simultaneously, it was eminently possible there might be more.

  That was what Abigail had concluded, after having spoken to Beverley, a gullible girl dazzled by the attentions of an older, attractive man, a girl who, in Abigail’s sharp and sometimes censorious opinion, was not very bright. She’d had the opportunity to kill Wetherby: after going down to the market with Trish to visit the stall which sold designer knitwear at discount prices, they’d parted and she said she’d then cycled to the Green Man over at Lattimer where she’d agreed to meet Wetherby for a pub lunch, something she’d failed to admit when she’d first been questioned. He had never turned up. She’d returned to the office tear-stained and twenty minutes late to find the place in an uproar and Wetherby dead. Nevertheless, there was only her own word to say where she’d been after she left Trish: she said she’d waited for Wetherby in the car-park of the Green Man but no one remembered seeing her there. There had been ample time after leaving Trish for her to have slipped back to Lavenstock College. She had the motive: it wasn’t the first time Wetherby had stood her up, said Trish shortly.

  ‘But you surely don’t imagine she came back here and shot him?’ she then demanded scornfully. ‘She was a fool over him, and he was a louse, but she was in love with him – or imagined she was. Besides which, she’s not the type to do anything like that, our Bev. Otherwise, she’d have given him the push long since, like I told her to.’

  Trish was a very different proposition from Beverley, in her early twenties but already hard-faced, fashionably dressed and made up like a china doll. But despite the scorn, there was an element of exasperated kindness when she spoke of Beverley; she seemed fond of her, in a patronising way, though Abigail guessed it was only the close proximity of working together that had made them friends.

  ‘I think Trish is right, though,’ she had said to Mayo. ‘Beverley wouldn’t have done it. Apart from having nothing to gain by killing him, I can’t see her as the sort to take revenge with a pistol. She’s one of those who’d forgive him and let him do it again. A tree-hugger, I shouldn’t wonder.’

  ‘Funny, that’s more or less what Riach said.’

  When the phone rang into the silence which followed the revelations about Tone, Cleo jumped a mile. She hadn’t yet got used to it being reconnected by British Telecom. Muriel, by dint of suddenly acquired efficiency and who knew what powers of persuasion, had miraculously managed to persuade them to act immediately.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘At last! Is that you, angel?’ asked a male voice.

  ‘This is 54278,’ Cleo said, rather stiffly, cross at being interrupted at such a crucial point by some love-lorn caller who’d obviously got the wrong number.

  ‘Then I’d like to speak with Angel, Angela, please,’ the man said, with what she now discerned as a transatlantic accent.

  ‘Mrs Hunnicliffe doesn’t live here any more. She’s gone back to America.’

  ‘What’s that you’re saying? Who is this? To whom am I speaking?’ the caller demanded, with admirable American correctness.

  ‘Cleo Atkins.’

  ‘Atkins? Daphne, is that you?’

  ‘No, it’s Cleo,’ she said, feeling this conversation was rapidly sliding out of co
ntrol. ‘Daphne’s my mother and I’m living here now. She’s here if you want to speak to her.’

  ‘No, no. Where’s Angel, then?’

  ‘I’ve told you, she’s with her husband, in America.’

  ‘No, she isn’t. I’m her husband. Brad Hunnicliffe here,’ he introduced himself belatedly.

  There followed a measurable pause, which Hunnicliffe broke by saying, ‘I apologise for disturbing you, it must be late over there, but I’m very worried about her. She was supposed to fly back here to the States, couple of weeks after I did, and stay with her sister in Boston for a few days. My father hasn’t been too good and I’ve been staying with him in Connecticut since I got here. Angel and I were due to meet up at Logan airport today to take the flight for San Francisco. She never turned up and I’ve found she never arrived at her sister’s, either. What’s going on?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but I think you’d better speak to my father. He’s here, too. He was the one who dealt with Mrs Hunnicliffe.’

  ‘I’d surely appreciate that.’

  Yes, said George, Mrs Hunnicliffe had certainly left Lavenstock as arranged. Everything was paid up and she’d left the house all in order (apart from a Clarice Cliff candlestick, thought Cleo, suddenly remembering she’d never spoken to her mother about it) and returned the keys by the date she said she would. He took out his notebook and began making notes. Yes, if Mr Hunnicliffe wished, he’d certainly start making enquiries immediately …

  Keys! thought Cleo.

  By the time the conversation had finished, she had the bunch of keys in her hand, back door key, front one and a smaller one which was probably the one to the locked cupboard upstairs, which she’d never had cause to open.