Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  ‘Go on, Dad, open it,’ she said in a choked voice a minute later, suddenly feeling extremely glad of Daphne’s hand on her shoulder as all three of them stared at the blank cupboard doors.

  George turned the key. It was empty but for five pieces of matching blue luggage, locked, strapped and labelled with Angela Hunnicliffe’s name, destination Boston, and flight number. Sitting ready on top of one of them was an airline folder containing the flight documents and her ticket, dated Friday 3rd March, with her passport also tucked inside.

  Cleo slowly let out her breath, let her heart resume its normal beat. Too much imagination, that was her trouble! She and her father looked at each other, the same unspoken thought in both their minds.

  ‘I think,’ said George, ‘Brad Hunnicliffe had better get himself back on the first flight over here.’

  15

  The spring sunshine, signalling the beginning of the end of winter, had overtaken the best efforts of the central heating programme at Milford Road, and Mayo’s office was several degrees too hot for comfort, despite the open windows. He ran a finger round the inside of his collar and wondered how the man sitting opposite could bear it.

  Bradshaw K. Hunnicliffe Jr, drawn and jet-lagged, an American equipped for English weather in a long, heavy raincoat of British origin, had thrown it open as his only admission of the heat but refused to be parted from it. He sat staring at a cup of cold, untasted coffee. His face was blank with stunned incomprehension, refusing to believe that anyone could have wanted to harm his wife, his lovely wife, much less kill her.

  ‘She can’t be dead, not Angel!’ He had seen her body, positively identified her, yet he had said this three times in the last fifteen minutes.

  Mayo sympathised. Hunnicliffe was understandably shocked and under strain, he had just suffered the terrible ordeal of looking into his dead wife’s face, but however much Mayo felt for the man, there it was, he had run out of platitudes with which to console him. They were getting nowhere like this. ‘I know how painful it must be for you, Mr Hunnicliffe, and I’m very sorry to press the point, but I’m afraid there’s more. Your wife’s death isn’t the only murder we’re investigating. Charles Wetherby was also shot last week.’ He paused to let that sink in, but when the other man barely responded, except with a nod, as if the fact were quite irrelevant, he added a rider that he hoped would prod him. ‘Most likely with the same gun, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Wetherby? The Bursar?’ Hunnicliffe still hadn’t made the connection, which should by now have been evident to anyone. Either that, or he was refusing to face the inescapable conclusion. In denial, as current jargon would no doubt have it. But Mayo was having none of that claptrap, he preferred his own interpretation. He saw Hunnicliffe as a typical academic, with a mind raised above the mundane, or the practical. Bright intelligent eyes behind wire-framed spectacles, hair receding at the temples, dark-complexioned. A thin man with a habit of clasping his hands over a small, incongruous pot-belly, like a swami in contemplation. He was said to be brilliant at his subject, he had written several textbooks dealing with such wonders as particle physics, he was reputedly a good teacher, but he was not proving good at coping with or understanding the crises of life, large or small.

  Mayo clicked his pen several times. ‘I see I must make it plainer, Mr Hunnicliffe. We have reason to believe your wife and Mr Wetherby had at one time been having an affair. And directly or indirectly, it has led to their murders.’

  First, a refusal to believe. Now – outrage. The bright eyes suddenly shot sparks from behind the glasses. ‘You bring me across the Atlantic and tell me my wife has been murdered – then you tell me she was having an affair under my nose! Mr Mayo, my wife was not that kind of woman – not ever!’

  ‘When she was found she wasn’t wearing a wedding ring.’

  ‘She never wore one. She regarded it as a badge of subservience, or some such feminist bullshit.’ Impatience flashed briefly across his face, then he recovered himself. ‘Nevertheless, we had a wonderful, meaningful marriage.’ He sounded as though he believed every word of it. But in the end he was the first to look away.

  Delia had that morning brought in a big bunch of tight green daffodil buds and stuck them in a vase on top of the bookcase near the window. They had unfolded their petals almost immediately in the warmth and flickering sunshine now caught their bright gold, sent coins of light dancing on the ceiling. Hunnicliffe stared fixedly at the flowers, refusing to meet Mayo’s eyes, but in the face of his silence was forced at last to speak. A huge sigh escaped him, seeming to be fetched up from the bottom of his heart. ‘Oh, my God,’ he said tiredly, ‘if the first is true, then why not the other? If it’s true she’s dead, then … They’re both equally unbelievable.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, Mr Hunnicliffe.’

  ‘I guess.’

  ‘Are you willing to answer a few questions? We need to know the answers if we’re going to nail whoever did this.’

  ‘Go ahead. If you must.’

  While Mayo was talking to Hunnicliffe, Abigail was told that a Mr Bysouth was at the front desk, wanting to speak to her. She went downstairs without much enthusiasm for a second encounter, and found a stranger waiting. It took a second or two, before he introduced himself, to register that this was Reuben Bysouth’s brother, Jared. They had clearly come from the same mould, but Jared was an older, fitter, altogether more acceptable version than Reuben. A big, outdoors man with close-cropped hair, a stern, weatherbeaten face, a firm handclasp and a steady look, his movements were slow and unhurried. ‘Can I speak to you in private?’

  She took him into an interview room. He politely declined tea or coffee and came straight to the point. ‘I’ve come here on behalf of my sister-in-law, Vera. She told me you’d spoken to her.’

  ‘She’s all right?’ Abigail asked quickly.

  ‘She is now,’ the farmer replied grimly. He clasped the edge of the table with both big hands and leaned back, his arms stretched out in an attitude usually considered confrontational. As soon as he began to speak, however, she realised the body language was simply that of a man who meant to drive home his points without any misunderstanding. ‘I’ve sent that brother of mine packing,’ he announced bluntly.

  ‘Packing? What happened?’

  ‘What happened? He thought I was away, not expected back, that’s what happened. I was just in time to stop him knocking the hell out of Vera. I think you know what I’m on about.’ He met Abigail’s gaze squarely. ‘I blame myself, I should have realised what’s been going on. To tell you the truth, I did suspect it, but not the half of it, he was always careful to hit her where it didn’t show. Once or twice I tried to get her to talk to me, but she never would. Not until now.’

  ‘That’s the difficulty, Mr Bysouth. Women like Vera, they blame themselves, come to think they must have deserved it, somehow.’

  Slowly, he nodded. ‘Trouble is, I suppose, she still has some feeling for him, though how she can have … And how he can do that to her, after what we saw our father do, as kids, beats cockfighting … That sanctimonious, hypocritical bastard used to lambast our mother till she was black and blue, until one day, when I was fourteen and as big as he was, I hit him. He never did it again.’

  Good for Jared. He’d not easily be roused, a man like him, but watch out when he was.

  ‘It wasn’t an act of charity on my part to take them in, you know. I needed an extra pair of hands on the farm, and after Joyce – my wife – died, the house and the cooking were all to blazes. I knew Vera would get stuck in there, sort things out, and so she has.’

  ‘So Reuben’s gone? Gone where?’

  ‘Ireland, he says, but I don’t much care where. He reckons he has a mate there been begging him to join him for months. I’ve been fair with him, given him some money and told him if he ever shows his face again, I’ll break his legs. He knows I mean it, he’ll not come back. I won’t have history repeating itself, not in my house. Life shouldn’t be like that.’
>
  ‘And Vera?’

  ‘Vera can stay with me. She’ll be able to settle down, once she gets used to the idea he isn’t coming back. She’s a good wench, and I’ll take care of her.’ A tinge of colour crept into his cheeks. ‘She’s safe with me.’

  She believed him. Vera had found a saviour. Her Rock of Gibraltar.

  ‘There’s something on her mind and she wants to talk to you,’ he said. ‘Would you come and see her? She’s still mortal shamed of going out. She somehow got between us when I went for him, see, tried to stop me getting hurt, she said, and she’s not a pretty sight just now.’

  ‘I was coming to see her anyway.’

  Brad Hunnicliffe, now that he’d accepted the unbelievable, had loosened up. He spoke freely, revealing himself as a man who rarely used one word where six would do. He even slipped off his Burberry as he prepared himself for Mayo’s questions, and noisily slurped the fresh coffee which had been sent for.

  ‘Let’s start with why your wife stayed behind after you left?’

  ‘My move back home came up somewhat unexpectedly.’ He droned on for some time, explaining every detail of the circumstances. ‘And since I wanted to visit with my father before taking up my new appointment, I left her to wind up all the business over here. Sorting out the lease of the house, getting rid of the car and so on, plus all the necessary bureaucracy, pardon me, we transatlantic visitors have inflicted on us when we visit Europe. Shipping all the English bits and pieces she’d collected … she was, [’m afraid, a real sucker for your country house sales and all that – you would not believe the amount of rubbish she’d picked up!’

  Mayo sought rapidly for something less controversial to fix on, in case he might be tempted to say what he thought of this unexpected attack on his patriotism. ‘Your car … what sort of vehicle did you run?’

  ‘It was a used Mondeo Verona I bought from Automart on the Coventry Road when we came over here. Used in that it had only a few thousand miles on the clock, you understand. The agreement was that they would buy it back from me at a reasonable price when I had to return to the States, and they were happy to do this. I told Angela to leave it with them the night before she left and take a taxi to the airport next morning, which I assumed she had arranged to do.’

  ‘What colour was it?’

  ‘The car? Green. Metallic green. Have you found it?’ The prospect of having lost the car, and therefore the money it represented, as well as his wife, appeared to increase his consternation and his annoyance considerably. ‘I have to say,’ he added austerely, ‘I would have thought identification before now would not have been too much to expect from you people.’

  A metallic green Mondeo, thought Mayo, holding on by ignoring this last. Then why had Angela – for he was sure, now, that it had been Angela who had been parked in the lane – been using a blue Fiat? Unless she’d already sold the Mondeo and had hired the Fiat, a fact easy enough to establish.

  ‘No, we haven’t found it yet,’ he said. Mildly, he felt, in the circumstances. ‘Do you recall the registration number?’

  ‘I have it written down somewhere.’ Hunnicliffe fumbled in various pockets and eventually came up with a pocket diary from which, after some searching, he produced the information.

  ‘There’s a possibility she had already turned it in, of course. We’ll get on to Automart, see what they have to say.’

  Hunnicliffe put down his cup, clasped his hands across his belly, a gesture Mayo was beginning to find increased his own irritation. He looked as if he expected Mayo to ring Automart immediately, but Mayo had no intention of breaking into the thread of the interview. That could come later.

  He said, ‘We’ve made enquiries from Mr George Atkins, the owner of the house you’d been renting, and it appears everything else was left ready for her departure on 3rd March. From the evidence we have so far, we think it likely she met her death on Thursday, and it looks as though she was all set to leave the following morning, Friday. All her things cleared out and packed. There was no food left apart from some milk in the fridge.’

  ‘She never ate breakfast,’ Hunnicliffe said absently, then went again into attack mode. ‘I have to ask you, Mr Mayo – didn’t anyone think it strange when she didn’t turn the car in, wasn’t there for the taxi, didn’t claim her seat on the airplane? Why were no questions asked? And what about the house keys?’ He slurped more coffee and set his cup down with a distinct bang on the saucer.

  ‘The keys were pushed through the door of Mr Atkins’s office, with a letter. People do fail to turn up for flights they’ve booked, you know, or forget they’ve booked a cab. And she may have decided to keep the car for a little longer, for all the garage knew. Taken together, all these things might have been suspicious, but since they were separate happenings, none of them gave out warning signals. Mrs Atkins did say she was surprised to find a pair of pyjamas and a few toilet things still in the house, but she thought they’d been forgotten.’ (What Daphne had actually said was that since Angela hadn’t even bothered to strip the bed, she could write for them if she wanted them forwarding. Something she was rather shamefaced at having even thought, now.) ‘The rest of her luggage, with her passport, if you remember, was locked up.’

  ‘I have to say that was one thing in her favour, she could be relied upon for that, she was always the sort of person to be careful about her possessions. What’s happened to her purse, by the way?’

  It took Mayo a second or two to realise he meant her handbag. ‘I’m afraid that’s something we haven’t recovered yet.’

  Hunnicliffe raised his eyebrows at this further evidence of incompetence. Having decided half an hour ago he didn’t like the man, Mayo hadn’t seen any reason since to change his opinion. Maybe Angela could be forgiven for playing away from home – although it did seem as though she might have exchanged one pompous prat for another in choosing Wetherby as a substitute.

  When he had gone, half an hour later, Mayo was left with the unsettling question: could Hunnicliffe have been quite so unaware of what was going on under his nose? Without a hint, however much his academic head was in the clouds, that his marriage was not as perfect as he’d believed it? It wasn’t uncommon, after all, for people not to have an inkling in such circumstances – or to profess they hadn’t – even people much more percipient than this American appeared to be.

  He picked up the phone and gave instructions to have Brad Hunnicliffe’s travel times checked, and to make sure that he had actually been in Connecticut the whole time he declared he had, and hadn’t made a trip back to England in between. Although everything obtained from the American had been seemingly negative, Mayo allowed himself to feel a little more optimism. The identification of the murdered woman as Hunnicliffe’s wife at least indicated a move forward in the investigation.

  Connections were being made, links were forming. Lives which had apparently had nothing to do with each other were seen to have touched in a significant way. He never ceased to marvel at how one person’s life could, by remote association, brush against so many more, through every individual’s personal network of family, friends, acquaintances, business contacts … with the milkman, the window cleaner, the TV repair man, a hundred others … And how each of those reached out to yet more. It was the sort of interactive view of life, a mechanistic world view that appealed to him as a policeman and an individual, the world like one of his own clocks.

  He doodled as he thought, spun his chair round, gazed out of the window at the Gothic Town Hall, smelled the faint spring scent of the daffodils.

  Means, motive and opportunity, and the greatest of these is means. In this case, a gun. We didn’t yet, thank God, live in a gun culture society, for all its increasing violence; the number of people likely to own and know how to use guns in a community like this was small, compared with America. Nevertheless, a gun had been used – and not yet found – a gun, moreover, which had in all probability been used to kill two people.

  Motive, then. If wha
t Abigail suspected was true (and Mayo had no doubt it was), and Wetherby had been physically abusing his wife, Hannah had every reason to wish herself free of her husband, but it was no use questioning her about his violence towards her, she would only deny it, she wasn’t going to provide another motive against herself – not forgetting that other she might have, her possible involvement with Leadbetter. Or with Riach, come to that. Both of them, moreover, might have thought they had cause to kill Wetherby for that same reason: indeed, Riach could have had a double motive – to pave the way for Hannah and himself, and to step into Wetherby’s shoes. But motive was a slippery notion at the best of times. Find the means first, look for the opportunity, and the motive, however slender it might appear to be to anyone but the perpetrator, would present itself.

  Opportunity? None in the case of Hunnicliffe, unless he was lying and had in fact known about Angela’s association with Wetherby, and had slipped back into England and murdered first his wife, and then her lover. John Riach had had the time, but had covered himself by proving he was drinking coffee with another member of staff between arriving back at the school and half-past one. Sam Leadbetter, on the other hand, had no credible alibi at all for that time. Moreover … Mayo thought about that little nugget of information which had been dug up about Leadbetter. He had, it seemed, a capacity for violence. His affair with Hannah, as they’d suspected, had started about four years ago. Gossip gathered from around the school had it that it had been brief – Wetherby had found out, and that had been the end of it. Sam had left Lavenstock, though not before a spectacular fight in which he had broken Wetherby’s jaw. Some time later he’d joined the Antarctic expedition – the equivalent, Mayo supposed, of joining the Foreign Legion. He decided it was time he spoke to Leadbetter again, and his allegedly dotty aunt. Bearing in mind that Leadbetter had never, apparently, met Angela.