Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  There was truth in his half-serious remarks. Educated guesses, suppositions, hypothetical theories, a shot in the dark, call it what you will, they all came to the same thing when there was a lack of hard evidence. Surprising, really, how often they led to logical conclusions – but usually only after a long, hard slog of trying, trying again and again. Abigail felt suddenly tired. She looked out at a sky heavy and sombre with rain clouds, thinking of the sun that was promised later by the weathermen, the predicted rise in temperature, longing for it, daring to hope the investigation would allow an hour or two of spare time again next weekend. Time to finish the tidying up of her winter garden that she’d started this weekend, before the For Sale sign went up. With difficulty, she brought her mind back to the present.

  She said, ‘Iris has never been properly interviewed. That cosy little session Jenny and I had with her doesn’t rank as that.’ But she thought, how could I ever have thought Wych Cottage cosy? The stifling, choking sensation of unease as she’d stood there in the lane under the rose-streaked evening sky, looking at the dark silhouette of the house, came back. She was suddenly certain that the key to the whole affair lay at Wych Cottage, with Iris Osborne.

  ‘What’s getting at you, Abigail?’ Mayo was suddenly very serious indeed.

  She looked down and realised she’d moved from doodling on her scratch pad to folding what she’d scribbled on into smaller and smaller folds and was now trying to tear the result, impossible as tearing a telephone book. What was the matter with her? Tough, in control, Abigail Moon, police inspector, filled with silly fancies and imaginings?

  She tried to smile. ‘If we do go and see Iris again, what are the chances of a search warrant? It’s probably the only way to get anything out of her.’

  ‘Remote. Non-existent on present grounds. But we’re a long way from that yet.’

  Though maybe not as far away as all that. Facts were piling up – not an avalanche yet, but Mayo knew from experience how a case could become a landslide once certain facts were established. Yet when it did, as if it were an undeserved stroke of luck, it usually felt like an anticlimax – perhaps because of that puritanical Yorkshire streak that told him nothing was worth it if you didn’t have to sweat blood for it. Sometimes he suspected he was happier when he had to fight every inch of the way, dig for every little fact, put them together piece by piece, but he never dwelt on that. Especially not at the moment. Just now he was grateful for anything that would wrap this case up. ‘Let’s go for it,’ he decided, suddenly, positively, with that authoritative certainty which energised everyone around. ‘Wych Cottage and Iris Osborne.’

  With a great effort, Abigail pushed aside the morbid reluctance to return there. ‘OK, let’s go.’

  It hadn’t been considered necessary to stop rehearsals for The Beggar’s Opera, due to be performed in another six weeks, on Founder’s Day, especially since most of the cast didn’t yet know their lines, or their movements, including the handsome youth cast as Macheath, who’d no objection to playing a dashing highwayman, but had nearly withdrawn from the cast when he found he was actually expected to sing.

  Were all school productions like this? wondered Jenny Platt, watching from the darkened auditorium. The cast fooling around, the girl playing Polly Peachum behaving like a bored diva, the teacher directing operations at the hair-tearing stage – an exceedingly tall, weedy-looking individual by the name of Roger Barmforth, who called everyone darling and uttered ‘Oh God,’ in a doom-filled voice at regular intervals. Remembering plays from her own schooldays, in which she’d always been cast as the maid, she decided they might be.

  ‘If with me you’d fondly stray, over the hills and far away,’ sang Macheath persuasively to his languishing Polly.

  So this was Polly Peachum. Or Rosie Deventer, the girl she’d come to see. Evidently regarding all this as a bit of a drag. Nothing apparently in her mind except clothes, make-up, boys. Seventeen, going on twenty-five, and not doing anybody any favours by still being at school, not even herself. Wasting everybody’s time. She looked intelligent enough – she had to be intelligent to have reached the Lower Sixth at Princess Mary’s, where most of the girls were expected to go on to university or vocational career training – but Rosie didn’t seem to be going anywhere, except heading for marriage and two kids before she was twenty – well, kids, anyway. Unless somebody got hold of her and shook some sense into her. Jenny guessed it was only parental pressure that was keeping her on at school.

  ‘You like acting, Rosie?’ Jenny asked to break the ice when the rehearsal had dragged to a close, and she had guided Rosie to a seat at the back of the hall, though she was thinking on the same lines, had she but known it, as Hannah Wetherby, some time before: that Rosie was not much overburdened with the necessity actually to act in this part she’d been selected for. And she did have a good soprano voice.

  Rosie rolled her eyes. ‘It’s all right. Better than school. Boring, that is. Dead boring.’ She had a painstakingly concealed middle-class voice and, out of her stage clothes, still looked like a tart. She had on a red, black-spotted skirt so tight Jenny wondered how it could contain her substantial bum, decorated with a baby frill round the curved hem which was split to her crotch at the front. With very little fabric to speak of between that and the end of her cleavage. Hair growing out from a blonde tint, a mane of permed curls. Big brown eyes.

  Jenny explained why she was here. ‘Just to check on the time you went for your costume fitting at Mrs Wetherby’s. Your lunch hour, wasn’t it? Which is what time?’

  ‘Twelve to half-past one.’

  ‘That’s school dinner hour?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So you’d finished eating by …?’

  ‘I don’t eat that grot! I had a Mars bar.’

  ‘And how long did it take you to get to Mrs Wetherby?’

  ‘Ten minutes.’ Jenny raised her eyebrows. ‘I have a mountain bike.’

  ‘Which way did you go?’

  ‘Same as always. Across Danvers Street and up Vanson Hill.’ The girl looked at her watch. ‘If that’s all, I have a date.’ She glanced towards the door, where the handsome, sulky youth who was playing Macheath was hanging impatiently about.

  Jenny, who’d gone to some trouble to talk to Rosie here rather than embarrass her by interviewing her during school hours, or at home, was annoyed. She thought of her own date, put off yet again. Rosie snapped her chewing gum, which annoyed her more. She said sharply, ‘No, you didn’t go that way, Rosie. Think again.’

  ‘Oh yes, I did! I remember, ‘cos I always stop and look in Benetton’s window, in case they have some new things in. I saw a fantastic top and I went in and asked how much only they were out of my size.’

  ‘Rosie, there was a diversion on Danvers Street that day, all day. A burst water main, and traffic was directed round by Victoria Road. You couldn’t have called in at Benetton’s.’

  ‘Must be thinking of the wrong day, then.’

  Jenny clenched her teeth. This was like chipping cement with a nail file. ‘I don’t think you went to see Mrs Wetherby at all, did you?’

  Rosie snapped her gum again and Jenny resisted the impulse to shake her, hard. ‘Rosie,’ she said, ‘I asked you a question. Where were you when you were supposed to be having that costume fitting?’

  Rosie’s glance strayed once more, very briefly, towards the door where Macheath still lounged.

  ‘Right. Macheath!’ Jenny called. ‘Have you a minute?’

  ‘He has a name of his own, you know! But there’s no call to bother him.’ She raised her own voice. ‘Be with you in a minute, Andy!’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘OK, the sodding costume didn’t need fitting, it’s not too tight, never mind what old Barmpot says!’ She glanced scornfully towards where the released Roger Barmforth, with a young female teacher, was collecting scripts and props. ‘So I rang Mrs Wetherby and she said it would be all right, I needn’t go. She told me she wouldn’t say anything if
I didn’t.’

  ‘So where were you?’

  Her eyes strayed to the door and back again. She said hurriedly, ‘If you must know, I was with my boyfriend.’

  Jenny would have bet her next month’s wages that it wasn’t Macheath.

  She wasn’t a vindictive young woman, but she couldn’t help feeling a malicious pleasure as she rang into the station and relayed the information she’d just obtained before going thankfully off duty. Oh, Scotty, she thought, Mayo’ll have your guts for garters. He’ll have you back on traffic duty before you can say Caramello.

  Strangely enough, now that darkness had really come, the cottage looked ordinary, unthreatening, a small chocolate-box affair, not at all inimical. Or perhaps, Abigail thought with a vestigial memory of her earlier apprehensions, that was simply because its owner wasn’t here. She hadn’t answered the door, the cottage was in complete darkness. As they walked round to the back, and Mayo pointed to the hard standing, the concrete slab tucked discreetly out of sight and just large enough for a small car, she saw it was vacant.

  A vehicle drew up as they walked round to the front of the cottage again. It proved to be driven by Jared Bysouth, returning to the farm, blocking the lane with his Land Rover. Being a good neighbour once more, nosing around and preventing anyone who’d no business at the cottage from escaping.

  ‘Oh, it’s you, Inspector,’ he called, leaning out of the window. ‘I wondered what was going on. If you’re looking for Iris, you’re out of luck. She was backing her car out when I passed about half an hour ago.’

  He stuck his elbow out of the window, looking ready for a chat, but Abigail said, ‘Thanks, Mr Bysouth, we’ll come back in the morning.’

  Deflated, she looked back at the house as she slid back into the driving seat of the car. She had screwed herself up to a pitch of expectancy, and now, prosaically, the interview would have to be put on hold. Finding out whether Iris was a killer or not would simply have to wait until morning.

  As they drove back, Mayo sat next to her, picking up messages, one of which was to lighten his days for some time to come, the other to prove crucial to the immediate situation. Acting Sergeant Farrar came though, jubilation triumphing over the crackling static, with news of a patrol car, responding to a 999 over a fight outside the Lion and Lamb which had arisen during a drugs handover. One man had been stabbed and was in a critical condition, several others were in custody and one of them was offering information about the man suspected of shooting and killing Danny Fermanagh in exchange for leniency. ‘We’ve got him, gaffer,’ Farrar exclaimed, forgetting in his excitement to sound like the world-weary, seen-it-all sergeant he aspired to be.

  ‘Hallelujah!’ said Abigail when she heard the glad tidings, saw Mayo punching the air. And then fell silent and listened, as he did, when Farrar started speaking again.

  ‘Jenny rang in a report on that interview she did. Want to hear it?’

  20

  Sam Leadbetter never knew what sudden urgency drove him to push aside his writing and immediately leg it out for Hannah’s house. He only knew that the need was as imperative as a sneeze, something he couldn’t have stopped and had no control over. And that he had to prevent her: Hannah, at the moment, was dangerous, volatile, and liable to go off at any moment, with who could say what disastrous consequences?

  He could have saved himself fifteen minutes if he’d been able to cut across the playing fields and use the gate near the house. But even Sam didn’t entertain the possibility of scaling the school’s chainlink fencing, behind which grew a robust hawthorn hedge – and to drive via the ring road would add at least fifteen minutes. No alternative but to walk along Kelsey Road and turn right into Vanson Hill.

  The night was soft and springlike after the day’s rain, the sap was rising and even in his hurry he noticed the faint flower scents drifting from the gardens he passed. He had to pause at the hospital gates for an ambulance to turn out and gather speed as it raced urgently down the hill; the hospital itself stood berthed like a great, lighted ship in the lee of the hill, giving out its subliminal message that here the desperate business of life and death went on all the time, separate from the rest of the world, regardless of its material pressures. A sense of nameless panic caused him to lengthen his strides into a jog.

  A full moon sailed high, sending a wash of cold light over the garden as he turned into Hannah’s drive, the delicate scent of a single daffodil made nauseous when multiplied into that of a thousand, naturalised as they were under the trees here, increased year by year … a heaviness of lilies, funeral chapels, hints of mortality. As a sitting tenant, it was rumoured that Hannah would now have the legal option to buy at a reasonable price. How would she be able to bring herself to continue living here?

  The front of the house was in darkness. He didn’t bother to ring the bell but tried the side door, tutted at finding it unlocked, but then, seeing a wedge of light driven out into the darkness from the conservatory, he moved quietly round towards the back.

  Fifteen minutes earlier, Hannah had been sitting in Charles’s study, from which led the conservatory extension. Drawers were open, piles of papers were stacked on the desk in front of her, but she felt incapable of doing anything except stare in front of her. There wasn’t much she needed to do in actual fact; he had typically left his affairs, as was to be expected, in perfect order.

  She sat facing the conservatory, where the expensively installed uplighting and downlighting mutated the spiky leaves of palms and other nameless plants into rapiers against the glass, and limned the twelve foot high cheese plant she hated, throwing demon shadows of its monstrous holed leaves on to the walls. That, at least, was weeping for him, dripping sticky honeydew from the points of its leaves on to the floor and on to a small polished table beneath it, something it had never done before. She hadn’t either moved the table or wiped away the secretion.

  She’d had the lighting, the whole extension in fact, copied from an illustrated feature in one of the magazines devoted to showing the interiors of other people’s homes, but now she hated it. There was garden lighting, too, but rather than enhance the features there, the coloured lights had the effect of making the waving branches of the trees seem menacing and grotesque. Charles, who rarely commented on her choice of furnishings or decor, had, strangely enough, liked it.

  What had it felt like to be Charles, sitting here, night after night, his Wagner CDs going at full volume, looking out across the conservatory? Had he, too, been trying to push back the jungle that was just outside? Had he had any intimations of his own death? Her Catholicism had always induced a certain fatalism in her, she had believed you died when your destiny was fulfilled, but now her beliefs were being strangely tested.

  Why did he have to die? Why did he have to be what he was? They could have had such a wonderful life together. Instead, for years she had been like a rabbit transfixed in the headlights of a car, held in thrall. Until she had, suddenly, found herself able to move again, felt life coursing through her veins. Alive. Vibrant. Active and powerful. But it had all drained away, leaving her empty again.

  The house was so quiet you could have heard a fly crawling on the ceiling.

  Then she saw, or imagined she saw, some movement in the shadows of the garden. She squeezed her eyes shut, like a child who thinks if she can’t see the menace in front of her, it won’t be there, as she’d done every time Charles lifted his hand to her. Put her hands over her ears to shut out words that wounded like arrows. But now, her eyes flew open, fancying she heard the faint creak of the conservatory door handle. Heart jumping, she remembered it wasn’t locked. She hadn’t yet become accustomed to going round the house and locking up, every evening before supper, as he had always done. Meticulous in that, as in everything else. After that first leap, her heart settled into a slow, hard, painful thumping, and she strained her ears for the next, slightest sound, sitting as if turned to marble.

  A clock chimed. Unnaturally loud sounds penetrated the
silent house. The traffic, whooshing by on Tilbourne Road. A wailing ambulance siren, a sound so common in this house that she normally never noticed it. Charles’s long-case clock sounding a measured tock, tock. The house was very empty.

  Gradually, she heard it, no imagination this time, a halting footfall exploring the dark, finding it hard to discover the step up from the conservatory into the study. Still she sat motionless as the door opened and the air from outside lifted the fronds of a huge fern, making it shiver like a live thing, and the figure moved slowly forwards, out of the shadows.

  A small figure with white hair.

  She was wearing grey, unlike the sweet-pea colours she and the Queen Mother normally favoured, an old-fashioned suit with a Gor-ray skirt she must have had hidden in her wardrobe for years. Indeed as she came nearer, a faint, sickeningly sweet smell of orris, patchouli, strawberry, of Body Shop clothes-protector sachets, came with her.

  Hannah felt a shiver of something almost akin to anticipation. Keep her talking, wasn’t that what they always said you must do in these sort of situations? Calmly, as though you felt no astonishment at this invasion of privacy from someone you hardly knew.

  ‘Goodness, you gave me a fright!’ Leaning back, fanning herself exaggeratedly, she let her other hand trail over the chair arm. ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘Well, I’m beginning to think it’s about time we got our act together, as my grandchildren say. I’ve been visited by the police, Hannah, and I’ve no intention of taking the blame for something that was no fault of mine.’

  She was mad, barking mad, but Hannah had suspected this from the beginning. Mad, or dangerous. Had been certain of it ever since she had received that parcel she’d had to pretend was a new pair of scales.

  Remembering what it had actually contained, again she felt that shiver of excitement, a remembered thrill of fear, almost sexual. Her trailing hand sought for her handbag, on the floor next to her chair, while she spoke: words, something, nothing, anything, it didn’t matter. The soft leather bag had a magnetic catch, and opened easily. She pulled the flap open and her hand curled around cold metal. Pulling it gently out, she felt its solid weight in her palm. She raised her arm, her finger on the trigger, and brought her other hand up to it. She squeezed, once.