Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  This is a nightmare; the day Angela died, all over again.

  The unexpected pull that had made her stagger, the bang that had made her ears ring and ring, the smell of cordite, Angela, toppling forward, like one of those target dolls at a fair …

  And now … the same thing, happening again. Iris Osborne this time, with blood blossoming from her chest.

  The conservatory door was still open and Sam came charging through. He stopped at the sight of the gun in her hand.

  ‘Oh, Sam! Oh, my God, Sam! She would have killed me if I hadn’t got the gun from her – just like she killed Angela, and Charles.’

  ‘Let me have the gun, Hannah.’ His voice was stony.

  She looked at her hand, holding the weapon. It was quite steady, when it should have been shaking. For a moment, she hesitated. It would be so easy. Then she allowed her hand to tremble as she passed the gun over to Sam. Let herself cry, big tears spilling from huge, frightened brown eyes as she raised her head to him. In the circle of lamplight, with the old woman’s body on the floor six feet away, she stood waiting for his arms to encircle her.

  Instead, he walked away from her, towards the telephone. ‘What are you doing, Sam?’

  ‘I’m ringing the police, what do you think?’

  21

  The tape recorder in Iris Osborne’s hand was slippery with sweat. Hospitals were always overheated. She felt under the pillow for one of her lace-edged, freesia-scented hankies and wiped it fastidiously. Normally cool and calculating, she was unused to nerves, and the fact that she was shaking disorientated her. But she had to get this recording right, listen to it over and over again before committing herself to making that statement the police needed. She would think it over, carefully, do it in her own time, in her own way. They weren’t pressing her too much, yet. She was off the danger list but far from well. The bullet that madwoman had fired at her had missed any vital organs – the shock had done far more harm.

  She must do this before Eleanor came and began fussing and lecturing her again on how foolish she’d been. Then she could concentrate on getting well and being allowed to go back to her own home and her own affairs.

  She pressed a calming hand to the bosom of her fluffy turquoise bedjacket, drew a deep breath and took her mind back to the day when she’d first met Angela Hunnicliffe, through one of Iris’s own advertisements. That was where it had all begun, when Angela had rung and asked whether she was interested in buying a piece of Clarice Cliff pottery.

  Iris herself didn’t admire Art Deco in any shape or form, but she had customers who did. Clarice Cliff was avidly collected and fetched phenomenal prices. She couldn’t afford not to be interested. She’d said she would very much like to see it and arranged for Angela to bring it to Wych Cottage.

  ‘Where did you come across this?’ she asked interestedly, when she’d examined the candlestick and calculated what she could get for it.

  ‘Oh, a car boot sale,’ Angela answered evasively, with the irritating giggle Iris was to become familiar with. She was a rather colourless blonde, and her little girl ways sat oddly with her height. Iris didn’t believe her. Maybe she had picked up a similar candlestick, but not this one. She knew Angela was lying for some reason, and trying to cover up rather clumsily – people at car boot sales in the past had let fortunes slip through their fingers for fifty pence, but not nowadays. The lie made her wary. Anyone capable of lying about one thing could lie about others. But a simple thing like a lie never worried Iris too much and, thinking of the profit she was going to make, she didn’t press the matter.

  As they chatted over the tea and biscuits Iris always provided for her clients as part of the general softening-up process before the hard bargaining started, Iris learned that Angela had come over here from America with her husband and while he’d been very much taken up with his job, she’d been left with nothing to occupy her empty days. As a way of overcoming her boredom, she’d started going to auction rooms, markets and antique fairs to pass the time, and discovered an interest in porcelain and pottery. As her collection, and her knowledge, grew, she gradually become more discriminating, and dissatisfied with her earlier, naïve, ‘finds’. She had begun a little modest trading to offload some of them. And that was how it had come about that she had telephoned in response to an advert of Iris’s in the back of one of the glossy magazines devoted to antiques.

  Iris found to her surprise that Angela could drive as hard a bargain as she could herself. This was something she understood, and she looked at the young woman with more respect than she had at first. Their meeting started an association that was to their mutual benefit. Angela looked out for anything Iris might be interested in buying from her, and Iris did likewise for her. She was quite sorry that Angela would be returning to the States within the year, when Brad Hunnicliffe’s exchange here ended, they’d become quite good friends.

  The last time Angela had knocked on the door of Wych Cottage she had been sheltering from the pelting rain under an umbrella, having paddled through the widening mud-scree the ceaseless downpours of the last week or two had made of the lane. ‘My, you’re going to be under water if this deluge doesn’t stop soon!’ she announced, prophetically had she but known it, as Iris ushered her in.

  ‘Pray that it does stop, then.’ Iris was beginning to be very worried indeed at the amount of water that was sweeping down the lane to the dip where Wych Cottage stood.

  ‘This weather is something I shall not miss when I’ve gone,’ said Angela, taking off her rubber boots and leaving them and her umbrella in the porch.

  ‘Gone?’

  Angela then told Iris that she was in fact returning to America the next day. Her husband had unexpectedly been called back to the States – had already left, in fact, to spend a couple of weeks with his ailing father before taking up his new position in San Francisco. Angela had arranged to stay behind for that period, in order to attend a country house sale she didn’t want to miss, where there might be bargains to be had, and also to arrange for her china collection to be shipped over to America. ‘My suitcases are packed, all I have to do is leave the keys with our landlord. But I can’t say I’m sorry to be going.’

  ‘No doubt you’ll be glad to get home, quite apart from leaving all this rain behind.’

  But Angela said not really, in fact she’d rather begun to enjoy being over here, now that she’d found – now that she’d found such an absorbing interest. She’d flushed a little and Iris thought, shrewdly, she hadn’t been going to say that, there’s a man. She’d suspected before now that Angela, if not her husband, Brad, was finding their marriage a strain. But lately, Angela went on, she hadn’t been so comfortable around Lavenstock. She’d hesitated, as though not expecting to be believed, and then rushed on … We-ell, it sounded paranoic, but she’d had the definite feeling lately that someone had been following her, and not just once or twice, but several times. ‘It’s weird!’ Her hands twisted nervously and she shivered, but then she shrugged it off with a forced laugh and unpacked the latest piece of china she’d acquired for Iris.

  They’d struck an amicable bargain, and Angela had been ready to leave, standing in her stockinged feet waiting for Iris to fetch her mac, when the knock came at the door. A strange woman stood there, dripping, rain streaming from her unprotected hair and from the light, showerproof jacket she wore, useless in such a deluge, her eyes wild.

  ‘You have Angela Hunnicliffe in there!’ she announced, accusingly, and before Iris could stop her, had forced her way in.

  Iris, protesting, hurried after her into the sitting-room where Angela and the woman Iris later learnt was Hannah Wetherby faced each other like a pair of tigresses. Iris was outraged, being forced to endure this vulgar cat-fight, here in her own pretty sitting-room, but could do nothing to prevent it: Angela, pale as death, and Hannah, hair plastered to her head, her inadequate shoes squelching mud all over Iris’s precious Persian rugs with every movement she made. Spitting out, in a low, furious voic
e, that she knew all about her husband and Angela Hunnicliffe, and that it was something she would not tolerate any longer. This was obviously the person who had been following Angela – she hadn’t imagined it, then.

  If Angela had simply said, in answer to the accusation, that she was going away the following day, maybe the other woman would have calmed down. But Angela didn’t. She retorted that if Hannah hadn’t been such a frigid bitch in the first place maybe Charles Wetherby wouldn’t have had to look elsewhere.

  Hannah could barely contain herself. She hissed furiously, ‘And maybe if he’d treated you like he’s treated me, you’d be frigid towards him, too!’

  Angela didn’t draw away as Iris would have done, but took a step nearer. ‘You’re hysterical,’ she said coldly, and slapped Hannah’s face.

  However Iris searched her memory, she could not be quite certain of how it had appeared to her then – whether Hannah deliberately shot Angela, had meant to do so all along (though if not, why had she come equipped with a gun?) or whether it was, as she said afterwards, an uncontrollable impulse that came over her, that she’d only meant to threaten Angela. Iris, in view of what had happened to her, now believed it was certainly the latter. But whatever the truth was, she had pulled a pistol from her bag and in a moment it was all over. Angela was dead.

  Iris couldn’t believe it. Ten minutes ago, in this lamplit room with the dark weather comfortably on the other side of the windows, she’d been sitting in front of a roaring fire, having a cosy chat and a cup of tea, eating shortbreads. And now, here she was, with an armed madwoman in front of her and the dead body of her friend at her feet. Her heart was pounding ominously. She shook with fear and reminded herself she was no longer a young woman. And then she looked at the intruder and saw she was also trembling, even more uncontrollably, staring at Angela’s body with horror and with the gun dangerously hanging from her fingers.

  Iris breathed deeply and took two courageous steps forward. ‘I think you’d better give me that,’ she said, and took the gun from Hannah Wetherby’s thankfully unresisting grasp. She pressed the safety catch, as her husband had always taught her to do with firearms, and then, not knowing what to do with the weapon, she pushed it into the nearest drawer, which happened to be the top one of the walnut bow-front chest which the Bysouths had later carried upstairs for her. And with so many other things to worry about, her brain had promptly blanked out the memory of ever having seen it; she’d totally forgotten it until her mind and body acted almost in unison to prevent that girl from the contract cleaners seeing what was in the opened drawer.

  She had eventually, not knowing what to do with it, simply wrapped the gun in layers of cotton wool and bubble-wrap, put it in a shoe-box and posted it back to Hannah. Let her find the means of disposing of it!

  Hannah was standing as if rooted to the spot. ‘Oh God,’ she whispered, almost soundlessly. ‘Oh God, what have I done? I never lose my temper.’

  ‘Come away,’ Iris said, averting her eyes from the body, putting off the decision she knew would have to be made, later, when they were both calmer. Taking refuge in practicalities because the woman frightened her to death. She could go off at any moment like a time bomb. ‘You need to dry off.’

  Hannah allowed herself to be led into the kitchen, where Iris found some cooking brandy and poured generous measures into two glasses. ‘Drink this,’ she ordered, sliding one across to Hannah, before reaching for a couple of dry towels from the tumble-dryer. Hannah stood like a doll while Iris helped her off with her jacket and pushed it into the dryer. Her sweater, underneath, was damp and her skirt was sopping, too. ‘Dry your hair while I fetch you a bathrobe, and we’ll put everything else in the machine,’ Iris commanded. She wanted this woman out of her house, as soon as possible, but there were things to be decided and she wouldn’t be any help while her teeth were chattering and she was in that near catatonic state. Iris’s feet, as she went upstairs, felt leaden; she had to pause for breath on the landing, and wait for her heart to resume its normal pace. She was very much aware that she was too old for all this.

  Hot, sweet tea might have been a wiser recommendation for shock than spirits, but after the first sip or two of the brandy, Iris began to feel better; Hannah downed hers as if it were lemonade and the return of some colour into her cheeks showed it had done her no harm, either.

  While her visitor was stripping off her skirt and sweater, Iris couldn’t help noticing how underweight she was; neither did the long thin cicatrix of a healed scar right down her upper arm escape her notice. There were also the faint yellow marks of a fading bruise on her neck. Iris looked at her huge dark eyes and facial bones, and the hair that, now it was nearly dry, gave hints that it might be thick and glossy, and thought this woman might once have been very beautiful, but that it had been some time since.

  ‘Well, don’t you think you owe me some sort of explanation?’ she demanded at last. ‘Your name, for a start?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hannah said, an unnatural calm descending on her, and began to speak. When she’d finished, Iris said, ‘If he’s treated you like that, why do you want him back? Why didn’t you just leave him?’

  ‘You don’t understand. If I left him now, I should have nothing. After all, I’ve put up with him for all these years, provided a front for him, pretended to be a model wife for a model husband – why should I have to leave everything, be reduced to skimping and saving, having nothing? He owes me for that. I’ve had a life of sorts. Now I can have a better one …’

  Could she possibly have forgotten the corpse lying bleeding into the hearthrug in the other room?

  Iris had asked herself a dozen times since why she hadn’t called the police, then and there. But she knew the answer, really. The police were the last people she wanted around, poking their noses where they weren’t wanted. In the event, it was Reuben Bysouth she rang, not sure how far she could trust him, but knowing no one else to turn to, after she and Hannah Wetherby had dragged Angela to the cold-room door and tipped her down those wicked stairs to get her out of the way until they could think of what to do with the body.

  ‘I’d like you to get rid of that car in the lane for me, Reuben,’ she said when he’d sloshed down the lane in the Land Rover and come in, shaking off water like a dog. ‘Anywhere, anyhow, as long as it can’t be traced. You can have what you can get for it.’

  Angela’s car. His bribe for listening, without comment, to her carefully edited account of what had happened; for his complicity in what would later have to be done. Unshockable, he understood perfectly well, without her saying so, why she hadn’t contacted the police. He did ask her who the woman was who’d done the shooting, but when she refused to give either her name or the dead woman’s, he didn’t press her. What he didn’t know, he couldn’t be forced to tell. No one understood the need for keeping schtum at times better than Reuben Bysouth.

  ‘And you can drop these keys in at the Atkins Inquiry Agency.’

  Iris had typed a short letter, as if from Angela, signing it with a reasonable facsimile of her signature, copied from a receipt for china, explaining her departure the following day, and put it in an envelope, together with the bunch of keys that were labelled, with foolish disregard for safety, in Iris’s opinion, ‘9 Elton Street’.

  ‘All right,’ Reuben said, ‘I’ll do that, and I’ll see to the car, but what you going to do with her then?’ He jerked his head towards the low door that led into the cold-room. ‘Can’t keep her where she is.’ He stared reflectively out of the streaming window, where the rain still lashed down. ‘I could get rid of her for you.’

  Iris followed his gaze, across the sodden fields to the pig units. ‘No!’ She wasn’t squeamish, but even she couldn’t contemplate that. ‘Leave her where she is, until I have a think what to do.’

  ‘Don’t leave her too long,’ Reuben said. ‘She’ll smell worse than a slaughterhouse by tomorrow.’

  But that night, the waters rose and rushed down the lane and swirled an
d sucked around the cottage and in through the cold-room’s air space. The pressure forced in and broke away the rusty iron grating covering the vent. And as the water level rose even further and eventually seeped in under the doors to cover the ground floor of the cottage, the body in the cold-room rose with it, floating on the surface, until it was level with the vent and was sucked outside with the current, to be borne away on the flood.

  22

  Hannah had never in her life been in a police station but its severe impersonality, she thought with that new, not-part-of-all-this feeling, made it an appropriate place to tell her bleak story, unemotionally and without passion. That story which had been leading up to this point for years, if she had but realised it, but she had only known it with certainty after she’d fired that first shot.

  She had, since being arrested, discovered qualities in herself, a courage she hadn’t dreamed she could possess, that made her ready to accept the consequences of what she’d done. She was afraid of breaking down, however, of letting her defences crumble in front of these accusing strangers. No – she quelled the trembling within – she would not do that: she’d learned the hard way how to keep a rein on her emotions, not to show outwardly what she was feeling, even when she was being ripped apart, mentally and physically, and she could summon up the endurance this last time.

  She’d already told, as calmly as if she were talking about another person, her version of what had happened on that wild, unforgettable day at Wych Cottage. The worst day of a life that had long since ceased to have any joy in it. They told her that Iris Osborne – not dead, she’d made a botch shot there, and that had been her undoing – had also made a statement, and it must have tallied with hers, because they seemed basically satisfied, up to that point.