Untimely Graves

by Marjorie Eccles

  But there were still questions, questions. Finding herself capable of unexpected determination, she had demanded that the questions should not be put to her by a man and they had, amazingly, agreed. Her interrogators were the russet-haired inspector, Moon, and a younger version, deceptively gentle, soft-eyed and pretty, a detective constable called Jenny Platt. Hannah had asked if Tracey Matthews could be there as well, she who’d been so bumblingly kind to her before, and to her surprise, they’d eventually agreed to that as well.

  The first thing they wanted to know was why she’d been following Angela, and she knew immediately this was going to be the hardest question of all, because it was something she’d asked herself again and again, and she still didn’t know the answer. What had she expected to gain from following that woman – and why had she picked on that gawky, unattractive creature, out of all the others? Perhaps it had been just because of that – that even such a Plain Jane as Angela Hunnicliffe was more alluring to Charles than his own once-adored, once-beautiful wife. Stalking, they were calling it. Why were you stalking her?

  It wasn’t only men who stalked, through revenge at being sexually spurned. That she knew. Then why? To put some sort of hex on to the woman? She deliberately hadn’t been too careful, she had wanted Angela to suspect someone was behind her, a shadow, knowing what she did, where she went, who she met, to be frightened, even though she’d had no means of knowing if it had worked. Confrontation, then? It must really have been that, though she had never intended to go so far as to kill her. But when she told them this, she could see they didn’t believe her, and who could blame them, when she’d had the gun, so ready to hand, so snugly convenient, sitting in her bag?

  ‘Where did you get that gun?’ asked Inspector Moon, watching her every expression, while DC Platt took careful notes of everything that was said, shared the questions, and the tape recorder whirred at the side. She had refused a solicitor, despite their advice. She didn’t want to be prevented from doing this her own way, however deeply it would incriminate her.

  ‘Please answer the question. Where did you get the gun?’ the inspector repeated.

  ‘The gun? Oh, I’ve had it for years. It belonged to my father and I found it after he died, when I was clearing out his things. He used to be a member of a gun club, I didn’t know he still had it. He taught me how to use it, he said you never knew when such knowledge might come in useful.’

  Target practice in the garden. A dartboard nailed to a tree. Shooting at magpies and squirrels. Bang, bang. Watching them fall, dead. Vermin, her father had said.

  ‘Why did you keep it?’

  ‘For the same reason. I thought it might come in useful some day.’

  ‘You mean you intended to use it on your husband?’

  ‘My husband? Don’t you understand, yet? I loved Charles!’

  ‘But you’ve admitted you shot him dead.’

  ‘I’m not denying that. I would never have killed him – but you see, I found out that he knew … He knew that I’d killed Angela.’ But that was only the half of it.

  You fool, Charles had said, she would have been gone the next day. Why did you have such a fixation on her? It was all over anyway, bar a farewell drink after she’d been to see that woman at Kyneford about a plate she had to sell. But she had never turned up. Philosophically, he’d accepted he’d been stood up, that Angela had gone off to America without bothering to say a proper goodbye, but then a body had turned up near Kyneford, and he’d known. That it had to be Angela, that Hannah had killed her. How had he known that? Well, how did Charles always know everything about her? A process of osmosis? Black magic? More simple than that this time. He discovered she’d been using John Riach’s car – some busybody had seen her in it and told him – and he would not stop until he found out the rest of it, employing his usual subtle methods.

  ‘Why did Mr Riach agree to lend you his car?’ the young DC asked.

  ‘To spite Charles.’ The truth, out before she thought of the consequences, to both of them. ‘He thought the reason I didn’t drive was simply because Charles didn’t approve. He saw encouraging me to do something Charles didn’t like as a way of getting at Charles behind his back – he’s always detested him. But you mustn’t blame John, he didn’t know –’ She shouldn’t have said that, it hadn’t been necessary, but what did it matter now?

  The inspector was looking at her with that look all the police seemed to have developed, that intent, steady look that made you say stupid things, muddle up the truth, unless you were a better liar than she was. ‘Didn’t know what, Mrs Wetherby?’

  ‘He didn’t know that – I’d lost my licence.’ For the first time she felt herself falter. ‘I lost it after I once nearly killed a child, driving while I was drunk. She ran out from behind an ice-cream van, I didn’t have much chance, but I might have avoided her altogether if I’d been sober.’

  I drank because my husband had stopped loving me. Or did he stop loving me because I drank? Who knows which came first? Can either of these three women begin to imagine what it felt like to live in the same house as someone you love and never to be kissed tenderly, not even when you were having sex, or hugged, or even touched, except to hurt? Year after year after year? No, they would never understand that particular kind of hell. How desolate you felt, so that drink became a comfort, then a necessity?

  ‘I didn’t care about having my licence taken away, in fact I was glad. I felt I didn’t ever want to drive, not ever again. The accident stopped me drinking, though – next time, I might have really killed someone. Not someone who deserved it, but someone innocent, like that little girl.’ A nightmare for the rest of my life. ‘But I needed a car to follow Angela … and John Riach asked no questions.’

  She’d learned, some time since, that John would have done practically anything she asked. Implicit in this was the expectation that some day he would be repaid …

  ‘Angela Hunnicliffe’s body was found on 4th March,’ said Moon. ‘You say your husband was immediately suspicious and confronted you, and the truth emerged. You knew that he knew what you had done, and was prepared to keep silent, yet twelve days later you killed him. Had he threatened to tell the truth?’

  ‘No, no – it suited him to have a hold over me!’

  ‘Then something happened between you and John Riach when you lunched together that day, to make you act as you did?’

  It had quite suddenly become clear to Hannah what she had to do. She had almost laughed, wondering why, when it was so simple, she’d never thought of it before. ‘I saw him staring at a bruise on my neck. I saw the expression on his face and I knew he was going to say something, to sympathise with me. If I’d told him what was going on, there would have been no going back from then. I could see the words almost beginning to choke him, but I managed to stop him from saying anything. I …’

  ‘Why, Mrs Wetherby? Why were you afraid of him knowing that your husband had been hurting you? He was a friend.’

  ‘I was afraid – of what he might do. There’s a violence in his nature. I’m an expert at recognising that. Not the same sort of violence as Charles used, but cold, and in the end even more deadly, I should imagine. You see, I knew he – I knew what he felt about me, though he’d never said anything. I didn’t feel that way about him, but even so, I couldn’t let him do something he might regret, just for me. He has been kind to me, in his own way. So I stopped him from speaking and packed him off.’

  ‘He might have been able to help,’ Tracey Matthews said, unexpectedly. ‘Or somebody might have. If you’d told somebody what was happening.’ She blushed and subsided, with a quick apologetic glance for her intrusion, but the inspector smiled at her.

  ‘I couldn’t,’ Hannah said. ‘I could never tell anyone. It was a matter of pride, for one thing. Don’t you see how humiliating it is to admit you’ve allowed your husband to beat you for years?’

  ‘Yes,’ said DC Platt, ‘I can see that’s hard, especially if you try and bear it alon
e.’

  ‘I couldn’t leave him. Nor tell anyone. My faith meant that my marriage vows were sacred. As for help … I did try, once. I went to a nun, when I was on a weekend retreat. I was told I must try and forgive.’

  For a long moment, nobody said anything. The tape whirred, the workaday sounds from outside continued. Hannah heard her own voice repeating in her head what she’d just said. It sounded hollow. She’d tried so hard to believe in it: the sanctity of marriage, turning the other cheek. And what had it led to?

  She said, ‘For a while, it worked. I did everything he wanted, turned a blind eye to his philanderings, became a good wife again, so that even he could find no reason for hitting me. I listened to him. Oh, how I listened to him! Sermonising, lecturing, pontificating. All for my own good, of course! It wasn’t easy, but I’d had years to learn submission, and I had my compensations, as I’ve always had, freedom of a sort, plenty of money. He was never mean. I tried to see him as the man I fell in love with. The peace didn’t last. And when he found out about Angela, it was worse than ever.’ Suddenly, Hannah wanted this done with. She said, almost impatiently, ‘Something had to break, sooner or later, and it was me. I have never been able to stand pity, and when I saw it in John Riach’s eyes, something snapped. So when Rosie Deventer rang a few minutes later, to complain about having to come over for a fitting, I told her it didn’t matter. I had already decided I was going to kill Charles.’

  A different quality of silence fell. Hannah felt it hanging now, like a heavy curtain of condemnation. These were women, she told herself, just as she was, sisters under the skin, and she had, up to now, felt their sympathy. But now she had trespassed even the boundaries of their understanding. They were, after all, also officers of the law, committed to upholding it. Then the inspector, the one she had thought was the toughest of the three, put out a hand and touched hers. Brief as the touch was, swiftly withdrawn, so that Hannah thought she might almost have imagined it, it gave her the impetus she needed to go on.

  ‘I went upstairs for the gun, put it in my handbag, and walked across the playing fields to the school. I didn’t care if anybody saw me, but nobody did. The dinner hour was over, school was beginning again, though the admin people hadn’t returned from their lunch. I walked into Charles’s office, gave him some reason for being there, a book I knew he had in the office. I walked to the bookshelves behind him and I said, “This is for all the things you’ve ever done to me, dear Charles,” and I shot him.’

  Bang, bang. Dead. Vermin.

  ‘The paper – in his mouth?’ asked the inspector, gently, after a while.

  Hannah laughed. ‘Oh yes, the paper! I tore off the top page of that report he’d been yammering on about for weeks, and it gave me the greatest pleasure to make him, just for once, eat his own words. And then I went home.’

  But that wasn’t how it had felt. She had never knowingly broken the law before … except to drive the Fiat without a licence, and when she shot Charles, she was amazed at the violence in herself, all the violence that had been used on her turned itself inside out and spewed out of her. Until she was empty inside. Empty.

  The tape machine clicked off. As DC Platt leaned forward to replace the spool, gently, as if she were afraid of breaking something, Hannah said, ‘Shall I tell you something? I can’t be sorry for anything I did, except for hurting Angela. That was done in a split second, never to be undone. But it wasn’t like that with Charles. The world seemed new when I walked out of that office. There was a smell of spring and there was a music lesson going on in the chapel when I crossed the quad, some of the younger boys singing. There’s nothing in the world so beautiful as young boys’ voices, is there?’

  Also by Marjorie Eccles:

  Cast a Cold Eye

  Death of a Good Woman

  Requiem for a Dove

  More Deaths Than One

  Late of This Parish

  The Company She Kept

  An Accidental Shroud

  A Death of Distinction

  A Species of Revenge

  Killing me Softly

  The Superintendent’s Daughter

  A Sunset Touch

  Echoes of Silence

  UNTIMELY GRAVES. Copyright @ 2001 by Marjorie Eccles. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  First published in Great Britain by Constable, an imprint of Constable & Robinson Ltd

  eISBN 9781429973311

  First eBook Edition : February 2011

  First St. Martin’s Minotaur Edition: March 2004