The Shape of Snakes

by Minette Walters

  I hesitate to say that your indifference amounts to contempt, although I am angry enough to believe that that is what it is. Yes, Ann suffered a neuropsychiatric disorder, and yes, she was black, but neither fact should influence your decision to pursue belated justice on her behalf.

  Of course it's true�and I am quoting your own words�that the cost of pursuing her alleged robbers will far outweigh any benefit to the taxpayer from the recovery of her possessions, but since when did justice have anything to do with cost? Justice is, and should be, impartial, yet your remark suggests that the police are selective in how, when and for whom they enforce the law.

  Yours sincerely,

  Sheila Arnold

  Dr. Sheila Arnold

  c.c. Police Superintendent Hathaway, Richmond Police

  Rt. Honourable William Whitelaw, home secretary

  FROM THE OFFICE OF:

  POLICE SUPERINTENDENT A. P. HATHAWAY,

  METROPOLITAN POLICE, RICHMOND

  Dr. Sheila Arnold

  39 Lyvedon Avenue

  Richmond

  Surrey

  June 21, 1983

  Ref: APH/VJ

  Dear Dr. Arnold,

  Re Miss Ann Butts, 30 Graham Road. Richmond

  Thank you for the copy of your letter of May 25 to PS Drury, together with photocopies of correspondence and notes of telephone conversations, all of which I have read with interest. I have since discussed the case at some length with Sergeant Drury and, while I have some sympathy with your contention that Miss Butts was robbed prior to her death, I also agree with Sergeant Drury that no purpose would be served by investigating it.

  Sergeant Drury admits that the inquiry in November 1978 did not take into account the possibility of robbery, however he stresses that at no time was it suggested to him that the situation found inside Miss Butts's house was unusual. Quite the reverse. There was considerable evidence, already on record following complaints from her neighbors, that the house was overrun with cats: that there was a continuous unpleasant smell from the premises: and that her living conditions were unhygienic and squalid. In these circumstances I do not consider that Sergeant Drury was either indifferent or negligent in his handling of the case.

  The incidence of theft and burglary in England and Wales is rising at over 15 percent per annum, with few successful convictions resulting from police investigations. These figures are a matter of public record, and politicians from all parties are now demanding tougher sentencing policies and increased funding for police forces in order to stem what has effectively become a crime epidemic.

  In such a climate it would be unreasonable to order an investigation into a burglary that may or may not have happened five years ago; where the alleged victim is no longer alive to give evidence; where there is no accurate inventory of what was in her house: and where the chances of successful closure are zero. While I realize this is not what you want to hear, I hope you will understand the reasoning behind this decision. It would be different had there been any question marks over the manner of Miss Butts's death, but the inquest verdict was unequivocal.

  In conclusion, let me assure you that Richmond Police take their responsibilities to all members of the public extremely seriously, irrespective of race, color, creed or disability.

  Yours sincerely,

  A. P. Hathaway

  Police Superintendent A. P. Hathaway

  *4*

  "One of your letters to the RSPCA inspector mentions a going-away present that Annie gave you," I said to Sheila Arnold when she and her husband came to lunch the following Sunday. "What was it?"

  She extended an arm. "A jade bracelet," she said, turning a pale green bangle on her slender wrist. "There was a set of them on her mantelpiece and she chose this one for me because she thought it suited my coloring. I had red hair in those days."

  "I remember," I said.

  Her husband, Larry, a tall, soft-spoken American, stirred in his seat. "In fact it's jadeite," he said, "which is the most expensive of the jades. We had it assessed in '83 so that Sheila could demonstrate to the police that she wasn't imagining the value of what was in Annie's house." He circled the bracelet with a finger and thumb. "It's of Mexican origin ... probably eighteenth century ... worth in excess of Ł200. Considering Sheila thinks there were ten in the set, it gives you some sort of starting point for estimating Annie's wealth."

  Sam gave a low whistle. "No wonder you wanted the police to investigate."

  Sheila sighed. "I still feel I should have pushed a bit harder ... at the very least forced Drury to face a disciplinary hearing. He was appallingly negligent. Worse, a racist. He just assumed a black woman would be living in squalor."

  Larry clicked his tongue impatiently. "That's twenty-twenty vision speaking. I agree the man was an asshole but he was correct about one thing ... no one suggested there was anything odd about the house ... even John Hewlett, the RSPCA inspector, didn't challenge the conditions." He spoke with surprising firmness as if the subject were a touchy one between them. "And there weren't enough hours in the day for you to commit any more time to Annie's cause, not with your practice and two kids to bring up. Also," he went on, turning to us, "the Superintendent made sense when he talked about zero success rates. Sheila made a list of the things she remembered but it was very vague on detail and, as the police pointed out, there was no hope of a prosecution if she couldn't be more positive in her descriptions. In the end it seemed pointless to go on."

  We were sitting outside on the terrace under the shade of a worn umbrella which had had most of its color bleached out by long summers of sunshine. The garden fell away at the back of the house and some sensible person in the distant past had had the foresight to construct a raised platform out of Portland stone, which gave a glorious view of the other side of the bowl-shaped valley in which we lived. It seemed strange to me how the English climate had changed during the years we'd been away. I had always thought of it as a green and luscious place, but the garden, paddocks and fields had turned brown in the heat, and the drought-starved flowers drooped their heads. Sheila and Larry were sporting matching panama hats and they made an elegant couple, she in a primrose-colored cotton dress, he in white shirt and chinos. I guessed him to be about ten years older than she was, and I wondered where they'd met and when they'd married, and whether the two children he'd mentioned were his or a previous husband's.

  I leaned across the table to refill their wineglasses while I thought lazily about going inside to fetch lunch, a simple affair of cold meat, salad and French bread. "If it was one of her neighbors who robbed her," I said idly, "they might have kept some of the pieces, particularly if they weren't of any value. The peacock feathers in the artillery shell, for example ... the one John Hewlett described. When I read his letter I couldn't help thinking they were the kind of things someone would hang on to, if only because feathers could never be specifically identified as Annie's."

  Sheila eyed me curiously. "You seem to have quite a down on her neighbors," she remarked. "Why is that?"

  Sam answered for me. "The whole damn street took against her after she labeled them racists at the inquest. They plagued us for weeks with abusive phone calls. It's the reason we left England."

  Liar! I thought.

  "No wonder you hate them," said Larry sympathetically.

  It was a throwaway line, which Sheila, with a questioning lift of her eyebrows, invited me to expand upon. Instead I stood up and said it was time for lunch. I had learned to talk about threatening phone calls without becoming strident...

  ...but hate? That was a different matter entirely.

  Sheila and I walked down to the paddock after lunch and leaned on the rail to watch the horses nibble halfheartedly at the withered vegetation. "Larry and I always assumed it was professional thieves," she told me. "I don't think it ever occurred to us that it might have been someone closer to home."

  "How would professionals know what was in the house?" I asked. "You said yourself sh
e never let anyone inside."

  "That's equally true of her neighbors," she pointed out reasonably. "She was more suspicious of them than she was of strangers."

  "They used to look through her windows," I said, remembering how I'd come across a gang of young thugs making faces at her through the glass. "The children were the worst. They thought it was funny to frighten her."

  Sheila caught at the brim of her hat as a warm breeze blew across the field. "Larry's convinced it was whoever did that valuation she showed me. He thinks it was a scam�someone knocking on doors and posing as an art or antiques expert in order to find out which houses were worth robbing."

  It makes sense, I thought.

  "But I don't agree with him," she went on. "I'm almost certain it was a Sotheby's valuation because I remember thinking that the figures must be right if a bona fide auction house had come up with them." She sighed. "And now I'm furious with myself that I didn't question it at the time. I mean, the whole episode was very odd. What prompted her to get a valuation? And how on earth did she gear herself up to letting a stranger loose on her treasures?" She shook her wrist and rattled the jade bracelet against her watch. "When she asked me to choose a present she wouldn't let me touch anything. I had to choose by sight, not by feel."

  "When did she show you the valuation?"

  "Sometime during the summer. I remember she was particularly difficult that day. One minute she wanted me to read it, the next she snatched it away as if she thought I was going to steal it. She used to get caught in mental loops that made her repeat the same words and actions over and over until something new pushed her on to another track. She could be very tiresome when she was in that sort of mood, which is probably why I didn't question what the valuation was for."

  "An insurance condition?" I suggested. "No valuation, no insurance."

  She gave an exasperated sigh. "That's what the police said and it made me boiling mad. 'You can't have it both ways,' I told them. Either she was a mindless cretin who let cats and drink destroy her life, or she was so switched on that she was able to organize insurance for herself. It might have helped if I could have talked to her bank manager but by the time I got around to thinking about it he was long gone. Someone told me he was working in Saudi Arabia but I never followed it up."

  (I had, and I could remember the man's answer verbatim down a crackly line from Riyadh. "I can't help you, I'm afraid. Unfortunately Miss Butts decided I was stealing her money, so I passed her account to my deputy, who died five years ago.")

  "Did you think of contacting Sotheby's to find out if they still had a copy of the valuation and why she wanted it?" I asked.

  "No, but it wouldn't have made any difference if I had," she said with a dry laugh. "Larry started getting stroppy about the amount of time I was wasting so I put the husband and children first and let Annie go."

  I thought about Sam's fury over the policeman in Hong Kong. "It's very irritating, isn't it?"

  "What?"

  "Doing your duty."

  "Yes." She pulled a wry smile. "The worst is yet to come, though."

  "How do you mean?"

  "Larry's older than I am and he's here under sufferance until I reach pensionable age ... and that's only two years away. Then we retire to his condo in Florida."

  "Why?" I asked curiously.

  "It's the bargain we made when he took on me and the children." She read my expression as criticism. "We don't have the same sort of marriage as you and Sam. The plan was to return to the States when Larry retired, but he agreed to wait after I was offered this job in Dorset. He said he could tolerate another few years as long we weren't in London." She sighed. "It's a long story ... full of compromise."

  "It sounds it," I said sympathetically. "Do you want to live in Florida?"

  "No," she said honestly, "but I want lonely old age even less. I've seen too much of it to consider it as an option."

  It was a salutary warning, coming from a doctor. "What makes you think Sam's and my marriage is any different?"

  She shrugged. "He wouldn't abandon you if you gave him an ultimatum."

  I was about to point out that Sam had done it once and there was no reason to imagine he wouldn't do it again. But I realized she was probably right. Somewhere along the line our roles had changed and it was Sam who feared ultimatums now. "He's more afraid of loneliness than I am," I said slowly. "which means I hold the cards in our relationship ... just as Larry does in yours."

  She glanced at me in surprise. "That's a very calculated way of looking at it."

  "Born out of experience," I said lightly. "I think real loneliness is to be abandoned inside a relationship ... to find yourself questioning your worth all the time. I know what that's like, and I know I can survive it. I imagine the same is true of Larry. He's been there, done it, got the T-shirt ... and you haven't. Neither has Sam. It puts you both at a disadvantage."

  "Larry wouldn't know what loneliness was if it smacked him in the face," she protested. "He's the most gregarious creature I know. It drives me to distraction sometimes. I'm constantly being hauled out to social functions when all I want to do is sleep because I'm dog-tired from pandering to the ill all day."

  I smiled at her. "That's the whole point. You're leading a fulfilled existence and Larry isn't. He has to go outside to find a sense of purpose. Yours is so strong you just fall asleep and prepare for the next day's challenges."

  She propped her arms on the fence and stared across the field. "Is this your way of telling me Annie was your sense of purpose?"

  "Part of it."

  "You had babies," she said. "Didn't they fill a gap?"

  "Did yours?"

  "No, but then I had a career. In any case I'm not remotely maternal. I can cope with my patients being totally dependent on me ... but not my children. I expect my children to fend for themselves."

  I wondered if she was listening to herself, and whether she'd asked Larry how he felt about the professional/private divide. "Mine just added to the general anxiety," I said, joining her at the fence. "My elder one did, anyway. We moved to Hong Kong while I was pregnant and a child was about the last thing I needed at that stage."

  "How did Sam take it?"

  "Blindly."

  Sheila gave a snort of laughter. "What's that supposed to mean?"

  "He had a son," I said dryly. "He was thrilled ... just so long as someone else looked after it." We stood in companionable silence for a few moments, understanding each other. "Do you still have a copy of the list you made of Annie's possessions?" I asked her next.

  "Isn't it in the file?"

  "No."

  She looked doubtful. "I'll have a look when I get home ... the problem is we threw so much out when we moved down here seven years ago. The other thing that's missing is the correspondence I had with the social worker. I remember she wrote a long letter describing the interior of Annie's house, but none of it was in the file when I photocopied it for you. I'm afraid it must have come adrift during the move."

  I wondered what else had come adrift and indulged in a few dark thoughts about Larry, who clearly wasn't above a little sabotage to ensure that his needs came first. Shades of Sam? "Could you make another list?"

  "I can try. It won't be as detailed as the first. What do you expect to find?"

  "Nothing valuable," I said. "Little things that someone might have kept."

  "Like the peacock feathers?"

  I nodded.

  "They could never be used as evidence."

  "I know but..." I hesitated, afraid of sounding ridiculous. "It's a stupid idea really but supposing you put on your list the peacock feathers, the silhouette pictures of her grandparents and ... well, other things of little or no value ... a wooden statue, say..." I ran out of ideas. "I just thought that if 1 found someone with a similar combination in their house, I'd at least feel I was on the right track."

  She threw me a startled glance. "Does that mean you're going to look?"

  I shrugged s
elf-consciously.

  "But where would you start, for goodness' sake?"

  "Graham Road? There must be someone left who was there in 1978. If I knock on a few doors I might come up with something." I spoke only to give her an answer, not because I had any intention of taking such a scattergun approach. I watched her expression change to one of skepticism.

  "But why? It'll just be a lot of hard work for nothing. Larry was right when he said there'd be no prosecution."

  "I wouldn't be looking for a prosecution for theft, Sheila; I'd be looking for a prosecution for murder. As the chief superintendent said in his letter to you, it would be different if there were question marks over Annie's death." I smiled. "Well, there are ... and I intend to prove it."

  She searched my face intently for a moment. "What really happened between you and Annie that night?" she asked abruptly. "Drury showed me your statement, but you said she never spoke to you."

  "She didn't."

  "Then ... why?"

  "I've got nothing better to do at the moment."

  It wasn't much of an explanation but it seemed to satisfy her. "I doubt many of her neighbors will still be there," she warned. "Most of them had moved on even before we left."

  "What about the vicar?" I asked. "He was always visiting people in Graham Road."

  She pulled on the brim of her hat to shade her eyes from the sun. "I don't think he's there anymore."

  I lifted one shoulder in a relaxed shrug. "His successor at St. Mark's ought to be able to tell me where he is. Do you know his name?"

  "The new vicar? No."

  "What about the one who knew Annie?"

  She didn't answer immediately, and I turned to look at her. Her expression was impossible to read because her eyes were still in shade, but the set of her jaw was very grim. "Peter Stanhope," she said.