Grave Concerns

by Rebecca Tope

  Drew forced a laugh. ‘Oh no, I don’t think so. At least I can tell my wife I tried. I’ll just pop everything back in the cupboard.’

  ‘Don’t be silly. Take it. It’s no use to anybody else, and if she does turn up, we’ll tell her Peter Stafford took it all. She’ll know where to find it then, won’t she?’

  Drew gulped and nodded. ‘She ought to,’ he croaked.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  In the office, Maggs had run out of work by eleven o’clock. Although dry outside, it was overcast and uninviting – and besides, she had been instructed to stay close to the phone. She tried positive thinking – visualising a succession of customers, visiting and phoning, with at least three new funerals all booked and agreed by the time Drew came back. There could be no argument about the satisfaction level of the families of those few burials they had conducted so far – why hadn’t they passed the word to all their friends and relations? Though, she admitted to herself, even if they had, it would be unlikely that further deaths would yet have taken place in their immediate circle.

  Doodling idly, she let her thoughts turn to Drew and Karen’s new baby. It worried her, the way they hadn’t bothered to make proper provision for Stephanie. The best outcome now would be if Karen gave up work altogether and stayed at home to look after her own babies. If Drew had more time to himself, to get on with doing the job properly, there was every chance that Peaceful Repose would take off in a big way. Maggs could think of a dozen sidelines they could offer, if only they could get themselves better organised. Eventually, they should aim to build a chapel of some sort, so people could have a proper ceremony – not necessarily religious – in comfort. As it was, they had the option of using the village church, only three hundred yards away – but that didn’t suit the majority of their strictly secular customers. They wanted a place to gather, out of the rain, with somewhere to plug in a tape or CD player. Despite the clear proscription of any such building in the field, according to the terms of their Planning Permission, Maggs had every confidence that there would be some way around that in the future. Petty bureaucracy, she decided, dismissively.

  At half past eleven, she had a visitor. The sound of a car engine alerted her, in time to see a woman getting out of a minicab. The car didn’t drive away; apparently the passenger had asked the driver to wait for her. Maggs met her at the office door. ‘Hello again,’ she said.

  Caroline Kennet looked very uncomfortable, she glanced up the sloping field towards the infamous grave. ‘Oh – er – hello,’ she faltered. ‘I hope you don’t mind—’

  Maggs was wary. ‘Didn’t bring the policeman with you this time then?’ she challenged.

  ‘No – he said he wouldn’t be needing me any more. I didn’t turn out to be very useful, I’m afraid. He seemed to want me to be so certain – and I just kept getting less and less sure. I came back to see if I could remember anything on my own. Do you mind if I just have a little walk around?’

  Maggs considered this with deep suspicion. The story of the buried woman was still very unclear to her, and this visit from the only witness seemed distinctly significant. Why couldn’t she leave it alone, especially as she’d been given the brush-off by the police?

  ‘All right then,’ she nodded. ‘Can’t see any harm in it.’

  She went slowly back into the office, taking care to keep watch on the woman through the back window. Mrs Kennett went directly to the grave, much more confidently than she had when in company of the policeman. The minicab waited patiently, and Maggs wondered how much it had cost to come here again. Unless Mrs Kennett had an extremely dull life, it seemed quite a bit of trouble to go to in the circumstances.

  Had she perhaps invented the story of being a mere witness to the burial taking place, when she was actually much more closely involved? And now was she having one final check to make sure there were no incriminating details to be found? Perhaps on her previous visit she’d noticed something that could give her away. Maggs’s imagination began to run riot, as it often did, and she continued to watch the woman carefully, wishing she had her glasses with her. When Caroline bent down, reaching her hand to the grass at her feet, Maggs had no idea what she was doing.

  ‘Damn it!’ she muttered to herself. She was tempted to run up for a closer look, but it would be too late. Whatever the woman was doing, she’d have finished by the time Maggs got there. She was already leaving the site of the grave and walking slowly up to the fence by the railway, as she had before. Crossly Maggs withdrew her scrutiny and tried to get back to her work. She was writing busily when the woman tapped on the office door.

  ‘See what you wanted?’ Maggs enquired.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said the woman worriedly. ‘It’s all so difficult. But those trees’ – she pointed at the tall oaks on the roadside – ‘they do look very much the same as I remember.’

  Maggs shrugged. ‘Difficult,’ she agreed.

  ‘Well, I must get on,’ Mrs Kennett said fussily. ‘I’m supposed to be visiting my Aunt Hilda, but when I got to the station, I decided to come here again. The minicab’s costing a fortune, but I wanted to put my mind at rest. By the way—’ she added, ‘there’s a very nasty smell up there. I think there’s a dead animal or something. Near the railway line. It’s quite strong.’

  ‘I’ll go and look,’ Maggs promised. ‘Not the sort of thing we want. Who knows what people are going to think?’

  She waited for the woman to leave, and then went to investigate. It was true – there was inescapably the whiff of putrifaction. She followed it determinedly, until finally discovering the source.

  ‘Yuk!’ she gasped, holding a hand over her nose. ‘Wait till I tell Drew about this!’

  On his way back from Henrietta Fielding’s, Drew remembered his promise to Maggs and called her from a phonebox. She took some time to answer and when she did, she was breathless. ‘Too busy to answer the phone?’ he demanded. Answering the phone was an absolute priority in their line of work.

  ‘You could say that,’ she puffed. ‘It was as quiet as the you-know-what until an hour ago, and then things started to happen. The police are here just now, because somebody’s made a complaint about us. Some nutcase accusing us of paganism and witchcraft. Your friend PC Graham Sleeman came with some other bloke. They’re not bothered – it isn’t against the law, anyway, to be pagan. But I had to show them round. Oh – and that Kennett woman came back again. I don’t know what she wanted, but she said there was a smell, and I found a stinking dead cat wrapped up in a sheet, up by the railway line. Remember those two men with the spade that I chased away a couple of weeks ago? It must have been them that left it there.’

  ‘What have you done with it?’

  ‘Nothing. I thought Jeffrey could deal with it, next time he’s here. The stink’s awful. Very bad for business.’ She went back to one of the earlier topics. ‘Why do you think she’d come back again? It seems a bit fishy to me—’

  ‘Can’t you do it?’ Drew interrupted her, evidently still focused on the dead cat. ‘It won’t need much digging.’

  ‘I might,’ she said unhelpfully. ‘I’ll see how I feel. Oh, and that Jarvis chap phoned. Wouldn’t tell me anything. Patronising git.’

  ‘Sounds like a busy morning,’ Drew said brightly, hoping to divert her. ‘But nobody wanting a funeral?’

  ‘Not a soul,’ she told him. ‘When will you be back?’

  ‘Mid-afternoon, I should think. I’m going to collect Stephanie and report my progress to Genevieve. I’ve got some more questions for her.’

  ‘Well, enjoy yourself,’ Maggs said with a burst of irritation, and slammed the phone down noisily.

  Drew sat in the van with a large jotter pad on his lap. He had bought it specially at a nearby stationer’s. He tried a flowchart, starting at the top with Gwen Absolon, alias Wendy Forrester, and following threads downwards, via Genevieve, Willard, Dr Jarvis, the Egypt shooting, Sarah Gliddon, Trevor, Henrietta Fielding and Brigid. He knew he was merely feedi
ng in every name he’d come across so far, with little or no resulting enlightenment. He wrote: Jealousy/suicide/blackmail alongside the listed names, and then added ‘runestones?’ next to Trevor. Consulting Gwen’s notebook, he added the names from the list that he guessed was the tour group she’d taken to Egypt. Steven and Felicity Fletcher, Maggie Dobson, Janet Harrison, Karl Habergas. He supposed he should try to trace them all, and ask them when they last saw Gwen, discover whether they could throw any light on where she might be now. He was confident that he hadn’t left anything out, but he was no further forward.

  The pressure of the imminent burial – or reburial – of what he now firmly believed was Gwen Absolon’s body made Drew’s head hurt. In his mind, it was a deadline (a word he’d learnt not to use in the funeral business), and he badly wanted to solve the mystery before the burial took place. He couldn’t waste time sitting in the van trying to think. He’d already spent half an hour staring at the jotter, struggling to build a picture of the dead woman from the conflicting comments he’d heard. Hair colour? he had written, underlined twice. Henrietta Fielding had said it was dark grey – the woman in the grave had white hair. Of course, it might have lost pigment while in the ground. He’d heard stories of dark-haired people turning ginger after they’d been buried for a few months – but understandably, there was little hard evidence. The white had been so white – he’d seen it for himself, and it had been mentioned prominently in the newspapers. It was definitely something he would have to ask Genevieve about.

  Although not as final as a cremation, the bureaucratic hassle of disinterring a body for further forensic examination was enough to make it a highly unusual occurrence. Drew didn’t think he could face the idea of that – more police presence in his burial ground, more suspicion and bad publicity. If there was to be any increased police interest, following new facts or leads, then it was in his own best interest to produce it within the next few days.

  Remembering the newspaper articles about the shooting in Egypt, Drew wondered whether there was any sense in trying to locate Gliddon, husband of the dead Sarah. He should probably visit the widowed man and ask if he’d ever met Gwen – and whether he knew why Free had been written alongside his wife’s name in Gwen’s list. The assumption had to be that she would have visited him to offer her condolences after Sarah had been killed, or at least attended the funeral of her slaughtered charge. He needed to know whether she had seemed depressed or unstable – anything that might support Dr Jarvis’s suggestion of suicide. Given Genevieve’s volatile nature, and the past tragedies that the whole family shared, he found it entirely credible that Gwen had been prone to mood swings, at the very least. Had she perhaps talked about anyone threatening her or causing her concern? The long list of questions was wearying, and he put the jotter down on the long seat beside him and turned the key in the ignition.

  Throughout the day he had repeatedly felt impelled to go back to Genevieve’s house. He wanted to be sure she was taking proper care of Stephanie – but just as much he wanted to lay eyes on her again. There was a quiet thrill at the prospect. Even better, his researches of the morning had thrown up a lot of genuine progress, and he now had more than enough to talk to her about. Whether she had ever heard of Trevor, in particular. Had Gwen actually spoken to her about the Egypt tragedy? Had Willard acted especially oddly during August? Questions galore – but much more importantly than that, he wanted to look into those grey eyes again.

  By two o’clock, he was driving into her village’s main street. He promised himself he would work that evening – telephone the Gliddon man, reread all the papers he’d taken from the bedsit. He wanted Genevieve to get value for her money. And if he stayed at her house long enough, he might witness the return of the elusive Willard, and perhaps assess for himself whether the man could be a murderer.

  In fact, neither Genevieve nor Stephanie seemed particularly pleased to see him. They were in the back garden, despite the cool April weather, cuddled together on a rug with a book. Drew saw them as he went to the side door, and savoured the tableau before they became aware of him. His sturdy little daughter was cradled in the pregnant woman’s arm, as Genevieve reclined gracefully against a contraption apparently designed specifically to prop you up as you read a book in the garden. The intimacy was not merely physical: both heads bent over the book in rapt attention. Genevieve’s long black hair was loose, and hung in wavy hanks over her shoulders. Trevor’s letter, with the word witch, flashed into his mind.

  ‘Hello!’ he said heartily. ‘You two seem to be getting on very well.’

  Both faces turned towards him, oddly alike in expression. Neither smiled. Both pairs of eyes seemed preoccupied with whatever they’d just been doing. ‘You’re early,’ said Genevieve. ‘Case solved already?’

  ‘Far from it, I’m afraid. But I haven’t come back empty-handed. I need to ask you a few things before I can go any further.’

  She made no move to get up. Unprompted, Drew felt a wave of longing rush through him, a huge desire to kneel down beside her and hold her in his arms. Gritting his teeth, he held his ground, eight or ten yards away, and focused on murder, dead bodies, unofficial graves. For something to say, he told Maggs’s story of the cat.

  ‘Just after you came to the burial ground, Maggs saw two men running away. They were carrying spades. Well, now she’s found a dead cat in the hedge, where they were hiding. I guess that’s one little mystery solved.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Well – I assume they wanted to bury it somewhere. Maybe they live in a flat or something. Like the man and his wife with the labrador. They said they hadn’t got anywhere to put it. Cheeky of the cat people, though. I could have charged them for the service.’

  ‘Doesn’t a dead cat make you think of anything a bit more sinister than that?’ she asked him, her head on one side. He met the beautiful eyes full on. A harmless pleasure, surely.

  ‘Um – no, I don’t think so. What did you have in mind?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter. It’s my fevered imagination. We’ve been reading this, look.’ She held up the book, and Drew recognised Where the Wild Things Are from his own childhood. ‘It’s going down very well. I think we’ve been through it six times so far. I know it off by heart.’

  With a sense of capitulation, he walked forward and sat down on the rug, two or three feet from Genevieve. ‘Now, can I ask my questions?’ he pleaded.

  ‘Go on then,’ she invited him. ‘Though I ought to get you some coffee or something first.’

  He waved that aside, and launched into an account of his morning’s discoveries, such as they were. He omitted the runestones, but tried to include everything else. ‘So – have you ever heard of Trevor?’ he finished.

  She shook her head. ‘Definitely not. Sounds a bit of a lush to me. Some passing ship in the night who didn’t know when to keep going. My ma collected lots of those.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Drew nodded. ‘But it’s possible he did come over, and she angered him enough to provoke him to murder her. God knows how we’d begin to trace him now, though.’

  ‘We wouldn’t,’ she said flatly. ‘If that’s what happened, then he’s going to get clean away with it.’

  ‘The other thing is this shooting in Egypt. I think I ought to try and speak to someone who was in the tour party. I’ve got what looks like a list of names – though no addresses.’

  ‘I think Willard knows who they are,’ she said vaguely. ‘He helped her to write to them all, when she came back here after it happened. He persuaded her it would be diplomatic. He’s quite keen on Egypt, as it happens – it was one of the things they talked about a lot. He worries about the country’s economy when something like that shooting happens.’

  Drew blinked. It was hard to envisage someone worrying about Egypt’s economy, in the face of so much else to get upset about. Genevieve noticed his bemusement.

  ‘It’s not as weird as you think. His subject is economics. Egypt’s a stabilising
influence in the Middle East, and when things start to slide for them, the whole area’s at risk. Or so he says. I can’t say I take much interest.’

  ‘What is his job, exactly? You never did tell me,’ Drew asked, as casually as he could manage.

  ‘He’s a senior lecturer, at the University of North-East Devon,’ she replied readily, almost as if waiting for the question. ‘It used to be a technical college. Quite honestly, it’s rather a joke to call it a University. But don’t tell him I said so. He fits in a bit of history or sociology lecturing as well if anyone’s missing. Jack of all trades, is Willard. He’s cruising towards retirement now, cutting down on his hours. Mind you, he’s more enthusiastic than ever when it comes to acquiring knowledge. He’s taken to the internet in a big way recently.’

  The image of Willard produced by Genevieve was fragmented and contradictory, not much helped by Drew’s recollection of him two years earlier. The man was a real enigma.

  Are you planning to go back to Radio Three after the baby’s born?’ he asked.

  ‘Absolutely,’ she said with force. ‘I’d go mad, here on my own all day.’

  ‘That’s a shame,’ said Drew without thinking. ‘It looks as if all your maternal instincts are in the right place,’ nodding at Stephanie, still roughly turning the pages of their book and jabbing at the monsters with an excited forefinger. ‘I’ll be expecting her to start saying Let the wild rumpus start in the middle of the night, now.’

  Genevieve laughed sceptically. ‘This is easy. I’m happy to devote a few hours to a nice little person like Stephanie. A helpless puking baby is going to be quite a different prospect.’ Again he glimpsed the flash of fear he’d seen before. A spasm that pulled her face into a blank mask of paralysis.

  ‘Do you think you could ask your husband for those names?’ Drew forced himself back to the business in hand. ‘It would be very helpful.’