Shallow Grave
Authors: Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
Tags: #Fiction, #Mystery & Detective, #General
Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
was born and educated in Shepherd’s Bush, and had a variety of jobs in the commercial world, starting as a junior cashier at Woolworth’s and working her way down to Pensions Officer at the BBC. She won the Young Writers’ Award in 1973, and became a full-time writer in 1978. She is the author of over sixty successful novels to date, including thirty volumes of the
Morland Dynasty
series.
Visit the author’s website at
www.cynthiaharrodeagles.com
The Bill Slider Mysteries
ORCHESTRATED DEATH
DEATH WATCH
NECROCHIP
DEAD END
BLOOD LINES
KILLING TIME
SHALLOW GRAVE
BLOOD SINISTER
GONE TOMORROW
DEAR DEPARTED
GAME OVER
FELL PURPOSE
BODY LINE
The Dynasty Series
THE FOUNDING
THE DARK ROSE
THE PRINCELING
THE OAK APPLE
THE BLACK PEARL
THE LONG SHADOW
THE CHEVALIER
THE MAIDEN
THE FLOOD-TIDE
THE TANGLED THREAD
THE EMPEROR
THE VICTORY
THE REGENCY
THE CAMPAIGNERS
THE RECKONING
THE DEVIL’S HORSE
THE POISON TREE
THE ABYSS
THE HIDDEN SHORE
THE WINTER JOURNEY
THE OUTCAST
THE MIRAGE
THE CAUSE
THE HOMECOMING
THE QUESTION
THE DREAM KINGDOM
THE RESTLESS SEA
THE WHITE ROAD
THE BURNING ROSES
THE MEASURE OF DAYS
THE FOREIGN FIELD
THE FALLEN KINGS
THE DANCING YEARS
Published by Hachette Digital
ISBN: 978 0 7481 3324 6
All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Copyright © 1998 Cynthia Harrod-Eagles
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Hachette Digital
Little, Brown Book Group
100 Victoria Embankment
London, EC4Y 0DY
For Tony, my accessory before and after
Eheu Fugaces, Postume
The Old Rectory, St Michael Square, on the Mimpriss Estate, was the sort of house Slider would have given anything to own.
‘On a copper’s pay? Your anything wouldn’t even make a down payment,’ Atherton said.
Slider shrugged. ‘What’s a man without a dream?’
‘Solvent,’ said Atherton.
It was a long house, built of stone, whose façade reflected three different periods. The middle section had the perfect proportions of classical Georgian domestic, with a fanlighted door and small-paned sash windows disposed harmoniously about it. To the right was an early-Victorian addition, very plain, with tall, large-paned sashes. The section to the left seemed much older: the stone was undressed and uneven, the windows casements, and at the far end were two pairs of double wooden doors like those of an old-fashioned garage. But despite, or even because of, its oddities, Slider coveted it. Whoever had altered and added to it over the ages, they had had a sense of proportion. As with a beautiful woman, he thought, the character in its face only made it more beautiful.
The Mimpriss Estate was itself an oddity. In the middle of the west London sprawl of Victorian–Edwardian terraces, it was a small area of large and desirable houses, built in the Arts-and-Crafts style at the turn of the century by a wealthy man with a bee in his bonnet. Given the proximity to central London, houses on the estate were now worth small fortunes. For the Old Rectory you were talking a three-quarter-million touch, minimum, Slider reckoned. Atherton was perfectly right, though it was unnecessarily cruel of him to have pointed it out.
The estate comprised half a dozen streets, with St Michael Square in the middle and the railway running along the back. The church in the centre of the square was dedicated with nice inclusiveness to St Michael and All Angels. Slider turned to look at it as Atherton locked the car, and was mildly surprised. This was no painstaking 1890s copy. It stood in its own small, railed churchyard with all the grave, reserved beauty of the fifteenth century, its grey stone tower rising serenely above the tombstones to dwell among the clouds. ‘There should be rooks,’ Slider said. ‘Or jackdaws.’
‘Settle for magpies,’ Atherton said, as one of them went off like a football rattle in a tree overhead. He turned to look at the church as well. ‘It’s old, isn’t it? Not just Victorian?’
‘Early Perp,’ Slider said. So, there must have been a village here once. ‘He built the estate round it.’
‘He who?’
‘Sir Henry Mimpriss. Industrialist and amateur architect.’
‘The things you know!’
‘I read,’ Slider said with dignity.
‘Si monumentum requiris,’
Atherton remarked admiringly. ‘Wren only had a cathedral, and even that had some other bloke’s name on it.’
It was one of the nice things about London, Slider thought, looking round, that you never knew when you would come across the good bones of an ancient settlement visible under the accumulated flesh of urban development. In this square, as well as the church and the Old Rectory, there was a row of cottages whose Victorian tidying-up couldn’t fool the trained eye, and a pub called the the Goat In Boots whose wavy roof and muddle of rear buildings dated it along with the church. Inn, church, rectory and a few houses: all you needed for a country village – set, in those days, amid the rolling hayfields and market gardens of Middlesex. And then the railway came, and life was never the same again.
Atherton was reading the church noticeboard. ‘Rev. Alan Tennyson. Tennyson’s a nice sonorous name, but I think the Alan’s a mistake. Lacks gravitas.’
‘Make a note to tell his mother.’
‘And they only get a service every second Sunday,’ Atherton said. They started across the road towards the house. ‘If this
is the Old Rectory, where’s the new one? Or does “old” just mean “former”?’
‘Pass,’ said Slider.
‘It looks like three houses in a motorway shunt.’
‘Don’t be rude. It’s just very old and altered,’ Slider said defensively. ‘The left-hand bit shows the real age. The Georgian face is only skin deep, and the Victorian wing’s been added, by the look of the roof.’
‘I’m glad I brought you along,’ Atherton said. ‘And now they’ve got a body. Careless of them. Gin a body meet a body lying down a hole …’
‘That’s “doon”, surely?’
‘If you insist. But don’t call me Shirley. Shall we knock or go round the side?’
‘Side,’ said Slider. To the right of the house – between it and the next house, from which it was divided by a fifteen-foot hedge of that omnipresent British Leyland spruce that someone was soon going to regret not keeping cut down to a manageable height – was a gravelled parking area on which stood a very dirty, light blue Ford pickup with various items of builder’s equipment in the back. Parked at the roadside and blocking it in were a patrol car and the Department wheels – a maroon Orion, which had brought DC McLaren, who had been on duty when the shout came in. At the back of the gravel area was a low wall that gave straight onto the terrace behind the house.
Slider and Atherton crunched over the gravel, stepped through a gap in the wall, and then stopped.
‘Now that’s what I call a patio,’ Atherton said, with a soundless whistle.
‘And I thought I was the Philistine,’ Slider replied. ‘That’s not a patio, that’s a terrace.’
It ran the whole length of the house, a broad and glorious terrace paved with York stone in slabs so wide and worn and ancient they might have been nicked from a monastery, and who knew but they were? Beyond it there was a steep drop to the lawn, which sloped down to a belt of trees, behind which, but hidden at this leafy time of year, was the railway. It should have been a river, Slider thought, for perfection. Still he coveted, country boy though he was at heart. Sitting on this terrace and gazing at the trees, you could almost believe …
Presumably the forces of nature were exacting a toll on the structure, for there was all the evidence of building work going on: a heap of earth and rubble, another of sharp sand, a pile of bricks, three bags of cement, a bright orange cement mixer, a wheelbarrow with two spades and a pick resting across it, and a blue plastic tarpaulin the colour of the inside of a lottery-winner’s swimming-pool, with frayed nylon rope through the eyelet holes at the corners.
The tarpaulin was folded back on itself, half covering a long trench dug in the terrace, parallel with its front edge, about three feet wide and two feet deep. The paving stones which had been levered up were neatly stacked away to one side, and an opportunist black cat was sitting on top of them in the sun, its paws tucked fatly under itself and its eyes half closed.
The builder himself was sitting on the low wall with his hands and his lips wrapped around a mug of tea: a stocky, powerfully built man in his thirties, with untidy thick blond hair, bloodshot blue eyes, weather-roughened cheeks and an unshaven chin. He was wearing mud-streaked work trousers and boots, and a ragged blue sweater over a check shirt. His strong hands, grained white with cement, were shaking so that the mug chattered against his teeth; he stared at nothing over the rim, past the blue-black legs of PC Willans, who was standing guard over him with an air of gentle sternness. It was a demeanour, Slider noted, often adopted by coppers towards remorseful domestic murderers.
McLaren came across to report. He was eating a cold Cornish pastie straight from the Cellophane wrapper and his lips were flecked with pastry and whatever the pallid glop was that passed for filling. ‘Breakfast, guv,’ he justified himself, seeing the direction of Slider’s gaze. ‘The body’s down the hole.’ With his free thumb he indicated the builder. ‘That’s Edward Andrews – Eddie Andrews. It’s his wife.’