Shallow Grave (15 page)

Atherton felt the pain of both of them acutely, and wished to be anywhere but here. Any moment now she would nobly offer to leave him, and Bill would accept sadly and go back to prison with Irene because it made financial sense. Atherton didn’t want to be here to witness it. He had been against Joanna and Bill getting together in the beginning, but he knew now it was the best thing for Bill, and it was too late by an extremely long chalk for him to go back. Atherton didn’t want to see the two people he was fondest of in the world commit suicide.

Fortunately, at that poised moment, a figure loomed up to the table and said, ‘One sausage, egg and chips and one chilliburger and chips, was it?’ They all looked up, and after a blank instant Joanna said, ‘That’s right.’

The woman smiled and set the plates down. ‘And there’s a lasagne to come, and I’ll bring your knives and forks. Any sauces, atawl? Salt and pepper? Vinegar for your chips?’

When the interruptions were over and they were alone again with their food, Joanna said, ‘Isn’t it strange how of all the spices in the world, the only one that’s routinely offered is pepper? A weird sort of hangover from the Middle Ages.’

‘There’s spices in my chilli,’ Slider said, with an effort.

‘In it, not offered separately. Imagine her asking, “Salt and cinnamon?” or “Mace and nutmeg?”’

‘But they’re sweet spices.’

‘All spices are sweet. Pepper’s sweet.’

Atherton joined in helpfully, ‘Have you tried black pepper on strawberries?’

They talked about anything but the cloud that hung over them.
Atherton could see how a man more stupid, more selfish, more violent in his passions than Bill – like Eddie Andrews, perhaps – might end up murdering the cloud because he could neither face up to it nor see any way out from under it. But facing up to things was Bill’s forte, poor devil, and Joanna was not enough of a selfish bitch to force the issue. Too good for her own good, really.

Slider got back to the factory with a headache. He tried to sneak it up to his room to seduce it with aspirin, but as he tiptoed past the door to the shop, Paxman, who was duty sergeant, spotted him and called after him. ‘Sir! Bill!’

Slider turned back resignedly. ‘Thanks for the knighthood.’

‘Eh?’ Paxman’s stationary eyes were troubled. He was a big man, solid as a bull, and he had never quite got to grips with Slider’s humour.

Slider waived the flags. ‘Did you want something?’

‘There’s someone waiting to see you.’

‘I was born with someone waiting to see me,’ Slider said sadly.

‘Name of Potter. Mean anything? Looks like a cat on hot bricks. I put him in interview room two, but I can get rid of him for you if he’s trouble.’

‘No, I’ll see him. Thanks.’ Atherton had just gone off to the Goat to re-interview him. Slider rubbed his forehead. ‘You haven’t got any aspirin, have you, Ted?’ he asked. Paxman had. Slider washed them down with a gulp from the water-cooler in the charge room. They lay sulkily on top of his chilliburger and chips, with which they were obviously not going to play nicely.

Jack Potter was pacing about the interview room, looking worse than Slider felt. He turned eagerly as Slider came in. ‘I was just thinking of leaving,’ he said.

‘I’m sorry, I’ve only just got in,’ Slider said. ‘Have you been waiting long?’

He gave a short laugh. ‘Cold feet,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to say what I’ve come to say, but it’s on my conscience. And if
I don’t and you find out anyway, it’ll look worse than it is. Besides, I don’t want anyone coming round the Goat asking questions in front of the wife.’ There was a question mark at the end of the last sentence, and a fawn in the eyes.

‘If it’s about you and Jennifer Andrews—’ Slider began.

Potter’s scalp shifted visibly backwards as his eyes widened. ‘How the hell did you know?’

‘Detective Sergeant Atherton’s on his way round to interview you at this very minute,’ Slider said.

‘Oh, blimey! He won’t go and—? I mean, Linda’s there, my wife, that’s why I came here. If Lin finds out she’ll skin me alive. Your bloke won’t blurt it out?’

‘I’m sure he’ll be discreet,’ Slider said. ‘He’s a man of the world. Why don’t you sit down and tell me about it?’

Potter sat automatically, his eyes flat with apprehension. ‘I wanted to tell you when you came round that first time, but with Lin in the house – suppose she’d walked in and heard? You do see? I did feel bad, with Jen – with Jen—’ His eyes filled abruptly with tears. ‘I can’t believe she’s – you know. Did he do it? Did he kill her? Eddie?’

Slider avoided the question. ‘Tell me about you and her,’ he said, sitting down opposite him.

Potter took out a handkerchief and blew his nose. ‘I never meant it to happen. I mean, with Jen being Linda’s friend, it was a bit too close to home. You don’t shit on your own doorstep, know what I mean? But she was always around, Jen was –
you
know,’ he went on pleadingly. Nothing propinks like propinquity, Slider thought. ‘I mean, she was a bit of all right. You never met her, but she was a real smasher. And when she started coming on to me – well—’

‘What man could resist?’ Slider said.

Potter looked relieved at his understanding. ‘It’s not that I was looking for it. I’m not the running-around sort. Oh, I’ve had my moments,’ he added modestly. ‘I mean, before I married Lin I was in the merchant. Well, it goes with the job, know what I mean? I’ve had women all over the world. Some of them eastern tarts, you wouldn’t believe the things they can do! Oh, don’t get me wrong, I love my wife. All right, since I been married there’s been one or two occasions, but all very discreet. But, well, when it comes down to it, a
man’s a man, if you get my drift, and when it’s offered him on a plate—’

‘Jennifer Andrews offered herself on a plate?’

He shrugged. ‘Let’s face it, Jen was a sparky girl. I wasn’t the first and I won’t be the last.’ He didn’t seem to see the incongruity of those words. ‘But Linda thought Jen was a snow-white lamb and Eddie was the coal-black villain, and no shades in between, get me? Though if you ask me that man had the patience of a Jonah, with what she put him through.’

‘He knew about her – infidelities?’

‘Yes and no.’ Potter frowned a little. ‘Funny thing, that. I mean he was jealous, and I don’t say he didn’t have cause, but I don’t think he knew anything definitely. That was the ironic bit, really,’ he said, with a mirthless laugh. ‘I don’t think he believed half of what he said he thought she’d got up to. I reckon he probably thought a lot of the time that he was probably being jealous about nothing, when all the time he was probably right.’

Slider felt disinclined to untangle that sentence. He got the general idea. ‘So let’s get this straight, you and Jennifer Andrews were having an affair? How long had it been going on?’

‘Oh, best part of a year, but it was only occasional. I mean, it was tricky for both of us, both being married. We done it once or twice upstairs at the Goat, when Lin was out, but I didn’t like leaving Karen on her own down the bar, and you never knew if she might come up for some reason. And it’s always hard for the likes of me to get time off. You wouldn’t believe the hours involved in running a pub! But, well, Linda likes to have a day’s shopping up west every now and then, and I cover for her, so in return she sometimes tells me to have a day off. I’m a bit of a motor-racing fan, I like going down Silverstone or Brands Hatch once in a while. At least,’ he dropped a ghostly wink, ‘that’s what I tell the wife.’

‘But instead you met Mrs Andrews – where?’

He grinned. ‘Well, that was the beauty of it, Jen being in the estate-agent business: she’d always have keys to houses they were selling, and we’d use one of them. It was a bit exciting sometimes, wondering if the owners were going to come back early and catch us.’ He caught himself up abruptly, and appealed to Slider, ‘It was just a bit of fun, and no-one ever knew about it, so where was the harm?’

Slider refused the wig and gown. ‘So has this got something to do with Tuesday evening?’ he asked.

‘Well, yes, it has. You see, lately she hasn’t been much interested – Jen. Got other fish to fry. She used to hint stuff, to get me going. She wasn’t a nice person, you know. She was a bit of a prick-teaser, if you want the truth. She liked to brush past me when Lin was in the room, and say things that meant one thing to me and something else to Linda. For a couple of weeks she’d been winding me up, and then when I tried to do something about it, pushing me away and saying she had someone else and she didn’t need me. Only when I got mad at her she’d threaten to tell Lin.’

‘But two could play at that game, surely?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, yes, and I said that to her, but she always said I’d never do it, because if I split on her to Eddie, he’d come straight round to me and then Linda would find out, and that would hurt me worse than it hurt her – Jen – because when it came down to it she didn’t care if Eddie did find out, but I did care about Lin. Well, I love my wife, you see.’ He slithered his eyes sidelong. ‘And in any case, the pub’s in her name. I couldn’t get a licence ’cause of a little bit of trouble I had a long time ago. So everything belongs to Lin, officially. If she chucked me out, I’d get nothing. Jennifer knew that, of course. So she used to say to me, “You just be a good boy and do what I say and don’t get any funny ideas. Because I shall be gone soon anyway,” she said.’

‘Gone? Where?’

‘She never said. I s’pose she was just hinting she’d take off one day. She was always saying she was bored with Eddie. I mean, he’s a nice enough bloke, but he’s dull, and she’s a bit of a bright spark, know what I mean? I never thought she’d stop with him for ever. Ambitious girl, was Jen.’

‘So that’s why you agreed to cover for her on Tuesday night?’ Slider asked. ‘She blackmailed you into it?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose you could say that. And of course, once I’d covered for her, I couldn’t let Lin find out. That’s why I couldn’t say anything when you came round the pub. But you won’t let on, will you? I mean, I didn’t do anything wrong, just told a little porkie or two, and what man doesn’t do that to the missus?’

‘Do you know where Jennifer went?’

Potter’s look was eager now, willing to help. ‘No, I don’t, and that’s straight up. She just said she had to see someone. Well, naturally I thought it was another man. She was – excited, see? All worked up and – sort of electric, like it was a bit dangerous. She liked a bit of danger, did our Jen. That’s why she liked using clients’ houses – give her a charge to think someone might walk in. I said to her, You’ll go too far one day, I said. I s’pose,’ he added dully, ‘that’s what happened in the end.’

‘So she left at about seven thirty, and you’ve nothing more you can tell me?’

‘That’s right. Old Eddie only just missed her. When he came in the first time and I went to chuck him out, he said he’d just seen Jen drive away and he wanted to know where she was going. I said she’d gone home with a headache, and he said I was lying, because she’d gone in the other direction, so I said in that case I didn’t know where she was because she’d told me she was going home. Well, I
didn’t
know where she’d gone, did I? I s’pose he realised I was telling the truth – anyway he seemed to believe me and away he went. But the second time he come in he was pretty drunk, and he said, I know you know where she’s gone, he said, and if you don’t tell me I’ll smash your face in. I said to him if there was any smashing of faces in, it’d be me that done it to him, and I told him to go home and sober up, because I didn’t know where Jen was and that was all about it. Well, after a bit I managed to get rid of him, and that was that.’

‘You don’t think he knew about you and Jennifer?’

‘No,’ Potter said, with clear certainty. ‘He’d have said if he did.’ Interesting, Slider thought: evidently Eddie hadn’t believed the guv’nor of the Mimpriss. It just went to prove that jealousy is all in the mind. ‘No,’ Jack said, ‘he just thought I knew who she was with and wouldn’t tell him, but I think he believed me in the end that I
didn’t
know. Because I didn’t, did I?’ This accidental cleaving unto veracity seemed to give him some perilous comfort.

‘Do you know who else Jennifer Andrews was – seeing?’

Potter shook his head. ‘Well, no. I don’t know for certain that she
was
seeing anyone else. I just wouldn’t be surprised if she was. I mean, no-one found out about her and me, did they?’

It was possible, of course, that the landlord of the Mimpriss was merely making mischief and guessing right by accident; but the picture Slider was forming of Jennifer Andrews suggested that she liked to wield her power over people and enjoy the credit for her bad behaviour. If he read her right there would be at least one other person who knew about Jack Potter, but it would be someone who couldn’t make use of the information, as Potter couldn’t about the last mystery appointment.

He no longer wondered that someone had wanted to murder her. He only wondered there had not been a queue; he’d have taken a low number himself. But it was still obvious who was clutching ticket number one. It was time, Slider thought, to have another chat with Eddie. He must remember, if sympathy for this long-suffering man threatened to overcome him, that if Freddie Cameron were right, it had not been a murder of impulse, of the man driven to a hasty lashing out he instantly regretted. If she had been smothered while comatose, then a degree of premeditation had been present. He must have waited for her to fall asleep: plenty of time for temper to cool and better instincts to take over.