Shallow Grave (31 page)

Slider put his head in his hands. ‘All you had to do was to take down what he said. Just let him tell you, and write it down.’

‘But, guv, we’ve got a confession,’ McLaren pointed out. ‘You can’t get over that.’

‘A paraplegic terrapin could get over that! Mr Tarrant says Andrews was nothing like the man he saw. He also picked out a Transit van from the cards, not a pickup, as the motor he saw parked on the square – an identification, incidentally, confirmed by the other motor witness we had. The phone-in who saw a man and a woman on the embankment didn’t leave his name. And the woman across the railway lines was too far away to identify the man she saw in the bushes. How long do you think it would take defence counsel to knock that house of cards down, balloon-brain?’

‘But Andrews still confessed. We know it was him. He knows it was him. We’ll get other evidence – bound to.’

‘Andrews is in a highly suggestible state of mind, and his confession is extremely suspect. And now you’ve contaminated the field. How are we supposed to know now what he really remembers and what’s been suggested to him? You were given a simple task to do, basic police work, and you made a complete Horlicks of it. I’m disgusted with you.’

‘Sorry, guv,’ McLaren said, with a stubborn lack of contrition.

‘Oh, go away,’ Slider said. He still had to go and tell Mr Porson his prince was a frog.

Porson, annoyingly, was inclined to side with McLaren. ‘It’s a nuisance, of course, but I don’t think the situation is irredeemiable. It’s not as if we’ve got
no
corroboration. We know he was drinking all evening and threatening to kill her, and we know she was having affairs. And her handbag was found in his pickup. We’ve got enough to be going on with, and other witnesses will come forward in time. Andrews isn’t asking to go home, is he?’

‘No, sir, but—’

Porson held up his hand calmly. ‘There you are, then. Andrews is here completely gratuitously. And if he wants to make a
voluntary statement of his guilt, then it’s his perjorative to do so.’

Slider stumped up to the canteen for a cup of tea and a quiet fume. He found Atherton there at a table on his own, resting his elbow on the table and his chin in his hand like a Scott Fitzgerald débutante, dunking his teabag delicately with the other hand.

‘Your problem is, you always want to know everything,’ he said languidly, when Slider had unpocketed his troubles. ‘You want all the teas dotted and the eyes crossed. Porson’s probably right. And Eddie probably is guilty.’

‘Probably? Where’s your intellectual curiosity?’

‘Oh, I can’t be bothered with all that on a Sunday.’

Slider took a few deep breaths and drank some tea. ‘And to have to stand there while Mr Porson mangles language at me,’ he grumbled, diminuendo.

‘You don’t really mind that,’ Atherton told him. ‘That’s just psychosemantic.’

Somewhat restored, Slider went downstairs again and found Swilley looking for him. ‘I think we may have got something here, boss. A woman’s phoned, who says she was Jennifer’s best friend. And she says she saw Jennifer on the Tuesday evening.’

Janice Byrt lived, worked and generally had her being in that strange and lost part of Hounslow that lay under the flightpath of Heathrow. Once there had been only little villages, tile-hung farmhouses and rustic churches. Then arterial roads had linked them with ribbons of mock-Tudor semis, traffic lights and neat set-back arcades of shops. But the placid life still went on, in a world where people wore hats, and walked to the shops pushing babies in prams; for few had cars, and their sound was but as the trickle of a stream, and you could hear the birds when you went out of doors.

And then the airport came. Now the great white bellies of arriving and departing jumbos flashed like monstrous fish above them, crushing down the sky and leaving a shimmering wake of hot kerosene like a snail’s trail over the frail roofs. Roaring cars and bellowing lorries sucked up whatever air was left, and, to prevent any pocket of peace taking root, satellite dishes on
every house probed the sky for new sources of bedlam, while shops and pubs vomited endless loops of strident pop.

In this insanity of noise and stink, a race of people clung to existence, like those bizarre microbes that manage to live inside volcanoes. The thirties semis had been armoured with triple-glazing and wall insulation, and a cheerful, and to all appearances normal, life went on, monument to man’s astonishing adaptability. Janice Byrt had a little hairdressing establishment on one of the traffic-lit corners where one arterial road crossed another, and the music of the day was regularly informed with the screaming brakes and tinkling glass of yet another driver’s belief that red lights were optional. Her shop front was painted pink, with pink ruched curtains in the windows and the name of the salon hand-painted in curly magenta writing on a pink background over the top:
Hair You Are.
It was an especially good joke, Slider discovered, because Janice came from Lowestoft, where they pronounce ‘here’ as ‘hair’.

She lived in the flat above the shop. Slider parked in the service road in front of the parade, and then found the archway several shops down that led to the granite stairs, which led to the balconies at the back, which gave access to the flats. Inside, the traffic noise was several degrees lower, and when a plane came over it was still possible to carry on talking, though the whole flat trembled like a vibrating bed in a motel, so that Janice’s collection of china figurines tinkled together as though they were chatting in tiny china voices.

‘You get used to it,’ she assured Slider when he asked about the noise. ‘I hardly hear it any more. And those new jumbos are ever so much quieter.’

Slider felt as though his brains were being scrambled by a master chef with an extra large whisk, but there certainly could be no more pleasant, normal and relaxed person than Janice Byrt seemed. He supposed it was natural selection. Those who went bonkers were carried off screaming to a suite at the Latex Hilton, and the rest just got on with their lives.

She had been shocked to learn of Jennifer’s death. ‘I didn’t know a thing about it,’ she said. ‘Well, I don’t have time for newspapers, and I never watch the news on telly – too depressing, all that war and MPs and stuff. It wasn’t till a friend of mine rung up this morning – she’d seen it on the
news last night, and of course the name made her jump. She said she wasn’t really watching, but when she heard the name she looked up, and there was Jen’s picture all over the screen! That give her such a fright! So she rang me up this morning, and she say to me, “What d’you think about our Jen getting killed like that?” and there, I say to her, “I don’t know what you’re talking about, girl.”’ Her accent became stronger as she grew agitated, Slider noticed.

The friend who had rung her lived in St Albans. ‘Val and me were Jen’s bridesmaids when she married Eddie. Would you like to see the photo?’

Slider accepted with interest, and was handed a framed photograph from its place of honour on one of the crowded shelves of the chimney alcove. It was a typical wedding-photographer’s line-up: bride and groom flanked by two bridesmaids and best man, grass under foot and grey stones of the church out of focus behind. There was Jennifer with a glittering smile and meringue hair, scarlet lips and nails, all in white grosgrain, tight bodice and puffed sleeves that Princess Di had made fashionable up and down the land back in another age. She held red roses and white lilies wired into one of those bizarre flat-fronted sheaths designed by florists purely for holding in wedding-photos, and a silver cardboard horseshoe dangled on white ribbon from her wrist. Her other hand rested on the sleeve of a younger, blonder Eddie, bundled into a blue suit patently not his own, and looking, from his expression of bewildered euphoria, as if he’d just had his brains beaten out with a lump of pure pleasure in a silk sock.

To Eddie’s other side stood the best man, a scrawny, raw-faced, crop-haired youth who looked as if he’d only just learned to walk upright. To Jennifer’s other side stood a plump, dark-haired bridesmaid, and Janice.

‘That’s me,’ she said helpfully, pointing. The bridesmaids were in matching Princess Di jobs in bright pink taffeta with circlets on their heads, and small, flat, round bouquets of Valentine-pink roses that looked like Las Vegas wedding-parlour pizzas. ‘They were lovely frocks,’ she said wistfully, ‘only Val had the figure for it and I didn’t. My sleeves kept slipping down.’ Slider remembered being told just recently that no-one said ‘frocks’ any more. Who was that? Yes, poor Janice was small and weedy and flat in every dimension and looked as if her
frock was independently rigged like a bell-tent, and she merely standing inside it, looking meekly out of the hole at the top. In a pneumatic-bust competition with Val, she was definitely the twin who didn’t have the Toni.

Janice took the picture back from him and caressed it with a thumb. ‘It was a lovely wedding. Val’s married now, got two children. I’m the only one not married. That’s the only time I was ever a bridesmaid, too.’ She put the picture back in its special place, probably unaware that she had just told her whole life’s philosophy in four sentences.

‘You’ve known Jennifer for a long time?’

‘We went to the same school. She was Jennifer Harris then.’

‘In St Albans?’

She nodded. ‘She was my best friend. I was ever so shy, and then, well, my mum and dad moved from Lowestoft when I was fourteen, so I didn’t know anybody, and I felt really awkward and, sort of, out of it. I was never much good at making friends. But Jen just came over to me on the first day and started talking to me, and after that she sort of looked after me, and let me go about with her. She was lovely! I mean, she was pretty and everything, and so lively, too, always into everything, always laughing and teasing the boys. She was never scared of anything. And popular! I never did know what she saw in me.’

Slider nodded encouragingly. Every Dame Edna needs a Madge, he thought; and often the wildest extroverts were the most insecure underneath. They needed one quiet, loyal, reliable lieutenant who loved them blindly and uncritically – and also, who would never be a rival. ‘Did you wear glasses at school?’ he asked unwarily, out of his thoughts.

‘Yes,’ she said, surprised. ‘I wear contacts now. How ever did you know?’

He waved it away. ‘Doesn’t matter. Please go on. You kept up with Jennifer when you left school?’

Jennifer went to work in an estate agent’s office, and Janice became a hairdressing apprentice, and was still permitted to hang about with Jennifer’s gang, and play buffer and straight man in Jennifer’s games of seduction with the boys. ‘Of course, it wasn’t the same after she married Eddie, but we still kept in touch, and after she came to London, I decided to come too, to be nearer.’

Though quiet, plain, and shy with boys, Janice was no duffer. She had worked her way up the hairdressing hierarchy and finally opened her own salon which, though not in a fashionable place – or perhaps because of that – had a large and loyal clientele. It was making her a nice little pot of money. ‘I don’t really have anything to spend it on,’ she said to Slider, but without self-pity. ‘I don’t go out much, and I bought the flat cheap from the council years ago so there’s no mortgage. I like to buy things for my nephews – my brother’s boys – and I like nice holidays. But it still builds up. I suppose,’ she laughed deprecatingly, ‘it’s for my retirement, really.’

Over the years, too, Jennifer had come to value the quiet friend more, and had increasingly entrusted her with her confidences. ‘People think not being married I must be really sheltered. But that’s funny what women will tell you when their hair’s wet. I think they feel vulnerable – well, no-one looks their best like that, do they?’ She laughed the little laugh again. ‘I think it’s a bit like being a priest – you know, the confessional? I bet I’ve heard things that would make your hair stand on end. Well, not yours,’ she amended humbly, ‘you being a policeman, but most people. And you don’t have to do everything to know about it, do you?’

‘I should hope not,’ Slider said. ‘So tell me what happened on Tuesday.’

‘Well, Tuesday’s my half-day closing. Of course, Jen knew that. She turns up, oh, about ha’ past four, it must have been. I could see right away she was upset. She comes right in and says, “Give me a drink, Jan, before I start crying and make a fool of myself.” So I made her a gin and tonic, a big one. That was her drink, gin and tonic. I always kept some in for when she dropped in. I like a Cinzano, myself, or a sherry.’

‘Had she already been drinking, do you think?’

‘She wasn’t drunk, if that’s what you mean. But I could tell she’d had a couple. But she was too upset and angry to get drunk. She was burning it up, sort of.’

Slider nodded. He knew that mood. ‘What was she upset about?’

‘She’d been with one of her men that afternoon – David.’ She looked at Slider to see if he knew about him, and he nodded again. ‘She said, “He’s dropped me, Jan, the bastard’s dropped
me. Now what am I going to do?” You see, it was different with David. She was always having affairs, but they never meant much. But she had high hopes of David.’

‘High hopes?’

‘Well, he was posh – you know, educated and upper class. Went to a public school and everything. And he was rich, too. Jen had always wanted someone like that. Eddie – he was a mistake, really. She married him too young. If she’d stayed single a bit longer she never would have married him at all, because they weren’t suited. He was dull, you know? No ambition. Jen wanted to go up in life. And she thought with David she’d really found the right man.’