Shallow Grave (6 page)

‘Would you say she and your daughter were friends?’

His lip curled. ‘Frances hasn’t the knack of making
friends.
Never had. She and Jennifer Andrews had acquaintances in common and sat on the same committees. And, of course, the husband did quite a few jobs for us. You took him away, I see.’ He nodded towards the windows that looked out on the street. ‘Poor devil. Driven to it by that frightful woman. The man should be decorated for performing a public service, not hanged.’

‘We’re not allowed to hang anyone nowadays,’ Slider reminded him.

‘More’s the pity.’

‘You seem to be very sure it was Andrews who killed her.’

‘Oh, please, Inspector, play your parlour games with someone else! The body turns up in a hole in my terrace, which by complete chance was dug by the victim’s husband – with whom she was on famously bad terms! It’s hardly a challenge to the intellect!’

‘Why were they on bad terms?’

Dacre seemed to lose interest quite abruptly. ‘I have no idea,’ he said, and turned his face away with a stony expression. ‘I don’t interest myself in other people’s domestic affairs.’

‘Do you remember when you last saw Mrs Andrews?’

He seemed to consider not answering, and then said, ‘On
Sunday morning. She called on Frances briefly. Something about arranging the flowers for the church, I believe. I didn’t see her – Frances went out to her, in the hall. She didn’t stay long.’

‘Did she come to see her husband here, while he was working?’

‘I sincerely doubt it. But how would I know? I can’t see the terrace from here.’

‘Do you always sit in this room, then? I noticed there is a desk and typewriter in the other room, which looks out on the terrace and garden. Is that where you write?’

‘I don’t write any more,’ he said irritably. ‘In case it has escaped your notice, I am a dying man.’

‘I’m sorry, sir. I do have to ask questions—’

‘About the protagonists in this sordid affair, perhaps. You do not have the right to interrogate me about my own activities!’ He put a hand rather theatrically to his forehead. ‘I must ask you to leave me now. I tire easily these days.’

Slider stood up patiently. ‘I shall probably want to ask you some more questions later.’

Dacre snorted. ‘If you insist on wasting my time in this way, you must take the consequences. However, since Jennifer Andrews was obviously
not
killed on these premises, you would be better advised to find out where she died and how she was brought here. Why don’t you try to find out who put her body into the hole?’

Slider felt his hackles rising. ‘Thank you for the valuable advice. I would never have thought of that for myself.’

Dacre’s face darkened. ‘How dare you display your insolence to me! You are a public servant! I pay your wages!’

‘And my parents paid yours!’ Slider went cold all over as he heard himself say it. In the brief silence that followed Dacre’s eyes opened very wide; and then, surprisingly, his face cleared and he began to chuckle.

‘Yes, I dare say they did! I am justly rebuked. You must forgive me my occasional self-indulgence, Inspector. At my time of life, being rude to people is the only kind of bad behaviour one is still capable of.’

To the right of the Old Rectory, beyond the gravel parking space and hard by the overweening hedge, was St Michael House, which had presumably been named by someone who had never shopped at Marks and Spencer. It was one of those 1920s joke Tudor houses, stucco above and herringbone brick below, with so many pitch-covered beams, horizontal and vertical, it looked as though it had been scribbled out by a child in a temper. It had an oak front door studded and bedecked with extraneous pieces of iron, hysterically quaint diamond-pane casements, and cylindrical chimneys so tall and elaborate they looked like confectionery. If you could have snapped them off, they would undoubtedly have been lettered
Merrie Englande
all through.

Not that WDC Kathleen ‘Norma’ Swilley, owner of the most fantasised-about legs in the Met, thought in those terms. Walking up the brick front path to start the house-to-house, her verdict was, ‘What a junky old dump!’ She lived in a brand new flat in a brand new block in West Kensington, and had no use for things antique, false or genuine. The newer the better, was her motto; and if whatever it was could function on its own by means of electricity, so much the better. She’d have had electric food that ate itself if she could.

When she reached the front door, there were so many bits of old iron attached to it that it took her a while to work out that the bell was operated by a pull-down handle on a shaft. The instant it rang, however, the door was opened by the householders, who must have been crouched behind it waiting, and she was glad-handed and whisked into the lounge with the avidity of an Amway induction. Defreitas had been right about that, it seemed: the Mimpriss residents were aching to be in on the act.

The inside of the house was at one with its exterior. The lounge had cast-iron wall lights in the shape of flaming torches, a wheel-shaped iron chandelier supporting electric candles, and a vast herringbone-brick inglenook containing a very small gas log fire. Perhaps to foster illusion, a log basket sat on the brick hearth, filled with real logs and pine-cones: Norma bet the old dame dusted them daily, probably with the Hoover attachment. The furniture was all fumed oak and chintz-covered; there were display cabinets full of the sort of limited-edition figurines that are advertised in the
Sunday Times
magazine, Vernon Ward framed prints on the walls, dried flower arrangements everywhere, and a row of royal-commemorative plates around the picture rail.

Mr and Mrs Vanhurst Bright – Desmond and Mavis, they assured Swilley eagerly and watched until she wrote it down – were in their sixties and gave the same impression of careful prosperity as the house. His face had the over-soft look of a man who has been thin all his life and only put on fat in retirement, and he wore the willing but slightly tense expression of a very intelligent dog trying to understand human speech. She was thin, brittle and ramrod straight, and looked as though her whole life had been a battle against importunate door-to-door salesmen. She had evidently gone to the same hairdresser as Mrs Hammond, though her arrangement was tinted a fetching shade of mauve; with her chalky-pink face-powder and rather bluish shade of lipstick it made her look as though she were slightly dead. She was dressed in a pink cashmere twinset and heather tweed kilt complete with grouse-claw kilt-pin, pearl earrings, two rows of pearls round her neck, more diamond hoop rings than perhaps the strictest of good taste would think necessary, lisle stockings, and well-polished brogues as brown and shiny as a racehorse’s bum. He was wearing a lovat tweed jacket over a cad’s yellow waistcoat, khaki shirt and green knitted tie, grey flannel trousers, and a beautiful pair of expensive brown Oxfords, which were so unexpectedly large compared with the rest of him that he looked as though he had been inserted into them as a preliminary to being tied up and dropped into the harbour.

Swilley wondered at their immaculate appearance so early in the day. Did they always dress like this, or had they made a
special effort in anticipation of a police visit? The house was immaculate too: perhaps they were the sort that would still change for dinner on a desert island. She bet they had twin beds with satin quilts and his ’n’ hers library books on the bedside cabinets. Well, good luck to them.

‘I’m sorry to have to disturb you—’ Norma began routinely, but they jumped in eagerly.

‘Oh, no, not at all. Our pleasure,’ said Mr Bright, with a social smile.

‘Naturally we were expecting to be called upon,’ said Mrs Bright, ‘and of course we are eager to do anything we can to help in these dreadful circumstances.’

‘It’s our duty,’ Mr Bright added.

‘We’ve never held back when it was a question of duty,’ said Mrs Bright, ‘however inconvenient.’

‘Well, I hope I shan’t have to inconvenience you for long,’ Norma said.

‘Oh, please, not at all, it’s no trouble,’ Mr Bright waffled happily. ‘Won’t you sit down, Miss – er?’

Norma sat on a slippery chintz sofa. Mr Bright looked at her legs with a slightly stunned air and sat down opposite her. Mrs Bright arranged herself carefully in an armchair between them and looked to see what Mr Bright was looking at. A spot of colour appeared in her cheeks. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee, Miss – er?’ she asked, rather sharply. ‘Desmond, shall we have coffee?’

He snapped out of it and began elaborately rising and enquiring about the nature of preferred beverage and Norma saw herself reaching retirement in this mock-Tudor embrace and said quickly, ‘No, thank you very much, no coffee. I’d just like to ask you a few questions and then I can take myself out of your hair.’

He sat again, trying to keep his eyes from her legs and not succeeding very well. ‘Ask away, then,’ he said heartily. ‘It’s no trouble. We’re glad to help.’

‘Not that we have much we can tell you,’ Mrs Bright put in, in a bid for attention. ‘We didn’t know Mrs Andrews well.’

‘She seemed a nice sort of gel,’ Mr Bright rumbled gallantly, and Mrs Bright gave him a sharp look.

‘I wouldn’t say that. I’m afraid my husband is rather susceptible to a pretty face. Mrs Andrews wasn’t really One of Us.
She worked at the pub, you know, the Goat In Boots.’ She gave Norma a significant nod, as though this explained everything. ‘She was rather a forward young woman. One might almost say
pushy.
She’s quite taken over the church social committee,
and
the flower arrangements, and I have to say that some of her ideas of what’s fitting for a religious building are—’

‘My dear,’ Mr Bright interrupted anxiously, ‘she is dead.’

‘That doesn’t change the facts,’ Mrs Bright went on relentlessly. ‘She didn’t understand our ways, and she never seemed to realise where her interference wasn’t welcome.’

‘Oh, come, I wouldn’t say “interference”.’ Mr Bright seemed anxious for his wife not to expose herself. ‘Someone has to organise things and she had so much energy—’

‘Well, I have to say I didn’t like her,’ Mrs Bright said, giving him a nasty look, ‘energy or no energy. She attached herself to poor Frances Hammond, who hasn’t the sense of a day-old chick, poor creature,
and forced
her way into our circle, and then tried to impose her vulgar ideas on us. There’s a time and a place for everything, and
our
church fête is not the time and place for a bouncing castle, or whatever they like to call it.’

Mr Bright appealed to Norma. ‘I always found her very polite. Quite a nicely spoken girl. She was always cheerful and pleasant to me.’

‘Yes, well she would be, wouldn’t she?’ Mrs Bright said sharply.

Mr Bright went a little pink. ‘I don’t know what you mean, Mavis.’

‘Work it out for yourself,’ Mrs Bright snapped, with an appalling lapse from British Empire standards, and clamped her thin lips shut.

Norma, fascinated by this glimpse under the carpet, reflected how odd it was that the more determinedly a couple kept up their shop front, the more eager they were to trot out old grievances before a ‘safe’ audience like a policeman, priest or doctor. She looked at Mr Bright. ‘Tell me what you know about Mr Andrews.’

He got as far as ‘Well,’ when his wife interrupted.

‘We didn’t know him. I’ve heard he’s a good builder, but we have our own people that we’ve used for twenty years.’

‘Kept himself to himself,’ Mr Bright said approvingly.

‘He’s done one or two jobs next door. I can’t say whether he did them well or not,’ Mrs Bright went on, finding another grievance, ‘but I wouldn’t use anyone who wasn’t more careful about leaving things clean and tidy. Only a few months ago I had to speak to him quite sharply about parking his lorry outside our house. Quite apart from spoiling the view, it leaked oil all over the road. There’s still a stain there.’

Swilley tried another pass over the subject. ‘So you have no idea how things stood between Mr Andrews and his wife?’

‘I don’t interest myself in other people’s private business,’ Mrs Bright said loftily. ‘It’s poor Cyril Dacre I’m sorry for. It’s a dreadful thing to have happen on one’s own premises.’

‘All those people tramping about,’ Mr Bright joined in, now the topic was safe again. ‘Journalists everywhere. And in his state of health—’

‘He’s very ill, you know.
Cancer.’
She lowered her voice and almost mouthed the word, as if it were indelicate. ‘It’s dreadful that he should be upset at a time like this.’

‘You know him well?’

‘Oh, of course. Margery Dacre was one of my
dearest
friends,’ Mrs Bright said eagerly. ‘She’s been dead – oh, ten years now?’

‘Ten, it must be,’ he confirmed.

‘Of course, Cyril Dacre is a
very distinguished
man. We’re proud to have him as a neighbour. His mother was a Spennimore before she married – very old Hampshire family.’

‘Wonderful brainy chap,’ Mr Bright said admiringly, and added with faint puzzlement, ‘Odd sense of humour sometimes, but I suppose that comes with being so clever. He writes books, you know.’

‘The parties they used to give, before Margery died! She was fond of music. They had a grand piano in the hall, and they had wonderful musical soirées. Quite famous musicians came to play, friends of Cyril’s. He had friends in every circle – artists, actors, scholars—’