Shallow Grave (8 page)

‘We don’t know yet,’ Slider said. ‘Did she have heart trouble, do you know, or any chronic condition like that?’

‘Heart? Strong as an ox, her,’ Mrs Attlebury said. ‘Far as I know, anyway. But you’d want to ask him, really.’

‘Oh, we will. But it’s nice to get these things confirmed. Was she on any medication, that you knew about? Did she ever take sleeping pills?’

‘I never heard that she did. There was never any on the bedside table, anyway – or in the medicine cabinet. Her doctor’d be the one to know, I expect. Dr Lands, same as me, she went to, in Dalling Road.’

Slider noted down the name, and she watched him, her mind working. ‘So it wasn’t a road accident, then, or anything like a shooting or a stabbing? I mean, you wouldn’t be asking about pills if it was,’ she said ruminatively, and then seemed to feel this comment lacked proper feeling, for she looked at them defiantly and said, ‘I hadn’t any time for her, if you want to know. She wasn’t a nice person, in my view.’

‘In what way, not nice?’ Slider prompted.

‘Fast,’ said Mrs Attlebury decisively, and made a face. ‘I don’t know how he stood her, to tell you the truth. He had a hell of a life with her, poor soul. All right, she kept herself nice, and I don’t say she wasn’t a smart-looking woman, but it was his money she spent dolling herself up, and she should have been doing it for him, not showing herself off to every Tom, Dick and Harry. I mean, he’s out working every hour God sends to make money for her to spend, and she’s off gallivanting around and flirting with anything in trousers. Oh,’ she said, with a significant look, ‘it wasn’t a secret. I mean, she didn’t bother to hide it. Flirted openly – if it wasn’t worse than flirting. I wouldn’t put it past her.’

‘How did Mr Andrews take that?’

‘Well, he didn’t like it, of course,’ she said. ‘What man would?’

‘Did they quarrel about it?’ Slider asked.

‘What do you think?’

‘Were the quarrels violent?’

‘Shocking! I’ve heard them going at it hammer and tongs in another room when I’ve been cleaning. Heard them over the Hoover more than once – well, she was a loud-mouthed woman, you know, voice like a foghorn. And bossy? Always telling you how to do your job. Had to organise everything – you know the sort. She’d organise a pig into having puppies, that one. Well, it’s not nice for a man, being taken down by his wife like that, in front of other people, like she did. It’s no wonder he got mad.’

‘Did he hit her?’

She seemed to realise at last where this was going. ‘We-ell,’ she said cautiously. ‘I can’t say I’ve ever seen him lift his hand to her. He’s not that type, to my mind. And, like I say, he worshipped the ground she walked on. Except when she got him riled and he lost his temper. But he’s the quiet sort, really.’

‘Those are sometimes the worst,’ Atherton said wisely. ‘Quiet till you push ’em too far, and then – bang.’

‘He could be shocking when he was provoked,’ she acknowledged, ‘but that’s the same as any man. But he’s never hit her that I know of. He’s a nice man. It’s her I couldn’t stand.’

‘Did they have any children?’

‘No, and it’s a pity if you ask me, because he’d have made a lovely dad, and it might have kept her at home a bit more, clipped her wings. But they didn’t, and why I couldn’t tell you, though I expect it was her that said no. Selfish, she was. Spiteful, too,’ she added, looking towards Slider with an old grievance plainly bursting to get out. ‘She changed the flower rota at the church so that I lost my turn, because the week she changed me to I was on holiday. She
knew
that. She just wanted another turn herself; thinks she’s God’s gift – her with her dead sticks and dandelions and runner beans! Load of rubbish! I mean, who wants to look at that ugly stuff instead of proper flowers? I do a nice arrangement, roses and pinks and pretty things like that.
But she says, Oh, Pat, she says, that’s so old-fashioned! Nobody does that sort of thing any more! Never mind if they don’t, I said, it’s what people want to look at that matters, and they don’t want to look at your rubbish, modern or not. It’s like that modern art, dead cows in fish tanks and all that stuff. It’s just plain ugly, I said to her. But you might as well talk to the cat. And, of course, Mr Tennyson backs her up. That’s why he gave her the rota – thinks the sun shines out of her eyes, and no wonder, the way she makes up to him. Making up to a reverent! It’s disgusting to my mind. But she’d flirt with anything in trousers, that one.’

She stopped abruptly, remembering the occasion, and what was required of it. She sipped her tea again, and then said, ‘Oh, well, they say you shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but I speak as I find, and it has to be said, she was a right cow.’

Outside in the sunshine, having seen her off, Slider turned to Atherton.
‘De mortuis?’

‘At least.’

‘I’ve heard things can get pretty fierce at those flower-arranging classes.’

Atherton snorted. ‘And this from the man who thinks oasis is a band!’

‘At least we’ve got a motive now,’ Slider said.

‘The old green-eyed monster: an oldie, but a goodie. And we’ve bust Andrews’ story wide open. Mrs Prattlebury left the house clean yesterday morning, and there’s not so much as a builder’s footmark to be seen, so he couldn’t have gone home after work last night.’

‘Unless he cleaned up after himself.’

‘Hoover ye lightly while ye may? But he wouldn’t, would he? If that’s his alibi, he’d want it to look as if he’d been there. He wouldn’t cover his tracks. It’s not as if there were oceans of gore to clean up.’

‘No, you’re right, of course. I have to admit that it looks as if he didn’t go home.’

‘Crikey, if Mr D. Thomas is convinced, it must be so! Where next, guv?’

‘I think we should pay a little visit to the Goat In Boots.’

‘Ah,
nunc est bibendum.’

‘Come again?’

‘I said, it’s a fruity notion. Lay on, McDuff. I’m right behind you.’

The pub was not open yet, and Slider and Atherton walked in on an argument about whether it should be. Jack Potter, the landlord, was in favour of staying closed for the day, out of respect for the dead.

‘It’s not as if we’ve got the brewery to please,’ he said. He was a wiry, flexible-looking man with a slight and incongruous paunch. He looked in his late forties, with thick black hair brushed back and slightly too long, bulging eyes, and a loose mouth. They came upon him bottling up behind the bar, shifting plastic crates of light ale about with the absent, practised strength of a circus juggler. He was wearing denim shorts, because of the heat, and a dark red polo shirt, which left his stringy, muscled arms bare. They were obviously strangers to the sun, for they were gleamingly white, and so generously veined and tattooed they looked like Stilton.

‘It doesn’t seem right to me to open up when Jen’s – you know,’ Potter went on, with syrupy tact.

‘She’s not “you-know”,’ his wife Linda said irritably. ‘She’s dead. It’s not an indecent word.’

He glanced at her, hurt, and then appealed to Slider. ‘Well, it doesn’t seem respectful, anyway. What do you think?’

‘I can’t advise you on that,’ Slider said.

‘It’s not as if she died in here,’ Linda objected. She was fortyish, professionally smart, so well turned-out that you would never remember after meeting her whether she was attractive or not. Her appearance was designed, like waterproofing, to repel. She was in full fig even this early in the morning, right down to her earrings, with her hair lacquered to immobility in one of those ageless styles only suburban hairdressers can achieve. She had
eyes hard enough to have etched glass, and a chain-smoker’s voice rough enough to have sandblasted it afterwards; but a determined inspection revealed that under her makeup she looked pale and shaken, and her eyes were ringed. She clutched a packet of Rothmans and a throw-away lighter in one hand, and a man-sized Kleenex crumpled up in the other. ‘I mean, no-one could be more sorry than me that she’s dead, but when it comes right down to it, she wasn’t family. Family you shut for,’ she decreed. ‘Not friends.’

‘But she worked here, Lin,’ Jack protested. His eyes were red and watery, and moistened further even as he spoke. ‘I think people would expect it. I mean,’ he appealed to Slider again, ‘they’re classy people round here. It’s all lounge trade – you know, shorts and wine. You don’t want to go offending them. And there won’t be a soul on the estate doesn’t know about it by lunchtime.’

Linda’s voice hardened. ‘I’ve got a full restaurant tonight, and five tables booked for lunch already, and I’m not giving all that away. Besides, they’ll all want to talk about it,’ she added, with an acidulous knowledge of human nature, ‘and where are they going to go and do that, if not here? We’ll have sales like you never saw for a Wednesday. Call it a public service, if you like, if it makes you feel better, but the long and the short is I’m not closing up for the sake of an empty gesture. It won’t bring Jen back.’

Jack looked cowed. ‘All right, love, if you think so. I just want to do what’s right, that’s all. I mean, Jen was—’ His lips trembled and his eyes seemed in danger of overflowing. He took out a handkerchief and honked briskly into it, and then emerged, looking almost shyly at Slider and Atherton, to say, ‘Can I offer you gents a drink, atawl?’

Linda shot him a hard look, and Slider said, ‘It’s a bit early for me, thanks all the same.’

‘Cuppa coffee, then?’

‘Jack, they want to ask questions,’ Linda said impatiently. ‘You get on with your bottling up, or you’ll have the twirlies in before you’re ready. If you’d like to come through to the snug where it’s quiet …’ she said to Slider and Atherton.

Slider fielded her smoothly, ‘I know how busy you must both be, so to save time I’ll talk to you while my colleague has a word with your husband, if that’s all right.’

Linda Potter looked as though no-one had ever conned her in her life, but she nodded briskly, and walked away before him into the private bar.

The pub had obviously been a number of separate rooms, before most of the walls had been knocked out to make one large irregularly shaped one, low-ceilinged, beamed, the upright timbers showing where the walls had once been. The bar was three sides of a rectangle, and the snug was behind the wall on the fourth side, with a wooden serving-hatch through to the bar, and a little brass bell hung on a bracket beside it for service. The snug had one casement window of diamond panes too small and old to see through, though the sunshine streamed in strongly and illuminated the eternally falling dust. The air was heavy with the smell of furniture polish. The cherry-red carpet was tuftily new. There were three small round imitation antique oak tables, and banquettes and Windsor chairs upholstered in a chintz-patterned material. A beam running the length of the wall opposite the bar supported a range of the kind of junk pubs display to make them look homey: leather-bound books, pewter mugs and plates, a copper kettle, a crow-scarer, a set of donkey-boots, wooden butter-pats, wicker baskets. Since the real-ale, real-pub revolution there was a whole new vocabulary of clutter, and presumably merchants who combed the antique shops of the realm and supplied it by the yard.

Mrs Potter slapped the hatch shut, sat down on a banquette, crossed her legs, and extracted a cigarette one-handed from the packet. It was such a dextrous, professional action that it reminded Slider of a prostitute he had once seen up an alley near King’s Cross extracting a condom from its wrapper without looking, using only her left hand. He shook the thought away.

‘Smoke?’ said Mrs Potter.

‘I don’t, thanks,’ said Slider, pulling out a chair and sitting opposite her, sideways on to the table.

‘I don’t usually in here. Get a lot of non-smokers in our class of trade, and I like to keep the snug smoke-free. But this morning – sod it! I’m not going to get through today without my fags. You watch ’em come in later, all the ghouls, to pick over the body.’

She put the cigarette into the dead centre of her crimson lips, and Slider reached across to take up her lighter and strike the
flame for her. She looked at him over the cigarette with her eyebrows raised, and then leaned forward, sucking the flame onto the tobacco with little popping puffs. Then she leaned back again, dragged deep, blew long and ceilingwards, and said, ‘Ta,’ with just enough surprise in her voice to convey the words, ‘It’s nice to meet a gentleman with manners. You don’t get too many of them these days.’ She folded her free arm, the one holding the Kleenex, across her chest, and propped the other elbow on it so that the cigarette was in the operative position just in front of her face. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘So how did it happen? Everyone’s talking about it, but nobody seems to know anything. Not that that stops them talking,’ she added viciously. ‘But they say – well, if she was found where they say she was – it looks like she must’ve been done in.’

Her eyes behind the mascara were frightened, and she looked at him with flinching courage, waiting to hear the worst; dreading it, but facing up to it all the same. The spirit of the Blitz. He liked her a little better. He put the lighter down neatly on top of the cigarette pack and said, ‘We don’t know yet what the cause of death was.’ And because of the fear in her eyes, he added, ‘There were no obvious signs of violence on her.’

‘Oh.’ Linda relaxed slightly. ‘Well, I suppose that’s something. But you do think it was murder?’