Grave Concerns (29 page)

‘What about Willard?’

‘He’s hiding in his study. It’s all too much for him – not surprisingly. I think he can be relied on for some basic shopping and that’s about it. The nephew’s still around, too, which is a big help. He seems very sensible.’

‘Where was he yesterday? There was no sign of him while I was there.’

‘He’s got himself a job at a local cinema. Works afternoons and evenings. Seems all set to stay until he starts his degree course, if they’ll have him.’

Drew tried to think. ‘Dr Jarvis – what about Gwen? What am I supposed to do now? Have you spoken to Genevieve about it?’

‘Not since the baby arrived, no.’

‘You were aware, of course, that she was worried that Willard might have killed her mother,’ Drew ventured. ‘At least, that’s what she told me. But now it looks as if he’s got an alibi.’

The doctor made a sound which came over as scornful dismissal. Drew changed the subject swiftly. ‘Has she chosen a name for the baby?’

‘Not as far as I know,’ the doctor said stiffly. ‘When I saw her she was considering Apricot – but I think I talked her out of that.’

Drew laughed. ‘Well, thanks for phoning,’ he said easily. ‘Give her my best wishes when you see her.’

‘You don’t understand,’ the doctor said urgently. ‘She wants you to go and see her – today. As soon as you can. That’s what she wanted me to tell you.’

‘Let me go instead,’ Maggs suggested. ‘I’ll say you can’t get away, and I’d love to see the baby.’ She grimaced at the blatant untruth. ‘I’ll tell her she can give me a message for you.’

‘She won’t like it,’ Drew warned her. ‘She’d be furious if she knew I’d told you everything.’

‘Well, I’ll be better than nothing. And I might pick up some clues that you’ve missed. I might get a chance to chat with the nephew.’

‘He won’t be there. He works at a cinema – probably won’t be home till eleven or so. You can’t stay that long.’

‘No,’ she agreed regretfully.

‘In fact, I’m really not sure about you going at all,’ he persisted. ‘Genevieve isn’t likely to want to talk to you. She hardly knows you.’

‘Can’t I just ask her if she wants you to continue with your detective work? I can easily
say you’re tied up here, running the business, but you thought it would be rude if nobody showed up.’

Drew was handicapped by his conscience. The birth had changed things substantially and the aftermath with Karen had fixed his resolution not to see Genevieve again. ‘Oh, all right then,’ he said snappily. ‘You can go after we close this evening – if you don’t mind doing it in your own time.’

The rest of the afternoon was unusually full of activity. An enterprising travelling salesman for a coffin manufacturer found his way to Peaceful Repose Funerals, and did his utmost to persuade Drew that he had a need for a stock of oak veneer coffins with satin linings. Drew pointed out the lack of storage space; the ideology of his business, which favoured less substantial containers for the deceased; the unrealistic prices he’d be expected to pay. The man had an answer to everything, but he eventually left unsatisfied.

Maggs drafted more advertisements for the pets’ cemetery, to be inserted in the county magazine and a local newsletter. ‘We ought to
fence off another corner for ashes plots,’ she suggested. ‘And do some special ads for them, as well.’ Drew agreed, bolstered by the prospect of another as yet untapped source of income.

As if to confirm the feeling of progress being made, someone then phoned with an enquiry about natural burials; his old mother was fading slowly away in a nursing home. Drew assured the caller that they could provide a full service at low cost, and that he could be contacted at any time.

‘I’m going to have to get a mobile phone,’ he concluded afterwards. ‘Otherwise I can’t guarantee to be there to answer queries like this. Nursing homes won’t even wait till morning, usually. And it would be nice to think I can go out in the evening sometimes.’

When Karen collected Stephanie, Drew made a special effort to greet her with a smile. ‘How was your day?’ he asked, grasping her by the shoulders and kissing her. ‘It’s good to see you,’ he added.

She looked at him suspiciously. ‘Why? Has she been playing up?’

‘Not at all. She’s been fine. She had a little friend to play with this morning. I’m officiating at another cremation next week. Nice people.’ He stopped himself, having resolved to keep the conversation on Karen, rather than his own concerns. ‘How was school?’

She shrugged. ‘Heavy going,’ she admitted.

‘We’ll have to do something about it,’ he assured her. ‘You’ll get ill at this rate.’ Remembering Maggs’s comment about depression, he wondered whether he was already too late to save the situation.

Karen shrugged again. ‘Not much we can do about it, is there,’ she said gloomily. ‘Come on, then, nuisance. Let’s get your tea.’ She lifted Stephanie slowly, wincing as she did so, and left the office.

The customary sense of freedom hit Drew as soon as she was out of sight. It was as if a great ball and chain had been disconnected from his leg. He wanted to run outside and dance, or go for a long drive in the van, just because he could. And yet he was still supposed to stay in the office and work at being an undertaker. He eyed the telephone blankly, wondering who he might call to further his own prospects. With a recurring sense of self-disgust, he could think of nothing and nobody but Genevieve Slater.

He tried again to concentrate on other things. Restless and angry with himself, he got up abruptly. Outside, in the last few hours of daylight, spring was growing more rampant by the day. There was blossom on the hawthorn and primroses along the edges of the field. Birds were inexhaustibly preparing for parenthood. Drew
decided to go for a circuit of his domain.

From the office, he turned to his left, walking alongside his western boundary until reaching the fence around the pets’ area. The grave of the labrador was still very visible, a solitary hummock amongst the thickening grass. Drew tried to calculate how many similar graves he might fit into the space, and how they ought to be arranged. Even a dog or cat needed to be recorded properly, and he would have to devise a grid reference system, similar to the one for the rest of the field. Knowing the British passion for pets, families would visit the grave of an animal at least as often as that of a deceased relative.

The fence came to an end at the top of the field, where the railway ran along the far side of the hedge. As Drew reached it, a train passed by; he stood watching it, feeling the age-old excitement that everyone experiences at the sight of passengers hurtling along to an unknown destination. The glamour of travel, of movement at speed, never faded. The woman who had witnessed what had almost certainly been the unauthorised burial of Gwen Absolon, at this very spot. The hedge had grown appreciably since then – there were few sections of it now where anyone inside the train could see into the field, unless they stood up. Last August, he had only just made his intentions public, in his campaign to win planning
permission and community approval for the new cemetery. The people who buried Gwen must have been quick to seize the opportunity.

The original resting place, where Jeffrey had made his discovery five weeks earlier, was now just a patch of earth; the grass was beginning to grow over it once more. The woman had been reburied lower down the field, further to the east. Drew stood beside the first grave, and tried to imagine the sequence of events. What a struggle it would have been to carry the dead woman from the road, how nerve-wracking, trying to dig quickly in case a car or train went past. Why, he wondered, hadn’t they waited until later? Until the last train had gone? Did they have to be somewhere else, to achieve an alibi, or to avoid being missed?

He recalled again the snug way the body had been lying, the cloth wrapped tidily around it, the ground tamped firmly down. Perhaps he was being fanciful, but it seemed to him now that there had been something almost compassionate in the way it had been done. They had taken care not to allow any soil on her face – something that Drew himself had always found very distressing. Even when burying the labrador, he had made sure it was well wrapped up first.

The presence of the Egyptian necklace had to be significant. It would have been so much more
sensible to remove it, if the identity of the body was to remain undiscovered. He ran once more through the clues and connections, searching for the one that would give him the key. For some nudge he could give the mechanism that would bring everything clicking into place.

‘Are you all right?’ Karen’s voice penetrated his musings, an unwelcome interruption. She was standing at their back door, a hundred yards or so distant. He frowned, trying to hold onto his thoughts and raised a hand to wave assurance to his wife that all was well. Something prevented him from calling back. You didn’t shout in a cemetery. You didn’t disturb the ghosts lying all around you. He remembered reading in a book of folklore that a buried corpse was likely to walk again, if given enough provocation. Some were so persistent in their refusal to lie down that their exasperated survivors dug them up again and burnt them. This, Drew suspected, was one strong but unacknowledged motive behind the wholesale swing towards cremation. It left the living free and clear to get on with their lives.

He slowly returned to the office, where Maggs was about to leave. ‘It’s five o’clock,’ she told him. ‘Are we locking up now?’

The odd look she gave him chimed with Karen’s call from the kitchen to check on his wellbeing. He was evidently behaving strangely,
but there didn’t seem to be much he could do about it. He nodded agreement, before locking the front door and exiting through the back with Maggs.

‘Try and keep an eye out for any more goings-on in the field,’ she lectured him. ‘Listen out for cars late at night – there can’t be much traffic through here after dark. I think you should make the gate harder to open. Put a chain round it with a padlock. We need to do something ourselves until the security lights and new locks are fitted.’

Drew pulled a reluctant face. ‘What if we need to get out quickly? Things like that always make me nervous – as if we’re barricading ourselves in, rather than keeping intruders out. We’d be sure to lose the key in any emergency.’

Maggs tutted impatiently. ‘Well, it’s silly to leave it all so vulnerable to outsiders, after what’s gone on. And if something does happen, the locals are going to be onto it right away. They’re obviously building it up into some kind of village scandal as it is. We really don’t need that, you know.’

‘I know,’ he said submissively. ‘And I will do something, I promise. After we’ve had supper, I’ll tie the gate up, and make sure there are no obvious breaches in our so-called security. OK?’

‘It’ll have to be, I suppose,’ she accepted ungraciously. ‘Now, I’m going home for my tea,
and then I’ll scoot over to the Slaters’ house. And you ought to phone the Regent Palace hotel – see if they were really there when they said.’

‘I was going to,’ he said with dignity. ‘Don’t stay long, will you? People with new babies don’t like visitors getting in the way.’

‘She
asked
you to visit, remember? Things can’t be in too much of a state if she can manage to do that.’
Tell her I miss her
, said Drew silently.

At the Slaters’ house, Maggs was causing a subdued disturbance. Willard had let her in, the puzzled frown on his face provoked by her attempt at explaining who she was. He led her into the lounge where Genevieve sat in an armchair with the baby lying along her thighs, wrapped in something that looked like an old cardigan. There was a strong unpleasant smell in the room, which Maggs quickly located as coming from the sofa. It was generously stained and looked wet. ‘Somebody to see you,’ Willard mumbled to his wife. ‘Must be some sort of health visitor.’

Genevieve glanced at her with no sign of recognition. ‘I’m not doing anything wrong, as far as I can see,’ she said defensively. ‘She’s still alive anyway.’

‘No, I’m not the health visitor,’ Maggs said, stifling a giggle. ‘I probably know as little about babies as you do. Don’t you remember me? I’m
Drew Slocombe’s partner. Business partner, I mean. He couldn’t come, so he sent me instead.’

‘Cheeky little bastard,’ Genevieve said carelessly. Maggs did giggle at that, despite the shock she felt at hearing the majestic Genevieve stoop to such language. Genevieve gave her a closer look. ‘Yes, I remember you now. The girl who didn’t want to play nursemaid. I’m beginning to understand how you feel.’

Maggs chose to ignore this. ‘He’s told me about your mother,’ she said briskly. ‘We work closely together, you see – he couldn’t really keep it secret. I’m interested, anyway.’ She realised she was trying to convince Genevieve of her detective credentials. It didn’t seem to be working very well.

‘I’m not,’ said the woman wearily. ‘Not any more. You’ll have to put the whole thing down to pre-baby panic. I was completely terrified, you know. It must have sent me a bit loopy. I wish now I’d left it alone. Let the dead bury the dead – isn’t that what they say? If my mother’s off my back, who am I to complain? She’s never been any use to me anyway, not after all this time.’

Maggs thought of her own mother and felt a flash of sadness at how wickedly some people could waste these most precious relationships. ‘But Drew’s in too deep to stop now,’ she persisted. ‘He wants to follow it all through to the
end – so he can get things straight with the police if need be.’

‘I’m not stopping him,’ Genevieve said. ‘He knows that. It’s just that I don’t really care very much any more. I admit I got myself in a bit of a state about it, but I’m all right now. So – what do you think of her?’

Maggs gave the baby a brief glance. ‘Looks fine to me,’ she said quickly. ‘I’m not really into babies.’

‘They’re nothing like as complicated as people tell you. She seems to know what to do without much input from me. Stuart does the mucky bit, bless him. Not that there’s been much of that yet. He tells me it all starts tomorrow, with oceans of ghastly yellow stuff. Willard’s pretending nothing’s happened – stays out as much as he can, and then sits in front of the computer when he’s here. I don’t know when he last had anything to eat. Stuart does a bit of cooking, luckily, or we’d probably starve. I don’t seem to have worked out how to put this little thing down.’ She closed her eyes and leant carefully back in the chair. Maggs hovered uncomfortably, having found nowhere to sit. The smell from the sofa was still causing her to take shallow disgusted breaths. ‘So,’ she said firmly, ‘Drew’s going to carry on with his investigation. He doesn’t really feel he’s earned the money you gave him yet.’

‘He saved me a fortune yesterday,’ Genevieve said. ‘I thought I was going to have to summon a private midwife – but he did it all instead.’

‘If you had someone booked, you’ll probably have to pay her anyway,’ Maggs told her.

Genevieve shook her head. ‘I didn’t. I hadn’t even got as far as that.’

‘You must be mad,’ said Maggs with feeling. The older woman looked at the girl with eyes full of a sudden naked pain. ‘You could say that, I suppose,’ she whispered. ‘If a bone-deep phobia can be called madness. There is no way I could ever step inside a hospital. They’d have to give me a general anaesthetic first, and keep me under the whole time I was there. I couldn’t even go for an abortion. So I didn’t have any choice. I’ve never had my own doctor, in case he ever insisted I go to hospital for something. So being pregnant had to be a completely non-medical event for me. I’m sure I’ve broken any number of laws, in the process.’

Maggs tilted her head sideways, considering the dilemma. Clear-sighted as always, she made an obvious connection. ‘It’s like your mother’s death,’ she said. ‘All handled unofficially – outside the law? I shouldn’t wonder if you buried her in that field.’ She looked at the baby again. ‘Birth and death – you’re equally careless about both. You think you can do everything in your own sweet way.’

Genevieve gave a throaty laugh, humourless and harsh. ‘I didn’t bury my mother in your field. If I had, why would I have then asked Drew to investigate it?’

‘Conscience? Double bluff?’ Maggs suggested. ‘Keeping your husband from guessing what you’d done? Loads of reasons.’

‘I didn’t, though. I absolutely swear to you.’

Maggs could think of nothing more to say. The brief certainty that she’d resolved the whole matter quickly evaporated. Apart from the sincerity of Genevieve’s denial, there appeared to be a more than adequate alibi, if Drew got confirmation from the Regent Palace Hotel. But she couldn’t help feeling disappointed that she couldn’t prove Genevieve guilty immediately.