Shallow Grave (13 page)

Meacher’s expression became grave and helpful, the look of a serious, responsible and well-intentioned citizen. ‘Oh! Of course. About Jennifer Andrews, I suppose? I read the paragraph in the paper this morning. It’s a terrible business. Well, do come in and sit down.’ He retreated to the largest and handsomest of the desks and waved Slider to a deep-buttoned leather swivel chair on the supplicant side of it. ‘Er – Caroline? Could you go and put the kettle on, there’s a good girl.’

The fair girl departed through to the back of the shop, and Meacher took his place at the desk and rested his hands on it, leaning forward just a little, like the headmaster of a fee-paying
school interviewing applicants. ‘I suppose,’ he enquired delicately, ‘that it was murder?’

‘Why should you suppose that?’ Slider delicated back.

Meacher withdrew a fraction. ‘It said very little in the paper, but when a body is found in those circumstances … You’re not saying it was an accident?’

‘My mind is completely open at the moment,’ Slider said blandly. ‘I’m still trying to establish exactly what happened.’

‘Of course,’ Meacher said, with just a touch of impatience. ‘I supposed that was why you were here.’

‘You were one of the last people to see her,’ Slider suggested casually.

‘I doubt that,’ he jumped in sharply. ‘She finished work here at one o’clock on Tuesday. There must have been lots of other people who saw her after me, in the afternoon and evening.’

Slider looked mildly puzzled. ‘Why do you think she was still alive in the afternoon and evening? I didn’t say what the time of death was.’

‘Oh, but—’ He frowned. ‘I’m sure it was in the paper.’

‘It wasn’t.’

Meacher’s frown cleared. ‘Well, murders usually take place during the night, don’t they? I just assumed. Are you telling me she was killed just after she left here, then?’

‘No, I’m not telling you that,’ Slider said. Unfortunately, there was truth in what Meacher said: it was natural to assume that murder took place at night. He had to give him that one. ‘Would you tell me, please, about her last morning here?’

Meacher gave a faint shrug of his elegantly clad shoulders. ‘There’s nothing to tell. It was a normal day. She arrived at the usual time – nine o’clock – did the usual things, and left at one.’

‘She was in this office the whole time?’ He assented. ‘And were there any unusual incidents? Did anyone come in to see her? Did she take any personal telephone calls?’

‘Absolutely nothing happened that I know about, except what you’d expect from a normal working day.’

‘And when she left, did she say where she was going?’

‘I assume she was going home. I don’t know whether she actually said she was.’

Slider was silent a moment. He felt there was something
here, something to be found out. But this was a very cautious witness: unless he could ask the right question he wasn’t going to get at it. You didn’t get to be a wealthy estate agent by giving things away. ‘What was she wearing?’ he asked abruptly.

‘What?’ It took Meacher by surprise.

‘What was Mrs Andrews wearing at work on Tuesday? What clothes was she wearing?’

Meacher hesitated, his eyes watchful. ‘I don’t think I remember.’

‘Try.’

‘She was always smart. I really don’t remember in detail.’

‘Perhaps your assistant would remember.’

‘Caroline wasn’t here. She and Jennifer do different days.’ Slider raised an eyebrow, and he said impatiently, ‘That’s the point of it. She and Jennifer and Liz, my other assistant, each do part time, covering the week between them. They’re never on together.’

Slider nodded. Because of the employment laws, three part-timers cost less than one full-timer. All females, Slider noted. It was funny how ripely handsome businessmen like Meacher always had to assemble a harem about them. He continued to regard Meacher in silence, and finally the estate agent felt obliged to break it, and said, ‘I think it was a navy dress. Yes, with a red belt. I remember now.’

Why had he pretended not to know? What was he afraid of? ‘How well did you know Mrs Andrews?’ Slider asked.

‘She’s worked for me for a couple of years. I wouldn’t say I know her well,’ he said indifferently.

At random Slider said, ‘What sort of car do you drive, sir? An Aston Martin, is it?’

Meacher paused a fraction before answering. ‘No, I sold the Aston last year. It cost too much to run. I have a black BMW now.’

‘Registration number?’

‘The same as my Aston – DM 1. I transfer it from car to car. Why do you ask?’

‘Just routine,’ Slider said. He was poking sticks down holes, that was all; but lo, he’d unearthed another saddo with a personalised number-plate. Any connection? ‘What did you do on Tuesday afternoon? Were you here in the office?’

Another faint pause. ‘No, I went over to my other office, in
Denham. I wasn’t there all the time either, though. I was out looking at properties some of the time – empty properties.’

‘And in the evening?’

‘I had a meal with a friend and went home. Why? What have my movements to do with anything?’

‘As I said, sir, it’s just routine. We like to know where everyone was who was connected with the subject.’ He was framing another question when Meacher changed the subject abruptly.

‘It’s poor Frances I feel most sorry for. It must have been a terribly upsetting thing for her, finding the body like that. I’m an old friend of the family, you know.’

‘No, I didn’t know that.’

‘Oh, yes. I’ve known her for a very long time. I was a friend of Gerald’s – her husband. He and I were at school together. Between you and me, he treated her rather badly over the divorce. She ended up without a roof over her head and the two boys to look after, while Gerry took off to South Africa with the girl and the loot.’ He gave a half-roguish, half-apologetic smile. ‘I have no brief for him. He behaved like a complete swine. Frances would have been out on the street if her father hadn’t invited them to go and live with him. Not that that’s been a bed of roses. I have the greatest admiration for Cyril, but he can’t have been an easy man to live with. Though, of course, Frances’s mother was still alive then, which helped.’

Slider listened with interest to this considerable slice of volunteering from what should have been a donation-free zone. It was a smokescreen, he thought, but meant to distract him from what? It offered, however, a fertile new field for consideration.

‘You’ll have telephoned Mrs Hammond, then, when you heard about it?’ Slider suggested. ‘Perhaps that’s where you got the idea that it happened in the night.’

It was extraordinary to watch the thoughts flitting across Meacher’s face as he wondered what to lay claim to, and what traps were being set for him. There’s such a thing, Slider thought, as being too clever.

‘No,’ Meacher said at last, ‘no, I haven’t phoned her yet. Well, I only heard about it this morning – read it in the paper
– haven’t really had time. I didn’t want to intrude. People don’t want endless enquiries after their well-being at a time like that, do they?’

Slider stood up to go. ‘Well, thank you for your time, Mr Meacher. Oh, by the way, could you let me know where you went after you left here on Tuesday?’

He looked uncomfortable. ‘I told you, I went to the Denham office, and then to look at some properties.’

‘Yes, sir, but I need some addresses. Perhaps you’d be so kind as to make me out a list of the places you went, and the approximate times?’

Meacher reddened. ‘I say, what is all this? Are you trying to accuse me of something? Why should I have to tell you where I was every minute?’

‘No-one’s accusing you of anything, sir,’ Slider said soothingly. ‘It’s a matter of eliminating people from the picture. We get hundreds of reports in from witnesses, and it’s just as important to eliminate the people we don’t suspect, so that we can be left with the ones we do.’

Meacher seemed to accept this explanation without probing its structure, promised but without grace to see what he could do, and saw Slider off the premises with an air of wanting to be sure he’d really gone. Slider went back to his car with his mind whirring like a sewing-machine. Something was going on, but
what? Had
he telephoned Frances Hammond and got details of the finding of the body from her? If so, why had he denied it? Why had he mentioned her at all? And why the hesitation over what Jennifer Andrews had been wearing? And what
had
he been up to on Tuesday afternoon?

He telephoned the station and Mackay answered. ‘Oh, guv, we got the word from Jennifer Andrews’ doctor. She wasn’t on sleepers or tranks or anything. And no heart disease. He says she was perfectly healthy as far as he knew. He hadn’t seen her for eighteen months, and then it was only a holiday jab.’

‘All right,’ Slider said. ‘Nothing from Forensic?’

‘Not yet. But the Potters described what she was wearing, and it was the same at lunchtime and in the evening as what we found her in. So it looks as though she might not have gone home at all.’

Except that her car was there, Slider thought. Did she just leave it there without going into the house? It seemed unlikely she would have gone in and left no mark – no cup or glass used, no cushion dented, no towel crumpled. Unless, inexplicably, Andrews tidied up afterwards. Or perhaps her car was with her elsewhere when she was killed, and the murderer drove it back.

‘Okay. Get on to this, will you? David Meacher, her employer, has a mobile phone – get a list of all the calls he made from it on Tuesday.’

‘Okay,’ McLaren said. ‘But what’s up, guv? What’s he suspected of?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is he’s keeping some little secrets from me, and I want to know what they are.’

The Crown and Sceptre was a Fuller’s pub, so it was worth the extra distance from the station. Atherton came in singing a cheery little policeman’s ditty. ‘If I had to do it all over again, I’d do it all over you …’

Slider, waiting in their favoured corner, looked up. ‘What are you so cheerful about?’

‘Why not? I’ve been on a pub crawl,’ Atherton reminded him. ‘Is that for me?’

‘Do I usually buy my pints in pairs?’

‘I’ll take that as a yes.’ He sat down and took the top off the pint. ‘Ah, that’s better. First today.’

‘I thought you’d been on a pub crawl.’

‘I can’t drink at a pub with no ambulance.’

‘Did you say ambience or ambulance?’

‘Yes. And I’m here to tell you that the First And Last is about as like unto a coaching inn as my dimpled arse is like a Moor Park apricot.’

‘Who said it was a coaching inn?’

‘Jack Potter of the Goat In Boots, that’s who. The F and L, however, is a brewery’s delight. The lounge is all plastic rusticity and elastic Muzak—’

‘That’s easy for you to say!’

‘—and the public is stuffed with every electronic money-snatching device from bar pool to a Trivial Pursuit machine.’

‘I gather you didn’t like it.’

‘The Mimpriss at least was ghastly in an honest, unenterprising way. A bit like the Dog and Scrotum – oversized and underprivileged. How was your estate agent?’

‘Smooth, plausible and shifty.’

‘So what’s new?’

‘He sold his Aston Martin and bought a BMW.’

‘The man has no taste. No wonder you didn’t like him.’

‘Who says I didn’t like him?’

‘Shifty is generally deemed to be a pejorative term.’

‘He had a personalised number-plate, too – DM 1.’

Atherton raised his brows. ‘Now there’s a coincidence. Is bad taste catching, I wonder?’

‘I don’t know, but there was something about him that didn’t ring true. I don’t know what, but I wonder whether he didn’t know more about Jennifer Andrews than he was admitting to.’

‘Ah, well, it wouldn’t surprise me, after what I’ve heard this morning,’ Atherton said, putting his hands on the table in preparation for a speech.

But Slider wasn’t listening. He had seen a shadow outside the window, and now the door opened and Joanna appeared, brown, bare-shouldered, ruffle-haired, with her fiddle case in her hand and her sunglasses pushed up on the top of her head. His heart sat up and begged. ‘Here she is,’ he said.

Atherton looked, and then glanced sideways at his boss. ‘I knew I didn’t have your full attention.’

Joanna came over to them, wreathed in smiles. ‘Ah, my two favourite policemen!’

Atherton made a wrong-answer buzz. ‘That should have been “My favourite policeman and my second favourite policeman.” Thank you for playing.’

Slider stood up and kissed her across the table. ‘Pint?’

‘You know the way to a girl’s heart. God, the motorway was awful this morning! The queue for the Heathrow spur was backed up ten miles down the M4.’ She chatted, as newly arrived drivers do, about the journey. Atherton listened, while Slider fetched her drink.

Putting the glass on the table in front of her, Slider said, ‘Who’s Ted Bundy?’

She looked up. ‘How do you know Ted Bundy?’

‘Why do you always answer a question with a question?’ Atherton said to her.