Shallow Grave (14 page)

‘Why do you?’ she countered.

Slider sat down. ‘There was a message on the machine last night for “Jojo” to call Ted Bundy. He seemed to think you knew his number well enough for him not to have to leave it.’

‘What it is to have a detective in the family,’ Joanna said, licking the foam off her top lip in an unstudiedly sensuous way that made Slider’s trousers quicken. ‘He’s a trumpet player.’

‘Ha! I knew it! And why does he call you Jojo?’

‘Because he’s a nerk,’ she said. ‘Ted’s all right, but you wouldn’t want to get cornered by him at a party. And everyone knows his number, dear heart,’ she assured her fidgety mate. ‘He’s a part-time fixer – organises small ensembles for private parties and catering gigs and the like. All right if you haven’t got any other work: not much money, but usually plenty to drink. I once subbed in on a gig he fixed for a wedding reception at the Heathrow Hilton. I still can’t remember much about it, but the bride flew off on the honeymoon alone while the groom was having his stomach pumped at Hillingdon Hospital.’

‘Innocence itself. I hope you feel suitably chastened,’ Atherton said to Slider.

‘Oh, shut up,’ Slider scowled, and to Joanna, ‘I missed you.’

‘I missed you too,’ she said.

‘Well, that’s all right, then.’

‘What have you been up to while I was away?’ Joanna asked generally.

‘A murder on the Mimpriss Estate,’ Slider answered.

‘Sounds like that Agatha Christie novel where everybody dunnit,’ Joanna said. ‘Anyway, you can’t have a murder on the Mimpriss Estate. It’s far too posh.’

‘Well, up to a point, Lord Copper,’ Atherton said, amused.

‘To be fair,’ said Slider, ‘we can’t be absolutely sure it was murder.’ He outlined the case so far for her.

‘If Freddie Cameron says it’s murder, don’t you have to take his word? He’s never wrong, is he?’

‘Hardly ever.’

‘You’ve got the old man saying the victim was a bossy cow, the cleaner saying she was a multiple adulteress, and the friend
saying she was an angel and the husband a jealous monster,’ Joanna summarised. ‘But whether she did rude things, or the husband only thought she did, it comes out the same, doesn’t it? Obviously he’s the best candidate.’

‘Especially when I tell you my latest news,’ Atherton said. ‘Andrews was in and out of various local pubs all Tuesday evening, in his work clothes, drinking steadily, and at intervals telling anyone who would listen that he was looking for his wife, and when he found her he was going to kill her. And at ten forty-five or thereabouts he got chucked out of the Mimpriss for trying to get into a fight with the landlord. Don’t you want to know what about?’

‘Do tell,’ Joanna invited daintily.

He told. Brian Folger, the landlord of the Mimpriss, was one of those leering, slippery customers whose every word and gesture is loaded with sexual innuendo. ‘The way he thrust a cloth-shrouded hand inside a glass to dry it was positively gynaecological,’ said Atherton. Folger was a thin, bald man with little, suggestive eyes, and a wet, carnivorous mouth like one of those meat-eating plants. All the time he spoke his fingers were straying as if of their own accord into various cavities, slipping into his mouth and up his nose and into his ears like an involuntary overspill of lubricity. Atherton had caught himself thinking that Folger’s nose even looked like a penis – long, fleshy and flexible with a bulbous end. It gave a whole new significance to sneezing.

Folger made no bones about the quarrel with Eddie Andrews. ‘Oh, he comes in here a lot. On his way home from work usually. Well, some pubs don’t allow working clothes. I say the money’s the same, and a working man’s got a right to his pleasure, hasn’t he? We’ve got nothing in here to get dirty. I don’t mind what stains a man’s got on his trousers, as long as he gets the right thing out of ’em. His money, I mean! Ha ha!’ All his conversation was like that.

‘I bet his customers love him,’ Joanna remarked.

On the evening in question, Andrews had come in at about half past six and had a couple of pints, making them last an hour. ‘He said there was nothing to go home for, because his wife was out working that evening,’ Folger had said. ‘I made a little joke about his wife being a working girl, see, but he never
picked up on it. Anyway, he went about half past seven. Then he comes back middle of the evening.’

‘What time?’ Atherton had asked.

‘It must have been about an hour later. Half eight, say. He has a pint. He’s looking depressed, like, so I ask him, how’s the lovely wife, still showing off her assets down the Goat? He says no, she’s not there. He thought she was, but he’s gone over there and just seen her drive off somewhere. He’s driven past his house, but her car’s not there either. So I say something about what she’s up to, and he gets a bit shirty. I say, you want to learn to take a joke, mate, and he says how would I like it if everyone was after my wife. I says, my wife? I’d sell bloody tickets, I says, only who’d buy one? So he says if he knew where she’d gone he go after her and wring her neck. And he drinks up and he’s off again. About ten to nine, by then.’

‘Did he say where he was going?’

‘Nah, he just storms out in a temper. Anyway, he’s back again about ah pass ten. Getting to be a right little bar-fly, I says to him. He has a couple o’ shorts in quick order, and I ask him if he’s found his wife yet. He says no and mutters something about he’s not gonna let her work at the Goat any more, so I says, little joke, like, if Jack Potter’s finished with her, I wouldn’t mind having her behind my counter. He says he doesn’t want her to be a barmaid, I says, who said anything about being a barmaid?’ Folger winked horribly. ‘Then he starts getting nasty. I’m not having that. I tell him to get off his high horse, everybody knows why Jack Potter give her a job. If that’s all he’s giving her – because between you and I and the bedpost, Jack Potter never says no to it if it’s free, and all the nice girls love a sailor, know what I mean? Anyway, I says to Eddie, when she gets sick of the nobs at the Goat, she can come over here and give me a turn – and I’ll even pretend she’s the barmaid if it makes everybody happy. So then he tries to start a fight with me, and I chuck him out. Must a’ been about quart’ to eleven then.’

At this point in the narrative, Joanna said, ‘What a sweetheart. Do you think there’s any truth in any of it?’

‘Maybe,’ Atherton said thoughtfully. ‘Jack Potter was very nervous and very evasive when I spoke to him, and his story sounded like a load of Tottenham. He said Jennifer went off somewhere, which fits what Folger says Andrews told him,
but he didn’t seem to have a convincing reason for covering for her.’

‘That’d stand a follow-up,’ Slider said.

Atherton nodded, and went on, ‘Andrews was also in the First And Last during the evening – after his first visit to the Goat, to go by the timings – and he was there again at around eleven, trying to get a drink, being refused, and telling the barman his wife was cheating on him and if he found her he’d kill her.’

‘People say that sort of thing all the time,’ Joanna said. ‘Doesn’t mean they’d really do it.’

‘But in this case,’ Slider said, ‘the person he said it about is dead. I’m sorry, because I didn’t want to think Andrews was guilty of murder – and such a cowardly murder, if Freddie’s right – but it’s certainly looking bad for him.’

Atherton lowered his pint to half mast with some satisfaction. ‘I think I’d better have another little
parlare
with the guv’nor of the Goat, see if I can’t make him come clean about the real nature of his relationship with Jennifer A.’

‘All right, and when you’ve done that, I’ll interview Andrews again. Now we can table his movements up till eleven o’clock, it may be enough to make him tell us the rest.’

‘Especially when you apply the delicate sympathy over how badly you think he was provoked,’ Atherton said.

‘That’s not cricket,’ Joanna said sternly.

‘I wonder where she did go, though,’ Slider mused. ‘And was it innocent or guilty?’

‘If she was guilty with Jack, she was probably guilty elsewhere,’ Atherton said. ‘One thing, though – we now know she drove away from the Goat, so that means either she or the murderer brought the car back later in the evening or night. If anyone saw it arrive back, we might have something.’

‘Talking of having something, are we going to nosh?’ Joanna said. ‘I’m starving.’

‘I’ll go,’ Atherton said. ‘What does anybody want?’

While he was up at the counter ordering their food, Joanna asked Slider, ‘Were there any other messages for me?’

‘A couple about work. I haven’t cleared them off the tape.’ He hesitated. ‘I’ve had some news, though.’

‘Oh?’

‘Irene’s moved back into the house.’

She stared, reading his face. ‘With the children? Has she split with what’s-his-name, then?’

‘It’s hard to tell. She was very evasive about it – all she’d say was that they’ve decided not to live together for the time being.’

‘Oh, Bill, what now? It’s not going to be more trouble for us, is it?’

‘It needn’t be for you.’

‘If it is for you, then it is for me. What’s going on? Is she trying to get you to go back to her?’

‘I don’t think so. It sounds,’ he said slowly, ‘as if her friend Marilyn has told her that if she moves back into the marital home she’ll get a better settlement in the divorce.’

Joanna thought about that for a moment, sipping her pint. Slider watched her, knowing that she was choosing her words – perhaps her thoughts, too – carefully. She didn’t want to say unkind or disparaging things about Irene, to seem petty, spiteful, grasping or demanding, to belittle anyone’s pain or inflate her own. She wanted to come out of it all with her character intact – not to make herself look good, he knew, but because her own self-esteem rested on it. ‘And will she?’ was what she eventually said.

‘Yes and no.’

She grinned at him. ‘I used to be indecisive, but now I’m not so sure.’

‘What I mean is that the courts decide these things on relative need. They don’t take fault into account any more, which is what I can’t get her to understand. Okay, while she was living with Ernie, her needs would have been assumed to be taken care of, though not the children’s.’

‘You mean you wouldn’t have had to pay maintenance for her, only for them?’

‘Right. But even without Ernie, the courts will expect her to get herself a job. They won’t expect me to keep her for ever.’

She raised her eyebrows. ‘I didn’t know that.’

‘Nor does she. The good old days of skinning the erring husband down to his socks are over – though it’s all going to change again, apparently, when the new legislation goes through in 1999.’

‘And what about the house?’

Atherton came back. ‘Grub’s on its way. What house?’

‘Mine,’ Slider said.

‘Oh, sorry, private conversation?’

‘I don’t know what there is about my life that you don’t already know.’ Slider shrugged.

‘Oddly enough, neither do I,’ Atherton said. ‘Shall I go away again, or hum loudly?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ He turned to Joanna again. ‘The house is pretty academic, really. It’s not in negative equity, thank God, but what’s left after the mortgage won’t be enough to buy a greenhouse. But if she goes to court they could order it sold so that the proceeds can be split. And then where would she be?’

Joanna looked grave. ‘Homeless?’

Slider rubbed his hair up the wrong way in anxiety. ‘I can’t let that happen.’

‘Wouldn’t she go back to Ernie?’

‘But if she didn’t? Or couldn’t? I’ve told her if we agree to a settlement between us, the courts will uphold it. But with Marilyn needling her, she doesn’t trust me.’

Joanna laid a hand briefly on his. ‘She must be mad.’ Atherton looked at her and away again. He didn’t think she’d grasped the implications yet. Then she asked, ‘What sort of settlement?’

‘I couldn’t let them be homeless,’ Slider said again.

Now she saw. She removed her hand and put it back round her pint. ‘You’d go on paying the mortgage.’

‘Until the children leave school,’ he said.

‘Or university, or home, whichever is the latest,’ she qualified. Her voice was as neutral as Bird’s Instant Custard. ‘You’d go on paying the mortgage, and the house insurance.’ He nodded minimally. ‘And the bills – gas and electricity and so on.’

‘Yes.’

‘And maintenance for the children, of course. And for Irene?’

He looked at her helplessly. ‘She’s never been out to work since we were married. She couldn’t get a job now. What could she do?’

‘Bill, that’s your whole income accounted for. What are you supposed to live on? Something has to give.’ She knew what. Living with her he didn’t have rent to pay, but he had been contributing to household expenses. That’s where the only
slack was. Joanna would have to keep him, effectively, so that he could keep his family. She tried not to let her mouth harden, but she could never hide from him. ‘Let her go to court,’ she said at last.

‘They’re my responsibility,’ he said.

She looked at him with enormous sadness. ‘And I’m not.’ It wasn’t a question. They were back to where they had begun: Irene and the children were real life to him, and she was fun and magic and fantasy, but essentially separate, independent, outside him, the thing that, however little he would ever want to, he could jettison, because she could manage without him. He could put down his pleasures, but not his burdens.