Shallow Grave (23 page)

‘I know,’ she said again, in a different voice.

‘Matthew sounded so sad on the phone the other night. And if I can’t get her to agree to a settlement and the lawyers come between us, there’ll be a contentious divorce and she’ll get custody, and I’ll be just another weekend father. I’ll have to spend every Saturday of my life in McDonald’s.’

She stepped close. ‘Don’t cry outside a pub, it looks bad.’ He put his arms round her. ‘It will come out all right,’ she said. ‘Go and see her, talk to her. Who could resist you? You’ll work it out.’

‘I love you,’ he said.

‘I know,’ she said for the third time, and he felt her smile against his chest.

Atherton suspected Slider had sent him off to interview the priest on the assumption that it would keep him safe, and resented it. Of course, he mused, many priests through the ages had been seriously bonkers, so it didn’t mean a thing – which Slider must know as well as he did, so it rather spoilt his argument, but he went on feeling resentful for as long as it suited him anyway.

The priest’s house was across the road from the church with which St Michael and All Angels shared him. Atherton needed Slider to tell him the vintage of the church – St Melitus – though he put it down tentatively as (?) late Victorian, or at least not very old (?); but his own eye was enough to tell him that St Melitus Church House and Community Hall had been built, if that was the right word, within the last twenty years. To judge from its neighbours, a large Edwardian house had been knocked down to accommodate it, and it stuck out like a baboon’s bottom: a flat-faced, ugly building of pale yellow brick with a roof too shallow and metal-framed windows too
large for it. It had a porch, which was just a square slab of concrete meanly supported on two metal poles, and some unnecessary panels of barge-boarding by way of ornament, from which the paint was peeling like an unmentionable skin disease. The Community Hall was a single-storey extension to the side, with a flat roof and wire-cast windows. Bountiful Nature was represented by a plant-pot in the shape of a giant boot made of something grey, which looked almost entirely but not quite unlike stone. It stood beside the Church House porch and contained the leggy ghosts of some dead pansies and a flourishing crop of chickweed. The whole complex was surrounded by a liberally stained concrete apron for parking, and had all the warm invitation and spiritually uplifting charm of one of the less popular stalags.

Atherton thought of the aspiring beauty of St Michael’s and the solid harmony of the Old Rectory, and wondered when it was that the church had completely lost its marbles; and what God thought of an organisation that so passionately promoted ugliness. He rang the Church House doorbell, and it was answered by a tall man in khaki chinos, and a black teeshirt inscribed in white letters
If Jesus is your Saviour CLAP YOUR HANDS!.

‘Mr Tennyson?’ Atherton enquired politely.

‘Yes – are you from the police?’

‘Detective Sergeant Atherton. I spoke to you earlier.’

‘Yes, that’s right. Come in.’

Inside, the house smelt like a school, Atherton discovered: dusty, with a faint combined odour of socks and disinfectant. ‘Come through,’ Tennyson said, leading the way to the back of the house. Here there was an open door labelled ‘Waiting Room’, a narrow room facing onto what would have been the garden if it hadn’t been concreted over. It had french doors and two large picture windows – metal framed with wired glass – and since it was on the sunny side of the house it was as hot and dry as the cactus house at Kew. The low window-sills were of chipped quarry tile – as if the room had once been meant to be a conservatory – and along them lay a weary row of dead flies and wasps, desiccated corpses that Atherton could almost hear crackle in the sunshine beating in. The room contained a beat-up sofa and two ‘office’ armchairs, a coffee-table bearing a sordid array of ancient, coverless magazines and a tin ashtray,
the whole underpinned by a cherry-red cut-pile carpet pocked with cigarette burns, and spillings of something that had turned into that strange black toffee you find on carpeted pub floors.

‘Nice place,’ Atherton said. ‘It must cut down on time-wasters.’ Five minutes alone with your troubles in this room, he thought, and you’d slit your wrists – except, of course, that the window glass was unbreakable. On the whole, he’d sooner spend a night in the pokey.

Fortunately, Tennyson didn’t understand his comment. ‘It’s a bit warm, but I’m afraid the windows don’t open. They’ve warped, I think. Probably just as well,’ he added, with unexpected bluntness. ‘Nobody thinks twice these days about stealing from the Church.’

Tennyson was an interestingly gaunt man in his forties, with thick, bushy grey hair and deep-set brown eyes, handsome except that his skin had the dull pallor of the lifelong costive. He had a good, resonant voice, with a faint trace of an accent Atherton couldn’t pin down – somewhere north of Watford Gap, anyway. Tennyson sat in one of the chairs and Atherton, after one dilating glance at the sofa, perched gingerly on the other. Somewhere in the room was a smell of babies, and he was rather fond of the trousers he had on.

He couldn’t resist asking, ‘Don’t you sometimes long to exchange this for the Old Rectory?’

Tennyson shook his head. ‘Couldn’t afford it. I dread to think what their heating bills are like with those high ceilings. And the rooms here are better suited for our purposes. Besides,’ he added, ‘it just wouldn’t be secure. Anyone could break in with those old windows, leave alone the fact that the garage doors don’t lock.’

‘How do you know that?’ Atherton asked with interest.

‘Frances Hammond’s one of our stalwarts. I know the house very well. The oil man delivers through the end doors, and our sexton uses the tap in there, to get water for the flowers on the graves. Mrs Hammond doesn’t mind. She’s only too eager to help. Our best helpers are usually lonely women,’ he added, not entirely as if he were glad about it.

‘And talking of lonely women,’ Atherton suggested.

‘You want to know about Jennifer Andrews,’ Tennyson picked
him up. ‘I wouldn’t have said “lonely” was the best adjective in her case.’

‘No? What would you have said, then?’

‘Predatory.’ Tennyson clasped his hands between his knees and stared broodingly at the carpet. Don’t do that, Atherton wanted to warn him, you’ll go blind. ‘She was one of my flock, a member of the PC, she was on the flower rota, the bazaar committee, the coffee rota, the Happy Club, the Refugees Aid – she was into everything that was going. A valuable helper – but I didn’t like her.’

‘Are you allowed to say that?’

He glanced up with a bitter look. ‘I’m a clergyman, not a saint. I’d sooner have Mrs Hammond’s wool-gathering than Jennifer Andrews’ help, for all her energy. Frances Hammond has the same urges, but at least she knows how to behave herself.’

‘Urges?’

He paused, as if selecting the appropriate words, but when he spoke, it came out with the fluency of an old and oft-rehearsed complaint. ‘There is a certain type of woman who is just attracted to priests. Altar babes, we call them. Something about the dog-collar turns them on – it doesn’t matter who’s wearing it. Young, old, married or single. Sometimes they just gaze at you from afar and sublimate it by helping; but sometimes they make a nuisance of themselves. The worst sort throw themselves at you, always hanging around, trying to touch you, wangling ways of being alone with you.’

‘Jennifer Andrews was one of those?’

‘The worst. The sort that, when they finally get the message that you don’t want them, make trouble out of spite. You’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t with women like that. Have you ever wondered why there are so many stories about priests messing around with parishioners? Sometimes the only way to avoid being falsely accused is to go ahead and do it.’

‘It happens to coppers too,’ Atherton said. ‘The glamour of the uniform. Are you married?’

‘No,’ said Tennyson, ‘but don’t think that would stop them. My married colleagues get pestered to death just the same.’

‘Did Jennifer Andrews falsely accuse you?’

Tennyson gave him a horrible look. ‘What are you implying?’

Atherton spread his hands. ‘I wasn’t implying anything. It was a straight question.’

‘What you’re really asking,’ Tennyson contradicted, ‘is whether I slept with her. And the answer’s no.’

‘But she wanted you to?’

‘What do you think?’ Tennyson said morosely, staring at the floor again.

Atherton summoned reserves of patience. This interview was not without peril after all. If the hideous surroundings didn’t drive him to suicide, he could be bored to death, or choke on the smog of the vicar’s gloom. He decided to try a direct question of fact.

‘When did you last see Jennifer?’

‘Tuesday afternoon,’ he said promptly. ‘I thought you knew that. Isn’t that why you’re here?’

Atherton adjusted smoothly. ‘I want to hear it in your own words. Where did you see her?’

‘She came here, of course. It was about six o’clock, or just before. She rang up earlier to ask if she could come and see me and I said no, it wasn’t convenient, but she came anyway. She knew I’d be here, preparing for the mid-week service at seven. The woman knows my schedule better than I do. If there was any justice in law, clergy could get these women taken up as stalkers. Anyway,’ he responding to Atherton’s prompting expression, ‘she turned up here, smelling of drink, and said she needed to talk to me. I brought her in here.’

Atherton glanced around him eloquently. ‘That ought to have cooled her ardour a bit.’

‘That’s why I did it. She made a fuss about it, said why couldn’t we go to my sitting room or the kitchen. Said why didn’t I offer her a drink and why was I being so unfriendly. I told her I hadn’t much time before service and if she had anything serious to say she’d better get on with it. So she dropped the smarm and took the hint, and it all came out. Her – lover, boyfriend, what you will – had dumped her.’

‘Did she say who it was?’

‘Oh, she made no secret about it. It was her boss. She’d been telling me all about it for weeks, trying to make me jealous – though she’d pretend it was a religious or a moral problem she had, so that she could tell me all the details. Thought it would
get me excited. That’s the trouble with these altar babes, they’re cunning. And you’ve got to listen to them, or they’re straight off telling everyone you don’t care.’

Atherton tried a curve ball. ‘So this was her boss at the pub, was it?’

The bushy eyebrows rose. ‘Good Lord, no. The estate agent, David Meacher.’

‘Have you ever met him?’

‘Once or twice, at St Michael’s events. Just to recognise him. He’s chummy with Mrs Hammond. What he saw in Jennifer, I don’t know.’

‘I should have thought it was pretty obvious,’ Atherton said mildly.

‘I suppose you’re right,’ Tennyson said glumly. ‘Anyway, she said she’d met him that day at a motel somewhere – one of their usual places. They’d spent the afternoon in bed, and then he’d calmly told her it was to be the last time.’

‘Should you be telling me all this?’ Atherton asked in wonder.

He scowled. ‘You asked. I’m co-operating. Isn’t that what you want?’

‘I’m delighted,’ Atherton said hastily. ‘I just wondered whether—’

‘It wasn’t a secret. And she’s dead now anyway, so what does it matter? I’ve told you, she just liked telling me these things as part of her game of seduction. I had to pretend to give her advice, tell her to give up her activities and be faithful to her husband, but that was part of it too, for her. Gave her a thrill.’

This bloke was definitely in the wrong profession, Atherton thought. With his misogyny he should have been a fashion designer. ‘When she told you this about being dumped, how was she? What was her mood like?’

‘She was furious. She thought he had some other woman lined up, and she wasn’t going to be dumped for anyone else. She said, “He’s got some game going, and I’m going to scotch it.” She even asked me if I knew what he was up to – as if I would! I said, “I hardly know the man,” and she said, “All you men like to stick together.” Then she said she was going to get him back, whatever it cost. I told her she ought to be
satisfied with her husband, and stop running around with all these men.’

‘There was more than one, then?’

‘
You
ought to know,’ Tennyson said, shortly and obscurely. ‘But she seemed particularly keen on David Meacher – or that’s what I’d thought. But when I said that about not running around, she said, “I’d drop them all in a moment if you made it worth my while.”’

‘What did she mean by that?’

‘Use your imagination! She meant if I’d go to bed with her. Not that she would have given up the others even if I did. She collected men like badges. It was quantity she liked, not quality.’ He stopped abruptly, as if he thought that was a bit too uncharitable even for him. ‘Well, anyway,’ he went on, in a milder voice, ‘I told her that was out of the question, and got rid of her. I said she knew what she ought to do, and that I had to go and get ready for service.’

‘And what did she say to that?’ Atherton was fascinated by this glimpse behind the scenes of an English vicarage.

‘She said she knew what to do all right, that she was going to make Meacher see her again that night, and when she got him alone, he’d come back to her. And then she went.’