Shallow Grave (3 page)

He could hear a dog barking somewhere. On his left, the Victorian extension to the house, there were two doors. The first he tried revealed a large, high-ceilinged room, empty of life and smelling pungently of damp. It was furnished with massive, heavy pieces, partly as a dining room and partly as a study or office: a vast mahogany desk with a typewriter and books and papers stacked untidily on it, and a rank of ugly steel filing cabinets occupied the far end. There were two tall windows overlooking the terrace, and one to the side of the house, looking onto the gravel parking space.

The second door opened on the room at the front of the house, a drawing-room, equally huge, with a Turkish carpet over the fitted oatmeal Berber, one whole wall covered floor to ceiling with books, and the sort of heavy, dark furniture usually associated with gentlemen’s clubs. Here and there about the room were framed black-and-white photographs. Slider noted amongst them one of a man in climbing gear against a background of mountain peaks, a group of men ditto, the front row crouching like footballers, and another of a climber with his arm across the shoulder of a well muffled-up sherpa, both grinning snow-smiles at the camera.

The room also contained WDC Swilley, an old man in a wheelchair, and a large woman struggling with a dog. The dog was one of those big, heavy-coated, dark Alsatians, and it was barking with a deep resonance that was making the chandelier vibrate.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman, let her go!’ the old man said irritably. ‘Why must you always make such a fuss? Stand quite still,’ he commanded Slider, ‘and she won’t hurt you.’

The dog, released, sprang unnervingly forward, but stopped short of Slider, sniffed his shoes and his trousers, then looked up into his face and barked again, just once, its eyes wary and suspicious.

‘Good girl, Sheba,’ the woman said nervously. ‘Good girl, then. She won’t hurt you.’

Slider had known a good many dogs in his time, and wouldn’t have wagered the hole in his trousers’ pocket on the temper of this one. He offered his hand to be sniffed, but the dog flinched away from it, and then he saw that its ears were bald and red and scabbed with some skin complaint, which made him both wince and itch in instant sympathy.

‘Poor girl,’ he said quietly, ‘poor old girl,’ and the dog waved her tail uncertainly.

But the old man snapped, ‘Sheba, come
here!’
and the bitch turned away, padded over to the wheelchair, and flopped down, near but just out of reach.

‘I’m so sorry,’ the woman fluffed, blushing awkwardly. ‘She’s a bit upset, you see. She wouldn’t hurt a soul, really.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Frances, shut up!’ the old man snapped. ‘You don’t need to apologise to him. And what’s the point of having a guard dog if you tell everyone she’s harmless?’ He looked at Slider with a kind of weary disgust. ‘I despair of women’s intellect. They have no capacity for logical thought. The Germans had the right idea: confine them to
kinder, küche,
and
kirche.
Trouble is,
this
one’s no bloody use for the first two, and the last is no bloody use to me. Who are you, anyway? Another of these damned policemen, I suppose.’

Slider passed from Swilley’s rigid expression – was she suppressing fury or laughter? – to look at the old man. He had a tartan rug over his legs, and his upper half was clad in a black roll-neck sweater and a crimson velvet smoking jacket: very sprauncy, but that jacket, with the scarlet of the Royal Stuart plaid, was an act of sartorial vandalism. He sat very upright, and Slider thought he would have been tall once; now he was thin, cadaverously so, with that greyish sheen to his skin and the bluish tint to his lips that spoke of extreme illness. He had a full head of white hair, though that, too, had thinned until the pink of the scalp showed through, like the canvas on a threadbare carpet. His hands, all knuckles and veins, were clenched in his lap, and he stared at Slider with eyes that were surprisingly, almost shockingly dark in that corpse-white face, eyes that burned with some desperate rage, though the thin, petunia lips were turned down in mere, sheer contempt. Some poem or other, about a caged eagle, nagged at the back of Slider’s mind. There was nothing really aquiline about this
old man’s appearance. A caged something, though. If he was the climber in the photographs, it must be a bitter thing to be confined to a wheelchair now.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Slider, Shepherd’s Bush CID,’ he said, showing his brief. ‘May I know your name, sir?’

The old man straightened a fraction more. ‘I am Cyril Dacre,’ he said superbly.

The woman shot a swift, nervous look first at the old man and then at Slider. That, combined with the annunciatory tone of voice gave Slider the hint, and he was saying in suitably impressed tones,
‘The
Cyril Dacre?’ even while his brain was still searching the old mental card index to see why the name sounded familiar.

‘You’ve heard of me?’ the old man said suspiciously.

The woman crackled with apprehension, and Swilley, trying to help, swivelled her eyes semaphore-style towards the bookcase and back, and, concealed from Dacre by her body, made the unfolding gesture with her hands that in charades signifies ‘book’. But – and fortunately – Slider really had heard of him and remembered just in time why, so he was able to say with obvious sincerity, ‘Not the Cyril Dacre who wrote all those history books I learned from in school?’ How many times had he opened one of those fat green tomes and seen that name on the title page?
A
Cambridge History of England by
Cyril Dacre.
Volume VII, The Early Tudors, 1485–1558.
A name so well known it had become generic, like Fowler or Roget: ‘All right, settle down now, and open your Dacres at chapter seven …’

‘I am indeed Cyril Dacre the historian,’ Dacre said, and there was no mistaking the pleasure in his voice. ‘Why does it surprise you?’

‘Your name was such a part of my schooldays, it’s like meeting – oh, I don’t know – a legend,’ Slider said. For some reason, when he was at school he had always assumed that the authors of all textbooks were long dead, so it was even more unexpected to come across a live one all these years later. But Dacre didn’t look as if he had too tight a grip on life, so Slider didn’t think that it would be tactful to put it that way.

Dacre waved a skeletal hand towards the bookcase. ‘Of course, my Cambridge History series is only a small part of my oeuvre.’ In his head, Slider heard a ghostly Atherton voice
saying,
‘An oeuvre’s enough,’
and resisted it. ‘Though perhaps when the account is totted up, it may prove to have been the most influential part.’

‘It’s an honour to meet you, sir,’ Slider said, and looked pointedly at the woman, so that Dacre was obliged to introduce her.

‘My daughter Frances. Frances Hammond.’ The woman made a little woolly movement, as though unsure whether to step forward and shake hands or not, caught her toe in the carpet and stumbled. Dacre glared at her and made a sound of exasperation. ‘Clumsy!’ he said, not quite under his breath.

Slider stepped in to rescue her. ‘And there are just the two of you living here?’

‘Yes, that’s all – now,’ she said, in a failing voice. ‘Now the boys are gone. Left. Grown up, I mean. My two sons, who used to live here.’

Slider sensed another
for God’s sake, woman
just under the horizon and turned to the glowering historian to say, ‘I should like to talk to you later, sir, but I’d like to take your daughter’s statement first, if you’ll excuse me.’

Dacre’s eyebrows snapped down. ‘Excuse you? Where are you going?’

‘I’d like to speak to Mrs Hammond alone.’

‘Oh? And what do you think she’ll have to say that I mayn’t hear?’

‘We have rules of procedure which we have to follow, sir,’ Slider said smoothly, ‘and one of them is that witnesses must make their statements alone and unprompted.’

He snorted. ‘Statement? The woman can’t string two words together without prompting. You’d better talk to her here where I can help her.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr Dacre, but I must stick to the rules,’ Slider said firmly. ‘Mrs Hammond, if you’d be so kind?’

She fluttered again and started towards the door, hesitated, and glanced uncertainly back towards her father. Dacre looked irritated. ‘Yes, go, go! I don’t need you. Take the dog with you – and for God’s sake try to look as though you remember how to walk. Why I wasted all that money on ballet and deportment lessons when you were a child I don’t know—’

While he carped, Mrs Hammond called the dog, but it didn’t
move, only looked up at Dacre, which seemed to please the old man, but made Mrs Hammond blush again. She had to go back and take hold of the dog’s collar. Slider held the door open for her, but Mrs Hammond, bent over to tow the dog – for she was a tall woman – misjudged the opening and hit her head on the edge of the door.

Dacre roared, ‘You are the clumsiest moron of a female it has ever been my misfortune to—’

She passed Slider in an agony of confusion, and he shut the door on the dragon, feeling desperately sorry for her. She had a red mark on her forehead, and her eyes were bright and moist. ‘I’m sorry,’ she muttered disjointedly. ‘My father – all this is so upsetting. He’s in a lot of pain, you see. He has pain-killers, but they don’t stop it completely, of course. It makes him rather – cross.’

The childish, inadequate word was somehow the more effective for that. ‘Is he ill?’ Slider asked.

‘Cancer,’ she said. She met his eyes starkly. ‘He’s dying.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Slider said. She looked away. She had let go of Sheba’s collar: the dog was trotting rapidly round the enormous hall, tracking the smell of police feet back and forth across the carpet. ‘Is there somewhere we can go to talk?’ Slider asked.

She gestured limply across the hall. ‘The kitchen – we could – if that’s all right?’ she said. ‘It’s where I usually …’ Slider had to stand aside and make a courtly gesture to get her to lead the way. He could see how her constant ineffectual wobbling would get on Dacre’s nerves; on the other hand, maybe Dacre’s roaring and snapping was what had made her that way. If tyrants proverbially make liars, surely bullies make faffers?

The kitchen was on the far side of the hall, in the third section of the house. Mrs Hammond opened the door onto a room as different as could be from the drawing-room – about twenty feet square, low-ceilinged and stone-floored. Its long casement window facing onto the road was set deep into a wall two feet thick, and there were beams overhead and a stunning arched stone fireplace with a delicately carved surround, which now housed a rather beat-up looking cream Rayburn. Judging by the quality of its stonework, this must have been one of the main rooms of the original house, Slider thought, reduced to the status of kitchen when the house was enlarged.

Slider turned to his hostess. Frances Hammond,
née
Dacre, was a big woman – not fat, but tall, and with that unindented solidness that comes with a certain age. Slider put her in her middle fifties, but it was not altogether easy to tell, for her clothes and hair and general style made her look older, while her face, if one could take it in isolation, looked younger. It was a soft, creaseless face, pink and somehow blurred, with uncertain eyes and a vulnerable mouth. She made Slider think of a child of about ten finding itself trapped by sorcery in someone else’s body. Perhaps that accounted for her lack of co-ordination: she moved like someone coping with an alien planet’s gravity. But she might have been pretty once, and could have been handsome even now had anyone taken the trouble to encourage her. Her hair, in the dull, too-old-for-her style, was light brown and softly curling, and her eyes were large and brown and rather fawn-like.

‘What a splendid room,’ he said to her, to prime the conversation.

She looked pleased, but nervous. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, moving her hands vaguely. ‘I like it. I tend to sit here mostly.’ There was a saggy old sofa, stuffed with a variety of cushions, standing endways on to one side of the Rayburn, and an old-fashioned high-backed oak settle facing it on the other side. ‘It’s warm and quiet, and Father – well, he finds – he likes to be alone for reading and working and …’ She seemed to run out of steam at that point. Her voice had a faded, failing sound to it, so that she started her sentences feebly and lost impetus as she went along.

‘You don’t worry about his being alone, in his condition?’

‘He rings if he wants me. The servants’ bells are still …’ She glanced towards the indicator above the door, one of those boards with little handbells on brass springs. ‘And he has Sheba with him most of the time, though sometimes she gets on his nerves. And then he …’

‘What’s wrong with her ears?’ he asked, turning to look at the dog; it seemed restless, tracking round the kitchen with its nose to the floor, ears flicking with irritation.

‘Oh, it’s nothing catching,’ Mrs Hammond said at once, as though she had been accused of it many times. ‘It’s a nervous complaint, the vet says. Or maybe hormonal. It makes it difficult to …’ Fade-out again. It was like listening to Classic FM in a poor reception area. ‘She’s a bit upset, poor thing, with all this … I’ll just shut her out.’

Mrs Hammond opened a door on the far side of the kitchen, giving Slider a glimpse of a stone passageway with doors on either side – storerooms, he supposed – and called the dog. It did not obey, and she was obliged to catch it by the collar and drag it out, nails protesting on the stone floor, and shut the door quickly. Coming back, Mrs Hammond said, ‘Would you like a cup of tea? Or coffee. Or anything.’