Shallow Grave (35 page)

‘I suppose you’re looking into this business about Mrs Andrews,’ he concluded. ‘Shocking! Is that right she was done away with?’

‘It seems that way,’ Slider said. ‘I see you have the keys to the church.’

‘Who else should have ’em?’ he said, straightening up as though coming to attention. ‘Sexton, me. Alf Whitton’s the name.’ He inspected his palm to see if it was fit for the task, and then offered it to Slider. Slider usually avoided shaking hands with the public, but there was something beguiling about the man and the gesture, and he took the dry, horny palm and shook it briefly. ‘Just been sweeping up,’ Whitton added, jerking his head towards the church. ‘She don’t get so dirty this dry weather, but she do get get dusty. Mondays I sweep, even when there’s not been a service the Sunday; Tuesdays I does the woodwork – dust and polish.’

‘There must be a lot of work in keeping a church like this nice,’ Slider said sympathetically.

‘Oh, there is, there is,’ he said eagerly, ‘but I don’t mind it. I learned all about spit an’ polish in the army, and there’s a kind of rhythm to cleaning, a knack, if you like. Satisfying, it is, seeing things come up. Brass and silver especially: it’s ’ard work, but the results are lovely. There’s a brass lectern in there, shape of an eagle. All feathers! Cuh!’ He jerked his head and lifted his eyes to demonstrate the difficulties of cleaning brazen birds of prey. ‘But it comes up a treat when it’s done. I been
looking after this ’ere church for forty years, give or take,’ he went on, casting an affectionate eye over his shoulder at the grave, grey tower.

‘I should think they’re lucky to have you,’ Slider said warmly.

He looked pleased. ‘Sexton of her and St Melitus’s, but it’s her I like best. Otherwise I wouldn’t’ve taken on the cleaning, not at my age. Used to have a cleaner, up till five year ago, then they said they couldn’t afford to pay for one any more. Couldn’t
justify
it, they said,’ he added, as though it were a particularly nauseating weasel-word – which perhaps it was. ‘Well, I couldn’t stand to see her get grubby and sad, like I seen so many churches, so I said I’d do it. Keep her lovely, I do, though I says it as shouldn’t. But I wouldn’t do it for no-one else. I don’t clean St Melitus’s,’ he said sternly, in case Slider got the wrong idea.

‘You seem to keep very fit on it,’ Slider said.

Whitton jutted his white-bristled chin and slapped himself in the chest. ‘Eighty-two come September. How about that?’

‘Marvellous!’

‘And I still keep the graves,
and
stoke the boiler in winter. Not that that’s a job I like. Messy stuff, coke, and I never did like being down the crypt. Reminds me too much of air-raid shelters. Don’t like cellars and tunnels and such.’

Where Alf the sacred cleaner ran, through caverns measureless to man, thought Slider. Eighty-two and still shovelling it – they bred ’em tough before the war.

‘Wouldn’t mind someone younger taking over the boiler, but where you going to find one?’ Alf went on. ‘Young people today weren’t brought up to service like you and me was. Never think of nothing but themselves.’

‘If you’ve been sexton here all that time, you must know a lot of people hereabouts.’

‘Course I do,’ he said smartly. ‘Know everyone in the square, and the church, all the congregation, the council. Seen ’em come and go. Eight vicars we’ve had here since I been sexton. It’s the trufe! And everyone knows me, what’s more. Knew Jennifer Andrews, if that’s what you’re working up to. Want to have a little chat with me about it, do you?’

‘Yes, if you don’t mind.’

He smacked his lips. ‘Can’t talk with a dry mouth. Want to come in and have a cup of tea?’

‘In?’ Slider queried. In the church, did he mean?

‘My house,’ Whitton said, gesturing across the road.

Slider looked blank. ‘You live nearby, do you?’

‘Church Cottage, next to the Rectory,’ he said patiently, gesturing again.

Now Slider twigged. He meant the small cottage next door on the left of the Old Rectory. ‘You’re the missing householder!’

‘How’s that?’

‘We tried to interview everyone in the square, but we never got a reply from your house, so we thought you were away, on holiday or something.’

‘Away? I don’t go away. Prob’ly wasn’t in. I’m not in much – here and there, doing little jobs.’

‘We tried in the evening, too.’

‘I like to go to the pub of an evening. And even if I’m in, I don’t answer the door. Not at night. Never know who it might be.’

‘And you don’t have a telephone.’

‘Never have had,’ Whitton said triumphantly. ‘Never felt the need.’

‘So how do people ever manage to get hold of you?’ Slider asked in frustration. ‘Suppose someone had an urgent message?’

‘Oh, I’m here and there and round about. People know where to find me. You managed all right,’ he pointed out.

Slider gave it up, and followed the old man across the road to the cottage. In contrast to the baking day outside, it was dark and cold inside Church Cottage, and smelt strongly of damp and faintly of dog. The door opened directly onto the sitting room, which was dominated by a large fireplace with a fire of logs and paper in it made up ready to light. There was a massive beam over the fireplace, which supported a mess of ornaments, knick-knacks, letters, bills, photographs and assorted small junk, and a door beside it which Slider guessed would conceal the stairs to the upper floor. The low ceiling was also beamed, the plaster between them stained richly ochre by years of smoke – an effect refurbished pubs paid decorators large sums to replicate. For the rest there was a thin and ancient carpet on the floor, two old armchairs covered in imitation leather from the fifties
flanking the fire, and a portable television on an aspidistra stand. Under the window was a small table covered by a lace cloth on which stood a birdcage containing a blue budgie. It whistled as they came in, but then fell silent, looking rather depressed. The window was small and heavily draped in nets which kept out most of the light, so Slider was not surprised.

‘That’s Billy,’ Whitton said, noting Slider’s look. ‘He’s company for me, since my old dog died. I’d like another dog, but I haven’t got the time to train a puppy, and I don’t fancy someone else’s leavings.’ He chirruped at the bird, but it just sat there glumly, shoulders hunched, like someone waiting for a bus in the rain.

Whitton led the way through the open door on the other side of the fireplace to the kitchen, evidently the only other downstairs room. It was a narrow room, lino-floored and defiantly unreconstructed: an earthenware sink with an enamel drainer and a cold tap, a geyser on the wall above for hot water, one of those 1950s cupboards with the flap in the middle that lets down to make a work surface, and on a home-made shelf beside it an electric kettle and a double gas-ring.

There was also a wooden kitchen table and two chairs, drawn up under the window. Whitton gestured Slider towards it. ‘Have a seat, while I put the kettle on. I mostly sit in here in the summer, when I don’t have the fire going. It’s brighter.’

It was. Slider sat as requested, and looked out through the window at a neat square of garden, gay with flowers. Where the Rectory’s plot went all the way down to the railway, Whitton’s extended a mere twenty feet, ending in a high fence over the top of which could be seen the walls and roofs of some natty new little one-size-fits-all houses. ‘Your bedders look very nice. Are you a keen gardener?’ Slider asked, convensationally.

Whitton turned from his kettle activities with a bitter look. ‘Used to be. Nothing to be keen
with,
now. Used to go all the way down to the bottom, my garden. Fruit, vegetables, apple and pear trees. Lovely chrysanthemums, I used to grow. Potting shed down the bottom. Greenhouse. And a little bit of a wall I grew figs against. You like figs?’

‘Yes.’

‘All gone now. Sold the land, they did, for development. Cuh! Call that development? Rabbit hutches! I said to them, I seen
that kind of development in a dead bird I found under a hedge. Developed into a maggot farm, it had.’

‘They sold your garden without your permission?’

‘Belongs to the Church, this cottage. They can do what they want. Oh, I got advice,’ he added, seeing Slider’s concern. ‘I asked Mr Dacre what he thought, and he asked Mr Meacher, the estate-agent man, to look into it for me, but it turned out I didn’t have any right to use the land. I didn’t understand the ins and outs of it, but that was how it was in the Law. Mr Dacre’s a proper gentleman. He wouldn’t put me wrong.’

It had led very nicely to the subject. ‘You’ve known him for a long time, I suppose?’

‘Oh, yes. He’s an important person around these parts – practically like the local squire, if you take my meaning. Lived here all his life. His dad bought the Old Rectory from the church when they built the new one in eighteen ninety or thereabouts – that’s that big house on the other side of the square, with the bay windows. Course, they’ve sold that now, too. Vicar’s got a new house opp’site St Melitus’s. Sell everything in the end, the Church will,’ he added gloomily.

‘So Mr Dacre was born in the Old Rectory?’

‘That’s right,’ he said, milking the tea. ‘Only son, he was, and with his father dying when he was only a boy – died of the Spanish flu, just after the First World War – he come into the house then, so to speak, so he never needed to move away. Three older sisters, he had: they all married and went. Then it was just him and his mother. I remember her – she died in, what, ’thirty-six it must have been.’ He put a cup down in front of Slider and sat with his own opposite. ‘Real hatchet-faced woman she was! What I’d call a Victorian matron, if you get my drift. Tongue like a razor blade. And everything had to be just so. Even used to tell the rector off – it was a rector we had then. Used to criticise his sermons.’ He chuckled at the memory. ‘“My husband was a literary figure,” she used to say, “so I know what I’m talking about.” He was in publishing, Mr Dacre’s dad – had his own company. Mr Dacre’s a writer, did you know that?’

‘Yes, I did,’ said Slider.

‘I suppose that’s why he went in for it. Went to university at Oxford, and then started writing books and everything, and
got famous straight off.’ He shook his head in wonder at such cleverness. ‘Got married straight off, too, to a very pretty young lady, and they had a little boy. ’Thirty-two or -three, he was born. Gor, Mr Dacre doted on that kid! Frank, his name was.’

‘So he’s Mrs Hammond’s brother?’

‘Half-brother. I’ll tell you how it was. Terrible sad thing. Mrs Dacre had this message that her dad had been took queer and took to hospital. Winter of nineteen forty, that must’ve been. Anyway, she went over to see him. They lived in South London,’ he added, in the same tone of voice that he might have mentioned Zanzibar or Bogota. ‘So she’s on her way back when the air-raid siren goes off, and she goes down the tube to shelter. That was the night Balham tube station took a direct hit. A bomb goes right through to the tunnel. Sixty people killed. Terrible.’

‘I’ve read something about it,’ Slider said.

‘And the worst thing, so Mr Dacre always said to me, was that her dad wasn’t even really bad. They thought he was having ’eart-attack, but it turned out to be just his stomach turning him up. He had one of them drastic ulcers. By the time she got there, he was getting dressed to go home. So she needn’t’ve gone.’ He shook his head. ‘Ironic, Mr Dacre always said it was. He said God must have a funny sense of humour. He used to talk to me a lot when he was on the council. Tell me all sorts of things. People like him think people like me are a safe pair of ears. Truth to tell, I think they think we don’t understand half what’s said to us.’

Another insight. Slider wondered whether that accounted for his own confidability. ‘So Mr Dacre married a second time?’

‘That’s right. Near on right away it was. Well, he was always an impulsive one. Young Frank got that from him. Anyway, he married a nurse he met at the hospital where they took Mrs Dacre’s body. Margery, her name was. Ever such a nice lady, but not glamorous – older than him – very quiet and shy. Not shy, but—’ He groped for a word.

‘Self-effacing?’ Slider hazarded.

‘That’s it. Like that. I suppose he thought she’d be a good mother for young Frank. Anyway, she was Mrs Hammond’s mother. Born in ’forty-two, Mrs Hammond was, so you can see Mr Dacre didn’t waste any time.’

‘And they called her Frances as well,’ Slider mused.

‘That’s right. It was a bit of a rum do, that was. To tell the truth,’ he leaned forward confidentially across the table, ‘I think he regretted marrying the second Mrs Dacre because, nice as she was, she wasn’t his class, and, like I said, not glamorous. But, well, when a man’s in a state like that, it’s easy to fall for a nurse. And the uniforms they used to wear in them days, with them big white head-things like nuns—’

‘Hard to resist.’

‘That’s right. But then, of course, when he got her home and woke up, like, from the dream, he was stuck with her. A gentleman like him wouldn’t go back on his word, and divorce just wasn’t done in them days. And then when she has her baby, it turns out to be a girl – which Mr Dacre’s got no use for daughters anyway. So I think he named her after young Frank, just to put the second Mrs Dacre in her place.’

Some gentleman, Slider thought. But it was throwing an interesting light on the domestic set-up at the Old Rectory. ‘So he was never very fond of Mrs Hammond?’