Shallow Grave (39 page)

There was no answer. For a moment there was silence; the bright day outside and the dusty air within equally still. Atherton glanced towards his guv’nor, and saw, with a strange chill, that Slider had thought of something, was pursing a train of thought which must have been triggered by something he had just said or noticed. He was preoccupied; he was no longer looking at Dacre. The urgency of his thoughts was almost palpable to Atherton, and he tried anxiously to work out what it was Bill had thought of, because he had a sense of being left behind in a cold place where he very much didn’t want to be.

Then he looked at Dacre. The dying man was etched against the bright window, thin as a Byzantine martyr and with eyes as deep and dark and burning; failing hair making a fuzzy aureole around that thinker’s skull. And then Dacre started shaking, his bunched hands, his knees under the tartan rug, his shoulders, his head. Slowly as a cinematic western shoot-out, he moved one hand to his lap, caught at the rug, pulled it away and threw it down, shoved away the foot-rests, put down his feet and stood up. It was terrible and unnatural, like seeing a tree uproot itself and walk. The dog looked up, startled, and then rose, backing away a step, tail and ears down, unsure what reaction was required. Dacre let go the chair-arms and reached equilibrium. Erect and burning, impressive and frightening as a forest fire, he said with quiet triumph, ‘You’re right, Inspector. I applaud your diligence and persistence. I killed Jennifer Andrews – or rather, I exterminated her! Don’t look upon it as murder, if you please, but as a public service. I killed her, and I am ready to take my punishment.’

Slider rose as well, facing him, and the dog began to growl menacingly; and when Atherton, between them, stood up, she jumped at him, barking. Dacre turned his head and fixed her with a look. ‘Quiet, Sheba! Lie down!’ The dog subsided slowly; but in the moment Dacre was thus occupied, Atherton looked at Slider, and saw that his earlier expression had changed from
the taut, preoccupied look of the man on the scent to a look of sadness and defeat.

‘Please sit down, Mr Dacre,’ Slider said quietly.

Dacre stared a moment, and then lowered himself back into his chair. He did not attempt to replace the rug; his legs inside his trousers were like broomsticks inside a Guy Fawkes effigy. ‘Well,’ he said, and Atherton could see it cost him an effort to speak, ‘what happens now? Am I to be arrested and carted off to the police station?’ He met Slider’s eyes, and some message passed between them, something almost of pleading from the old man, out of a black depth beyond anything Atherton could imagine. Bottom of the trench, sea-bottom, colder and darker than death.

But Slider had no opportunity to answer, for the door opened and Mrs Hammond was there. She registered the scene and a look of alarm came over her vague, indeterminate face. ‘What is it? What’s happening? I didn’t hear anyone come in.’ She came forward, her hands moving nervously. ‘Father, what is it? Are you all right?’

‘Everything is quite all right, Frances,’ Dacre said. ‘Don’t fuss.’

She went on scanning the room, trying to understand. ‘Why is the rug on the floor?’

‘I put it there. Be quiet. There is nothing for you to do here,’ Dacre said. ‘I was merely demonstrating a point to Inspector Slider. And now, having satisfied him on that point, I am going to make a statement, which he will take down to my dictation.’ He looked at Slider, trying for hauteur and almost succeeding. ‘I imagine that will obviate the need to take me to the cells? As you are aware, I am in no condition to flee the country – or, indeed, this house – and I should prefer not to be locked up for the short time that still remains to me.’

‘A statement is all that’s required at this stage,’ Slider agreed neutrally, dividing his attention between Dacre and his daughter. ‘You can make that here as well as anywhere.’

‘What are you talking about?’ Mrs Hammond was looking bewildered. ‘Statement? Father, what’s going on? Statement about what?’

Dacre held her eyes. ‘A statement about how I killed Jennifer Andrews.’

She whitened. ‘No!’

‘I told you, Frances, there’s nothing to make a fuss about.’

‘No, you mustn’t!’

‘I understand it must be a shock to you, but you know I always disliked the woman. I am perfectly happy to confess to my crime and take what’s coming to me. And at my age and in my condition, I have nothing to fear. What can they possibly do to me?’

‘No, Father, no!’ Her face was collapsing in distress, with the slow inevitability of a demolished factory chimney; almost tumbling in anguish. Her hands were twisting about as though they were trying to burrow into her stomach for shelter; her eyes held her father’s pleadingly. ‘Oh, no, please!’

‘Be quiet, child,’ he said, so gently it made Atherton shiver. ‘Leave the room now. I wish to be alone with the officers. No! Not a word. Go!’

The command in the voice was so firm it even had the dog on her feet again. Mrs Hammond dragged out a handkerchief and applied it to her face, covered her trembling lips. She was making hoarse noises, a cross between sobs and gasps, and her eyes were everywhere, but she turned away, to obey as she had obeyed all her life.

And Slider said, ‘Just a moment.’

His voice was quiet, but Mrs Hammond jerked as if she had been hit across the spine with a heavy stick. She stopped, turning only her face back towards him, so that her eyes showed white like those of a frightened horse.

‘Go, Frances,’ said Mr Dacre, but the command had gone out of his voice. It sounded much the same, but it was powerless; an empty firework case. ‘Inspector, I forbid you to speak to my daughter. I forbid you to trouble her with this. I’ve told you, I’m ready to make a statement.’

But Slider only looked at the woman. ‘Mrs Hammond,’ he said, ‘I can quite see how, when you realised the enormity of what you’d done, you wanted to cover your tracks, but how could you let us arrest poor Eddie Andrews? How could you let him take the blame for your crime? That was cruel.’

Atherton looked at Slider.
Her?
he thought.

She turned. ‘Cruel?’ Her face was working horribly, like something trying to escape from under a blanket, and her
voice rose as she repeated,
‘Cruel?
What do you know about
cruelty?’

She flung herself at Slider. Atherton moved fast – the reaction of instinct, which later he would remember and be glad about – to try to interpose himself between them. The dog barked like machine-gun fire and jumped at him, teeth not quite making contact, but keeping him back. But as he tried to fend it off, and Mr Dacre shouted at it and him and Slider almost indiscriminately, Atherton saw that Slider was holding Mrs Hammond, not wrestling with her, that she was not trying to kill him, but weeping on his shoulder, in his arms; a big woman, almost as tall as Slider, too big and ungainly easily for him to comfort.

When sufficient back-up had arrived, Slider pulled Atherton out of the room, which saved Atherton from having to pull Slider out.

‘Are you crazy, or am I?’ Atherton asked urgently. ‘I’d just like to know.’

Slider hardly noticed. ‘Come with me. I need you to witness this.’

‘What?’ Atherton demanded, but he got no answer.

Slider led the way across the hall to the kitchen. The kitchen door was open, the room was empty, cool in shadow, the window a dazzling rectangle of white light. A cup of tea, half drunk, stood on the table, and a library book lay open and face down on the sagging sofa where Mrs Hammond must have abandoned it when she heard the dog bark. Under the scarred polythene protective, the dust jacket showed a passionate embrace, a woman in red, a man with dark hair and huge shoulders. Here it was: love – authentic, romantic, unfailing, marriage guaranteed; every woman’s birthright. What Irene had been promised as a little girl. No, not Irene, this was not the time for that. Frances, woman turned monster, still feeding on the poison, the white refined sugar that warped and rotted.

He crossed the kitchen to the darkest corner and bent over the dog’s basket, probing down amongst the hairy blankets. In a moment he straightened up, with the shredded strip of red silk dangling from his fingers, damp with dog saliva. He felt as though, with a very little encouragement, he would be able to cry.

He turned to Atherton. ‘Jennifer’s scarf,’ he said, in a dead
voice. ‘The one she was wearing the last day, that got lost somewhere between the Meacher house and the grave. I saw the dog chewing it in its basket, but, God help me, I never made the connection until just now.’

Atherton came close and looked. ‘Her scarf?’

Slider was looking round. ‘Here. She did it here, on this sofa, where she always sits – where she was going to go on sitting, drinking tea and reading romances. My God, what a monster!’

‘That pathetic nothing of a woman?’

‘She didn’t take the dog out that morning, as she said she did. I should have realised from the beginning. I did know something wasn’t right about it, but I didn’t know what, and of course I never suspected her – a pathetic nothing of a woman, as you say.’

‘But what—?’

‘Don’t you see? If she’d taken the dog out with her on the terrace that morning, it would have found the body! It would have gone straight to it and barked its head off. But she never said a word about the dog’s reaction to the corpse, and neither did Eddie. And the next-door neighbours, who heard her cry out or shout when Eddie arrived, heard no barking. Because the dog wasn’t there.’

‘But where does that get us? When you said the dog was the key, I thought you meant about the barking in the night.’

‘Yes, I did. I was wrong there, too. My God, I made such a stupid, elementary mistake!’ he said fretfully. ‘And after I’d been warning everyone else –
and
referring to the Christie case. Timothy Evans hanged because no-one entertained for a moment the notion that he might be telling the truth and Christie lying. It was the same with Eddie Andrews and Mrs Hammond. I thought Andrews was trying to distance himself from the trench by saying the work was her idea, but in fact he was telling the truth and
she
was trying to distance
herself.
I should have known the corner of the tarpaulin couldn’t have blown back. It was a still night, and the ropes on the corners showed that he was in the habit of tying it down. It was she who turned the tarpaulin back, because she knew what was under it. But from the very beginning I took her as the standard, and everything had to be measured by her truth. Stupid, stupid!’

‘Don’t beat yourself up. Who would have thought—?’

‘I should have thought.’ He looked at Atherton. ‘There weren’t two possibilities, but three. Either the dog didn’t bark, or they didn’t hear it – or it did bark, and she was lying.’

‘Yes,’ said Atherton.

‘Mrs Hammond had the same access to the Rohypnol as her father. Jennifer went to see her that night. Mr Dacre must have been already tucked up asleep in his bed, and he slept soundly all night. She gave Jennifer a spiked drink here in the kitchen, and smothered her, probably with one of the cushions from this sofa. At some point in the – not exactly struggle, but let’s say transaction – Jennifer’s scarf came off and I suspect got lost amongst the cushions. In her distracted state, Mrs Hammond didn’t notice it, or its absence; but later the dog nosed it out – she was wearing quite a lot of scent, you remember – and carried it to its basket, where I saw it chewing it. Saw, but didn’t see.’

‘But what did Mrs H. do about the dog? If Dacre was already in bed, it must have been in the kitchen with her while she was murdering.’

‘Yes, of course. The dog was upset, and she couldn’t deal with the corpse with it barking and growling, maybe even trying to attack her. She had to drag it out into the passage; but she knew it could get the kitchen door open by lifting the latch – I saw it do it – so she dragged it into the empty storeroom, the first on the left, which had a bolt on the outside. The dog went mad trying to get out – I saw the gouges on the inside of the door, and the empty sacks were ripped where it worried them in its frenzy. But no-one could hear it in there. The room has no window, and those walls are two feet thick.’

‘My God, yes. It’s the perfect cell.’

‘And there the dog stayed all night. It was still in there in the morning when she went out on the terrace to do whatever she meant to do.’

‘And what was that?’

‘I don’t know. There are some things I shall have to ask her, little as I want to. But I think I’ve worked most of it out.’

‘You might let me in on it, then,’ Atherton said. ‘What did she do with the body? Leave it on the sofa?’

‘No, I think she moved it straight away, started dragging or carrying it out as soon as she’d shut the dog in. I don’t know what she meant to do with it in the long run, but I think she got
it as far as the back lobby and then decided to hide it temporarily in the downstairs loo, perhaps because that was the one room she knew her father would never go in – the door’s too narrow for his wheelchair.’

‘Oh, my God, and she sat the body on the loo?’

‘On the closed seat, and kept it in place by tying it to the down-pipe. Freddie said the ligature had a broad, flat section like a luggage strap, and I saw a long webbing dog-lead in the lobby she could have used.’

‘I expect the dog was very much on her mind,’ Atherton remarked.