Shallow Grave (41 page)

‘The poor creature,’ Joanna said with feeling. ‘That Andrews woman deserved—’

‘Don’t say it,’ Slider stopped her. ‘It’s not true.’

‘Metaphorically, I meant.’

‘I know what you meant.’

‘Go on, then. What happened next?’

‘A murderous rage came over Mrs Hammond.’ The temper her father had bequeathed her came into its own at last, and
for once in her sorry existence she hit back at the forces that had bullied and mocked and subordinated her, taken from her everything pleasant and lovely and left her with nothing but the shucks and the labour. ‘It was easy to slip a pill into Jennifer’s second whisky. Jennifer went on talking. She was not entirely sober, of course, and I imagine Mrs Hammond’s apparent lack of reaction threw her. She must have expected a flare-up of some kind, but of course Mrs H. had spent a lifetime being meek, patient and silent, and her responses were all bottled up inside. Eventually Jennifer went floppy, and Mrs Hammond got up, put one of the cushions over her face and smothered her.’

Just like that, Joanna thought. Slider had stopped, and she didn’t prompt him, seeing he had gone away, probably back to the long, frequently interrupted, exhausting and harrowing interview he had conducted with Mrs Hammond. For Joanna, the whole story was just a story: she knew none of the protagonists and they meant nothing to her. But through his distress she could catch a glimpse of the reality behind the words; could feel through him the leading edge of the black, bitter cold of chaos and evil that lay under the surface crust of the world and every now and then broke through. He must be so much stronger than her, Joanna thought, to be able to bear such repeated contact with it and still stay on his feet and sane. At times like these she admired him almost painfully.

Sue stuck her head out of the door. ‘Jim says to eat inside. We don’t want your responses to the food confused by the smell of other people’s barbecues.’ They looked at her but didn’t move. ‘Well, shift then,’ she commanded. ‘We’re just dishing up.’

‘What’s all this “we”?’ Joanna said, getting up. ‘From a woman who couldn’t burn water …’

‘We’re a team,’ she said with dignity. ‘He cooks, I taste.’

‘How did he ever manage without you?’ Joanna marvelled. She held out a hand to Slider, and he took it and got up, and then drew her to him and held her a moment gratefully, resting his head against hers. It felt heavy to her, and she knew how much effort it took him not just to lay it on her shoulder and go to sleep.

A long time later, after a prolonged and mostly merry meal, when they were back at her place and in bed, Joanna was
ready for sleep, but felt how the tide had gone out again for him, leaving him wakeful. The talk and the company as well as the food and drink had stimulated him, and she had been glad to see him shake off his sadness and respond. There had been plenty of chat and plenty of laughter to dilute the rest of Mrs Hammond’s strange story, as Jim and Bill between them told it to her and Sue.

For all the rest had been Mrs Hammond’s story, and Joanna, who had never even seen the house, saw with strange clarity, as though watching a film, her shock and fear at finding herself, as her rage dissolved, alone with the corpse, intruder in her familiar kitchen. She watched Mrs Hammond struggling with the hysterical dog, dragging it out to lock it in the storeroom, hurrying away from its muffled barking and scrabbling, to face that lolling dummy on the sofa, and wonder in spinning terror what she was going to do with it.

The downstairs loo was the immediate and desperate hiding place, just to get the thing out of her sight. Then she had returned to the kitchen and paced up and down for hours, trying to think what to do. She couldn’t leave the body where it was for ever. She considered briefly throwing it onto the railway lines in the hope that a train would run over it and thereby advance a reason for the death. Then she thought of burying it in the garden; but the ground was rock hard after the long drought, and how could she dig a hole big enough and fill it in again, all before Eddie Andrews arrived?

And thinking of Eddie she thought of the hole in the terrace, which he had already dug. It was the right size and shape, and she was sure she could get the body that far. She went back to the cloakroom to look at it again, half fascinated, half horrified, and it was then that she noticed how smudged the makeup was. She fetched Jennifer’s handbag and redid Jennifer’s face with her own makeup.

‘But
why?’
Sue had demanded at that point in the story. ‘That was bonkers.’

‘Guilt, shame; some confused idea of covering up her traces,’ Atherton said. ‘You have to realise she was bonkers by that time. But it had the benefit, from her point of view, of reminding her of something that had to be dealt with – Jennifer’s handbag left behind on the sofa.’

She took the handbag with her out onto the terrace and put it down by the wall while she untied the tarpaulin and folded it back. Then she went back for the corpse, hoisted it over her shoulder, and staggered out with it: she was a strong woman, and having nursed her mother and her father, had some experience of handling inert bodies. She put it into the hole, but at the sight of it lying there was overcome with fear and guilt and remorse. As an act of atonement she had straightened the limbs and pulled down the skirt, laying it out decently. Then she had simply knelt there, frozen, unable to think or act.

‘But what was she meaning to
do?’
Joanna had asked. ‘I mean, Eddie was due to arrive next morning. How was she going to explain it to him?’

‘Her idea was to fill the hole in with the stuff that had come out of it,’ Atherton had explained, shaking his head in wonder, ‘and when Eddie came, tell him they had changed their minds about having the work done and send him away. You see, Eddie had said all along that it wasn’t really necessary; she’d insisted out of fear of the terrace falling down, after all the horror stories she’d heard from other people about subsidence. So if she now said she’d changed her mind, there was nothing he could do about it.’

‘Now that is bonkers,’ Joanna had said. ‘Wasn’t he supposed to wonder why she’d filled the hole in with her own hands in the middle of the night? Or why there was so much of the filling left when the hole was full?’

‘You can’t expect someone in her position to think straight,’ Atherton said kindly. ‘It was the best she could manage in the circumstances. But anyway, when it came to it, she couldn’t do it. The thought of throwing earth and rubble into Jennifer’s face might have been enticing in life, but was impossible in death. She was still standing there trying to bring herself to the point when Eddie arrived, much too early, and she realised the night was over and her chance had gone.’

The shock of seeing his wife dead, especially after his drunken ravings the night before, had gone to Eddie’s legs. He told Mrs Hammond to phone the police, sat down on the wall and put his head in his hands. It was at that point Mrs Hammond had seen the handbag which she had left there, practically under Eddie’s feet, and in a panic she had grabbed it and thrown it
into his pickup, not to incriminate him, but simply to be rid of it. Eddie was in no state to notice. Mrs Hammond had gone into the house, leaving Eddie with time to think how bad things were going to look for him, and to decide on his feeble story of having been home all evening watching television. And so the stage was set, as Slider had said, ‘for the rest of the farce’.

Joanna felt his chest move under her cheek in a sigh, and she pressed herself a little closer for comfort – his and hers, both.

‘What will happen now?’ she asked, knowing he would still be thinking about it.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. Mrs Hammond was in custody; Dacre had been found a bed in the clinic where he had his treatment, and from his state of collapse it seemed unlikely that he would ever leave it. The problem of the dog had been solved by Alf Whitton, who had willingly taken it into his cottage next door. Sheba had gone with him without a struggle, and he had seemed happy to have a dog about the place again. ‘She knows me, she’ll be all right with me, poor old girl,’ he had said, and Slider had thought it would be a good permanent home for the creature, should such a thing become necessary. The house – that lovely old house he had coveted – was empty. For centuries it had grown and changed, matured and mellowed harmoniously, sheltering generations of normal, happy families. Now in one short week its peace had been destroyed, perhaps – who could know? – for ever. It was such a terrible, pitiful waste, he thought.

But that was not what Joanna meant, of course. ‘Porson thinks the CPS won’t go for it,’ he said.

‘But you’ve got her confession.’

‘They won’t go on a confession these days, not after all those overturned sentences. There’s got to be good material evidence as well.’

‘But you’ve got – what, the scarf?’

‘Can’t prove that was Jennifer Andrews’.’

‘The fingerprints on the handbag – didn’t you say they matched Mrs Hammond’s?’

‘Yes, but they could have got there any time. Jennifer visited the Old Rectory frequently.’

‘What about the traces of makeup on the cushion?’

‘That’s suggestive, but not enough on its own; and even with
the Rohypnol in the bloodstream, we can’t prove it was Mrs Hammond gave it to her. The trouble is, you see, that the CPS is judged on results. If they take a case and don’t win it, it’s a slap on the wrist for them; too many failures and bang goes their bonus. And they’ve got budgets – prosecutions are expensive, and Mrs Hammond is low priority, quite apart from the winnability factor. In the old days, when the police conducted their own prosecutions, we’d have a go if we were sure, and if we lost, well,
c’est la guerre.
Now we catch ’em, and the CPS shrugs and let’s ’em go.’

‘Is that why you’re so down?’ she enquired delicately.

‘No. Not entirely,’ he amended. He was silent a moment, and she waited for him. ‘So many lives have been ruined. Jennifer, Eddie Andrews, Mrs Hammond; her sons – how will they live with it? Dacre’s last days turned into horror. Janice Byrt. Lady Diana.’

‘It’s not your fault. It’s Meacher’s, for being a greedy, unprincipled tart. And Jennifer Andrews’, for being a spiteful, heartless tart. And Mrs Hammond’s—’

‘For being what? A put-upon tart?’

‘For being a murderess,’ Joanna said robustly. ‘Nobody made her do it. And it was her who let Eddie Andrews suffer by being wrongly accused, not you. She should have owned up. You don’t need to feel sorry for her.’

‘I don’t – not for that. For the rest of her life, perhaps.’ He thought about her reluctantly, and saw, quite separated from the meek and bullied woman of his first acquaintance, the monster in the kitchen – as if they were two different people. The monster had slipped Jennifer Andrews the drug, and then waited for it to take effect before killing her. Waited and watched. That was what horrified him. It had not been the action of an instant, it had been slow, calculated, deliberate; and he couldn’t convince himself otherwise than that, at the moment Mrs Hammond had smothered her victim to death,
she had enjoyed it.

He dragged his mind away from the image, which he knew from experience was going to dog him for a long time. ‘Well, she’s paying for it now, anyway.’ Horror and shame and guilt were her portion. ‘And even if it never comes to court, she’ll have to live with it for the rest of her life. Her father’s dying. Meacher will never speak to her again. Perhaps her sons won’t either.
She’ll never be able to serve on any more church committees. She’ll be ostracised – all alone in that house for ever.’

‘Well,’ Joanna said, ‘maybe after all it’s really Gerald Hammond’s fault, for leaving her in the first place for a younger woman.’

‘Oy,’ he protested.

‘You asked for it. Listen to me, my darling dingbat, I think you are wonderful: clever, resourceful, thoroughly professional, honest, full of integrity; and kind and tender-hearted into the bargain. I am very proud of you – and very proud to be here in bed with you, too.’

‘Really?’ he said, almost shyly.

‘One thing you can be absolutely sure of is that I’m here because I want to be.’

‘It’s your bed.’

‘Don’t nitpick. All right, you’re here because I want you to be. I’m trying to tell you that I love you.’

‘Tell me, then. Don’t let me stop you.’

‘I love you, Inspector.’

‘I love you, too.’ He kissed her, long and thoroughly, and then settled again with her head on his shoulder. ‘Are we going to be all right, do you think?’

‘What, you and me? It should be me asking you that. Have you really settled things with Irene?’

‘I think so. I hope so. Of course, there will always be problems. And I’m going to be pretty tapped until the children leave school.’

She didn’t say anything to that. Pretty tapped was putting it mildly, if the experience of various of her divorced musician friends was anything to go by. And that meant she would be tapped too. It wasn’t that she had wanted him for his money – fat lot of use that would ever have been! – but her life as a self-employed musician was doubly precarious: she might fail, or the work might fail. Was it unreasonable or base of her to have hoped that if ever she did get together with a man, he would provide a little fall-back security for her? Setting aside accident and the various physical ills that attacked violinists, and provided she had no breakdown of nerves or temperament, she could go on playing the fiddle to orchestral standard until, and perhaps after, retirement age; but with new young musicians pouring out of the colleges every year, and
rampant gerontophobia attacking promoters and managements alike, would anyone go on employing her? Just a little security in an insecure world was all she had hoped for; but it seemed that was not to be. She would have to provide the fall-back position for him instead, and try not to feel resentful of the wife and children she would be indirectly supporting.