Shallow Grave (Bill Slider Mystery) Read online

  About the Author

  Cynthia Harrod-Eagles was born and educated in Shepherd’s Bush, and had a variety of jobs in the commercial world, starting as a junior cashier at Woolworth’s and working her way down to Pensions Officer at the BBC. She won the Young Writers’ Award in 1973, and became a full-time writer in 1978. She is the author of over sixty successful novels to date, including thirty volumes of the Morland Dynasty series.

  Visit the author’s website at www.cynthiaharrodeagles.com

  Also by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  The Bill Slider Mysteries

  ORCHESTRATED DEATH

  DEATH WATCH

  NECROCHIP

  DEAD END

  BLOOD LINES

  KILLING TIME

  SHALLOW GRAVE

  BLOOD SINISTER

  GONE TOMORROW

  DEAR DEPARTED

  GAME OVER

  FELL PURPOSE

  BODY LINE

  The Dynasty Series

  THE FOUNDING

  THE DARK ROSE

  THE PRINCELING

  THE OAK APPLE

  THE BLACK PEARL

  THE LONG SHADOW

  THE CHEVALIER

  THE MAIDEN

  THE FLOOD-TIDE

  THE TANGLED THREAD

  THE EMPEROR

  THE VICTORY

  THE REGENCY

  THE CAMPAIGNERS

  THE RECKONING

  THE DEVIL’S HORSE

  THE POISON TREE

  THE ABYSS

  THE HIDDEN SHORE

  THE WINTER JOURNEY

  THE OUTCAST

  THE MIRAGE

  THE CAUSE

  THE HOMECOMING

  THE QUESTION

  THE DREAM KINGDOM

  THE RESTLESS SEA

  THE WHITE ROAD

  THE BURNING ROSES

  THE MEASURE OF DAYS

  THE FOREIGN FIELD

  THE FALLEN KINGS

  THE DANCING YEARS

  COPYRIGHT

  Published by Hachette Digital

  ISBN: 978 0 7481 3324 6

  All characters and events in this publication, other than those clearly in the public domain, are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1998 Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.

  Hachette Digital

  Little, Brown Book Group

  100 Victoria Embankment

  London, EC4Y 0DY

  www.hachette.co.uk

  Contents

  About the Author

  Also by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  For Tony, my accessory before and after

  CHAPTER ONE

  Eheu Fugaces, Postume

  The Old Rectory, St Michael Square, on the Mimpriss Estate, was the sort of house Slider would have given anything to own.

  ‘On a copper’s pay? Your anything wouldn’t even make a down payment,’ Atherton said.

  Slider shrugged. ‘What’s a man without a dream?’

  ‘Solvent,’ said Atherton.

  It was a long house, built of stone, whose façade reflected three different periods. The middle section had the perfect proportions of classical Georgian domestic, with a fanlighted door and small-paned sash windows disposed harmoniously about it. To the right was an early-Victorian addition, very plain, with tall, large-paned sashes. The section to the left seemed much older: the stone was undressed and uneven, the windows casements, and at the far end were two pairs of double wooden doors like those of an old-fashioned garage. But despite, or even because of, its oddities, Slider coveted it. Whoever had altered and added to it over the ages, they had had a sense of proportion. As with a beautiful woman, he thought, the character in its face only made it more beautiful.

  The Mimpriss Estate was itself an oddity. In the middle of the west London sprawl of Victorian–Edwardian terraces, it was a small area of large and desirable houses, built in the Arts-and-Crafts style at the turn of the century by a wealthy man with a bee in his bonnet. Given the proximity to central London, houses on the estate were now worth small fortunes. For the Old Rectory you were talking a three-quarter-million touch, minimum, Slider reckoned. Atherton was perfectly right, though it was unnecessarily cruel of him to have pointed it out.

  The estate comprised half a dozen streets, with St Michael Square in the middle and the railway running along the back. The church in the centre of the square was dedicated with nice inclusiveness to St Michael and All Angels. Slider turned to look at it as Atherton locked the car, and was mildly surprised. This was no painstaking 1890s copy. It stood in its own small, railed churchyard with all the grave, reserved beauty of the fifteenth century, its grey stone tower rising serenely above the tombstones to dwell among the clouds. ‘There should be rooks,’ Slider said. ‘Or jackdaws.’

  ‘Settle for magpies,’ Atherton said, as one of them went off like a football rattle in a tree overhead. He turned to look at the church as well. ‘It’s old, isn’t it? Not just Victorian?’

  ‘Early Perp,’ Slider said. So, there must have been a village here once. ‘He built the estate round it.’

  ‘He who?’

  ‘Sir Henry Mimpriss. Industrialist and amateur architect.’

  ‘The things you know!’

  ‘I read,’ Slider said with dignity.

  ‘Si monumentum requiris,’ Atherton remarked admiringly. ‘Wren only had a cathedral, and even that had some other bloke’s name on it.’

  It was one of the nice things about London, Slider thought, looking round, that you never knew when you would come across the good bones of an ancient settlement visible under the accumulated flesh of urban development. In this square, as well as the church and the Old Rectory, there was a row of cottages whose Victorian tidying-up couldn’t fool the trained eye, and a pub called the the Goat In Boots whose wavy roof and muddle of rear buildings dated it along with the church. Inn, church, rectory and a few houses: all you needed for a country village – set, in those days, amid the rolling hayfields and market gardens of Middlesex. And then the railway came, and life was never the same again.

  Atherton was reading the church noticeboard. ‘Rev. Alan Tennyson. Tennyson’s a nice sonorous name, but I think the Alan’s a mistake. Lacks gravitas.’

  ‘Make a note to tell his mother.’

  ‘And they only get a service every second Sunday,’ Atherton said. They started across the road towards the house. ‘If this is the Old Rectory, where’s the new one? Or does “old” just mean “former”?’

  ‘Pass,’ said Slider.

  ‘It looks like three houses in a motorway shunt.’

  ‘Don’t be rude. It’s just very old and altered,’ Slider said defensively. ‘The left-hand bit shows the real age. The Georgian face is only skin deep, and the Victorian wing’s been added, by the look of the roof.’

  ‘I’m glad I brought you along,’ Atherton said. ‘And now they’ve g
ot a body. Careless of them. Gin a body meet a body lying down a hole …’

  ‘That’s “doon”, surely?’

  ‘If you insist. But don’t call me Shirley. Shall we knock or go round the side?’

  ‘Side,’ said Slider. To the right of the house – between it and the next house, from which it was divided by a fifteen-foot hedge of that omnipresent British Leyland spruce that someone was soon going to regret not keeping cut down to a manageable height – was a gravelled parking area on which stood a very dirty, light blue Ford pickup with various items of builder’s equipment in the back. Parked at the roadside and blocking it in were a patrol car and the Department wheels – a maroon Orion, which had brought DC McLaren, who had been on duty when the shout came in. At the back of the gravel area was a low wall that gave straight onto the terrace behind the house.

  Slider and Atherton crunched over the gravel, stepped through a gap in the wall, and then stopped.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a patio,’ Atherton said, with a soundless whistle.

  ‘And I thought I was the Philistine,’ Slider replied. ‘That’s not a patio, that’s a terrace.’

  It ran the whole length of the house, a broad and glorious terrace paved with York stone in slabs so wide and worn and ancient they might have been nicked from a monastery, and who knew but they were? Beyond it there was a steep drop to the lawn, which sloped down to a belt of trees, behind which, but hidden at this leafy time of year, was the railway. It should have been a river, Slider thought, for perfection. Still he coveted, country boy though he was at heart. Sitting on this terrace and gazing at the trees, you could almost believe …

  Presumably the forces of nature were exacting a toll on the structure, for there was all the evidence of building work going on: a heap of earth and rubble, another of sharp sand, a pile of bricks, three bags of cement, a bright orange cement mixer, a wheelbarrow with two spades and a pick resting across it, and a blue plastic tarpaulin the colour of the inside of a lottery-winner’s swimming-pool, with frayed nylon rope through the eyelet holes at the corners.

  The tarpaulin was folded back on itself, half covering a long trench dug in the terrace, parallel with its front edge, about three feet wide and two feet deep. The paving stones which had been levered up were neatly stacked away to one side, and an opportunist black cat was sitting on top of them in the sun, its paws tucked fatly under itself and its eyes half closed.

  The builder himself was sitting on the low wall with his hands and his lips wrapped around a mug of tea: a stocky, powerfully built man in his thirties, with untidy thick blond hair, bloodshot blue eyes, weather-roughened cheeks and an unshaven chin. He was wearing mud-streaked work trousers and boots, and a ragged blue sweater over a check shirt. His strong hands, grained white with cement, were shaking so that the mug chattered against his teeth; he stared at nothing over the rim, past the blue-black legs of PC Willans, who was standing guard over him with an air of gentle sternness. It was a demeanour, Slider noted, often adopted by coppers towards remorseful domestic murderers.

  McLaren came across to report. He was eating a cold Cornish pastie straight from the Cellophane wrapper and his lips were flecked with pastry and whatever the pallid glop was that passed for filling. ‘Breakfast, guv,’ he justified himself, seeing the direction of Slider’s gaze. ‘The body’s down the hole.’ With his free thumb he indicated the builder. ‘That’s Edward Andrews – Eddie Andrews. It’s his wife.’

  ‘And presumably his hole,’ Atherton suggested.

  ‘That’s right,’ McLaren said, with a world of significance. ‘He got here very early this morning – earlier than usual – but, bad luck for him, the lady of the house was up even earlier and found the body before he could concrete her in. The plastic sheet was apparently pulled right over, bar a corner that’d blown back, when she found it. It was like it is now when I got here.’

  ‘Householder’s name?’

  ‘Mrs Hammond. Lives here with her old dad. Norma’s inside with ’em – I picked her up on my way here.’ He gestured towards the uniformed constable, Defreitas, guarding the body. ‘Daffy’s got all the gen about Andrews. He lives round here.’

  ‘On a PC’s salary?’ Atherton said disbelievingly.

  ‘Well, not on the estate as such,’ McLaren admitted, ‘but only just round the corner. Woodbridge Road. Anyway, he knows this geezer Andrews.’

  ‘All right, let’s have a look,’ Slider said. He went over to the hole and hunkered down. The victim was lying on her back. She had not been tumbled in, but laid out carefully as though in a coffin, decently composed, her clothes straight, feet together, hands folded one on the other. She was a slim woman in her thirties with well-cut blonde hair (helped, to judge from the roots, but not by all that much), wearing a short-sleeved, fitted dress of navy cotton with a red leather belt, bare legs and strappy leather sandals. She had full make-up on, rather on the heavy side, Slider would have thought, for a woman as attractive as she must have been; and her finger- and toe-nails were painted red to match the belt. Her eyes were closed, and there were no obvious marks of violence on her. She might have been fresh from the mortician’s parlour.

  ‘Expensive scent,’ he said. Even after however long it was lying out in a trench, it had lasted well enough for Slider’s sensitive nose to catch it. He felt her hand: it was cold and stiff.

  ‘Expensive jewellery,’ Atherton said, looking over his shoulder. She was wearing a wedding-ring and an engagement hoop with five large diamonds, a sapphire and diamond dress ring of more expense than taste, a rather nice gold watch and three gold chains of varying thickness around her neck. ‘I wonder why he didn’t take them off? The rings and the watch at least. Shame to bury them in concrete.’

  ‘He says he didn’t do it,’ Defreitas offered.

  ‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ Atherton said.

  Slider stood up. ‘Things must be on the up in the building trade.’

  ‘It’s a good area for it,’ Defreitas said. ‘Lots of work – quality stuff, and no trouble about payment.’ Something about his voice made Slider look up, and he noted that Defreitas seemed upset. He was pale, and there was a rigidity about his expression that suggested he was holding himself firmly in check. His cheek muscles trembled with the effort of control, but he went on steadily, ‘Eddie’s been doing all right for himself. Just built himself a big new house, down the end of Woodbridge Road. Corner of the main road. Fourways, it’s called.’

  ‘Yes, I know it,’ Slider said. He had passed it often over the months while it was being built in what had been the back garden of a big Edwardian house: the Curse of Infill. He had noticed it because it had irritated him that it was called Fourways when it was on a T-junction, not a crossroads.

  ‘Supposed to be really smashing inside,’ Defreitas said. ‘Built it for her.’ He moved his head slightly towards the body, but without looking at it. ‘Her name’s Jennifer.’ He stopped and swallowed a couple of times. Some men couldn’t bear a corpse, even such a seemly and undamaged one as this.

  ‘Take it easy, lad,’ Slider said. ‘You’ll see worse in a long life.’

  Defreitas swivelled his eyes towards Slider and then away again. He was a good-looking youngster, with brown eyes and a lean face and the sort of vigorous, slightly fuzzy tight brown curls that look like pubic hair. ‘I know, sir. But it’s different when it’s someone you know, isn’t it?’

  ‘What do you know about Jennifer Andrews?’ Slider asked.

  ‘She works – worked – part time for David Meacher – you know, the estate agent? – and she did part time at the pub, too. The Goat In Boots, I mean,’ he added conscientiously, ‘not the Mimpriss Arms.’ That was the estate’s own pub, built at the same time as the houses: draughty and uncomfortable, an overblown, over-quaint thing of pitch-pine and vaulted ceilings, like the fruit of an illicit union between a village hall and a tithe barn. ‘The Mimpriss is a bit rough sometimes. The Goat’s where the nobby people go. It’s got a
restaurant and everything. You know, a posh one – nouveau cuisine and all that.’

  ‘How well do you know Andrews?’ Slider asked.

  ‘Just to say hello to,’ Defreitas said. ‘I’ve seen him in the Goat sometimes. He seems a nice bloke. I’ve heard people say he’s a good builder.’

  ‘You drink in the Goat?’

  He seemed embarrassed by the implication. ‘Well, I used to mostly go to the First And Last in Woodbridge Road, but they’ve got music there now and a lot of young kids come in. The Goat’s nice and quiet, more like a village pub. Local people like it quiet. They don’t like the Mimpriss – lets the tone of the estate down, they say.’

  ‘They’re not going to like having a murder here, then,’ Atherton observed.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Defreitas said. ‘A murder like this—’ He swallowed again. ‘It’s quite a toney crime, really. They’ll all want to be in on it.’

  ‘No trouble getting them to talk, then?’ Slider said.

  ‘Getting ’em to stop, more like,’ Defreitas said succinctly.

  ‘Doc’s here, guv,’ McLaren called.

  Out in the road Slider could see reinforcements arriving and the photographer’s van drawing up too. A group of onlookers was gathering on the pavement. ‘Get some crowd control going,’ he told McLaren. ‘And we’d better get Andrews back to the shop before the press arrives.’

  ‘When murder comes, can the Gazette be far behind?’ Atherton enquired rhetorically. ‘D’you want me to take him? I can have a crack at him while he’s still warm. He’s obviously number one suspect.’

  Slider turned to look at him.

  The morning sun shone on Atherton’s face, illuminating the fine, deep lines, that looked as though they’d been grooved with an etching tool, and the indefinable bruised look that Slider associated with people who have been gravely ill. Atherton had not long been back at work, after an extended leave during which there had been doubt as to whether he would come back at all. His knife wound had been slow to heal; and there was the psychological wound as well. But Atherton was not the only one affected by the incident. For some weeks Slider had been obliged to consider the prospect of carrying on in the Job without Atherton, and to face the unwelcome realisation that he didn’t want to.