The Accomplice Read online

  One of the workmen was explaining to Mr Wilson, who had evidently only arrived minutes before Zita herself, how he had been loosening a strip of earth with a pick when a clod had detached itself in a neat cap-shape and revealed beneath it the upturned bowl of the skull.

  “We’re digging behind it, d’you see what I mean? and a lump of earth just falls down like that, so you can see the back of the skull, like. Then I lift off the top and there’s no mistaking it. It’s a body.”

  “Then we called you.”

  Zita continued to gaze at the skull as they talked. The way the head was tucked into the earth, as if reluctant to emerge from under its quilt, evoked the image of Tom lying under his tightly stretched bedclothes.

  “And stopped digging.” She spoke sharply to cancel out the momentary vision.

  “And stopped digging. I’m not going to touch nothing. Like, it’s for the police to move it, not us. Besides, you never know what you could catch from a corpse. The plague or sommat.”

  “This one never died of the plague. He came to a sticky end.” Mr Wilson pointed to the fracture of the skull. “Someone coshed him from behind. You don’t have to be Sherlock Holmes to see that.”

  “You have called the police, Mr Wilson?” Zita asked. The builder continued to peer at the head, caught between the same suspicion and fear that his young workmen felt and the fascination of the skull itself. He lifted his attention reluctantly. “Yes, I called Mrs Loftus in London and I called the police. They’ll be sending someone right away. I’m surprised they’re not here.”

  The horror of the moment of recognition of the skull had passed for Zita now. She had been reassured, she found, by the young labourer’s reference to the plague. He, the skull, whoever he had been, clearly did not die of the plague, but he was probably very ancient. The house was old and the body had been in the ground for a very long time. She had no idea how long a corpse took to reduce itself to bone: she thought that it varied according to conditions. In any event, that body had not been buried yesterday, or even last year.

  “I’ll wait until the police come,” she remarked to the builder, “to find out what they intend to do.”

  Their arrival, some ten minutes later, at first reinforced the reassurance that the apparent age of the body had given her. The first to make his appearance was a uniformed constable who had barely finished radioing a description of what and whom he had found when a party of four entered, all in plain clothes. They did not introduce themselves, disposing themselves rapidly, without conversation, each evidently knowing his task. One of them brusquely hauled the builder out of the trench and told him to wait with his two men. They walked around the pit, viewing the skeleton from various angles. Their voices and gestures seemed to register disappointment; they had expected something more demanding than a very ancient skull. Not much for us here, they felt. Zita, relieved, seeing them thus occupied, began to walk back to the house, when she was arrested by a shout.

  “Hey, where do you think you’re going?”

  She turned. It was the senior of the four men, his status indicated by his sports jacket; the others were wearing jeans and sweaters.

  “We’ll need to interview you. You can’t leave.”

  Zita strolled back towards him. She could see he was about her own age. His light brown hair flopped forward onto his brow. He did not look as fierce as he tried to appear. “You make it sound very serious.”

  He looked sheepish. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to be overdramatic. But we will need to interview you, all the same. It won’t take long.”

  “I’ll be in the house, then,” she said and continued on her way. She was trapped. By arriving before the police she was required to give an account of her presence, and questioning her and the builders had evidently a lower priority than setting up the examination of the scene. Inside the house she discovered that the builders had made themselves at home, with an electric kettle, mugs, tea, coffee, sugar, milk, biscuits and sandwiches. She boiled the kettle, poured herself a mug of instant coffee and carried it upstairs to the drawing room on the first floor from where she could watch the police at their work, as if in mime.

  They stood on the edge of the pit and conferred, laughing. The sports jacket jumped down into the hole and, like Wilson, straddled the corpse, bending over to look it in the face. Finally, he turned round to find a way out without breaking down the sharp edge of the grave; he pulled himself neatly over the rim with a display of agility and stood up, brushing dry earth and grass off his jacket. Zita suspected that he had caught sight of her watching them from the house.

  There was a sudden ripple of activity in the garden, as if a pause button had been released. The faces of the five policemen all turned towards the house. Someone new had arrived. Zita could not see him; he was evidently standing immediately below her, in the doorway, viewing the scene from a similar vantage point to hers. The sports jacket had evidently received orders; his gestures to the scene-of-crime officers had a new abruptness. The meaning of his swathing arm became apparent a little later, when tarpaulins were brought through the house and unrolled in the garden. The photographer was now setting up his camera. Zita could hear the telephone from one of the ground-floor rooms. The battered metal table and chairs that had been in use on Saturday evening were carried across from the summer-house to serve as an impromptu desk.

  Mr Wilson was called in for his interview. The two workmen sat on the steps of the summer-house, drinking their Coke and watching others working with the ease of men who have an unexpected paid holiday. Zita fretted, thinking of the pile of papers waiting for her which she had thought she was leaving for thirty minutes at the most; she would end up taking it home this evening. She took her phone out of her bag to call her secretary and saw that one of the workmen was being led round the trench into the house. She was to be last.

  The officer whose arrival had changed the tempo of activity in the garden had installed himself in the room looking over the garden which in recent years had been Jean’s bedroom. There was still a faint scent of Jean’s Black Russian cigarettes in it, Zita noticed. It was now empty of furniture, except for the garden table and chairs. The newcomer was large and his air of authority explained the effect on his men. His head, massive and square as a sculpture, was naked, as hairless as the skull lying in the ground and much the same colour, tea-stain brown. Yet it was not skull-like, shiny, smooth, or bony. Its covering skin, subtle and tactile, moved in folds and creases around his neck and face. It was impossible to tell whether it was disease or some wayward vanity which had produced his bizarre appearance. His voice was impatient and unfriendly; a shaved head is always threatening. Yet as she faced him, Zita had the impression less of aggression than melancholy. He reminded her of one of the breed of Chinese dogs called Shar Pei, with folded faces like W.H. Auden.

  He introduced himself as Detective Superintendent Stevens, the sports jacket as Detective Constable Neville. She was invited to seat herself on one of the rickety ironwork chairs and to state her name and her business.

  When she had explained that she was the lawyer acting for the owners who had phoned her as soon as they had heard from the builder, she gestured to the photographer and the scene-of-crime officers in the garden. “That skeleton must have been here for centuries. What do you have to do if you find a pile of old bones when a bulldozer is excavating the foundations of a multistorey car park or a new road? You don’t have to call an inquest every time?”

  The dismissive impression given without any words by the police that they had been called to investigate history was suddenly cancelled. When Stevens did not reply at once, she saw that his attitude was quite different and that what she had said was being interpreted as a desire to minimize the find, to write it off before an investigation had been made.

  “No,” he said flatly. “We don’t have an inquest for every odd bone that is found, but when we find a body neatly buried in someone’s back garden, we have to establish who it is and how long it has
been there. It could be only ten or twelve years. A corpse can rot down very quickly; that one could have been put there a very short time ago. And there’s no cut-off point for murder. It’s not like tax where if the Revenue forget about it for six years, it’s forgotten. If there is a possibility that a crime has been committed and the perpetrator is still alive, we have to pursue it.”

  In the garden the scene-of-crime officers were now pulling the tarpaulins over the frame they had erected, hiding the pit from view. Jean had lived here for forty three years, so she had said on Saturday. A long time.

  “Of course,” Stevens added, “We have to be reasonable. There could be other explanations, apart from murder, I mean. We start with the pathologist and the archaeologist.”

  “So you agree it could be very old, the skull?”

  “It could be. The archaeologist, Reskimer, will tell us. He’s at London University. He’s not a forensic specialist but his laboratory can do a lot that ours doesn’t. We’ve used him before; he’s very co-operative. Likes doing it. Makes a change from neolithic flints or Sumerian pottery or whatever his speciality is.”

  “So you can’t begin until he gets here?”

  “We can do our bit. It’ll be tomorrow or the day after, I guess, before he comes. But as you said, it’s been there a long time. It can wait.”

  Zita rose, assuming the interview to be at an end. She had learned as much as she could hope for now. “If you need me again,” she said, “you know where to find me.”

  “We do. And I’m sure we’ll come back to you. But I haven’t quite finished for today. I want to know a bit more about the owners, Mr and Mrs Loftus of Hampstead. Still the same Mr and Mrs Loftus, is it?”

  “The same?”

  “I remember there used to be a Mr and Mrs Loftus living here a long time ago; or was it Dr and Mrs Loftus?”

  “The same family. Dr Loftus is dead. It’s his son and daughter-in-law.”

  “And about old Mrs Loftus? What’s happened to her? Died, did she? Gone into a home?”

  “No, neither. She’s moved to the edge of town, to a bungalow. She’s very arthritic, but neither dead nor gaga.” Even at the time it occurred to Zita that Stevens’ knowledge of the inhabitants of Broad Woodham was extraordinarily detailed.

  “And she gave the house to her son? When did she do that then?”

  “Her stepson. Just recently. That’s why the house is empty and the garden is being dug up. He and his wife are renovating it. There’s going to be a new garden with an ornamental pool in front of the summer-house, which is why the hole was being dug in the first place.”

  “And how long was she living here, Mrs Loftus? Many years?”

  Zita was becoming more and more uncomfortable with the line of questioning. She recalled Jean’s slow reply to Marcus’s query. “How long is it?” Forty-three years.

  “A long time,” she said vaguely. “Since the fifties.”

  “Forty years. That’s a long time. And she’s handed the ownership over to her son?”

  “Stepson,” Zita repeated. “Not formally. She is still the legal owner.” Stevens was tapping the metal of the table with broad-nailed, blunt-ended fingers. “And what was the garden like before they began digging?” he asked. “They’re really giving it a going over, aren’t they? They certainly didn’t know there was anything there.”

  “How could they? It was beautiful. There were roses everywhere. Two rose beds there, just in front of the steps and a path between them, lavender along the walls, a rather moth-eaten lawn…”

  “The rose beds came out as far as where the body lies?”

  “Yes, though the path between them leading to the summer-house would have crossed it.” She looked out at the tarpaulin. “It’s very neat, isn’t it? The grave, I mean. Whoever put it there, and lined it up to lie parallel with the summer-house, had an orderly mind.”

  Stevens looked a little surprised, and then nodded, as if acknowledging a useful insight. “I’ll let you get back now,” he said.

  As soon as she entered her office Zita rang Naomi, who said irritably, “I suppose they won’t be able to get on with the work for the time being.”

  “I forgot to ask when they could restart.” Naomi had the ability to make you feel that whatever you had done was not enough, so that you owed it to her to do a little more to make up for the shortfall. “It depends on how long the archaeologist takes.”

  “Who is the archaeologist?” Naomi demanded. “I’ll ask Al about him.” It was Naomi’s assumption that there was always someone they knew who would be able to do something about any problem that troubled her. In this case she was referring to Rosie’s boyfriend. “Al’s an archaeologist, didn’t Jean tell you? Or at least he was; he read archaeology and anthropology at Cambridge. Now he writes.” Naomi rang off abruptly, saying that she had a client whose hour was about to start. She had not taken in the implications of what Zita had told her: only the inconvenience had struck her so far. Probably not until Marcus came home in the evening and she began recounting her day to him would it occur to her that a corpse in the garden posed some difficult questions.

  4

  Jean was really more involved than Naomi, Zita thought, driving home that evening. She ought to tell her about what had been discovered. She parked in Jean’s drive in order to avoid being seen by Lynne and Tom and disappointing them by not coming in at once. The door bell’s light, two-toned chime had none of the sonorous importance of the great lion’s head door knocker at Asshe House. She waited a long time for Jean to make her way from her sitting room on the other side of the house to unlock the front door, and then followed her slowly back to her seat.

  The old woman had established herself in her new surroundings as if they were the old ones. Her customary wing-chair with its pile of cushions was positioned so that she looked out over the empty lawn to a thick wall of cypresses which separated her garden from that of the house beyond. Beside her was the small table with its neat piles: books and spectacles, pad and pencil, cigarette box of Black Russians and matches, just as it had stood at Asshe House.

  “Pour yourself a drink, my dear, and one for me too, if you don’t mind.” Zita pottered about finding ice and soda for Jean and wine for herself, wondering how to begin. Her hesitation cost her the initiative, for no sooner had she sat down than Jean said, “The Russian girl arrived yesterday, I think.”

  Zita looked puzzled; the only Russian in her mind at that moment was her mother.

  “The one who is going to stay with Naomi and Marcus. They want me to have her when Lucia is on holiday. She is called Xenia Chornoroukaya.” This was the first time that Zita had heard the name and she suddenly recalled a conversation which she had had with Jean months ago, at Asshe House, before the move.

  “Chornoroukaya? I didn’t realize… Is she the same one who wrote to you?”

  Jean was lighting a cigarette. She had once been a heavy smoker; now she had five a day, carefully rationed. “Yes.” She sighed. “I made a mistake. After I had shown you the letter, I told Naomi and Marcus about it. I should have known better.”

  The occasion Jean referred to, the arrival of the letter from Russia, clearly marked in Zita’s mind, had taken place before Christmas. Jean had called her at the office to ask her to come to see her at lunchtime. It had been during the early stages of the plan to move house and, although she could see no reason why the business could not be dealt with on the telephone, Zita had assumed that her summons had to do with that. When she had arrived, knocking and pushing open the front door of Asshe House, she had found Jean seated in the same chair that she sat in now, although then her view had been over the railings to the daily movements round the square, filled with office workers out in search of lunchtime sandwiches.

  Jean had gestured to her to sit down opposite her and had said, “I wanted to show you this.” She held out an envelope, addressed in a distinctively foreign hand.

  A little surprised, Zita had taken the airmail paper and ex
tracted a letter, written mostly in Cyrillic script. “Do you want me to translate it for you? How curious to get a letter in Russian.”

  “No, it’s not a translation I need. I’ve read it already. It is… It’s advice… Not even that, an opinion, your reaction.”

  The letter had no longer held Zita’s attention. “Do you read Russian? You never said.” She had recalled that there was supposed to be some Russian connexion in the Loftus family. She had never related it to Jean.

  A pause. “Yes, I read Russian; indeed, in some senses, I am Russian.”

  “You are Russian? You don’t sound…”

  “No more do you, my dear. I am exactly as Russian as you; my mother, too, was Russian. It may have been my mother tongue, in the sense of being my first language. Of that I am not absolutely sure, because I grew up speaking so many languages, I am not certain whether Russian or English or even Latvian had priority. I am more Russian than you, however, because I was born in Petrograd in 1917 and at that time my parents were Russian citizens. So you see, it is no wonder I speak Russian.”

  As Jean had talked, Zita had listened attentively for those sounds that mark the native Russian speaker, the liquid vowels, the strong stress, that characterized her own mother’s English. Nothing was to be detected. There was no trace in the voice that this was other than an elderly upper-middle-class Englishwoman speaking. Nor did she look in any way Russian; she had none of the features that Zita associated with Russianness: the solid body, the round head with its massive forehead and blunt nose. Jean had been tall; she was now bent and angular; her forehead was broad and her face tapered down to a small rounded chin. Her hair, the fine hair of the aged, was smoothed into a knot at the base of her skull, held severely in place by combs. Her colouring must once have been very fair, for she retained under the cobwebbed lines that covered her face a translucency of skin; her eyebrows and eyelashes had almost disappeared.