The Shape of Snakes (39 page)

"No, I meant, why
then
. Why wait so long?"

He looked interested, as if it were something he'd never considered before. "It was after Mr. Drury retired," he said. "I remember Mum saying there was no one left who'd recognize him-" He broke off abruptly. "She probably just meant he wouldn't be picked on anymore."

"Is Alan fond of her?" I asked, remembering what Beth had said about Alan's depression every time he visited Maureen.

"Maybe. He's the only one who bothers to see her."

"But?" I prompted when he didn't go on.

He stretched his right arm and dropped the stone, staring at his hand in absorbed fascination as he flexed his fingers. "He's scared of her," he answered abruptly. "That's the only reason he goes ... to keep her from turning on him."

We went for a walk through the sculpture park, diving down little alleyways between craggy walls of stone. We squeezed through a cleft into a cave where a pink blanket and a pile of empty cans suggested someone had taken up residence or a couple of lovers had found a private retreat.

"Maybe I should take it over," said Danny, "and sneak out at night to carve the stones by moonlight."

"Do you enjoy it that much?"

He made a rocking motion with a hand. "Not all the time-it can be bloody frustrating when it doesn't go right-but it's what I want to do."

"Sam's willing to let you work in the barn at the bottom of our garden," I said, leading the way back out again. "It'll mean slumming it in the tack room and working with the doors open if you want any light"-I shrugged-"but it won't cost you anything. If you can scrounge some stone and don't mind sleeping rough for a bit ... it's free and available."

He was less than appreciative. "I'd freeze to death in the winter."

"Mm," I agreed, "and Sam'll have your hide if he catches you smoking cannabis."

"What about you?"

"I never argue with my husband in public so if you come ... and he catches you ... you're on your own." I turned to look at him. "Think about it, anyway. You won't get a better offer today."

He became very quiet as we approached the car. "Why would you want to help me?" he asked, taking the keys from my hand to unlock the door.

"Think of it as an investment in the future." He held the door open.

"You'd never make a penny," he said gloomily. "I haven't that much talent."

I gave him a quick hug. "We'll see." I lowered myself onto the seat. "But it's not a financial investment, Danny, more a loan of goodwill that you can repay with interest to someone who deserves a similar chance at another time."

He wouldn't meet my eyes. "What do you want in return?"

"Nothing," I said honestly, reaching for the door. "There are no strings attached. The barn's there if you want to take us up on it. If you don't, no hard feelings."

He shuffled his feet on the gravel. "Alan's phoned a few times wanting to know what you've been saying about him," he said abruptly. "He's really twitched even though I keep telling him you're only interested in what happened to the black lady." I didn't answer.

"What did he do to you?" he asked me.

"What makes you think he did anything?"

"Your face goes blank every time his name's mentioned."

He put his hand on the door to stop me closing it. "I'd never go against him," he said painfully. "He's my brother."

"I wouldn't expect you to," I said as I started the engine. "But the offer of the barn has nothing to do with Alan, Danny. If you're happy to come, we're happy to have you. I hope you'll remember that ... whatever happens..."
 

My last visit that day was a prearranged one to Sheila Arnold in her office. She and Larry had been away the previous week on a whistlestop visit to the Florida condo-"keeping Larry happy" had been her wry description over the telephone-and this was my first opportunity to show her the photographs of Beth and Alan's house. She had agreed to see me at the end of afternoon surgery and was updating some patients' notes on her computer when I dropped into the chair beside her desk. She gave me a quick smile, then pushed her keyboard away and turned to face me.

"Well?"

I'd had more copies made from the negatives after Drury's fit of pique with my rucksack, and I produced these from my pocket and spread them across her desk.

"My God!" she declared in amazement. "I thought you were exaggerating when you said you'd found the mother lode."

I tapped the bangle on her wrist, then pointed to a close-up of Beth Slater's forearm. "Snap?" I suggested. "She has four of them, and I think she wears them all the time because she pushes them up her arm every time she goes near the sink. I doubt she has any idea they're valuable or even that they're jade. She probably thinks they're plastic or resin."

Sheila studied a picture of Beth with her children. "She has a nice face."

"Yes," I agreed.

"You liked her."

"Very much," I said with a sigh, "which makes it difficult to know what to do next. I don't think she has any idea these things were stolen. She told me Alan bought the Quetzalcoatl in a junk shop then started collecting other Mexican pieces because he believes the Aztecs were an alien civilization. Her children were full of it while I was taking the photographs-they think their dad's a genius because he knows more about aliens than anyone else-and it seems rather pointless to make them unhappy just for the sake of proving he was a thief twenty years ago."

Sheila lifted each picture in turn and studied it closely. "I remember some of these things," she said finally, "but I couldn't swear to all of them. Also, apart from the bangles and the mosaic, there doesn't seem to be much of any value. What happened to the gold and silver pieces, for example?"

"Alan's mother sold them to buy her house," I said, "but I've very little proof to back that up." I showed her the Chiswick jeweler's affidavit. "The description of the woman fits Maureen-along with half a million others who can manage a Birmingham accent-but it's only five items and accounts for less than Ł1,000."

"How much did the house cost her?"

"About Ł15,000 in total. She claims it all came from a win on the football pools which is why she didn't have to declare it." I lifted an amused eyebrow. "The house is now worth upwards of Ł200,000 and increasing every day as the housing boom takes off."

"My God!" said Sheila in disgust. "We didn't get much more than that for our four-bedroom job seven years ago."

"I know. It's sickening." I isolated a wide-angled shot of the sitting room. "Maureen stuffed most of this into the cupboard under her stairs because she didn't think it had any value"-I smiled ironically-"and it was still there when you were trying to persuade Drury Annie had been burgled. In fact, as Alan didn't retrieve it until a good ten years later Drury could have found it if he'd bothered to investigate."

She looked annoyed. "And I would have been vindicated?"

I nodded.

"I'll never forgive Peter Stanhope for accusing me of neglecting her, you know. He said I'd only invented her wealth to make myself look better."

"I know." It obviously still rankled with her, I thought, and decided to keep to myself that Drury had known about the Quetzalcoatl long before Sheila had reported it stolen. I wanted an objective opinion, not one given in anger. "The worst of it is," I said, showing her the picture, "that poor Beth did all this decorating herself to make a Mexican setting for the artifacts ... and it seems cruel to take them away just to prove a point. No one else is going to appreciate them as much as she and Alan do."

Sheila propped her chin in her hands and regarded me solemnly. "Is this a way of asking me to forget that I ever said Annie was robbed?"

"I don't know." I sighed. "I keep wondering if it's right to destroy innocent children's lives over a crime that was committed twenty years ago."

"Except I seem to remember you telling me that if you found Annie's thief you'd also find her murderer. Were you wrong?"

I studied a close-up of the brass artillery shell that stood in Beth's fireplace with colorful silk flowers fanning out of it like peacock feathers. "Does it matter?" I asked her. "Doesn't the same principle apply whatever the crime? Wouldn't I be choosing the lesser of two evils if I left Annie's death as an accident?"

She eyed me thoughtfully. "It depends how two-faced you want to be," she said bluntly. "That was probably Sergeant Drury's excuse as well ... yet you've spent twenty years trying to prove him wrong."
 

Correspondence re: a meeting on 20.08.99

LEAVENHAM FARM, LEAVENHAM, NR
DORCHESTER, DORSET DT2 XXY

Alan Slater
12 Peasmont Road
Isleworth
Surrey

Tuesday, August 17, 1999

Dear Alan,

I shall be at your mother's house at midday on Friday, August 20. Please ensure that you and she are both there, otherwise I shall carry out my threat to go to the police despite the pain this will cause your wife, children and brother. You should be aware that I am writing to Sharon Percy and Geoffrey Spalding to insist that they, too, attend.

Yours sincerely,
M. Ranelagh
 

From: Mrs. Wendy Stanhope, The Vicarage,
Chanters Lane, St. David's, Exeter

Wednesday, August 18

I can certainly be outside Richmond station by 11:30 a.m., which, as you say, should give us ample time to reach Graham Road by midday. 1 can't imagine why you think I might be reluctant to support you against the Slaters. I'm not easily intimidated! Also, I've always regretted that Annie didn 't think of me as a friend while she was alive. So thank you for asking me, my dear.

With love,
Wendy

*26*

It wasn't until we approached the Kew Road intersection on the outskirts of Richmond that Sam asked me if I knew what I was doing. The drive from Dorchester had taken over three hours and he was remarkably restrained throughout with only the odd bout of swearing at other drivers to betray his anxiety. We had discussed tactics the previous day while sitting over a glass of wine in the sunshine, and the plan had seemed reasonable then-perhaps plans always do under the influence of alcohol-but the friendly, rolling hills of Dorset were a far cry from the congested rat-runs of London's link roads, and the idea of taking on four potentially violent people in the most anonymous city in the world began to seem dangerously flawed.

Even then, I might have abandoned the whole project if Sam hadn't agreed with Sheila's view. The story wasn't mine to control anymore. And it wasn't a question of the lesser of two evils, he said. More of a Pandora's box. I'd opened the lid and the secrets were out. Danny for one-Michael Percy for another-would start asking questions: of Alan, of their mothers, even of Derek if they could find him. And it wasn't fair for the innocent to be tarred with the same brush as the guilty.

I laid an affectionate hand on his arm as he drew up at the traffic lights. "Thank you," I said.

"For what?"

"Holding back. I know how worried you are, but it has to be more sensible to take an open-minded woman with me than an angry husband who's likely to lose his temper."

"We can still go to the police."

I shook my head. We'd been through this a dozen times. "They wouldn't do anything ... certainly not today ... probably never. It took Stephen Lawrence's parents seven years to win an inquiry, so I can't see myself walking into Richmond Police Station out of the blue and being believed." I sighed. "I tried that twenty years ago and all it achieved was to persuade everyone I was a head case."

He nodded.

"In any case I really do want the truth this time, and Wendy was the only person I could think of. Sheila's too conservative to work outside the rules-and Larry wouldn't have let her come, anyway."

"Could he have stopped her?" asked Sam in surprise.

"She'd have insisted on it," I said cynically. "She uses him as her get-out card whenever her involvement becomes too onerous." I recalled Sheila's horrified refusal when I invited her to confront the Slaters-
Good God, I couldn 't possibly. Larry would never allow it for a minute
-and I thought how wrong I had been to think that Annie's doctor would be the best support I could have. If I'd had any sense I'd have realized how passive she was when she admitted abandoning Annie's cause at the first sign of irritation from Larry, but I'd been seduced by her sympathetic report on Annie to the coroner and her gutsy defense of herself against accusations of negligence. The real irony, of course, was that I need never have upset my mother by moving the family to Dorchester if only I'd known in advance that an eccentric vicar's wife in Devon had more courage and crusading spirit in her little finger than Sheila Arnold would ever have. "And, apart from my ma," I went on with a sigh, "I couldn't think of anyone other than Wendy who had the guts to come with me."

Sam gave an abrupt laugh. "Did I hear right? Did you seriously consider asking your mother? Is this progress ... or what?"

"Actually, she was the first person I thought of," I said with a wry smile, "until I realized she'd handbag the lot of them and leave me worse off than when I started." I gave an indecisive shrug. "But it
is
odd ... maybe it's true that blood's thicker than water."