Shallow Grave by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles Read Free Book Online Page A

though it had been scribbled out by a child in a temper. It had an oak front door studded and bedecked with extraneous pieces of iron, hysterically quaint diamond-pane casements, and cylindrical chimneys so tall and elaborate they looked like confectionery. If you could have snapped them off, they would undoubtedly have been lettered
Merrie Englande
all through.
    Not that WDC Kathleen ‘Norma’ Swilley, owner of the most fantasised-about legs in the Met, thought in those terms. Walking up the brick front path to start the house-to-house, her verdict was, ‘What a junky old dump!’ She lived in a brand new flat in a brand new block in West Kensington, and had no use for things antique, false or genuine. The newer the better, was her motto; and if whatever it was could function on its own by means of electricity, so much the better. She’d have had electric food that ate itself if she could.
    When she reached the front door, there were so many bits of old iron attached to it that it took her a while to work out that the bell was operated by a pull-down handle on a shaft. The instant it rang, however, the door was opened by the householders, who must have been crouched behind it waiting, and she was glad-handed and whisked into the lounge with the avidity of an Amway induction. Defreitas had been right about that, it seemed: the Mimpriss residents were aching to be in on the act.
    The inside of the house was at one with its exterior. The lounge had cast-iron wall lights in the shape of flaming torches, a wheel-shaped iron chandelier supporting electric candles, and a vast herringbone-brick inglenook containing a very small gas log fire. Perhaps to foster illusion, a log basket sat on the brick hearth, filled with real logs and pine-cones: Norma bet the old dame dusted them daily, probably with the Hoover attachment. The furniture was all fumed oak and chintz-covered; there were display cabinets full of the sort of limited-edition figurines that are advertised in the
Sunday Times
magazine, Vernon Ward framed prints on the walls, dried flower arrangements everywhere, and a row of royal-commemorative plates around the picture rail.
    Mr and Mrs Vanhurst Bright – Desmond and Mavis, they assured Swilley eagerly and watched until she wrote it down – were in their sixties and gave the same impression of careful prosperity as the house. His face had the over-soft look of a man who has been thin all his life and only put on fat in retirement, and he wore the willing but slightly tense expression of a very intelligent dog trying to understand human speech. She was thin, brittle and ramrod straight, and looked as though her whole life had been a battle against importunate door-to-door salesmen. She had evidently gone to the same hairdresser as Mrs Hammond, though her arrangement was tinted a fetching shade of mauve; with her chalky-pink face-powder and rather bluish shade of lipstick it made her look as though she were slightly dead. She was dressed in a pink cashmere twinset and heather tweed kilt complete with grouse-claw kilt-pin, pearl earrings, two rows of pearls round her neck, more diamond hoop rings than perhaps the strictest of good taste would think necessary, lisle stockings, and well-polished brogues as brown and shiny as a racehorse’s bum. He was wearing a lovat tweed jacket over a cad’s yellow waistcoat, khaki shirt and green knitted tie, grey flannel trousers, and a beautiful pair of expensive brown Oxfords, which were so unexpectedly large compared with the rest of him that he looked as though he had been inserted into them as a preliminary to being tied up and dropped into the harbour.
    Swilley wondered at their immaculate appearance so early in the day. Did they always dress like this, or had they made aspecial effort in anticipation of a police visit? The house was immaculate too: perhaps they were the sort that would still change for dinner on a desert island. She bet they had twin beds with satin quilts and