Sarah Rayne - What Lies Beneath

She got out of bed and opened it. The sweater was crumpled up, the bloodstains dried to a horrid dark brown, and the blood had marked the bag’s lining, which meant the bag would also have to be destroyed. Moving quietly so as not to disturb Amy, she transferred most of the contents to another bag of similar size. The little make-up purse, her address book, her wallet and the mobile phone all went into the other bag.

She would not feel safe until she had got rid of the stained bag and the sweater. Derek said you should always do a thing right away. Seize the day, he said. Carpe diem . That had been Derek pretending to be learned. Veronica had probably been impressed by it, although she would not have been impressed if she had had forty years of it, as Ella had.

But she would seize the day now, or rather the night. She pulled on trousers and a sweater, and slipped her feet into flat shoes. Carrying the bag with its damning contents, and without switching on any lights, she went down the stairs and out through the kitchen door. She would bury these things where she had buried Clem’s diaries. Later, perhaps at the weekend, as originally planned, she would pretend the hedge clippings over them needed burning. Amy would think she was being absurd, bothering about garden rubbish when Derek was in a police cell, but Ella would be querulous and insistent. It would give her something to do, she would say. Something ordinary to occupy her mind.

She fetched a trowel from the potting shed and went down the path to the end of the garden around the side of the conservatory. As she glanced through the glass sides, she saw the oleander bush, and smiled slightly, remembering Clem.

The end of the garden was where they generally got rid of garden rubbish, and where they occasionally had barbecues. Derek liked barbecues; he usually donned a silly chef’s hat to grill sausages and spare ribs. He would not be doing that in the future, and Ella would not have to buy the ingredients for the complicated marinade he insisted on making, messing up the kitchen and splashing soy sauce everywhere.

But it was a part of the garden that was not overlooked, and in any case it was two o’clock in the morning. Amy’s bedroom was at the front of the house; she would neither see nor hear anything. Ella bent down, brushing away the few hedge clippings and scooping out a good deep hole for the bag and the sweater, which she put on top of Clem’s diaries. She patted the earth back in place, replaced the hedge clippings and, satisfied with what she had done, returned the trowel to the shed. Back in her bedroom, she got into bed again and this time fell asleep almost at once.

Amy could not sleep. She supposed nobody would sleep after such extraordinary events. She went over and over it all in her mind, while the bedside clock ticked its way round to half past one, and then two. This was infuriating. If she did not get some sleep she would be like a piece of chewed string in the morning, and she had to be strong and resourceful for Gran. But the more she tried to sleep, the wider awake she became.

She got up to take a paracetamol, then went quietly downstairs, not wanting to wake Gran if she had managed to get to sleep, but thinking she would find something light to read. Gran’s taste ran to the milder kind of chick-lit and historical romances – there was a whole shelf of Georgette Heyer in the sitting room – and Gramps liked nineteenth-century sea battles: Alexander Kent and Patrick O’Brian. Amy could not decide between Regency ballrooms and Regency sailors so she took one of each. She was about to go back upstairs when she heard footsteps outside the house. Her heart skipped a beat: surely they were not about to have a break-in on top of everything else? Perhaps it was the police returning with some news. But the police would not creep furtively round the house like that. Amy switched off the table lamp and went cautiously to the window, drawing back the curtains slightly.

A figure was half-kneeling, half-crouching over a patch of ground at the very far end of the garden and after a moment Amy saw with astonishment that it was Gran. She watched, trying to see what on earth Gran was doing. It looked so furtive Amy did not want to call out, and when Gran stood up and turned back to the house Amy scooted back to her bedroom. She heard Gran come in and go quietly into her room, then the house fell into silence. Amy, her mind tumbling with bewildering images and theories, finally drifted into an uneasy half-sleep towards dawn.

She woke at seven thirty feeling exhausted and almost as if she might be about to have flu. The day was leaden, rainclouds gathering overhead. It was unthinkable to ask Gran what she had been doing in the garden last night; Amy could not stop thinking it was something that would incriminate Gramps and had to be got rid of. But then she remembered Gran telling the inspector about Gramps’ temper, and the more she thought about that, the more she thought Gran had deliberately tried to plant the idea that Gramps had a violent side.

Trying to appear normal, she made toast and scrambled eggs and persuaded Gran to eat some to keep up her strength. She could not help Gramps unless she stayed strong, said Amy firmly.

The CID sergeant and a policewoman arrived shortly after nine with Gramps’s car.

‘It’s not really material to the case,’ said the DS, ‘but we had to get forensics to give it the once-over anyway. It’s as clean as a whistle. I’ll leave it in the drive, shall I?’

The policewoman, who was the one who had brought Ella home last night, asked if a few overnight things could be put together for Mr Haywood.

‘You’re still keeping him at the station then?’ said Gran.

‘Well, yes, for the moment.’

‘I can see him, can I?’ said Gran, surprising Amy.

‘Yes, certainly. The inspector wants to see you anyway.’

‘Why?’ said Gran very sharply.

‘Oh, only to check your statement before it’s printed for you to sign. Standard procedure. We’ll give you a lift if you prefer. I don’t expect you feel like driving.’

‘Would you like me to come with you?’ asked Amy. ‘I could drive.’

But Gran seemed to want to do this on her own, which Amy understood.

‘In any case I’ll probably be there ages, what with going through the statement and so on. You’d be hanging around for hours.’

So instead Amy hunted out a small overnight bag and helped Gran pack it. She waited until the police car had driven Gran away, then fetched a small spade from the garden shed.

It was easy to see where Gran had been. There was a little heap of twigs and bits of hedge at the very end of the garden and it was obvious that the ground had been turned over. The threatened rain had started, huge drops that spattered down on the ground and soaked the thin shirt Amy had on. She shook her hair angrily out of her eyes and tried to persuade herself there whatever Gran had been doing last night was entirely innocent.

But she had only dug out a few spadefuls when she knew it was not innocent at all. The things Gran had buried were quite near the surface. Amy dropped the spade and kneeled down. A bloodstained sweater – Gran’s oatmeal cashmere sweater she had been wearing yesterday. The leather handbag she often used, the lining visible, also bloodstained. And beneath it was what looked like a stack of leather-covered books. Amy prodded them. They were damp and the pages were already shredding so it was impossible to know what they were, but she could see they were handwritten.

It was raining even more heavily now and Amy scraped the earth back, replacing the twigs and branches. Then she put the spade away and went back into the house, thinking hard. After a moment she went to the phone and dialled the number of the Red Lion, praying the news about Veronica and Gramps would not have got out yet.