Free Shallow Grave by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

you think?’
    ‘I can’t advise you on that,’ Slider said.
    ‘It’s not as if she died in here,’ Linda objected. She was fortyish, professionally smart, so well turned-out that you would never remember after meeting her whether she was attractive or not. Her appearance was designed, like waterproofing, to repel. She was in full fig even this early in the morning, right down to her earrings, with her hair lacquered to immobility in one of those ageless styles only suburban hairdressers can achieve. She hadeyes hard enough to have etched glass, and a chain-smoker’s voice rough enough to have sandblasted it afterwards; but a determined inspection revealed that under her makeup she looked pale and shaken, and her eyes were ringed. She clutched a packet of Rothmans and a throw-away lighter in one hand, and a man-sized Kleenex crumpled up in the other. ‘I mean, no-one could be more sorry than me that she’s dead, but when it comes right down to it, she wasn’t family. Family you shut for,’ she decreed. ‘Not friends.’
    ‘But she worked here, Lin,’ Jack protested. His eyes were red and watery, and moistened further even as he spoke. ‘I think people would expect it. I mean,’ he appealed to Slider again, ‘they’re classy people round here. It’s all lounge trade – you know, shorts and wine. You don’t want to go offending them. And there won’t be a soul on the estate doesn’t know about it by lunchtime.’
    Linda’s voice hardened. ‘I’ve got a full restaurant tonight, and five tables booked for lunch already, and I’m not giving all that away. Besides, they’ll all want to talk about it,’ she added, with an acidulous knowledge of human nature, ‘and where are they going to go and do that, if not here? We’ll have sales like you never saw for a Wednesday. Call it a public service, if you like, if it makes you feel better, but the long and the short is I’m not closing up for the sake of an empty gesture. It won’t bring Jen back.’
    Jack looked cowed. ‘All right, love, if you think so. I just want to do what’s right, that’s all. I mean, Jen was—’ His lips trembled and his eyes seemed in danger of overflowing. He took out a handkerchief and honked briskly into it, and then emerged, looking almost shyly at Slider and Atherton, to say, ‘Can I offer you gents a drink, atawl?’
    Linda shot him a hard look, and Slider said, ‘It’s a bit early for me, thanks all the same.’
    ‘Cuppa coffee, then?’
    ‘Jack, they want to ask questions,’ Linda said impatiently. ‘You get on with your bottling up, or you’ll have the twirlies in before you’re ready. If you’d like to come through to the snug where it’s quiet …’ she said to Slider and Atherton.
    Slider fielded her smoothly, ‘I know how busy you must both be, so to save time I’ll talk to you while my colleague has a word with your husband, if that’s all right.’
    Linda Potter looked as though no-one had ever conned her in her life, but she nodded briskly, and walked away before him into the private bar.
    The pub had obviously been a number of separate rooms, before most of the walls had been knocked out to make one large irregularly shaped one, low-ceilinged, beamed, the upright timbers showing where the walls had once been. The bar was three sides of a rectangle, and the snug was behind the wall on the fourth side, with a wooden serving-hatch through to the bar, and a little brass bell hung on a bracket beside it for service. The snug had one casement window of diamond panes too small and old to see through, though the sunshine streamed in strongly and illuminated the eternally falling dust. The air was heavy with the smell of furniture polish. The cherry-red carpet was tuftily new. There were three small round imitation antique oak tables, and banquettes and Windsor chairs upholstered in a chintz-patterned material. A beam running the length of the wall opposite the bar supported a range of the kind of junk