Shape of Snakes

*3*

"It blew over very quickly," Sheila Arnold told me as we went downstairs, "except that Annie's house stood empty for about three years. She hadn't made a will and no one knew if there were any living relatives. In the end, everything was appropriated by the government and the property was released for sale. It was bought by a builder who renovated it before selling it to a young couple with two small children."

"A white couple presumably," I said with poorly veiled sarcasm.

She ignored the remark although her mouth lifted in a faint smile. "I visited the house soon after they moved in when the younger child fell ill," she went on, "and the place was unrecognizable. The builder had gutted the whole of the downstairs and redesigned it as one huge open-plan room with patio doors to the garden." There was reservation in her voice as if she wasn't sure that an open plan was an improvement.

"Didn't you like it?"

She paused by the door. "Oh, it was splendid enough, but I couldn't help remembering what it was like in Annie's day. Did you ever go inside while she was living there?" I shook my head. "It was like an Aladdin's cave. She and her mother were both hoarders. The front room was packed with West Indian and Central American artifacts, all brought back to England by Annie's father during the '40s and '50s. Some of them were quite valuable, particularly the gold pieces. I remember there was a little statuette on the mantelpiece which had emeralds for eyes and rubies for lips."

"I didn't know there was a Mr. Butts," I said in surprise. "I always assumed the mother had been left holding the baby."

"Good Lord, no. Her father died of lung cancer some time in the late '50s. I never knew him but one of my partners remembered him fondly. His name was George. He was a retired merchant seaman with a fund of anecdotes about his travels round the world. He married Annie's mother in Jamaica in the '30s and brought her and Annie home to live in Graham Road soon after the war." She smiled again. "He said he couldn't bring them back while his parents were alive because they wouldn't have approved of a black daughter-in-law."

I shook my head in amazement, realizing how many gaps there still were in my knowledge of a woman I had never spoken to. Did Annie's neighbors know she was half white? I wondered, and would it have made a difference if they had? I thought "no" to both questions. They had been even later arrivals to the street than Sam and I ... and Annie had been too dark-skinned to pass as anything other than black. "I didn't know any of this," I told Sheila. "I certainly didn't know her father was a white man. Why didn't someone come forward to claim her estate? She must have had English relations, surely?"

"Apparently not. My colleague said George had a younger brother who was torpedoed in the North Atlantic, but other than that-" She broke off on a shrug. "It's tragic but not unusual. Whole families were wiped out during the two world wars, particularly those with sons and no daughters." She glanced reluctantly at her watch and stepped outside. "I really must go. I've two more patients to see." But she moved slowly as if she didn't want to break this link with the past. "Do you still think she was murdered?"

"I know she was."

"Why?"

I led the way down the path. "I can't explain it. I tried once, but everyone just thought I was as mad as she was. Now I don't bother."

"I meant, why would anyone have wanted to murder her?"

It was the great imponderable. "Because she was different," I suggested. "Perhaps they'd have left her alone if she'd been mad but not black ... or black but not mad ... Sometimes I think they despised her for her color, other times I think they were afraid of her."

We halted beside her car. "Meaning you think one of her neighbors killed her?"

I didn't say anything, just gave a small shrug which she could interpret as she liked.

She watched me for a moment, then opened the rear door of her car and put her bag on the backseat. "She wasn't mad," she said matter-of-factly. "She had Tourette's syndrome, which caused her to grimace and talk to herself, but she was as normal as you or I in every other respect."

"That's not the impression the coroner gave at the inquest."

Dr. Arnold nodded unhappily. "The man was an idiot. He knew nothing at all about TS and wasn't interested in finding out. I've always felt very badly about not giving evidence in person, but I left for a twelve-month sabbatical in the U.S. before she died and had no idea he would effectively ignore Annie's medical records." She saw the sudden hope in my face. "The verdict would have been the same," she said apologetically. "There was no evidence to suggest it was anything other than an accident, but I was very angry afterward to discover how her reputation had been destroyed."

I thought cynically that the anguish I'd seen in Annie's dying eyes had had nothing to do with concern for her reputation. "Did you read the pathologist's report?"

She nodded. "I was sent a copy with the inquest verdict. It was very straightforward. She caught a glancing blow from a truck and was thrown against a lamppost. Frankly, it was a tragedy waiting to happen-they should never have let Graham Road be used as a shortcut-but I always thought a child would be hit, not someone as mindful of safety as Annie was."

I nodded. "She was wearing a dark coat the night she died, and the weather was frightful ... rain like stair rods. I only saw her because I almost stepped on her as I was crossing the road." I put a hand on Dr. Arnold's arm as she prepared to open the driver's door. "You said you were angry about her reputation being destroyed. Did you follow that up?"

A faraway look crept into her eyes as if she were searching some distant horizon. "Not for three years. It may sound callous but I forgot all about her while I was in the States, and it wasn't until I saw what the builder had done to her house that it occurred to me to ask what had happened to the contents."

"Presumably they were sold off."

She went on as if she hadn't heard me. "People had a very false impression of Annie because of the way she dressed and the way she behaved, but she wasn't a poor woman by any manner of means. She once showed me a list of valuations that a dealer had put on some of the artifacts, and my recollection was that the total came to over Ł50,000. That was a fair sum in the 1970s."

"The police must know what happened to it all," I said. "Did you ask them?"

She gave a theatrical shudder. "Not them," she countered tartly, "just the one. A man by the name of Sergeant Drury- Joseph Stalin's younger, ruder and more aggressive brother. It was his case so I wasn't allowed access to anyone else."

I laughed. "I knew him. It's a good description."

"Yes ... well, according to him, Annie was destitute. They took some RSPCA inspectors in the day after the accident in order to remove her cats, and Drury said there was nothing of value in the house. Worse, he described the conditions inside as little short of a cesspit."

I nodded again, remembering. "It was mentioned at the inquest. The coroner said the RSPCA should have taken her animals away from her when the neighbors first complained about the smell."

"Except squalor was alien to her nature," said Dr. Arnold, folding herself behind the steering wheel. "I used to visit her regularly and it was a battle to stop her jumping up every ten minutes to wash her hands. She had a thing about germs-it's a common symptom of Tourette's syndrome-along with a compulsion to check the bolts on the front door hourly. Of course Drury didn't believe me. It was three years down the road and he decided I was confusing her house with someone else's." She reached out to shut her door, apparently under the impression that I understood what she was talking about.

I held it open. "What didn't he believe?"

She blinked in surprise. "Well ... obviously ... that Annie's house had been ransacked and everything of value stolen."

In the past, Sam had always shied away from discussions about Annie. I remember his embarrassment when I tackled a chief superintendent at a party in Hong Kong and pinned him to a wall with an hour-long diatribe on the inequities of the Richmond Police. Sam had hauled me away eventually and by the time we reached home his embarrassment had turned to fury. "Have you any idea how idiotic you sound when you start talking about that bloody woman?" he had demanded angrily. "You can't lecture total strangers on garbage about the eyes being the windows of the soul if you want to be taken seriously. You're my wife, for Christ's sake, and people are starting to avoid the pair of us because they think you're as mad as she was."

Two decades on, and once he'd ruminated at length on the bizarre coincidence of having Sheila Arnold as our GP for a second time-"You've got to admit, it's pretty damn spooky ... It's only a couple of days since Jock reminded me of Graham Road"-he was surprisingly interested in what Sheila and I had been talking about. I thought I knew why. He was never inclined to believe anything I said, but he rolled over to have his tummy scratched by doctors ... particularly female ones.

"Does she agree with you? Does she think Annie was murdered?"

"I'm not sure," I answered. "All she said was the house had been ransacked."

He ruminated some more. "When? Before Annie died, or after?"

"What difference does it make?"

"If it happened afterward," he said reasonably, "then it means somebody knew she was lying in the gutter and grabbed the opportunity to break in." He gave his jaw a thoughtful scratch. "Which in turn means she was probably out there a damn sight longer than the coroner said she was."

"That's one way of looking at it," I agreed, before wandering off to the kitchen to prepare some lunch. Old habits die hard, I find, and the subject of Annie had been taboo for so long between us that she wasn't easily resurrected from her grave.

Sam pursued me. "And if it happened before she died," he went on. "that might explain why she drank herself into a stupor. It must have been a terrible shock to go home and find all her treasures gone. Poor woman, I've never understood why she did that. I mean, we saw her pretty tipsy on occasion but never so paralytic that she didn't know what she was doing." He flicked me an apologetic smile. "I've always had a problem believing one of her neighbors pushed her under a lorry. Okay, some of them were shits, and some of them made her life miserable by complaining about her, but that's a far cry from committing cold-blooded murder."

I opened the fridge door and wondered what sort of meal I could make out of half a can of tomatoes, some staggeringly old cheese and iceberg lettuce. "She was five-foot-nine-inches tall and weighed fourteen stone," I murmured, "and was exactly fifteen milligrams over the legal driving limit-the equivalent of five shots of spirits or five pints of lager. By any stretch of the imagination that does not amount to drinking herself into a stupor." I pulled out the tin and inspected it for mold. "In fact the chances were she wasn't even tipsy because she was a practiced drinker and could probably consume twice as much as the rest of us before showing any signs of drunkenness." I smiled at him. "Look at yourself, if you don't believe me. You're a stone lighter and two inches taller, and you can put away eight pints of lager before you become embarrassing."

He retreated into his shell immediately because it was one thing for him to introduce the subject, and quite another for me to challenge the facts from superior knowledge. "Everyone said she was paralytic," he said huffily.

"Even if she was," I went on, "what makes you think one of her neighbors didn't give in to a spur-of-the-moment temptation to shove her into the road? It was dark ... It was raining ... She was mad as a hatter ... deeply irritating ... the street was empty ... and there was a truck coming. One quick shove and, hey presto, problem solved. No more blacks on the road and property values rise immediately." I lifted an amused eyebrow. "No one ever said her murder was planned, Sam."

Two or three days later, a folder of photocopied documents arrived in the post from Sheila Arnold with "Annie Butts" written on the front.

"Thought the enclosed might interest you," she wrote on a compliments slip. "It's not much, I'm afraid, because I gave up when I realized I was beating my head against a brick wall! PS How delightful to run into you both again."

By coincidence, it was the same day that Sam and I went for lunch in Weymouth, and Sam took against a man who seemed to be staring at me. We had chosen a pub overlooking the harbor, with tables outside, which allowed us to bathe in the sun and watch the yachts drift in and out of the marina every time the swing bridge lifted. It was a pretty place to while away a couple of hours, with eighteenth-century houses lining cobbled wharfs and battered trawlers unloading crates full of monkfish and crab, but Sam started bellyaching about the landlord who kept coming to the door to look at me, and my pleasure in the peaceful scene evaporated. I was wearing dark glasses and I studied the man secretly from behind my lenses. He was as lean and hungry as he had always been and undoubtedly as vicious. But he was better looking than Joseph Stalin ... or Joseph Stalin's brother...