"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...
INCIDENT REPORT
Date: 15.11.78
Time: 11:15
Officer in charge: PS Drury, Richmond Police
Incident: Authorized entry to 30 Graham Road, Richmond, following the death of the owner, Miss Ann Butts. Neighbors had reported a number of cats trapped inside the property. No next of kin was available.
Officers attending: PS Drury, PC Andrew Quentin. Also in attendance: RSPCA Inspectors: John Howlett, Tony Barrett
Entry to the property was gained via the front door with a Yale key that Miss Butts was wearing on a string around her neck at the time of her death. The house was very cold with no central-heating provision. There were two gas fires in each of the downstairs rooms, but neither was lit at the time of entry. None of the windows was open, although a small casement in the back cloakroom was insecurely fastened due to a broken fixing.
The officers had been informed by neighbors that there were at least twenty cats inside the premises, and the smell of cats' urine in the front hallway was overpowering. The conditions inside the house were squalid and untidy-in particular the downstairs cloakroom and the upstairs bathroom where neither toilet had been flushed and soiled paper was lying on the floors. Human feces was found in the two downstairs rooms. Boxes of empty vodka bottles were stacked against the kitchen walls.