Shallow Grave

Book 7: Bill Slider Mystery

by Cynthia Harrod-Eagles

Genres: Police Procedurals

Synopsis

'An outstanding series' NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

A Bill Slider Mystery

Detective Inspector Bill Slider has always been keen on architecture, and The Old Rectory is the kind of house he would give anything to won. But the dead body of Jennifer Andrews in her shallow grave rather spoils the view.

The case looks straightforward enough: a provocative woman murdered by her violent and jealous husband. But as the investigation proceeds, new suspects and motives keep crawling out of the woodwork. It seems there is something rotten at the heart of the community surrounding the lovely old house.

When Slider finally gets a confession, it's from a wholly incredible source. It seems in life there is always more going on than meets the eye...

Praise for the Bill Slider series:

'Slider and his creator are real discoveries'
Daily Mail

'Sharp, witty and well-plotted'
Times

'Harrod-Eagles and her detective hero form a class act. The style is fast, funny and furious - the plotting crisply devious'
Irish Times

Release date: September 1, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 224

Sample

The Old Rectory, St Michael Square, on the Mimpriss Estate, was the sort of house Slider would have given anything to own.

‘On a copper’s pay? Your anything wouldn’t even make a down payment,’ Atherton said.

Slider shrugged. ‘What’s a man without a dream?’

‘Solvent,’ said Atherton.

It was a long house, built of stone, whose façade reflected three different periods. The middle section had the perfect proportions of classical Georgian domestic, with a fanlighted door and small-paned sash windows disposed harmoniously about it. To the right was an early-Victorian addition, very plain, with tall, large-paned sashes. The section to the left seemed much older: the stone was undressed and uneven, the windows casements, and at the far end were two pairs of double wooden doors like those of an old-fashioned garage. But despite, or even because of, its oddities, Slider coveted it. Whoever had altered and added to it over the ages, they had had a sense of proportion. As with a beautiful woman, he thought, the character in its face only made it more beautiful.

The Mimpriss Estate was itself an oddity. In the middle of the west London sprawl of Victorian–Edwardian terraces, it was a small area of large and desirable houses, built in the Arts-and-Crafts style at the turn of the century by a wealthy man with a bee in his bonnet. Given the proximity to central London, houses on the estate were now worth small fortunes. For the Old Rectory you were talking a three-quarter-million touch, minimum, Slider reckoned. Atherton was perfectly right, though it was unnecessarily cruel of him to have pointed it out.

The estate comprised half a dozen streets, with St Michael Square in the middle and the railway running along the back. The church in the centre of the square was dedicated with nice inclusiveness to St Michael and All Angels. Slider turned to look at it as Atherton locked the car, and was mildly surprised. This was no painstaking 1890s copy. It stood in its own small, railed churchyard with all the grave, reserved beauty of the fifteenth century, its grey stone tower rising serenely above the tombstones to dwell among the clouds. ‘There should be rooks,’ Slider said. ‘Or jackdaws.’

‘Settle for magpies,’ Atherton said, as one of them went off like a football rattle in a tree overhead. He turned to look at the church as well. ‘It’s old, isn’t it? Not just Victorian?’

‘Early Perp,’ Slider said. So, there must have been a village here once. ‘He built the estate round it.’

‘He who?’

‘Sir Henry Mimpriss. Industrialist and amateur architect.’

‘The things you know!’

‘I read,’ Slider said with dignity.

‘Si monumentum requiris,’ Atherton remarked admiringly. ‘Wren only had a cathedral, and even that had some other bloke’s name on it.’

It was one of the nice things about London, Slider thought, looking round, that you never knew when you would come across the good bones of an ancient settlement visible under the accumulated flesh of urban development. In this square, as well as the church and the Old Rectory, there was a row of cottages whose Victorian tidying-up couldn’t fool the trained eye, and a pub called the the Goat In Boots whose wavy roof and muddle of rear buildings dated it along with the church. Inn, church, rectory and a few houses: all you needed for a country village – set, in those days, amid the rolling hayfields and market gardens of Middlesex. And then the railway came, and life was never the same again.

Atherton was reading the church noticeboard. ‘Rev. Alan Tennyson. Tennyson’s a nice sonorous name, but I think the Alan’s a mistake. Lacks gravitas.’

‘Make a note to tell his mother.’

‘And they only get a service every second Sunday,’ Atherton said. They started across the road towards the house. ‘If this is the Old Rectory, where’s the new one? Or does “old” just mean “former”?’

‘Pass,’ said Slider.

‘It looks like three houses in a motorway shunt.’

‘Don’t be rude. It’s just very old and altered,’ Slider said defensively. ‘The left-hand bit shows the real age. The Georgian face is only skin deep, and the Victorian wing’s been added, by the look of the roof.’

‘I’m glad I brought you along,’ Atherton said. ‘And now they’ve got a body. Careless of them. Gin a body meet a body lying down a hole …’

‘That’s “doon”, surely?’

‘If you insist. But don’t call me Shirley. Shall we knock or go round the side?’

‘Side,’ said Slider. To the right of the house – between it and the next house, from which it was divided by a fifteen-foot hedge of that omnipresent British Leyland spruce that someone was soon going to regret not keeping cut down to a manageable height – was a gravelled parking area on which stood a very dirty, light blue Ford pickup with various items of builder’s equipment in the back. Parked at the roadside and blocking it in were a patrol car and the Department wheels – a maroon Orion, which had brought DC McLaren, who had been on duty when the shout came in. At the back of the gravel area was a low wall that gave straight onto the terrace behind the house.

Slider and Atherton crunched over the gravel, stepped through a gap in the wall, and then stopped.

‘Now that’s what I call a patio,’ Atherton said, with a soundless whistle.

‘And I thought I was the Philistine,’ Slider replied. ‘That’s not a patio, that’s a terrace.’

It ran the whole length of the house, a broad and glorious terrace paved with York stone in slabs so wide and worn and ancient they might have been nicked from a monastery, and who knew but they were? Beyond it there was a steep drop to the lawn, which sloped down to a belt of trees, behind which, but hidden at this leafy time of year, was the railway. It should have been a river, Slider thought, for perfection. Still he coveted, country boy though he was at heart. Sitting on this terrace and gazing at the trees, you could almost believe …

Presumably the forces of nature were exacting a toll on the structure, for there was all the evidence of building work going on: a heap of earth and rubble, another of sharp sand, a pile of bricks, three bags of cement, a bright orange cement mixer, a wheelbarrow with two spades and a pick resting across it, and a blue plastic tarpaulin the colour of the inside of a lottery-winner’s swimming-pool, with frayed nylon rope through the eyelet holes at the corners.

The tarpaulin was folded back on itself, half covering a long trench dug in the terrace, parallel with its front edge, about three feet wide and two feet deep. The paving stones which had been levered up were neatly stacked away to one side, and an opportunist black cat was sitting on top of them in the sun, its paws tucked fatly under itself and its eyes half closed.

The builder himself was sitting on the low wall with his hands and his lips wrapped around a mug of tea: a stocky, powerfully built man in his thirties, with untidy thick blond hair, bloodshot blue eyes, weather-roughened cheeks and an unshaven chin. He was wearing mud-streaked work trousers and boots, and a ragged blue sweater over a check shirt. His strong hands, grained white with cement, were shaking so that the mug chattered against his teeth; he stared at nothing over the rim, past the blue-black legs of PC Willans, who was standing guard over him with an air of gentle sternness. It was a demeanour, Slider noted, often adopted by coppers towards remorseful domestic murderers.

McLaren came across to report. He was eating a cold Cornish pastie straight from the Cellophane wrapper and his lips were flecked with pastry and whatever the pallid glop was that passed for filling. ‘Breakfast, guv,’ he justified himself, seeing the direction of Slider’s gaze. ‘The body’s down the hole.’ With his free thumb he indicated the builder. ‘That’s Edward Andrews – Eddie Andrews. It’s his wife.’

‘And presumably his hole,’ Atherton suggested.

‘That’s right,’ McLaren said, with a world of significance. ‘He got here very early this morning – earlier than usual – but, bad luck for him, the lady of the house was up even earlier and found the body before he could concrete her in. The plastic sheet was apparently pulled right over, bar a corner that’d blown back, when she found it. It was like it is now when I got here.’

‘Householder’s name?’

‘Mrs Hammond. Lives here with her old dad. Norma’s inside with ’em – I picked her up on my way here.’ He gestured towards the uniformed constable, Defreitas, guarding the body. ‘Daffy’s got all the gen about Andrews. He lives round here.’

‘On a PC’s salary?’ Atherton said disbelievingly.

‘Well, not on the estate as such,’ McLaren admitted, ‘but only just round the corner. Woodbridge Road. Anyway, he knows this geezer Andrews.’

‘All right, let’s have a look,’ Slider said. He went over to the hole and hunkered down. The victim was lying on her back. She had not been tumbled in, but laid out carefully as though in a coffin, decently composed, her clothes straight, feet together, hands folded one on the other. She was a slim woman in her thirties with well-cut blonde hair (helped, to judge from the roots, but not by all that much), wearing a short-sleeved, fitted dress of navy cotton with a red leather belt, bare legs and strappy leather sandals. She had full make-up on, rather on the heavy side, Slider would have thought, for a woman as attractive as she must have been; and her finger- and toe-nails were painted red to match the belt. Her eyes were closed, and there were no obvious marks of violence on her. She might have been fresh from the mortician’s parlour.

‘Expensive scent,’ he said. Even after however long it was lying out in a trench, it had lasted well enough for Slider’s sensitive nose to catch it. He felt her hand: it was cold and stiff.

‘Expensive jewellery,’ Atherton said, looking over his shoulder. She was wearing a wedding-ring and an engagement hoop with five large diamonds, a sapphire and diamond dress ring of more expense than taste, a rather nice gold watch and three gold chains of varying thickness around her neck. ‘I wonder why he didn’t take them off? The rings and the watch at least. Shame to bury them in concrete.’

‘He says he didn’t do it,’ Defreitas offered.

‘Well, he would say that, wouldn’t he?’ Atherton said.

Slider stood up. ‘Things must be on the up in the building trade.’

‘It’s a good area for it,’ Defreitas said. ‘Lots of work – quality stuff, and no trouble about payment.’ Something about his voice made Slider look up, and he noted that Defreitas seemed upset. He was pale, and there was a rigidity about his expression that suggested he was holding himself firmly in check. His cheek muscles trembled with the effort of control, but he went on steadily, ‘Eddie’s been doing all right for himself. Just built himself a big new house, down the end of Woodbridge Road. Corner of the main road. Fourways, it’s called.’

‘Yes, I know it,’ Slider said. He had passed it often over the months while it was being built in what had been the back garden of a big Edwardian house: the Curse of Infill. He had noticed it because it had irritated him that it was called Fourways when it was on a T-junction, not a crossroads.

‘Supposed to be really smashing inside,’ Defreitas said. ‘Built it for her.’ He moved his head slightly towards the body, but without looking at it. ‘Her name’s Jennifer.’ He stopped and swallowed a couple of times. Some men couldn’t bear a corpse, even such a seemly and undamaged one as this.

‘Take it easy, lad,’ Slider said. ‘You’ll see worse in a long life.’

Defreitas swivelled his eyes towards Slider and then away again. He was a good-looking youngster, with brown eyes and a lean face and the sort of vigorous, slightly fuzzy tight brown curls that look like pubic hair. ‘I know, sir. But it’s different when it’s someone you know, isn’t it?’

‘What do you know about Jennifer Andrews?’ Slider asked.

‘She works – worked – part time for David Meacher – you know, the estate agent? – and she did part time at the pub, too. The Goat In Boots, I mean,’ he added conscientiously, ‘not the Mimpriss Arms.’ That was the estate’s own pub, built at the same time as the houses: draughty and uncomfortable, an overblown, over-quaint thing of pitch-pine and vaulted ceilings, like the fruit of an illicit union between a village hall and a tithe barn. ‘The Mimpriss is a bit rough sometimes. The Goat’s where the nobby people go. It’s got a restaurant and everything. You know, a posh one – nouveau cuisine and all that.’

‘How well do you know Andrews?’ Slider asked.

‘Just to say hello to,’ Defreitas said. ‘I’ve seen him in the Goat sometimes. He seems a nice bloke. I’ve heard people say he’s a good builder.’

‘You drink in the Goat?’

He seemed embarrassed by the implication. ‘Well, I used to mostly go to the First And Last in Woodbridge Road, but they’ve got music there now and a lot of young kids come in. The Goat’s nice and quiet, more like a village pub. Local people like it quiet. They don’t like the Mimpriss – lets the tone of the estate down, they say.’

‘They’re not going to like having a murder here, then,’ Atherton observed.

‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Defreitas said. ‘A murder like this––’ He swallowed again. ‘It’s quite a toney crime, really. They’ll all want to be in on it.’

‘No trouble getting them to talk, then?’ Slider said.

‘Getting ’em to stop, more like,’ Defreitas said succinctly.

‘Doc’s here, guv,’ McLaren called.

Out in the road Slider could see reinforcements arriving and the photographer’s van drawing up too. A group of onlookers was gathering on the pavement. ‘Get some crowd control going,’ he told McLaren. ‘And we’d better get Andrews back to the shop before the press arrives.’

‘When murder comes, can the Gazette be far behind?’ Atherton enquired rhetorically. ‘D’you want me to take him? I can have a crack at him while he’s still warm. He’s obviously number one suspect.’

Slider turned to look at him.

The morning sun shone on Atherton’s face, illuminating the fine, deep lines, that looked as though they’d been grooved with an etching tool, and the indefinable bruised look that Slider associated with people who have been gravely ill. Atherton had not long been back at work, after an extended leave during which there had been doubt as to whether he would come back at all. His knife wound had been slow to heal; and there was the psychological wound as well. But Atherton was not the only one affected by the incident. For some weeks Slider had been obliged to consider the prospect of carrying on in the Job without Atherton, and to face the unwelcome realisation that he didn’t want to.

That touched more than vanity. It was dangerous to be dependent on someone else in that way, and Slider had always thought of himself as self-sufficient. In a long career as a policeman he had made many working alliances and had had some very good partnerships, but he had never allowed himself to become attached to any colleague as he had to Atherton in the past few years. Atherton’s wounding and long sick-leave had forced him to realise how strong that attachment had become, and it scared him a little. He had coped with losing his wife and children to Ernie Newman, a man who could have bored for England; had coped – just – with losing his new love, Joanna, before he got her back again. But those traumas were in the social side of his life, and early in his career he had learned to keep the two sides separate. The Job was much the larger part of his existence.

It was not just that Atherton was a good bagman – anyone competent could learn his ways and fill those shoes; it was that he helped him to keep a sense of proportion about it all, something that got harder as time went on. Oh, he could do the job without Atherton, of course he could; it was just that, when he thought about it, really got down to it and looked it in the face, he felt an enormous disinclination to bother. Perhaps he was war-weary; or perhaps it was just the fleeting years. They were none of them, the Boy Wonder included, what they had been. But he had felt that if Atherton didn’t come back, it would be time to empty his Post Office savings book and go for that chicken-farm in Norfolk.

Well, the boy was back; but looking fragile. Only yesterday Porson, the new detective superintendent who had taken over from Little Eric Honeyman, had stopped him on the stairs and asked him how Atherton was ‘shaking out’. It was one of those maddening Porsonisms: it was obvious what he meant, but how did he get there? Did he think he was saying shaping up, shaking down, or working out? Or had he in mind even some more obscure metaphor for settling down, like Atherton shaking dusters out of the window, or shaking a pebble out of his shoe? Porson used language with the neatness and efficiency of a one-armed blind man eating spaghetti.

Slider had answered him optimistically; things were quiet and there was nothing even a fragile Atherton, given his gargantuan intellect, couldn’t cope with. But now here they were with a murder shout, and who knew where that might lead? If there was any likelihood of rough stuff, Slider had already determined, he would make sure Atherton was kept well away from it. But the trouble was, these days, you couldn’t necessarily predict the direction the rough stuff would come from. You might knock on any ordinary door and meet Mr G. Reaper in the shape of some crazed crack-head with half a Sabatier set clutched in his germans. And that was the worry, of course, that would wear you down. It was one thing to go into a known dangerous situation, with your body-armour, back-up and adrenaline all in place. But the creeping anxiety that any closed door and street corner, any routine roust, sus or enquiry, could suddenly turn bad and go for your throat, was unmanning. Slider wished he knew how Atherton was feeling about that; but Atherton had not brought up the subject, and Slider would not touch on it uninvited.

Atherton had noted his hesitation, and now said, with dangerous patience, ‘I don’t think he’ll turn nasty, but if he does, I’m sure Willans will protect me.’

Now the pressure was on Slider not to seem to be coddling Atherton, so he agreed. And then, of course, because Atherton had put the thought in his head, he started wondering whether Andrews would turn violent after all. This friendship business was a minefield, he thought resentfully, and went to meet the doc.

It was not, however, the duty police surgeon, but Freddie Cameron, the forensic pathologist, in all his splendour.

‘What’s this – short of work?’ Slider asked.

‘I’m actually nearer than Dr Prawalha,’ Cameron explained. ‘I don’t mind, anyway: if I’m going to be doing the doings, I’d just as soon see everything for myself while it’s untouched.’

‘You don’t need to apologise to me,’ Slider said, ‘except for looking so disgustingly brown.’

‘It was only Dorset,’ Cameron protested. ‘The Madam’s got a sister in Cerne Abbas. Lovely place, as long as you don’t suffer from an inferiority complex. What have you got for me?’

Slider took him to the trench. In accordance with procedure Cameron pronounced life extinct, but offered no suggestion as to the cause of death. ‘There’s nothing at all to see. Could be drugs of some sort, or even natural causes – heart, or a stroke. Can’t tell until I get her on the table. Presumably she died elsewhere and was transported here?’

‘Unless it was suicide and she took the precaution of lying down neatly in her grave first. And then covered herself with the tarpaulin.’

‘Those questions I leave to you, old dear,’ Freddie said, and shook his head. ‘Don’t like this sort of case. Too much room for error.’

‘Dead men don’t sue,’ Slider comforted him. ‘Can you give me an approximate time to be working on?’

‘Well, she’s cold to the touch and stiff, but there’s still some warmth in the axilla. It was a warm night, wasn’t it? And she’s been sheltered down this hole. Could be six to eight hours. Could be more. Probably not less than six.’

‘Late last night, early this morning, then?’ Slider said.

‘Is that enough to be going on with? I’ll have a better idea from the temperature, but I don’t want to do a stick here when I’ve no idea of the cause of death. You never know what evidence you might be destroying. Do you know who she is?’

‘She’s Jennifer Andrews, wife of local builder Edward Andrews.’

‘He the one who dug the hole?’ Freddie asked. ‘Ah, well, there you are, then.’

‘Here I am then where?’ Slider asked, resisting the obvious.

‘Whoever put her in here took the trouble to lay her out nicely,’ Freddie said. ‘So presumably it was someone who cared about her.’

‘Could be remorse,’ Slider pointed out.

‘Comes out the same.’ Freddie shrugged.

‘Get on with your own job, Sawbones, and leave the brainy stuff to me.’

Cameron chuckled. ‘You’re welcome to it.’

A small door from the terrace let Slider into a coats lobby sporting an array of wax jackets, waterproofs, overcoats, shapeless hats, walking sticks, a gardening trug, a fishing basket, rods in a canvas carrying sheath, green wellies, muddy shoes and an extra long canvas-webbing dog-lead. A narrow door with opaque glazed panels gave onto a loo, an old-fashioned one with a high seat and a stout pipe going up the wall behind it to the overhead cistern. That would give you a healthy flush, he thought. A third door passed him into the house. Here was proof that the Georgian elevation was only skin deep: he was in the beamed hall of a fifteenth-century house, going right up into the roof-space. Some Victorian, during the Gothic revival, had added a massive oak staircase going round three sides of it, and an open gallery on the fourth providing access to the rooms on the upper floor, giving it a sort of baronial-hall look; but the wood of the beams was silvery and lovely, and it worked all right.

He could hear a dog barking somewhere. On his left, the Victorian extension to the house, there were two doors. The first he tried revealed a large, high-ceilinged room, empty of life and smelling pungently of damp. It was furnished with massive, heavy pieces, partly as a dining room and partly as a study or office: a vast mahogany desk with a typewriter and books and papers stacked untidily on it, and a rank of ugly steel filing cabinets occupied the far end. There were two tall windows overlooking the terrace, and one to the side of the house, looking onto the gravel parking space.

The second door opened on the room at the front of the house, a drawing-room, equally huge, with a Turkish carpet over the fitted oatmeal Berber, one whole wall covered floor to ceiling with books, and the sort of heavy, dark furniture usually associated with gentlemen’s clubs. Here and there about the room were framed black-and-white photographs. Slider noted amongst them one of a man in climbing gear against a background of mountain peaks, a group of men ditto, the front row crouching like footballers, and another of a climber with his arm across the shoulder of a well muffled-up sherpa, both grinning snow-smiles at the camera.

The room also contained WDC Swilley, an old man in a wheelchair, and a large woman struggling with a dog. The dog was one of those big, heavy-coated, dark Alsatians, and it was barking with a deep resonance that was making the chandelier vibrate.

‘Oh, for God’s sake, woman, let her go!’ the old man said irritably. ‘Why must you always make such a fuss? Stand quite still,’ he commanded Slider, ‘and she won’t hurt you.’

The dog, released, sprang unnervingly forward, but stopped short of Slider, sniffed his shoes and his trousers, then looked up into his face and barked again, just once, its eyes wary and suspicious.

‘Good girl, Sheba,’ the woman said nervously. ‘Good girl, then. She won’t hurt you.’

Slider had known a good many dogs in his time, and wouldn’t have wagered the hole in his trousers’ pocket on the temper of this one. He offered his hand to be sniffed, but the dog flinched away from it, and then he saw that its ears were bald and red and scabbed with some skin complaint, which made him both wince and itch in instant sympathy.

‘Poor girl,’ he said quietly, ‘poor old girl,’ and the dog waved her tail uncertainly.

But the old man snapped, ‘Sheba, come here!’ and the bitch turned away, padded over to the wheelchair, and flopped down, near but just out of reach.

‘I’m so sorry,’ the woman fluffed, blushing awkwardly. ‘She’s a bit upset, you see. She wouldn’t hurt a soul, really.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Frances, shut up!’ the old man snapped. ‘You don’t need to apologise to him. And what’s the point of having a guard dog if you tell everyone she’s harmless?’ He looked at Slider with a kind of weary disgust. ‘I despair of women’s intellect. They have no capacity for logical thought. The Germans had the right idea: confine them to kinder, küche, and kirche. Trouble is, this one’s no bloody use for the first two, and the last is no bloody use to me. Who are you, anyway? Another of these damned policemen, I suppose.’

Slider passed from Swilley’s rigid expression – was she suppressing fury or laughter? – to look at the old man. He had a tartan rug over his legs, and his upper half was clad in a black roll-neck sweater and a crimson velvet smoking jacket: very sprauncy, but that jacket, with the scarlet of the Royal Stuart plaid, was an act of sartorial vandalism. He sat very upright, and Slider thought he would have been tall once; now he was thin, cadaverously so, with that greyish sheen to his skin and the bluish tint to his lips that spoke of extreme illness. He had a full head of white hair, though that, too, had thinned until the pink of the scalp showed through, like the canvas on a threadbare carpet. His hands, all knuckles and veins, were clenched in his lap, and he stared at Slider with eyes that were surprisingly, almost shockingly dark in that corpse-white face, eyes that burned with some desperate rage, though the thin, petunia lips were turned down in mere, sheer contempt. Some poem or other, about a caged eagle, nagged at the back of Slider’s mind. There was nothing really aquiline about this old man’s appearance. A caged something, though. If he was the climber in the photographs, it must be a bitter thing to be confined to a wheelchair now.

‘I’m Detective Inspector Slider, Shepherd’s Bush CID,’ he said, showing his brief. ‘May I know your name, sir?’

The old man straightened a fraction more. ‘I am Cyril Dacre,’ he said superbly.

The woman shot a swift, nervous look first at the old man and then at Slider. That, combined with the annunciatory tone of voice gave Slider the hint, and he was saying in suitably impressed tones, ‘The Cyril Dacre?’ even while his brain was still searching the old mental card index to see why the name sounded familiar.

‘You’ve heard of me?’ the old man said suspiciously.

The woman crackled with apprehension, and Swilley, trying to help, swivelled her eyes semaphore-style towards the bookcase and back, and, concealed from Dacre by her body, made the unfolding gesture with her hands that in charades signifies ‘book’. But – and fortunately – Slider really had heard of him and remembered just in time why, so he was able to say with obvious sincerity, ‘Not the Cyril Dacre who wrote all those history books I learned from in school?’ How many times had he opened one of those fat green tomes and seen th. . .