Part 9 (1/2)

”It's possible. Maeve Tredown would certainly like us to think that way.”

”But it's crazy, guv. Some villain steals a sheet on purpose to have a shroud all ready to wrap a body in? And he steals it from the house next door? Is he trying to incriminate the Tredowns? Does he know the Tredowns?”

”I don't know, Hannah. When you come up with some answers, I'll be interested to hear them.”

Damon Coleman had nothing to contribute. It was Friday and he and Burden were off to speak to Irene McNeil and then to revisit the house in Grimble's Field. Barry was on the point of saying something about the extract he had read in the Sunday Times Sunday Times but he thought better of it; it was too thin, too distant and remote. He folded up the newspaper page once more and put it in his jacket pocket. but he thought better of it; it was too thin, too distant and remote. He folded up the newspaper page once more and put it in his jacket pocket.

Mrs. McNeil's cleaner showed them in. Her employer sat in an armchair with her feet up on a footstool, her swollen ankles bulging over the sides and tops of her shoes. They looked as if they must cause her pain as well as discomfort.

”We want to ask you a little more about your visits to Mr. Grimble's house, Mrs. McNeil,” Burden said, keeping his eyes away from those ankles.

Irene McNeil said rather too quickly, ”I never went into the house. What gave you that idea?”

”Never? Not even, for instance, after Mr. Grimble was dead? I wondered if his son asked you to have a look round the place, you or your husband, and choose some little thing of Mr. Grimble's as a memento. You'd been neighbors for a long while, after all.”

”Grimble ask me that?” She sounded genuinely indignant. ”The man's a complete boor. He'd no more offer me something like that than he'd have a courteous word for me. I told you I never entered that house and I meant it. I'm extremely tired. I hope all this arguing isn't going to go on much longer.”

Burden said, ”I'm sorry you see it as arguing, Mrs. McNeil. We simply want to get to the truth of the matter and to do that I'm afraid we have to question you. We'll try not to pressurize you.”

”Then I think you ought to believe me when I say I never went into that house. I hadn't any call to go in there. It wouldn't have crossed my mind to go in there. I hadn't got a key, had I? What would I go in there for?”

She was protesting too much, Burden noted. ”Mrs. McNeil, what would you say if I were to tell you that you were seen going into that house?”

”I'd say that whoever told you that was a liar.” She had reared her heavy bulk up in her chair in order to say this and the effort exhausted her. She collapsed back, said, ”I don't feel at all well. Please give me some water.”

Damon poured water from a carafe on a side table and handed it to her. She didn't thank him but stared as if they had never met before. The cleaner came in, appointed herself Mrs. McNeil's carer, and bustled about, feeling her employer's forehead, announcing that she would get fresh water, and glaring horribly at the two policemen. They left.

”I wonder what she went in there for.” Burden looked back at the house as if it might answer him.

”If she went in, sir,” said Damon.

”She went in all right.”

Vincenzo Bellini, called one of the four great figures of Italian opera, was preferred by Barry Vine over all others. He often wondered what beautiful music was lost to the world by the composer's dying of gastroenteritis at the age of thirty-three. On Sat.u.r.day evening, Barry's wife having gone to see her parents, he was indulging himself by listening to I puritani. I puritani. But when its sweet pathos drew to a close and a pardon had been issued to Riccardo, he remembered the piece of newsprint he had put into his desk and suddenly it no longer seemed to him-what were the words he had used of it? Remote? Distant?-anything but urgent. How could he have neglected it for so long, nearly a week? Was he that irresponsible? But when its sweet pathos drew to a close and a pardon had been issued to Riccardo, he remembered the piece of newsprint he had put into his desk and suddenly it no longer seemed to him-what were the words he had used of it? Remote? Distant?-anything but urgent. How could he have neglected it for so long, nearly a week? Was he that irresponsible?

His parents-in-law lived only in the next street and his wife hadn't taken the car. Thank G.o.d. Without the means of getting down to the police station he'd have laid awake all night worrying about ”Gone Without Trace.” It was with a sense of enormous relief that he found the piece of paper where he had left it and he settled down there and then in the empty office to read.

Chapter Twelve.

The Sunday Times, News Review, 29 October 2006 News Review, 29 October 2006 Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father The day he went away remains very clearly in my mind and not just because it was the day I lost my father. It was also the day that drew a line between my happy and untroubled childhood and the rest of my life, a precise line coming halfway along. I was twelve and now I'm twenty-three. That's why I'm writing this, because of that halfway mark, and because, wherever he is now and whatever has happened to him, I think he deserves a memorial.

When you are twelve you've reached an age when you can make a fairly accurate a.s.sessment of other people's state of mind, of how happy or unhappy they are. My parents were happy together. They showed it. They were ”touchers” and demonstrative. When Dad came home from school-he was a teacher in a comprehensive school-he always kissed my mother, and sometimes, if he'd had a specially good day, I suppose, or had that sort of all's-right-with-the-world feeling, he'd put his arms around her and hug her. Or maybe it was just because he loved her. He talked to my sister and me. If that seems obvious it's not really. My friends' dads didn't really talk to them. I'd been in their houses and seen how their dads were kind and pleasant and all that sort of thing but mostly what they said to their kids was ”Yes, all right, but not while I'm watching this,” or ”I've had a hard day and I just want to relax, right?” My dad seemed to like answering our questions, especially the ones about animals and natural history and evolution. He had a degree in biology and while other people's fathers were crazy about this or that footballer or the Rolling Stones or some politician, his hero was Charles Darwin. At the weekends he took us out and that's why, when I reached that fateful halfway mark, the Natural History and Science Museums were as familiar to me as sports grounds were to some people.

He used to tell us stories too. Not read, tell. And I mean he still did, even though we were ten and twelve. The stories were a long way from his science and evolution and animal behaviour. I suppose you could say they were the Greek myths retold, tales of the whole pantheon of the Greek G.o.ds, most of them, as I later found out, from Ovid. But the one I liked best was about the Trojan War, starting with the beauty contest that Paris judged, his winning Helen as his reward and how the war broke out because Helen was Menelaus's wife and he resented her being stolen from him. Ever since then, whenever I hear about that war or the name Homer or Achilles and most of all Helen, I think of my dad and wish he'd never gone away and left us. Or whatever he really did.

We respected each other in our house. My sister Vivien and I had been brought up like that, to understand that Mum and Dad respected our privacy and our right to be listened to and to accord them the same attention. If I have to find faults in my parents, and they had their failings like everyone else, I'd say Mum was a bit too house-proud and fussy and a bit too in the way of ”keeping herself to herself,” reserved really to the point of shyness. As for my dad, maybe he did rather stuff us full of knowledge, more perhaps than we could handle, and he was a secretive person. I don't know if that's the right way to put it but what I mean is that he would withdraw himself from the rest of us sometimes, go to the little room that was his study and work at-something. Not at the weekends. Those were ours. At mealtimes he liked us all to engage in conversation-quite intellectual talk, considering our ages. He was there to help us with our homework and did so in the best possible way. But when we went to bed he went to his study and stayed in there till midnight.

I still don't really know what he did. ”He's working for a master's degree,” my mother said and then, later, that he was researching for a thesis. We had to accept. So many people we know were somehow involved with academia on one level or another. But every night? Not at the weekends but in the week, two or three hours every night? What I'm going to say now will make me look like a very selfish little girl and my sister another, for Vivien felt the same as I did. Our house was a three-bedroomed end-of-terrace, one bedroom for Mum and Dad, one to be shared by Vivien and me, the third my dad's study. We couldn't see why he needed it. Why couldn't he do whatever it was he did in our living room (sitting room and dining room converted into one) or in his own bedroom? Then I could keep our bedroom and Vivien, as the younger of us, could have the study. We asked, we even nagged a bit, but Dad was adamant, and Mum, of course, backed him up. To do him justice-and I'm always willing to do that-he bore it patiently for a long time until one day he said in his quiet firm way that couldn't be defied, ”That's enough, you two. I don't want to hear any more of it. All over, finished, right?”

Vivien argued a bit. I think she'd agree that she whined. Dad meted out the only punishment we ever had. ”All right, Vivien, go to the bedroom you so inconveniently have to share with Selina and stay there till I say you can come down.” And that was the end of it. He can't have got as far as submitting his thesis because if he'd been awarded a master's we would have heard about it, no doubt we would all have celebrated it. I mention all this because we never did find out exactly what he did in that study, but we all believed it had something to do with the reason for his departure, though no one else did, not the police who weren't interested anyway or his friends or our grandparents. They all thought what we knew to be impossible, that he'd gone off with another woman.

It was Thursday, June 15, 1995, and his school was to be used as a polling station in the local elections and was therefore closed. It happened to be the day the funeral was to take place of an old friend of my father's and the closing of his school meant that he could attend it, which he very much wanted to do. Mum would have gone with him, but there was no question of that with the two of us arriving home at three-thirty. Mine wasn't the sort of mother who left her daughters, aged ten and twelve, to come home to an empty house.

The funeral was in Lewes in Suss.e.x, which is on the Brighton line. I said I remember the day clearly and I do, that it was a wet morning, exceptionally dark at 8 a.m., and as a result Vivien and I overslept. Mum had to come in twice to get us up and when we finally did we had to rush. Rus.h.i.+ng was something she hated in her ordered and organized way, and I remember she was rather testy at breakfast, telling us it was ridiculous to insist on second pieces of toast when we'd already had Weetabix and orange juice. Did we think we were going to be malnourished if for once we went without a slice of brown bread and marmalade? Dad ate nothing. I remember this because it was so unusual. He never ate between meals but he never missed a meal either. He did that morning, just drinking a cup of coffee. Mum said later, when the terror started, that she thought he was too upset about Maurice Davidson's funeral to eat anything.

The boys next door, Martin and Mark Saunders, called for us as they always did and we were bundled off to school. We both kissed Dad, which was something we didn't always do and probably wouldn't have if he hadn't made a point of coming up to each of us in turn while the boys waited and putting his arms around us. To this day I remember the feel of his hands holding my shoulders and his lips on my cheek. That brief precious contact, the last, will be with me forever, and Vivien says it is the same for her, the touch of our beloved father who we were never to see again.

Math for me that morning, followed by music, then PE. A double science period in the afternoon and we had a test. I know I was able to answer most of the questions correctly because of the conversations we'd had at teatime with Dad and our visits to the Natural History Museum. But then it's because of those things that I'm a biologist now. We went home. Not with the boys this time but in a crowd until we reached the corner of our street where the others all went off in different directions. It had been raining most of the day but now it had cleared up and a weak sun was s.h.i.+ning between the heavy clouds. Mum was at the gate to meet us as she often was. She said she had come out to see if the rain had stopped, but I think it was really to see us coming.

Dad wasn't expected home until early evening. The children of a male teacher are used to having their father home at teatime if he doesn't work too far away. We missed him. I remember how much I wanted to tell him about my biology test and that I thought I'd done well. Isn't it funny how I remember what we had for tea? Bread and b.u.t.ter and Marmite and homemade scones and a Kit-Kat each. Families don't eat together anymore, or so I'm told, but we did all the time. I suppose we were old-fas.h.i.+oned.

Mobile phones were getting quite common even then, but Dad didn't have one, so my mother wasn't expecting him to call her. Even so, she started getting a bit anxious when it got to half past six. We had the television on because by then she thought there might be something on the news about a hold-up on the Brighton line. There wasn't and it got to seven, to seven-fifteen, to seven-thirty. . . . The rain had begun again and it was coming down in sheets. At eight o'clock Mum phoned Carol Davidson, Maurice's widow in Lewes. She didn't want to, she said it was awful phoning a widow whose husband would never come home again about your husband who was just a bit late home. Little did she know. Carol Davidson was very nice. She just said she appreciated Dad coming ”all this way” and they'd had a lovely talk about Maurice and old times. Dad had stayed and had something to eat, but he'd left at about two. She asked Carol if Dad had been all right when he left and Carol said yes, he'd been fine. Of course he'd been upset but that was natural.

That was six hours before and it was then that Mum started getting really worried. She thought he must have had an accident and be in hospital somewhere and it would have to have been a serious accident, he'd have had to be unconscious, otherwise he'd have phoned or got someone else to phone. After another half-hour had gone by she phoned the police. They were very nice and they wanted to know if she'd like to report him as a missing person, go down to the station and fill in a form. But they said it was very soon to do that and the chances were that by the time she had filled in the form he'd be back. The policeman she spoke to gave her the number of two hospitals in the Brighton area and suggested she phone them and enquire, which she did but Dad wasn't in either of them. Once she'd started she wanted to go on and by ten she'd phoned all the hospitals down there that she could find.

There was no question of Vivien and me going to bed. We stayed up with Mum, waiting and hoping and sometimes doing that ridiculous thing of running to the front door and out to the gate to look up and down our street. Viv and I did it four or five times, and then Mum said to stop because it was raining so hard and we came in soaked. She kept saying, ”I wish the rain would stop, I wish it would stop,” as if it made things worse, Dad being out in the rain.

Eventually, we went to bed but we couldn't sleep, and we heard Mum go downstairs and walk about and come back up again and go down again. She came into our room in the morning and said we had to go to school, it would turn out that there was some simple explanation for Dad not coming home, but we could tell she didn't believe this, and after a while she said we need not go. It was better for us to be here with her, she needed us here. And then she gave an awful sort of sob as if her heart would break.

She went to the police station at about nine and we went with her. It was true what she'd said, she didn't want to be anywhere without us. She filled in the missing-person form and the policeman who was looking after us said she wasn't to worry as he was sure to be back that day. In fact, he said, the police didn't search seriously if fit healthy men of his age-he was forty-four-went missing. It wasn't like children and young girls or old people. Most men of his age, ”the vast majority” he said, came back within seventy-two hours. My mother thanked him and said he was very kind, but even then, at that early stage, she knew my dad hadn't done any of the things other people suggested, gone off with another woman, gone away to start a new life somewhere, been on a binge, wakened in a strange bed, and been afraid to go home. Even then, she was saying he must be dead.

Next week: Selina tries to discover the secrets in the life of her father, Alan Hexham. These extracts are from Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father by Selina Hexham, to be published by Lawrence Busoni Hill in January 2007. by Selina Hexham, to be published by Lawrence Busoni Hill in January 2007.

Chapter Thirteen.

Damon Coleman had interviewed her and later so had Burden. Both had reported her as difficult, p.r.i.c.kly, and old-fas.h.i.+oned. Wexford's experience of Mrs. Irene McNeil consisted of the letter she had written him, and that had led him to expect a deeply conservative woman, a sn.o.b, her ethos centered in another, long-past age. Still, he thought he would be talking to someone with more sense and more dignity than the Tredown women.

What he didn't expect was that he would feel sorry for her. It wasn't her great lumbering girth and the fact that she had to use a stick-would soon need two sticks-which provoked his pity. It wasn't her apparent distress at coping with disability or the pain in her arthritic limbs but, rather, something in her eyes, a bewilderment at finding herself ending up alone here in a house that, though she had been there for nearly eight years, was still new and alien to her, without child or friend or companion. He told himself that whatever she told him, whatever he and Burden found out from her, he must be gentle and considerate.

The house that she and her husband had bought because it was near the shops and on a bus route-the bus went just twice a day-and ”easy to run” had evidently been designed for a young couple out at work all day. Its interior was stark, lined with built-in cupboards, ceiling eyelet lighting, hardwood laminate floors. There was something pathetic about Mrs. McNeil's padded, b.u.t.toned velvet furniture in this minimalist setting, her footstools and cus.h.i.+ons and ornaments crowded together and seeming to jostle one another.

Her husband had had his first stroke eight years before and had died six months after they moved in, when they were still at the stage, Mrs. McNeil said, of saying to each other that they would settle down, they would get used to it. She had had to get used to it alone. Wexford's recalling her mind to Flagford Hall, the house that she had left behind, let forth a flood of reminiscence. Mrs. McNeil spoke in a steady complaining whine, the voice of a woman who has left all life's pleasures in the past and to whom the present is all labor and sorrow.

”Even with that dreadful man Grimble living opposite, we were comfortable and peaceful there.” Sweat trickled down her cheeks. ”It was my husband's family home. You could call it his ancestral home. His family had lived there for generations. The house is perfect Queen Anne, you know, and the gardens are gorgeous-or they were, I don't suppose they are now. As for this place, you wouldn't believe the noise there is at night here, louts and young girls drunk and screaming in the street. Even on the day Mr. Grimble turned that young man out, when he put his furniture out into the front garden, there was nothing like I get here.”

”Let me take you back to that time, Mrs. McNeil.”