Part 10 (1/2)

Ghoulishly, she began to giggle, a sound not unlike her sobs, quite different from the Tredown women's cackling. ”We wrapped him up in newspaper to take him downstairs. There was newspaper in the cellar. I went down and fetched the paper and we wrapped him in that. We put him in the cellar and my husband piled logs on top of him and boards and boxes and we left him. Ronald said that would have to do until he could think of some way to get rid of him. Burn him perhaps or bury him but he didn't know where.”

”But you never did?”

”No, we never did.” She lifted to them a woebegone face. ”Ronald had his first stroke the next day. He couldn't have burnt or buried anyone after that.”

”Mrs. McNeil, did you shut the cellar door when you left?”

She shook her head. ”Not then. I did when I went back.”

The heart of Kingsmarkham was no place to be on a Sat.u.r.day evening, especially if you were over forty. It had once been a quiet country town, sleepy and peaceful, but now you might as well have been in Piccadilly Circus. The binge drinkers were out in force, spilling out of the pubs and clubs on to the pavement because this was an exceptionally warm November. Wexford told Donaldson to drive them to the little pub on the Kingsbrook called the Gooseberry Bush and not to wait for them, they would walk home from there. The place wasn't crowded but it wasn't exactly deserted either. Young people without cars disliked the half-hour walk from the town along footpaths bordering water meadows. The car park was full of the transport used by the middle-aged. If you turned your back to it, as Wexford said, if you pretended it wasn't there, you could look instead from your table at a clear starry sky and a moon shedding its pale light on to meadows bisected by dark hedges, willows fringing the Kingsbrook.

”That was awful,” he said flatly. ”I should have been tougher but I felt so sorry for her.”

”Did she say any more after I'd gone?” Burden had left the house and gone outside to sit in the car.

”Only that they'd never moved the body. I mean they'd never done what she says they intended, that is burn it or bury it. Well, we know they didn't. They moved house, leaving the body in there, covered by all the logs.”

Burden ordered drinks for them without asking Wexford what he wanted. He knew. ”That's how it was when Damon and I found it.”

”Her husband died. I suppose the shock of knowing he'd killed a man caused his first stroke. She kept thinking she would go back into the bungalow and take a look, see if it could remain there, but she didn't. Not till two years ago. Mrs. Pickford asked her to tea. She says she went over there on the bus and got there a bit early. Grimble's key was still under the stone by the back door. She went in and down the stairs.”

”The place must have stunk.”

”I know. All she said was that there was a faint smell of decay in the cellar. Of 'something gone bad' was the way she put it. She pulled off some of the logs-G.o.d knows what she thought that would achieve-and when she saw what was underneath-well, you know what it must have been two years ago-she just fled. 'It frightened me,' she said. 'I was so frightened.' She ran out, lumbered out, I suppose, the poor old thing, slamming the door behind her.”

”No doubt that's why I had a job getting it open.”

”She staggered up the stairs, went home, and tried to forget about it, I suppose.” Wexford lifted his gla.s.s, savored the claret that filled it, and sighed a little. ”I'm going back tomorrow.”

”Tomorrow's Sunday.”

”Can't be helped. The better the day, the better the deed, as my grandad said, or if he didn't he should have.”

”Are we going to charge her at least with concealing a death?”

”I don't know if I'd have the heart,” said Wexford, ”but I must eventually. I showed her the photo of the T-s.h.i.+rt, but it was plain she didn't recognize it. All she'd seen of him through the window was the orange anorak.”

”What became of the knife?” Burden asked.

The lost father couldn't be the man they were looking for, could he? The time was right, eleven years ago, disappeared in June, a male, the right sort of age as far as Carina Laxton could tell the age. If the DNA, that ultimate certain proof, was right . . . Two people were alive to provide it, those two daughters. Barry Vine's first thought when he had read the piece in the ”News Review” was that he must immediately tell Wexford but it was Sat.u.r.day night and the next day part two of Selina Hexham's memoir would appear. There might be something in tomorrow's installment to make it impossible for Alan Hexham to be their man.

He drove home and read it again. Nowhere did the writer say she positively knew her father was dead and knew how he died; nowhere did she say whether she and her sister had ever heard from him in the intervening years. She might say so in the next installment. Would he be justified in showing it to Wexford at this hour when he didn't know if the whole thing would turn out to make it impossible that Alan Hexham's was the body in Grimble's trench? Selina might write that her father had phoned home a year later without saying where he was or that they had had a postcard from Australia. His imagination working away, Barry forgot for a moment that whatever might appear tomorrow, Selina Hexham had already written it, perhaps a year ago, and wasn't feverishly penning her memories now for a newspaper due to publish them in a few hours' time. Then he remembered, told himself not to be ridiculous, to wait till tomorrow and settled down to his Linda di Chamounix CD.

Chapter Fourteen.

The Sunday Times, News Review, 5 November 2006 Part Two of Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father My mother knew he was dead. She knew it from that first day, the day we all went to the police together. She didn't say that to the police or to us, of course she didn't, but years later she told me she had known it from the first. There was no other explanation for his staying away for twenty-four hours without getting in touch with her. She knew when she was loved and she knew herself to be a sensitive, perceptive woman who would quickly have been able to tell if her husband was seeing another woman. It was this self-knowledge which perhaps made it worse when the rumor spread round our neighborhood, at our school, even at the church where Mum sometimes went, that Dad had run off with Denise Cole. There were other theories for his disappearance, of course: he was heavily in debt (he who had never owed anyone a penny), he was depressed because he felt himself a failure as a teacher (he who was a brilliant teacher and immensely popular), he had met someone in Lewes (at a funeral!) who had offered him a wonderful job at twice his present salary if he would leave at once, but the favorite one was that of his elopement.

Denise Cole isn't her real name. It would be unfair to give it. I'm sure she was quite innocent either of having designs on my father or of fostering the rumor. She was about twenty-five years old, rented a room in the next street to us, and was a checkout supervisor in a supermarket in Leyton High Road. She had left school at sixteen after getting half a dozen rather good O levels. Now she wanted to go to university and study for a psychology degree so that she could go into social work. Whether she ever got her degree and became a social worker I don't know, but I do know that she is married and living up in the north somewhere.

Dad used to coach her. She mostly came to our house for her coaching in biology, but sometimes they went to her room where she always had a friend of hers present. There wasn't so much danger then for a teacher to be accused of molesting a student he was alone with, but I suppose Denise and my dad thought it best to be on the safe side. The friend was also sitting for A levels, so Dad had two students to teach. No one ever suggested he was involved with Megan Lloyd. It was always Denise because it so happened that she had gone missing two days before he did.

I remember him going around to the house where she had a room and coming back rather cross to say that one of the other tenants had told him she'd done ”a moonlight flit.” Megan hadn't been there either, but there was no question of her being missing. She just hadn't turned up because Denise had told her she owed 3,000 on her Visa card and meant to go off somewhere for a while ”until it had all blown over,” whatever that meant.

Everyone began to believe that my dad and Denise Cole had gone off together. Well, not us and our friends, we didn't believe it. Even if Dad had been the sort of man who'd be unfaithful to his wife with a girl nearly twenty years his junior, we knew he'd never even been alone with her. Mum and Vivien and I were always in the house and Megan was always there when he went around to Denise's.

Did the rumor-and it grew into more than a rumor-influence the police not to look for him? Maybe they wouldn't have done anyway. Maybe he just didn't come into their category of vulnerable people. Up to a point we looked for him. Mum phoned every relative we had and wrote to those whose addresses we had, but her heart wasn't in it. As I've said, she knew he was dead. It was the only possible explanation.

But the insurance company didn't know. The building society with whom they'd got one of those arrangements that ensure that on a partner's death the other one gets possession of the property absolutely, they didn't know. Our house was only ours if Mum managed to go on paying the mortgage. Dad's pension was only hers if she could prove he was dead. Of course she could have gone on the benefit, but she wouldn't do that. She'd been a librarian before she married Dad and she managed to get a job working in a bookshop.

This was all months later and during that time we were living on what was in their joint account and her own savings. She knew it would be a good idea to sell our house and buy a flat which would be big enough for the three of us. But she couldn't sell the house. It didn't belong to her or, rather, it belonged to her and Dad, and Dad wasn't there to agree to the sale. To help make ends meet she let out one of the upstairs rooms, her own bedroom. We kept our room and she moved into Dad's study.

Before that happened it had to be cleared of what was in it. I ought to make it plain how dreadful all this was for her, how painful for all of us but specially horrible for her. To leave their bedroom to a stranger was bad enough but to go into Dad's study which she always looked on as somehow sacred to him, inviolable and absolutely private, to take it apart and empty it, that was agony to her, the ultimate sacrilege. But she did, she had to and we went with her. It wasn't that we asked to be there but that she asked us. I think she didn't want to be alone in there or she was afraid she might collapse in uncontrollable tears.

It sounds strange to say this, but we'd never been in that room before. I mean Vivien and I hadn't. Mum had, of course she had, probably when we were little and she and Dad were getting it ready to be his sort of sanctum. Later on we'd seen into it on our way to bed, for instance, when Dad had come out to say good-night and left the door open. The fact was we hadn't been all that interested. It was just an ordinary little room, the kind of place which in houses like ours was called the box room-because when the houses were first built and s.p.a.ce wasn't at a premium people kept bags and suitcases in there? We looked in and saw a place not much bigger than a cupboard with a desk in it and a chair, a filing cabinet, bookshelves full of books, and an awful lot of paper. That's all there was room for. When we went in for the first time, six months after we lost our father and Mum her husband, there was only just room for us all to get in there and then it was only possible because we were small thin people.

There wasn't a computer. Vivien and I had got used to computers, we had them at school, though neither of us then possessed one, and we'd never before seen an electric typewriter.

Mum had to tell us what it was. It seemed to us as ancient, as antediluvian, as a fountain pen or a pound note. What did Dad use it for? we wanted to know. ”Working for his postgraduate degree,” was the only answer she could come up with and then she said, ”Researching. Writing his thesis.” If this was true, what happened to the thesis? Had he started it? Was it half-completed?

Whatever it had been, there was no trace of it remaining. For all we found, he might have sat up here reading and rereading the books on the shelves. Those books themselves gave no clue. There was the Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, Shorter Oxford Dictionary, Roget's Thesaurus, and and Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, a Cla.s.sical dictionary, Ovid's a Cla.s.sical dictionary, Ovid's Metamorphoses Metamorphoses in a new translation, Icelandic sagas, novels by in a new translation, Icelandic sagas, novels by J.R.R. J.R.R. Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin and Terry Pratchett, Darwin's Tolkien and Ursula Le Guin and Terry Pratchett, Darwin's Origin of Species, Origin of Species, books by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins. books by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Dawkins.

We took the books downstairs and stacked them on top of the bookcase. There was no other s.p.a.ce. The papers we put up in the loft and the blank sheets we kept to use for writing letters on. But we hardly wrote any letters, we had no one to write to, and the sheets of paper are still in the house where I have lived alone since Mum died. We found only one piece of paper that might have given us some hint as to where Dad went when he left Maurice Davidson's funeral, but it didn't. I don't really know why I thought it might. Maybe because it was the only thing we found in there in Dad's handwriting. Oh, there were check stubs, of course-he attended to business in that room, paying bills, completing forms, and that sort of thing-but this sc.r.a.p of paper, half an A4 sheet, was the only thing he left behind that he'd written by hand. It was hard to escape the conclusion that he'd deliberately cleared the place of anything which might have provided a clue to where he was going and what he intended to do. I actually said this to Mum, but she wasn't having any of it. ”He didn't know he was going to die,” she said, ”and I know he's dead. I just know it.”

And the sc.r.a.p of paper that was the only thing in his handwriting? It was a list of names of contemporary authors, mostly science-fiction writers, all of them still alive, along with a list of publishers. Underneath he had written ”Fact-finding? Proofreading? Editing?”

Mum said it wouldn't help us find where he had gone that afternoon. Years before, she remembered, when they were short of money and she couldn't take a job because they had us, Dad had considered trying to get work as a publisher's reader. He knew such a thing was possible because publishers employed people to read ma.n.u.scripts. But he never did. The pay would have been too little to make it worth his while. We actually phoned the publis.h.i.+ng houses on the list, but none of them had ever heard of him. So that was no use. Don't they call it a red herring?

Meanwhile his study was cleared-he had been gone for over a year by then-and Mum moved in, leaving her bedroom for the lodger. Vera was a quiet tidy sort of woman, but Vivien and I never liked her. We resented having to share a bathroom with her, though we had never minded sharing with Dad. It must have been much more of a hards.h.i.+p for her sharing with us. We were coming up to the age when girls take over a bathroom, dropping towels on the floor and leaving messes behind them. She fried most of what she ate and our kitchen always reeked of chip fat. Mum minded that more than almost anything, more than sleeping in that tiny room, which, after all, must hourly have reminded her of Dad sitting in there in happy silence, more than having to sell the car and forgo summer holidays.

You can get used to anything, can't you? Our lives were utterly changed but we still had school, which we both loved, and our friends and the grandparents who were unendingly good to us. We didn't know it at the time, children aren't interested, but Mum told us later that Dad's mother and father paid the mortgage for two years and all the services bills. Our gran died when I was fifteen and Vivien was thirteen, and Grandad moved in with us. That was the end of Vera with her chip pan and the stink of cheap perfume she left in the bathroom, the end too of watching everything we spent and denying ourselves anything new. It was three years since my mother had even bought herself a sweater, still less a pair of shoes. Things were different with Grandad there. He had sold his own house for what Mum said was an amazing amount of money, he had a very good pension as well, and he brought his car with him.

We both loved Grandad. He was generous and easy-going and never intrusive, but I think the best thing about him was that he reminded us of Dad. This must have been painful for Mum, but it wasn't for me and I don't think it was for Vivien. His voice sounded like Dad's. He had the same build as Dad, though Dad was a bit taller, and he hadn't lost his hair, which was still quite dark. Sometimes I'd come home from school and go into our living room and Grandad would be there, sitting in an armchair reading. He was a great reader-like Dad. He'd turn to say hallo, put out a hand and kiss me, and then for a moment it was my dad, the same feel of the hand, the same dry firm lips.

So things got better for us. Or for Vivien and me they did. Mum had got very thin and the sadness in her face was permanent. She was in perpetual mourning. One evening, after Grandad had gone to bed and Vivien was in our room doing her homework, Mum said in a matter-of-fact way, ”I would quite like to die.” No doubt she shouldn't have said that to a child of sixteen but I suppose she felt she had to say it to someone. I think she put in that ”quite” to soften things a bit. ”I've lived without him for four years,” she said, ”and it hasn't got any better. If I'm in a crowd of people I see him, for a moment I know it's him, but of course it isn't. I was in the tube station the other day and I saw him coming down the escalator. I see him in photos in the paper and crowds on the television. I'd like to die so that that doesn't happen anymore.”

I didn't know what to say. It made me cry, but she didn't cry. She just sat there gazing in an empty sort of way across the room. ”I haven't minded much about selling the car and having to have Vera and getting a job and all that. That was nothing compared to losing him.”