Engleby

by Sebastian Faulks

  When everything was quite burned, I swept the ashes out and emptied the pan down the toilet, which I flushed until every speck was gone.

  I wondered what to do about Margaret. Best to find out what Cannon wanted first. I dialled the number and after being put on hold for a minute, got through to a young woman.

  ‘Can I speak to Chief Inspector Cannon, please?’

  ‘Who’s speaking, please?’

  ‘Michael Watson.’

  ‘Will he know what it’s in regard to?’

  I breathed in hard. ‘I’m not able to predict that.’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘I’m returning his call.’

  There was a pause, then suddenly Cannon was on the line.

  ‘Mr Engleby. Thank you for calling back.’ He sounded exhilarated. ‘We’ve had the devil’s own job tracking you down. Thank goodness for your old school. They pointed us in the right direction.’

  Cannon had become more confident with age; he’d also acquired a bit of bogus golf-club polish to his voice.

  ‘Good,’ I said.

  ‘I expect you know what I’m calling in connection with.’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘The case of Jennifer Arkland. I’m sure you remember.’

  ‘Yes. Of course.’

  ‘One or two things have come to light. I’d very much like to talk to you again. I’d like you to come up here and see me.’

  ‘I can’t come today.’

  ‘Yes, you can, Mr Engleby. I’m sending a car for you. Are you at home?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My man will be with you in a few minutes. I didn’t come to your newspaper because I didn’t want to make a scene in front of your colleagues. I have been requested by the family to play this very low key for reasons of press and publicity. In return for that, I’d appreciate your full co-operation. Please don’t leave your house. Otherwise I shall issue a warrant for your arrest. I can play it rough if you prefer.’

  ‘I understand.’

  I put the phone down. I felt all right. He wasn’t arresting me; it was all quite amicable. If they really thought I’d killed Jennifer, if they really had hard evidence, they’d have marched in and grabbed me. They’d have taken no chances. That’s how the plods operate.

  I called Margaret at work and told her I was going to Edinburgh and that I’d ring the next day. She received this news coolly, but things were not that good between us since I’d been spending less time in Holloway. I was relieved that she wasn’t too inquisitive.

  The bell rang and two reasonable policemen took me away to a tactfully unmarked maroon Volvo. We stopped for a sandwich and fizzy orange drink at a garage in East Finchley before we hit the North Circular. By two o’clock I was seated in the interview room in Mill Road police station.

  A constable in shirtsleeves sat with me, saying nothing. I had a cup of tea in a styrofoam cup. I asked if I could smoke and he nodded, so I lit up a Rothman’s, knocking the ash into a little tin ashtray on the table. One wall was clouded glass and I presumed it was a one-way, though that seemed a bit hi-tech for Mill Road. There was a cassette recorder on the table, housed in an odd, non-commercial wooden box.

  What was I thinking as I waited? I don’t know. Does one ever really think? I seemed just to drift through it. In order to keep itself functioning under pressure, the brain releases chemicals that make the bizarre and the frightening seem normal. The Nat Sci Tripos taught me that homo saps who did not have this brain function were unsuccessful in reproduction, presumably because they couldn’t handle stress and got themselves killed a lot by animals or other saps. So we who were chosen, we survivors, have it in spades.

  Oddly enough, it can work too well. It can sometimes render crises not just normal or dealable-with, but strangely flat. I had to keep on reminding myself to stay alert – that I was in danger.

  Cannon came in, all beer belly and bluster. He shook my hand, sat down and lit up with orange fingers.

  ‘See you haven’t stopped either,’ he said with a grin. This was a false note because he didn’t know I smoked; I hadn’t had one when he came to my room in college. He hadn’t offered me one.

  He swung his feet up onto the table. He was wearing brown suede shoes with uneven wear to the soles.

  ‘So let’s have a chat about Jennifer, shall we, Mike? Hang about. Better turn the old squawkbox on, hadn’t we? Is there a tape in, John? Jolly good. Here we go then. Date, 19 June, 1988. Time 14.24 hours. Those present . . .’

  ‘What happened to Peck?’ I said.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘Peck. The policeman who was in charge before.’

  ‘He took early retirement on health grounds. He lives in Huntingdon. Follows the case, though. Anyway, Mike, I’ve been having a little think about you. Why did you change your name to Watson?’

  ‘I got a job for a magazine, but they wanted to hire women. So I took the name Michèle Watt. It was a joke. It was a mixture between my own first name and the surname of a famous scientist.’ I paused. ‘James Watt. But the magazine misprinted it as “Watts”. Then eventually it wasn’t necessary to pretend to be a woman any more. And I moved to another paper, where I wanted to be a man again, but my professional identity was sort of bound up with this Michèle Watts, so I just changed it as little as I could to make a clean start.’

  Cannon looked at me, then at the tape machine, as though to make sure it had got all that down OK. He raised an eyebrow.

  ‘So you pretended to be a girl, then there was a misprint, then you pretended to be someone else again. Have I got that right?’

  ‘More or less.’

  ‘I see. It wasn’t because you were trying to disguise who you really were?’

  ‘Why would I do that?’

  ‘Did you change your name by deed poll?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But you have credit cards in the name of M.K. Watson.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a fraud, Mike, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s harmless.’

  ‘Ever been in trouble with the police – under either of your names?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never caught, were you? I asked around the shops a bit. At the time Jennifer disappeared. I showed your picture to a few people. Off-licences and that. I noticed the booze in your room – vermouth and gin – and I wasn’t sure how a boy on a full grant could afford it.’

  ‘I worked in the holidays.’

  ‘Some of the shopkeepers weren’t happy with you.’

  I didn’t say anything. I thought carefully. I could say, ‘I don’t have a record’; but I didn’t see how that would help. So I stayed silent.

  ‘I’ve done a lot of checking, in fact,’ said Cannon. ‘You became a bit of a hobby of mine, to tell the truth, Mike. I’ve had my eye on you off and on for all these years. You know, it’s like blokes you were at school with. You’re not in touch all the time, but out of the corner of your eye, you’re sort of aware of what they’re up to. Know what I mean?’

  I nodded.

  ‘Now let’s talk about Jennifer, shall we?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘Were you her boyfriend?’

  ‘In a way.’

  ‘What way? Were you having sex with her?’

  ‘That’s none of your business.’

  ‘Quite a few boys did have sex with her, didn’t they?’

  ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘According to what I read in the papers.’

  ‘I wouldn’t believe that stuff.’

  ‘Well, you should know! Anyway, I didn’t necessarily believe it either. So I went to check it out for myself.’

  I could see that Cannon was trying to rile me.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said, lighting up another Embassy, ‘quite a hot little number, our Jennifer.’

  I didn’t rise to it. It wasn’t true. One problem with her and Robin had been what she called ‘sex, lack of’. Of course Cannon couldn’t know this, because he hadn�
�t read her diary.

  I smiled, confident in my superior knowledge.

  ‘A boy in King’s and a boy in Downing both said—’

  ‘Both lying,’ I said. ‘Just schoolboy braggarts. Perhaps they kissed her at a party and they wished they’d gone the whole way.’

  Cannon stood up and went to a drawer in a desk in the corner of the room. From it, he took a plastic bag containing a large padded envelope, addressed to Jennifer’s mother in Lymington.

  ‘Do you recognise this?’ he said.

  I shook my head.

  ‘Someone sent it to Jennifer’s mother. It contained her diary.’

  I nodded. It was not a time to speak.

  ‘There aren’t any fingerprints on it,’ said Cannon. ‘Maybe whoever sent it wore gloves.’

  ‘Have you read the diary?’

  ‘Oh yes.’

  ‘And was it helpful to you?’

  ‘Very much so, thank you, Michael. Now I wonder why whoever sent this diary to Mrs Arkland did send it. Do you think he was suffering from a bad conscience?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Anyway, there are just traces of possible prints on the diary itself.’

  ‘Won’t they be Jennifer’s?’

  ‘Could be. Hard to tell. She hasn’t got any fingers left. Just bones.’

  There was a pause.

  ‘So,’ I said, ‘had this diary been with her flatmates or what?’

  Cannon laughed. ‘You’re a bit late with that, aren’t you, Mike? It’s as though you knew it had been missing.’

  ‘No, I didn’t. I didn’t even know she kept a diary.’

  ‘You were her boyfriend and you didn’t know she kept a diary?’

  ‘I didn’t see her every day.’

  ‘Listen, Mike, I’m going to give you a chance. I’m going to let you make a clean breast of the whole thing. It’ll be in your best interests. It’ll play really well in court. Remorse, regret. You can talk about the strain of exams and student life and all that. You’ll get life, you could be out in ten, twelve years. You’ll only be about my age. It’s nothing.’

  ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. Well, I do, but I mean I can’t confess to something I didn’t do.’

  ‘You might even end up in the loony bin. Broadmoor or Rampton. That would be appropriate, wouldn’t it? Rampton. Like the village where you killed her.’ He smiled. ‘Of course, you’ve been there before, haven’t you?’

  ‘Rampton?’

  ‘No. The loony bin.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Basingstoke, wasn’t it?’

  I felt the air go out of my lungs, and I slumped in the chair – but only for a moment. Then I bit my lip and pulled myself up. Cannon came round and put his face so close to mine that I could smell him.

  ‘Mike, I’ve pretty much got you. You had a car. You have a history of mental instability. You were obsessed by the girl. My chaps are in your flat in London at the moment seeing if they can match a typewriter to the address label on this envelope. In a moment you’re going to give me some prints and we’ll see if we can get something off the diary. You had no alibi for the crucial time on the night of the party.’

  ‘That’s all circumstantial crap and—’

  ‘Circumstantial’s OK, Mike. Circumstantial gets convictions. People like you journalists, you don’t understand that. You don’t often get eyewitness evidence. And people don’t often confess. I wish they would. It would make our life ever so much easier. And it would make it much better for you too.’

  My mind had suddenly gone empty. I looked inside and there seemed to be nothing. I had the impression that my brain was actually emitting a sound, like that of a clean saucepan being scoured with wire wool, or perhaps of a wine glass being made to ring with the note that any moment would shatter it.

  ‘Please let it be recorded that I am giving the suspect one last chance to confess.’

  I couldn’t confess because I couldn’t think.

  There was a long pause. I heard the cassette revolving.

  Cannon bit his lip. ‘Right. There’s another kind of evidence we didn’t mention just now.’

  ‘Is there?’

  ‘Yes. It’s called forensic, by which we mean scientific. Ever heard of DNA?’

  ‘Of course I have.’ Part Two of Nat Sci had been full of it.

  Cannon nodded to the constable, who left the room.

  ‘DNA was first used in a case in Leicestershire. Just recently. It got a man off. A man called Pitchfork, oddly enough. But it could equally convict a man. I do wish you’d confessed. I really do, Mike.’

  While we waited for the constable to return I asked myself what I was feeling. Not guilt, not fear, not apprehension. By far my strongest feeling was of curiosity. I really wanted to see what they’d come up with and whether it would prove that I’d done something wrong.

  The constable eventually came back in with what looked like a glass museum display case. Suspended inside on a coathanger was an orange tee shirt. On it was the face of Donny Osmond.

  ‘The suspect is being shown a tee shirt. Have you seen this before, Mike?’

  ‘It rings a bell.’

  ‘We took it from your room when we came to see you in college all those years ago. When we gave you your clothes back, we kept this along with a couple of other things. We looked after it well and kept it dry. Do you know why?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘See there’s some of it missing down here?’

  A square of about two inches across had been cut from the tee shirt just below Donny’s chin.

  ‘It had a bloodstain on it. Not a big one, but big enough. That’s why it’s taken me so long to get in touch with you these last few weeks. We were having a DNA match done in Leicester. It takes them ages. But we got the results yesterday. The bloodstain on your tee shirt is a match with the DNA from Jennifer’s bones.’

  I said nothing. I felt nothing. I was thinking of those two chemists who burst into the Kestrel that lunchtime to tell the uninterested boozers that they’d cracked the human code.

  Cannon drew himself up and spoke clearly. ‘We believe you picked her up after that party, drove her out to the place where she was found, or very near it, killed her with a blow to the head with a piece of brick or a lump of concrete, and in a fit of rage you also broke her leg. You buried her either then or when you returned with a spade. You buried her in such a way that you hoped she’d never be found. You showed no pity, no remorse. You little shit.’

  Cannon turned to face the cassette recorder and said solemnly, ‘Michael Engleby, I am arresting you for the murder of Jennifer Rose Arkland on or about . . .’

  To be honest, I wasn’t really listening. It was hard to take it all in, the bad turn of events, the famous formula of ‘anything you say may be taken down’. I wasn’t thinking about Jennifer at all. I was wondering whether this would be a good moment to own up to having killed old Baynes as well.

  Eleven

  I rang Stellings from Cannon’s office to ask his advice. He was appalled. He said it wasn’t his line of work, but he’d find someone and they’d be in touch. The odd thing was, he didn’t ask me whether I’d done it.

  Next, I was allowed to go to the toilet where I crammed in two blue pills before the constable who’d been sent with me saw what I was doing and stopped me.

  Then they took me to a cell. I had to hand over the contents of my pockets, including pills, and I was anxious about how I was going to manage without them. There was a bed and a grey blanket in the cell. I lay down and curled up beneath it, but time had stopped and everything was crowding in on me. When a constable came with some food later I asked if I could see a doctor and he said he’d ask. I couldn’t eat. The pills began to work and time realigned itself a little.

  In the morning, I appeared in court, represented by a local solicitor provided by the police. I was remanded in custody for two weeks, and that night, when no one could see, was put in a van and driven to a p
rison. I was alone in my new cell, and I was relieved about that. The spyhole in the door opened at twenty-minute intervals through the night. I suppose they thought I might try to kill myself, though I had nothing to do it with. I just lay there and thought of Jennifer. The trouble was, I found it hard to picture her. It was all so long ago and she didn’t seem real any more. I couldn’t see or touch her. I had no real way of knowing whether she or I existed.

  Some lag asked me the next day what I was ‘in for’; I told him and he warned me not to tell my lawyer I was guilty – if I was. ‘If you tell him you’ve done it, then you have to plead guilty in court. You can’t confess to your brief, then ask him to run a not-guilty defence.’

  ‘What if I do?’

  ‘He has to turn down the case.’

  ‘And is he bound to pass on what I’ve told him?’

  ‘Who to? If he turns you down then he’s not in a case and there’s no judge for him to tell. And there’s client confidentiality.’

  ‘But you’re saying I can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘No. Make up your mind before you get a brief. Work your story out first.’

  I was grateful for this unsolicited good advice but worried that an old lags’ code meant that I now had to pay for it in some unspeakable way.

  That afternoon, I had a visit from a Mr Davies, the solicitor that Stellings had found for me. I didn’t know what to say to him, so I asked him to tell me what might happen. He looked young, maybe only thirty, but he seemed to know what he was doing.

  ‘If you’re charged with murder, you can plead not guilty. That’s fine, then your barrister will do his best to overturn the evidence against you, which I gather is largely forensic, with some circumstantial.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘Or you plead guilty and we look for all the mitigation we can find. Just by pleading guilty you reduce the sentence. You show remorse and contrition. We look for circumstances in your past that would have had a bearing. We call character witnesses. That way we can perhaps get the minimum term recommended before parole is considered down to something like fifteen years.’