Missing, Presumed Dead

by J M Gregson

  The police surgeon shook his head, bent again to his task, stooping over the body without moving his feet—there might be clues beneath them, even here. He said nothing until he had concluded this first brief ritual over the corpse. A death had to be officially certified, even in these bizarre circumstances, even at this remove from the last moments of life. He would have to begin his report by stating that these remains were indeed human, and that there was material here for the coroner’s court.

  Capstick stood motionless with Tommy Clarkson at the side of the devastated quarry. Doctor Patterson did not bend for long over the thing at its centre. He waded carefully back through the puddles to the scarred grass beside them. ‘No suicide ever weighted every limb like that before casting herself into the water,’ he said.

  ‘Herself?’ Paul looked unwittingly at the slime-shrouded form which had once been human.

  ‘That much I can say. But not yet how old she was. Mustn’t disturb anything, you see. But I doubt whether this was a drowning.’

  Already that thing beneath the slime was beginning to acquire an identity. Paul looked anxiously towards the spot where a policeman had stopped a little knot of members from approaching any nearer to them. ‘Can we get the ambulance in now, and get this—get her away?’

  The doctor shook his head. ‘The ambulance will already have been ordered.’ The meat wagon, the police called it, but there was no point in visiting that term upon the laity. ‘But it will be some time before they can remove the cadaver, I’m afraid. The scene-of-crime team will need to examine the area thoroughly before anyone tramples over it. Anyone other than me, that is.’

  He looked back ruefully over the path he had trodden to where the shape of the body poked from the residue of water, the weights still stretching and defining its limbs, as if they had been attached as a prelude to some ancient torture. The path of the police surgeon’s journey to and from it was marked by a straggling line of small bubbles.

  ‘But this may not even be the scene of the crime.’

  ‘Very probably not, if this isn’t a drowning. But there may be things around which give a clue to her killer, even at this distance. He may have dropped something into the pond with her. There may be bits of his hair or his clothing on hers, though I doubt they’ll still be distinguishable after she’s been under the water for all this time.’

  ‘You say “he”,’ said Paul Capstick. He still felt as though this couldn’t be happening to him. He had to keep looking back to the thing half-hidden by water and mud to convince himself that it was real.

  Patterson laughed. ‘You speak like a policeman, Paul. I made the assumption that most laymen would make that a man did this. But you’re quite right, of course.’ He glanced back at the shape to which he had just given a gender. ‘There’ll be more details after the autopsy, but she was probably quite slight. There’s no reason why it shouldn’t have been a woman who put her in there. Besides, for all we know, she could have been killed here at the edge of the pond, not carried here.’

  He left them then, anxious to get back to the work of his practice after the diversion of this macabre side-line. Tommy Clarkson, sensing the secretary’s disquiet at this unsuspected tragedy, did his best to divert him. ‘At least we should be able to get on with the work down there.’

  For the first time since his arrival, Paul turned to look down the slope at the scene below them. In more normal circumstances, he would have been thrilled to see the half-formed lake, forming and enlarging itself exactly as they had planned. The water was still now, and they could see the shape this new feature of the course would have when it was fully formed. Tommy said, ‘We’ve got the tractor and trailer up here, ready to pick up this new stone as soon as we can. There should be enough to build the dam to about seven feet, which is the height we agreed.’

  Ninety yards below them, Clarkson’s four assistants were already using the rocks which the blast had scattered across the slope to put another layer on their half-built dam. Tommy looked at them for a moment with what might have been a pride in their handiwork. Then he voiced the thought which had been troubling him for the last hour to the man who was his immediate employer. ‘One of the lads seemed a bit bothered by this.’

  Capstick looked at him curiously. ‘All of them would be, I should hope, Tommy.’

  ‘No, not just that. I mean, before it—before this was found. Even before we started the work, he was worried about it, hoping that someone would change our minds and the whole scheme would be dropped.’

  The two of them turned and looked at the group working steadily on the dam below them. Paul Capstick’s mind was still reeling. It had enough to cope with, without taking this on. But he knew there was no escape from the knowledge, now that the Head Greenkeeper had gone this far. He said a little breathlessly, ‘And which of your lads would this be, Tommy?’

  ‘Gary Jones.’

  As if responding to a cue, the slim figure below them stood erect for a moment from his work and looked anxiously upwards, towards the spot where the body lay waiting to give up its secrets.

  ***

  There were too many people around a golf course for a secret to remain hidden for very long. Well before the grisly revelation at the bottom of the quarry pit, there was interest in the new earthworks which were re-shaping the eighth hole. Everyone around the place understood what the dull sound of the explosion at the old quarry was about. When police cars began to ease their way over the course half an hour later, the clubhouse was soon alive with the sensational news of a body discovered.

  When intelligence of this kind is passed from person to person, each new recipient likes to add a new gloss in conveying the news to others. The scene at the site of the shattered old quarry, to which none of them were eyewitnesses, was imaginatively embellished with gruesome detail. And the word which no one at the scene of the discovery had cared to voice was soon being whispered in the clubhouse. Murder.

  Christine Turner heard the word from behind the locked door of her cubicle in the ladies’ cloakroom. It was not a dignified retreat for the ladies’ captain of the North Lancs. She could not remember hiding in a lavatory since she had gone there to sulk and to plan as a child. But it was the only place in the club where she could guarantee that she would not be disturbed.

  She sat there, alone with her tumbling thoughts, trying to put some sort of organization upon them. And then two women came into the cloakroom, their voices alight with excitement, full of the vicarious animation of dramatic events which have no close connection and therefore no real fear. ‘It’s a woman, they say,’ said the first, ‘and almost certainly a sex crime.’ Rumour’s insidious tongue was rapidly turning conjecture into fact for her.

  ‘Murder,’ said the other, in awed tones.

  Then, having tried out the word and found it satisfactory, she reiterated it in capital letters. ‘MURDER! And on our course. Wonder what the committee will make of that at the annual general meeting?’

  They giggled together for a moment at the delicious picture. Then the first one said, ‘Have we any idea who it is yet?’

  ‘No. Apparently no one knows yet how long she’s been in there. None of our members have gone missing, have they?’

  ‘Not that I know of. But I can think of a few male members who might be candidates for murderer.’ They laughed delightedly at the thought, but didn’t suggest any names. Perhaps they had become aware of the single closed door in the cubicles behind them. They agreed to order tea and went off to await further news from the course.

  Christine Turner sat for a while longer in her self-imposed cell, trying to compose herself to face the world outside it. She told herself she was being totally illogical about this. There was no real evidence to support her wild fears.

  Not yet, that other, insistent voice within her said. Not yet.

  All that was established was that a body had been found. The body of a woman. Not even a young woman, as far as she knew. The corpse could have been put there las
t week, for all that had been said so far. The woman might never have lived round here, might have had no connection with the area. In all probability, Christine had never seen this victim when she was alive.

  It was no good. In her heart, Christine Turner was convinced that she knew exactly who this was.

  ***

  Derek Minton took care to arrive in the house at his usual time. He could not have explained why, but he thought that might be quite important to both of them in what was to come.

  He had heard the news an hour before he finished work. In the council offices, news spread fast, and the block housing the police headquarters was within two minutes of them. This was the area of the town where over the last fifteen years new municipal building had replaced the huddled terraces and high-chimneyed mills of King Cotton.

  Since the first hushed whispers of the discovery of a woman’s body on the North Lancashire golf course had reached him, Minton had moved like one in a trance, his emotions held in a numbed suspension, his fingers completing the routine tasks on the paperwork in front of him with a competence that was inexplicable. He did not realize that the end of the working day was at hand until chairs around him on the floor where forty people worked together began to shuffle and the locks turned in desk drawers and filing cabinets.

  He walked home, hoping to clarify his thoughts over the forty minutes it took him, trying to plan what he would say to Shirley. He was not successful. The sun was still bright in the October sky, even as it dipped towards the roofs of the long rows of semi-detached houses between which he walked. Women and a few retired men were working in some of the front gardens, pausing frequently to gaze up at the clear blue sky and congratulate themselves on their good fortune. Weather like this was worth a comment as Lancashire moved into Autumn, and more than one of the occupants called ‘Lovely day!’ to him as he walked briskly beside the low walls and privet hedges.

  It was that sort of afternoon, the sort which made people glad to be alive and anxious to communicate that enjoyment to others. Yet all the while he could picture only the little gang of watchers around that place on the golf course. His route lay in that direction: his house could not be much more than a mile from the North Lancs.

  When he had first married Shirley, in those first happy days when she rejoiced to be with him and he was coming to terms with acquiring a ready-made family, they had often walked over the path which skirted the high part of the course. Shirley would sometimes slip her hand into his as the children danced impatiently ahead, their high voices shrilling with excitement, as though competing with the larks which rose in such numbers from the rushes and heather on the ground around them.

  He had asked himself too often why it had all gone wrong to repeat that fruitless query now. If he had walked home along the main road, where his bus normally took him, he might have met the ambulance coming from the course. That is, if they used an ambulance on these occasions; he was vague about that, his only knowledge coming from television crime series. He never read about crime, whether real or fictional.

  At least Shirley was not looking at Debbie’s photograph when he went into the house. He had had a premonition that she would already have heard his news, but of course she had not. He wondered as he looked at her how he could ever have conceived that idea. Probably the news had not reached the Radio Lancashire bulletins yet but, in any case, Shirley did not have the radio on nowadays. And the neighbours had long since given up the effort of speaking to her. Conversations needed two sides, even if one of them only listened.

  The room was warm with the afternoon sun. Yet she who had once so loved the air had opened neither the window nor the patio door. Derek took off his jacket, folding it carefully over the back of a chair as he wondered how he could manage this. He said, ‘How long until tea, love?’

  ‘Have it when you want it. It’s only bacon and egg. But I’ll fry up the black pudding you brought home to have with it, if you like.’

  He had never taken over the meals, even when she was at her worst. The doctor said it was a kind of therapy for her, though the doctor had never seen her moving like an automaton through the kitchen of which she had once been so proud. She cooked a meal for Derek each day, though sometimes the timing went a little awry: that was not surprising, he thought, when Shirley frequently had little awareness of what part of the day it was. She ate very little herself, even though she placed upon her plate the same portions she had always given herself.

  He said, ‘We’ll leave it a little while then. I’ll make us a cup of tea.’ She looked up at him for a moment, then returned her gaze to the garden and its last golden glow of autumnal sun. Normally, he would have been glad to see a reaction in her. Today it made him apprehensive. He still had no idea how he was going to tackle this.

  It was Shirley who pricked him into speech when he came back with the tea tray. She said, ‘In three weeks, it will be exactly two years. Perhaps she’ll come home then.’ In the early days, she would have looked at him, hoping for some answering note of encouragement. For months now, she had delivered her thoughts as if they were parts of an intermittent monologue, requiring neither confirmation nor denial from him.

  He leant forward and took her hand in his, trying not to notice the way she looked sharply down at his hands encasing hers, as if they belonged to a stranger and the action was unnatural. ‘There’s been a development, love.’ So this was how it was going to be, he thought, seeing himself as though he stood in the doorway: wrapping it up, talking to her as if he was a professional counsellor, visiting once a week on paid duty.

  She looked at him then, for the first time since he had come into the house. Although she said nothing, it was the nearest thing he could remember to a normal reaction in weeks. He wondered if some sixth sense was operating even through her cocoon of pain, to tell her that there was a crisis at hand. He said, ‘They’ve found a body.’

  The mind works in peculiar, sometimes unhelpful ways; he was beset at this inopportune moment by the thought of how useful were the anonymous ‘they’ to the English. Then he pressed on, ‘It was in a pond, on the golf course. The North Lancs.’

  Shirley nodded, looking out to where a thrush hopped at the far end of the lawn. He studied her profile; there was no sign of apprehension in it. Any sort of interest from her would be a bonus, he thought, with a sudden savagery which frightened him. In slow motion, as if she were anxious not to cause offence, she removed her right hand from between his and folded it demurely with her left one in her lap. With her unlined, expressionless face, she looked for a moment like a child on her best behaviour.

  ‘It’s a woman, Shirley. A young woman.’ He couldn’t remember whether he had heard this in the gossip at work, but he pressed it upon her nonetheless. The more circumstantial evidence he could offer, the greater his chances of breaking through. ‘You’ve got to face it, this time. They might be coming to see us, you see. The police, I mean.’

  How much easier it would be if there was some reaction from her, even if she screamed, or wept, or beat at him with her fists to release her agony. Something like that would have to come, if they were ever to get back to normal. For the first time, he realized that he welcomed the news he had to give her, because it might be the first step back to that normality. He must be under a lot of strain himself, to find this a relief.

  He said quietly, pitching his voice as consciously as an actor seeking for a particular effect, ‘I think they’ll find it’s Debbie, love.’

  She said nothing, remaining motionless. For a moment, he could not be sure she had taken it in. Then she said, ‘It’s not Debbie. It can’t be Debbie. Not so close to home, after all these months.’

  To an outsider, it would have been the same zombie-like monotone in which she had delivered so much else in the preceding weeks. It took someone who had listened as hard and as long as Derek to detect a change. There was to him the slightest note of rising panic, the faintest tinge of despair.

  It was a crazy paradox t
hat he should find in these things a spurt of hope.

  He shifted a little nearer, taking both of her hands now in his. He was preparing to make a little concession, probing his way now into some new kind of relationship with her. It felt like that, like a new beginning. ‘I may be wrong, I suppose. But you know that I’ve always felt that if Debbie was alive, she’d have been in contact with us. Even if it was just to let us know that she was safe. She’d have done that, you know, our Debbie. I’m sorry, love. I—I just feel this is Debbie, that’s all.’

  He had spoken quickly, wanting to get it all out before she could interrupt him, with her bland vision of a happy daughter who was alive and unharmed in some far-off, indeterminate place. She turned her head slowly to look at him, meeting his gaze for the first time in months.

  Perhaps it was also the first time she had noticed the pain in his face. Whatever the reason, she moved her hands lightly up his forearms, until they stopped on the muscles below his shoulders. The touch of her fingers was light, investigative: as if they were lovers exploring each other for the first time, he would think later.

  In a whisper so low that he would not have heard it if they had not been so close, she commanded him, ‘Hold me, Derek.’

  He wrapped his arms round her then, feeling her hair against his chin. It was not soft, as he had remembered it, but wiry, almost abrasive. With her face against his chest, he found himself suddenly weeping, then convulsed by a wild sobbing. He wanted to apologize, to explain how he knew he should be calm and consoling, a rock for her to fasten upon. But he was in no condition to frame words.

  In a little while, her arms crept round to his shoulder blades. As his own sobbing subsided, he found that his shirt was wet with her tears.

  CHAPTER SEVEN