by Diane Janes
That was pretty much the end of it really, but as soon as they had gone, Rob said, ‘I’m going to be a suspect. You realize that?’
‘Not really.’ I gave him a hug.
‘Of course really. I knew the girl. I was virtually on the spot when she was killed …’
‘That’s rubbish. Come on,’ I said, falsely cheerful. ‘Have your shower and I’ll do a cooked breakfast. I’ve got bacon and some mushrooms if you fancy them.’
The fried breakfast was a mistake. We sat toying with food we did not really want, mushrooms cooling, eggs congealing, little puddles of grease appearing beneath the sausages.
I tried to find other things to talk about, but Rob kept coming back to the murder enquiry. ‘If I’m under suspicion, they’ll suspend me from school.’
‘Of course they won’t,’ I said briskly. ‘They can’t suspend you just like that, without any grounds.’
‘Being a suspect in a murder enquiry. I bet the governors will think that’s grounds enough. When a young girl’s involved it’s dead easy to suspend a teacher, to ruin his career.’
‘You’re not a suspect,’ I said. ‘Or at least, no more than anyone else. Think about it logically. Everyone in Lasthwaite knows Julie Peacock by sight. Half the men in the dale won’t have an alibi for the time she went missing. Lots of people drive home that way: it’s the main road in, for goodness’ sake. I bet you’re not the only teacher from the comp who was driving that way after school on Thursday afternoon. They can’t suspend every teacher who drove home alone that afternoon – they’ll have no staff left.’
He considered this. ‘Quite a few people do go that way,’ he said. ‘The trouble is I happened to be there at the right time. Think of it. She must have been lying there … maybe she was still alive when I drove past. If only I had seen something. If only—’
‘Stop it,’ I said, laying down my knife and fork with a clatter. ‘It’s too horrible to think about.’
‘But you do see,’ he said, his eyes searching my face for clues, ‘that I am on the spot. That perhaps no one else will admit to being there … which leaves …’
‘No,’ I said unnecessarily loudly. ‘It doesn’t signify anything. There’s no evidence to involve you at all. You’re just a witness. Just someone who can help them by saying that when you passed the place where she got off the bus there was nobody there. If they can find out what time you drove past, it will help them prove what time it happened.’
‘But …’ he began.
‘Rob, please – I don’t want to talk about it any more.’
For a moment I thought he was going to carry on regardless, but he swallowed back whatever he had been about to say and shook his head.
We gave up on the rest of the breakfast. He helped me clear away and wash up, and later we drove into Richmond, where he bought himself a new sweater and we had lunch in our favourite tea shop. We did not talk about Julie Peacock any more, but the subject hovered silently in the background.
‘Don’t think about it,’ I had said. But how was one not to think about it? Murders you just heard about on the news could haunt your thoughts for weeks. The slightest personal connection with a case made it a hundred times worse. Rob’s discomfort at his proximity to the murder scene gave me a strong sense of déjà vu. I could still remember the eerie sensation of my second-hand connection to Antonia Bridgeman’s murder. My involvement then had been tenuous, if slightly more substantial than I had indicated to Rob.
I had indeed met Antonia Bridgeman only once and it really had come about much as I had told him, while I was running an errand for my mother. Alan and I had called at Aunt Millicent’s to drop something off, arriving just as the girl was putting on her coat at the end of her music lesson. The weather was foul that day and as we were going Antonia’s way, we had given her a lift home. The journey only took a matter of three or four minutes by car, so there hadn’t been much time for a conversation. I think I asked her what grade she was up to, and possibly where she went to school. All totally inconsequential; I don’t suppose I would have remembered anything about it at all, except for the fact that three weeks later to the very day, Antonia was murdered.
On the day she died Antonia had attended her music lesson then set off home as usual. She was fifteen and a responsible sort of girl, with her own latch key. On that particular day it happened that her parents were both out when she should have returned home, so she was not immediately missed. When her mother did arrive home, she was surprised to find the house in darkness and no indication of her daughter’s whereabouts. She gave it half an hour and when there was still no sign of Antonia, she tried phoning a couple of the girl’s friends, thinking that Antonia might have called in to see one of them instead of coming straight home. Drawing a blank with them, she tried the piano teacher’s house next, but as chance would have it, Aunt Millicent was round at my parents’ house, where I too happened to be that evening because Alan was away at a big sale in Cheshire.
Our first intimation that something was wrong came when Uncle George phoned and asked to speak to my aunt – a singular occurrence which at once alarmed Millicent, who thought that he must have been taken ill. She almost fell out of her chair in her haste to get to the phone, but after a couple of minutes she came back into the room and told us that Antonia’s mother had rung Uncle George to establish that Antonia had been for her lesson and set off for home at the usual time. Mrs Bridgeman was beside herself, Millicent reported, before declaring that under the circumstances she had better return immediately, to sit with Uncle George in case the police came.
My mother and I had tried to persuade her that this was most unlikely, but she would not be swayed, so in the end I had driven her home, staying for a cup of tea with her and Uncle George before returning to my parents’ house for the night. In the event Millicent was correct. The police turned up to question them later in the evening, and poor Millicent became officially the last known person to see the girl alive.
Antonia’s body was found about a week later, in a wood a few miles outside town. The police said she must have been taken there by car. There were very few clues. Antonia’s parents always insisted that their daughter would never have got into a stranger’s car. I remember thinking that she had got into ours willingly enough – though of course that was hardly the same thing.
There had been a lot about the case in the press, both locally and nationally. Some of the papers made a big thing about there being a serial killer in the area, but the local police played that one down. It was after Antonia Bridgeman’s murder that one national Sunday paper ran a piece about the number of young women who had gone missing in the Nicholsfield area. Like the Bermuda Triangle, the Nicholsfield area seemed to have very nebulous boundaries. The paper printed a whole page of photos, most of them not proven murder victims at all, just women who had gone missing at one time or another, some of them with little or no apparent connection to Nicholsfield.
None of this proved anything, but there were a lot of people who were prepared to believe that there was a serial killer operating around Nicholsfield. My mother certainly did and I, who was prey to every kind of hysterical fear in those days, went along with it wholeheartedly, always arranging to stay at Mum and Dad’s whenever Alan spent a night away on business.
At least there was no question of Julie Peacock’s death being part of a pattern. No one had ever been murdered in Lasthwaite before – and it was a long way from Nicholsfield, even by journalistic stretches of the imagination.
THIRTEEN
Don’t think about it, I had said.
Impossible, of course.
The dale was suddenly full of police cars and journalists. Rubber-neckers too. People started to place flowers at the roadside. Complete strangers arrived by car to leave their tributes, some bringing teddy bears and similar girlish mementoes, which quickly became bedraggled and tatty in the rain, then dirtied by the passing traffic. I found this very odd and not in the least comforting or di
gnified. It did not provoke thoughts of appropriate solemnity, suggesting at best a bunch of pagans leaving their offerings at the site of a virgin sacrifice, or at worst a mawkish public afflicted by ghoulish curiosity and looking for an excuse to get in on the act.
For the first few days the murder was headline news. There was film footage on the local and national bulletins showing the school bus as it paused alongside the hedgerow, already bedecked with its strange assortment of tawdry soft toys and wilting flowers. A television reporter interviewed some passers-by in the village who said how dreadful it was, and how much Julie had been loved by everyone who knew her.
Then Julie’s parents were put through the ordeal of a press conference. Her mother broke down and had to be escorted out, her personal tragedy played out under the relentless gaze of the cameras. Though I scarcely knew the Peacocks, the sight of her mother’s grief brought tears to my own eyes. Murder casts a long shadow. In a week or two, the media would forget all about Julie Peacock, but while the rest of the world carried on with its affairs, life for her family would never be the same again. Murderers destroyed not one life but many, I thought.
Tentacles of suspicion encircled the village. Even today a rural community is small and enclosed, with inhabitants quick to point the finger. In Lasthwaite there seemed to be no shortage of suspects: people suddenly remembered rumours they had heard about Julie Peacock’s father, who was said to have an uncertain temper. Then there was poor old Jim and Bob – the last survivors of a farming dynasty who had been thought ‘tuppence short of a shilling’ for generations. Mrs Metcalf’s handicapped son came under a certain amount of suspicion, as did Luke Robinson, the boy who had previously caught the bus at the same stop as Julie, and was alleged to have been seen waiting for her there on various afternoons in the recent past.
Dr Millington, the newest arrival in our community, was also known to have been visited by detectives. He had been out and about on call that evening, and though the missing duty book had been recovered, his slapdash notes and the accompanying, indistinct Dictaphone tape did very little to establish a coherent alibi. Not that the police seriously suspected him. It was pre-Shipman and medics were still on a similar footing to the angels.
As for Rob, he had been right to assume that he too would be a suspect. In the days immediately following the murder, the police questioned him twice more. Not surprisingly, he was unsettled by this attention. His initial shock turned to frustration, beneath which I sensed a whole spectrum of emotions.
‘Everything has changed,’ he said one evening.
‘Not for us,’ I said.
‘Yes – for us. Nothing is the same. After last Thursday you start to doubt everything.’
‘You mustn’t let it get to you,’ I said.
‘Last week I thought I had everything in the world I wanted. You were the final piece which … which completed my jigsaw.’
‘So that’s how you see me? Small and flat with a few nobbly bits?’
He grinned. ‘I’m a geographer, not a poet. OK – you’re the stamp that completes my collection—’
‘Metaphors are getting even worse,’ I said. ‘Anyway, I’m still here. You’re still here …’
‘But it doesn’t feel as though you’re … well … safe any more.’
‘Darling, I am perfectly safe. You’re starting to sound like Maureen at work.’
‘I just want you to know that I love you,’ he said unexpectedly. ‘I’ll fight for you if necessary.’
He was looking out of the window when he spoke, as if in expectation of an invading horde. I had a sudden vision of him wrestling a wild-eyed assailant to the ground, moments before Jim and Bob panted up with their shotgun.
‘Of course,’ he turned to me with a grim smile, ‘it might be a case of you fighting for me – starting when you have to come and bail me out. Do they grant bail in murder cases?’
‘You won’t be arrested. You’re innocent.’
‘Perhaps they’ll ask me to do a DNA test or something like that,’ he said.
‘Well that would be all right,’ I said. ‘In fact, it would be a good thing. It would rule you out.’
‘I don’t know. You hear about these cases where the police plant evidence and fit people up.’
‘Not really,’ I said. ‘They want to find the person who actually did it. What would be the point of framing you?’
‘Crime statistics. It’s another solved case, isn’t it?’
‘Don’t be silly,’ I said, but my tone carried no conviction.
I wondered if the police really were in the business of massaging the statistics. That was what Martin Bullock had been hinting at in his Disappeared! programme, and what at least one journalist had accused the authorities of, all those years ago when Antonia Bridgeman was murdered; now here was Rob, usually the most sensible of citizens, banging the same drum.
‘You don’t think it’s me, do you?’
The question startled me. ‘Of course not,’ I exclaimed. ‘Why on earth should I think it was you?’
‘You might.’ He paused, took a breath. ‘Since the night Julie Peacock died you’ve been different.’
I didn’t let him get any further. ‘I’m not different. I’m the same. Exactly the same as I was before.’ Before what? Aren’t we all a little bit different every day? Isn’t it true that our cells keep on breaking down and being replaced by new ones, so that after a certain number of years every bit has been regenerated. After seven years – or was it ten – you had become a completely new person.
‘I might be suspended from school,’ he said abruptly.
‘Of course you won’t be.’ We’ve had this conversation before, I thought. We’re going round in circles.
‘The Head had me in today. She’d had a call from a parent. Someone who’d heard about what happened at my last school – goodness knows how.’
I had been fiddling with something in my bag, but I looked up at this, straight into his eyes.
‘There was this other girl, you see. At my last school. The police will find out about the other girl too. It will be on my record.’
FOURTEEN
I had never been given to praying, but that night I prayed fervently that the police would solve the Julie Peacock case quickly: not just to get a dangerous individual locked up, nor to satisfy the bereaved family; not even just for Rob’s sake, but for the good of the community at large. It was not the nervousness of the women (although requests for tranquillizers and sleeping pills at the practice were up). No, it was the parasitic suspicion implanted in people’s minds, feeding and growing, singling people out – a virus which had the potential to poison us all, causing permanent long-term damage. The valley was positively rippling with rumours. People knew to whose doors the police had returned after the initial house-to-house enquiries had finished. There could be few secrets in a little community like ours.
People would start speculating, putting two and two together. Rob was a popular teacher but he was still an incomer and now someone had found out about an earlier investigation at his previous school. ‘I should have told you about it before,’ he said, though I saw no reason why he should. It was just a trivial episode from his past, explanations for which would never have arisen if it had not been for Julie Peacock.
It was a simple enough story: a teller of tall tales called Mandy Rudge had hinted to her school friends that she was having some sort of relationship with Mr Dugdale. She had shown them a cheap bottle of perfume which she claimed he had given to her. One of her friends had promptly spilled the beans to her mother, who had not hesitated to inform the school. Rob had been suspended with immediate effect while the allegations were investigated.
Though Mandy Rudge admitted that the whole story had been concocted to impress the other girls, and Rob was exonerated as entirely blameless, he decided it was best to move to another school, in another area, where gossip and speculation about his sudden mid-term ‘leave’ could not touch him. Even so, the stor
y had caught up with him. You can sink the past with lead weights tied to each corner, but it still bobs back to the surface at the least opportune moment. It was not that the Head at the comp did not know about this episode – as Rob had said, it was on his record, rather she had called him in to tip him off that a local parent had somehow found out about it … and if one parent knew, that could lead to rumours circulating which ‘might put the school in a difficult position’. A sabbatical of some kind might become necessary …
‘The school,’ Rob had repeated with a hollow laugh as he’d related the conversation to me. ‘Let’s not worry about the police’s no-smoke-without-fire attitude to anyone who has ever been accused of anything, or the torch-lit vigilante procession heading down the road to drag me out of my place and string me up from the nearest tree.’
‘People round here aren’t like that,’ I had said, but I knew it wasn’t true. People were like that everywhere.
To be unjustly suspected is a horrible burden. With every day that passed, more and more people would be wondering, speculating about the killer in their midst. I knew all this because I had been through it all before. Girls had been disappearing in the Nicholsfield area over a period of almost a quarter of a century (although the fact that I was one of the most notable among them gave me more reason than most to think that talk of a serial killer might be a shade over dramatic). Statistically Nicholsfield might not have had any more women disappearing than other places of comparable size in middle England, but ever since the Marie Glover business a young woman disappearing in Nicholsfield tended to make the news.
Marie Glover vanished when I was ten years old. By the time Marie’s name hit the headlines, she and her family were living on a new estate on the outskirts of town, but before that the Glovers had lived near the school where my father taught and Marie had been a pupil there. Although she was only fourteen Marie had a job, working for an hour every day after school at her uncle’s shop. After work she always cycled home; a short journey, part of which took her along a country lane. It was conjectured that when she reached the lane that afternoon she must have realized that she had a puncture and got off her bike to have a look.
