Swimming in the Shadows

by Diane Janes

  ‘You know where he is?’ Rob sounded incredulous. He jumped up and strode the half-dozen steps it took to get across the room and back. ‘Thank God I got down here before you met up with him.’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ I said. ‘I rendezvoused with him yesterday afternoon, as arranged. He was waiting for me on a boat at Neatishead.’ I stopped and swallowed hard. Then I told him, as briefly and un-dramatically as I could about the trip to – and escape from – the bottom of the river, the confrontation in the garden, the long, lonely walk which had followed, my phone call to the police and my assumption that wounded though he was, Alan would eventually have made his way back to the boat.

  Rob sat beside me, listening patiently with his arms around me. I was crying and shaking long before I reached the end of the tale, but he did not speak until I had finished.

  ‘I’ll kill him.’ The intensity of his expression frightened me. ‘Prison’s too good for him. I feel as if I want to murder him with my bare hands for what he did to you.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘The police will have him by now. We have to close the door on this and leave it for others to finish.’

  THIRTY-TWO

  I was wrong about the manner of the arrest. Alan never made it back to the boat. In one of those peculiar happenstances which ends so many manhunts, a lone motorist spotted Alan cycling without lights, and assumed from his unsteady progress that he was drunk. On reaching home a few minutes later she rang the police to report the incident and a patrol car went to investigate. They initially took Alan in for riding a cycle without lights and resisting arrest, but it did not take them long to discover what a big fish they had landed. It goes without saying that the whole business made headline news. (If any action was taken following the anonymous tip off, there was no public mention of it, and if the police ever tried to trace the caller, they did not succeed.) Alan was charged and remanded in custody – and while he languished in prison awaiting trial, the case vanished from the media and the public forgot about him for a while.

  It was not so easy for me. That first night of deep, uninterrupted sleep had been wrought of sheer shock and exhaustion. Peace was far less easy to attain after that and the nights which followed were broken more often than not. I could no longer bring myself to sleep alone at the cottage or indeed anywhere else, and I often woke Rob, crying out or thrashing my way free of invisible bonds, fleeing imaginary pursuers. Sometimes I lay awake, haunted by the faces of the girls and women I had not saved, or straining to identify every nocturnal sound, wondering if Alan was really locked away, safe in his cell, or whether he had outwitted his guards and was even now effecting a stealthy entrance via a forced window. I did not doubt that Alan perceived me as the sole architect of his downfall. Retribution was only to be expected.

  It was a year before Alan came up for trial. Suddenly he was all over the media again, with TV cameras showing the prison van as it left the court each day, pursued by hysterical members of the public who bypassed the police cordon to bang on the sides and scream abuse. His barrister tried an insanity plea, but the court wouldn’t wear it. He was sentenced to life imprisonment, with the recommendation that life should mean life. He stood accused of a whole list of murders, but ultimately not with that of his wife. DNA testing proved conclusively that the body in the ditch belonged to a woman called Donna Mellor, who had been on the missing persons list for three years.

  The authorities proved to be a good deal more discreet and sympathetic than I could ever have anticipated. Jennifer Reynolds’s name was quietly removed from the charge sheet and the missing persons list, and a divorce petition severing the legal ties between Jennifer and Alan Reynolds went through soon after his conviction, unnoticed by the press.

  The case against Luke Robinson was dealt with more quickly than the one against Alan. A juvenile at the time of the offence, he was detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure. It raised barely a flicker in the national media, but in Lasthwaite the case was not so easily forgotten and seemed to cast a shadow over the dale for a lot of people. Several houses went up for sale and Rob was not the only teacher at the comp who decided to look for a new post. He was lucky enough to get a departmental headship at a good school in York, and we moved to live in a village a few miles north of the city.

  I think the doctors were glad to see me go. After taking time off for the death of my aunt, I rather went to pieces. Things began to slip and to make matters worse, the practice had been rocked by a minor scandal while I was away dealing with my aunt’s funeral arrangements, when Terry Millington became the source of a complaint from a patient (alleged drunkenness and inappropriate behaviour) which brought his placement in Lasthwaite to an abrupt end. I never heard what happened to him after that.

  As I struggled to keep going at work, unable to explain what was wrong with me, even to kindly Dr Mac, who was my physician as well as my boss, I received support from an unexpected quarter, for the Trollop became my unofficial right-hand woman, ally and general saviour, whose willingness and cheery good humour averted several crises. I gradually realized that she thought I was in some way responsible for the arrest of Luke Robinson, but whenever I tried to disabuse her she always adopted a knowing grin and said, ‘Aye, Susan. Mum’s the word, eh?’

  When it became obvious that I would be leaving, the Trollop expressed a willingness to undertake the qualifications she needed to fill my shoes. It seems that we all have hidden depths and the potential to surprise one another. Her real name is Kathy, and she continues to run Lasthwaite Health Centre with efficiency and flair.

  Rob and I never got to Australia. The biological clock was ticking and we opted for children instead. We were married quietly, with his family in attendance, and I think his mother forgave us the hole-in-the-corner ceremony when we provided her so promptly with two grandchildren – Josh and Rachel. At the wedding itself there were a few sharp intakes of breath when the vicar appeared to make a mistake over my name, but afterwards Rob explained to everyone that I don’t like Jennifer and prefer to be known as Susan – and Sue Dugdale it remains.

  Every so often, news filtered back to us from Lasthwaite. Bob Fox died and Jim sold the farm and moved into a cottage next door to the pub, where he continued to appear each evening, complete with collar and tie, shiny cap and a wild-eyed sheepdog called Jep in constant attendance.

  I tried not to look back, for there is no future in the past, but the long shadows cast by the murders haunted me all the same. Whenever there was some fresh appeal – another set of grieving parents at a press conference, seeking their vanished daughter or appealing for the evidence which would apprehend her killer, I thought of the parents of those other girls. Some people might think that I should have known – that I must have known. But I did not know and never guessed. In spite of which I repeatedly asked myself the question: could I have saved them?

  Alan became the stalker I never quite saw. A figure lurking at the periphery of vision as I turned over apples in the greengrocers, his footsteps echoing behind me as I walked the Labrador pup which Josh had demanded that we buy. When darkness fell, I imagined Alan silently unlatching the garden gate, stealing cat-footed towards the back door. Had I remembered to lock up? Dared I go and check? Or should I stay huddled on the sofa with my arms around my knees, listening for every sound, too scared to move until Rob returned from teaching his Tuesday night-school class? For a long time my sleeping hours were stalked by terrors best unnamed, and in that dangerous twilight between sleep and wakefulness I would often imagine that Alan had escaped. He was cunning and clever – he would surely find a way. Then I turned on the television news one night and learned that he was dead. He had hanged himself in his prison cell.

  I never rejoiced that Alan had taken one more life, but when I dream now it is of Rob and our growing children – the four of us together, taking that dream holiday to Australia, playing on the beach and swimming in the sun.

  ng in the Shadows