Vintage Crime

by Martin Edwards

  * * *

  It wasn’t until three years later that I went looking for Alan. Perhaps I should explain that.

  Alan never became a Missing Person, except in the crudely literal sense that he was a person, who was missing. No official body ever listed him as missing, because nobody ever reported him gone. He hadn’t had a regular job in years. He had no mortgage, no driving licence, no credit cards, no bank account. Alan Hallsworth was one of those people whose only proof of existence is their heartbeat, who never trouble the computers of the world, either with their presence or their absence.

  His parents had divorced when he was twenty, long after he’d left home, and Alan had achieved the impressive feat of becoming permanently estranged from both of them. I remember him boasting to me about that, one sober night. “I have literally,” he told me, “literally got an address book with no addresses in it.” Another night, equilibrium restored by Guinness, he’d changed his mind about that. “I didn’t mean that I’d literally got an empty address book,” he explained. “I just meant that I don’t know where my parents live, either of them, and don’t wish to know. I haven’t actually got a literal address book, empty or otherwise. Don’t need one – don’t know anyone.”

  His wife, of course, might have reported him missing, but when I once suggested it to Jackie, on the phone, she sounded puzzled. “But I kicked him out, Jerry. I mean, you know, him not being here sort of goes without saying, doesn’t it?”

  Missing Person, of course, is a definition rather than an occupation, and it’s one that not every person fits, even when they do happen to be missing.

  And me? I never reported Alan missing because I never believed for a moment that he was a missing person. Almost from the start, I thought of him as a missing corpse.

  * * *

  Two weeks after my pointless journey to and from Wiltshire, I still hadn’t heard from Alan and I was beginning to get worried. He didn’t know many people, and I’d been certain that he and his duffel bag would end up on my sofa before long. After all, where else do you go when you’re running away from home but to London? No offence to Wiltshire, but it’s definitely a from place, not a to place.

  That was when I phoned Jackie. She was no longer unable to speak without crying, and made it unambiguously clear to me that her marriage, her husband, her husband’s duffel bag, and her husband’s friends were all part of her past, not her present. Goodbye.

  So, I thought: he must be dead. If he was alive and well, he’d have been in touch with me. If he was alive and in trouble, the authorities would have been in touch with his wife. Therefore, he must be dead – and undiscovered. A missing ex-person.

  As weeks and months passed, Alan’s supposed death and disappearance faded from the forefront of my mind, the way even the biggest things in life will under the daily onslaught of little matters. I thought of him most at Christmastimes, when he didn’t send me a card. He never had sent me a card, you see, not once in all his life, and I’d always sent him one, and it had always rankled. But now, I couldn’t really blame him for not sending me a card, because there wasn’t really much he could do about it.

  And then, as the fourth Christmas approached, I suddenly thought: I’ve got to know. Just like that, really: I’ve got to know. After all, it was my car he got out of.

  The drive down still took me three hours. The weather was OK this time, but I still didn’t know the way.

  The cottage in which Alan and Jackie had served the greater part of their marital sentence was uninhabited now, empty and boarded up. I sat outside it for a while, smoking, listening to the shipping forecast, wondering where to start.

  Three years earlier, I’d asked Jackie on the phone “Was there another woman?”

  “Another woman?” she’d replied. “There were several other women. But not one that would have taken him in.”

  If Alan was alive he’d have been in touch. I’d known him since we were both kids, and I don’t think there’d ever been a period of three consecutive months during which we didn’t speak to each other at least once.

  He had been killed deliberately, because if it had been an accident his body would have been found, and word would have trickled through to me eventually, through one twisting conduit or another.

  I finished my cigarette, turned the car in the craterous road, and set off slowly to try and retrace the route we’d driven on the night he left. After about an hour of dawdling, reversing, peering and swearing, I gave up. One bit of rural road looks much like another, unless it’s where you live.

  Once winter’s early darkness had turned my mission from futile to farcical, I stopped at the next pub, which happened to be one I’d seen a few hours before, on my drive down. I reckoned it was about ten minutes’ walk from Alan and Jackie’s old place. Their local, by any chance?

  I needed a drink. Until that day, I hadn’t said the word “murder” to myself – not out loud, so to speak. The logic was solid enough, and had been there all along, but I suppose acknowledging it was just one of those jobs I’d preferred to put off indefinitely, like fixing a leaky tap.

  Murder, I thought, as I sipped a pint slowly. In which case, given the truncated nature of Alan’s social circle, there could only be two categories of suspect: his wife, or one of his girlfriends. (Not a wronged husband? No – Alan put it about a bit, before, during and after his various marriages, but he never to my knowledge slept with anyone else’s wife. “I have my standards,” he used to say. “They’re twisted ones, I know, but they’re the only ones I’ve got, so I keep ’em.”)

  In my mind, as I drank, I auditioned Jackie for the part of vengeful assassin. Supposing, when Alan got out of my car, he had walked or hitched back to the cottage. He’d changed his mind, he wasn’t leaving home after all. It had just been one of those rows that ignite in marriages, and then burn themselves out. Now I thought about it, his lack of luggage perhaps suggested a certain lack of resolution. You don’t walk out of a marriage with just a duffel bag, do you?

  All right, I thought, towards the bottom of the beer. He arrives back on his own doorstep, tells his briefly abandoned wife the good news: “I’ve decided to give you another chance, you lucky cow.” So why does she kill him?

  Well, for all I knew he performed the same show once a month. Leaving, coming back, expecting (demanding?) gratitude. And this time was once too often. Being left by your husband would be bad enough, I imagined, but being left on a regular basis would be even more humiliating. Worse – it’d be irritating.

  So much for the wife. What about the mistress?

  When he insisted on getting out of my car, Alan had claimed that he was going to seek shelter with a friend. At the time, I hadn’t believed him. It had crossed my mind then that perhaps he was going home, and was embarrassed to have me drive him there, but now it struck me that there really could have been a friend. She’d have had long, dark hair and big buttocks, no doubt, as did Jackie, and Susan before Jackie, and the Spanish one, whose name I could never recall, before Susan.

  But then, what was the story there? Alan gets out of the car, walks to his girlfriend’s house, says “I’ve finally left my wife, let me in, it’s raining” – and she kills him? No, that doesn’t work. All she’d have to say, if she wasn’t keen on the idea, was “Grow up, Alan. Go home and sleep it off, kiddo.”

  By the time my pint was dead beyond doubt, I’d talked myself out of the murdering mistress scenario. Which, unavoidably, meant that I’d talked myself into the murdering missus…

  I needed another drink, and maybe a sandwich to soak it up. While I was waiting for the sole barmaid to serve a man at the other end of the counter with a bag of peanuts (a transaction which seemed to involve a longer conversation than most people have with their mothers on Christmas Day), I eavesdropped a large, red-faced man with a local accent giving directions to an elderly couple who had wandered into the pub holding a r
oad map upside down.

  “Excuse me,” I said, when the old folk had departed smiling, with their map the right way up. “You seem to know your way around these parts.”

  “I should do, yeah. Been running deliveries round here for years. Plus I live just up the road. Why – you lost?”

  “Well, not exactly. Look, could I buy you a drink, if you’ve got a moment? I’d really like to pick your brains a bit.”

  He shrugged. “I wouldn’t say no to a lager top.”

  We took our drinks over to a table, and I pondered my approach. I need some village gossip probably wasn’t tactful. I decided to rely on ritual and feel my way.

  “Cheers.”

  “Cheers.”

  “Jerry, by the way.” I stuck out my hand.

  “Oh, right. Norman. Cheers.”

  “Cheers.” We drank, smacked our respective lips, put down our respective glasses. I leant my elbows on the table. “Look, Norman, hope you don’t mind me waylaying you like this. Thing is, I’ve driven all the way down here from London to look up some old friends.”

  “Round here?”

  “Right, yep, just up the road here. Haven’t seen them for ages, and obviously I should have phoned first, because when I got to their cottage I found it was abandoned. I mean, you know, actually boarded up!”

  Norman shook his head sadly. “Lot of that round this way. No jobs, see?”

  “Ah? Right, right. Terrible, really, what’s happening to the countryside. But the thing was, I was wondering if you might have known them – might know what happened to them. Alan and Jackie Hallsworth.”

  He looked at me suspiciously then, I thought, and I wondered if I’d underdone the subtlety, or whether I was merely receiving the standard amount of suspicion awarded by a villager to an outsider who asks questions. I couldn’t tell, having never lived in a village.

  Norman took his time swallowing a few mouthfuls of beer before he replied. “Well…Alan and Jackie. Yes, I did know them. Not to talk to, like, but to nod to. They used to come in here now and then, weekends and that.”

  “How long have they been gone?”

  “You’re an old friend, you say?”

  “Yeah, you know, we sort of lost touch. The way you do, you know.”

  He drank some more, and watched me over the rim of his glass as he did so. “Well,” he said eventually. “If you’ve not been in touch for some while, then you probably won’t know. They split up.”

  “Alan and Jackie?”

  “Yeah. Afraid so. Few years ago now, must be.”

  “Oh God, that’s awful! What happened, do you know?”

  Norman shook his head. “Didn’t know them that well. From what I heard at the time, Alan just walked out one night, and a month or so later Jackie was gone, too. Back to her mother’s, apparently. She waited around for a while, I daresay, just to see if he was coming back.”

  “Which he never did?” I asked.

  Norman studied me again, but this time without using the beer as camouflage. His suspicion now was overt, though not, I thought, hostile. “Never saw him again. Took off with one of his women, I suppose. No offence, what with you being a mate of his, but – well, he was a bit of a lad, if you know what I mean.”

  I couldn’t believe my luck. This was exactly the conversation I wanted: a discussion of Alan’s infidelities, preferably with names and places. But as I started to assure Norman that I knew exactly what he meant about my old friend’s ways, he abruptly stood up.

  “Got to be going now. She’ll be expecting me back soon.” He stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you. My advice, look for Jackie at her mum’s. Cardiff, somewhere, I seem to recall. Can’t help beyond that, I’m afraid.”

  Damn, I thought. I must have asked one question too many. Enough to turn a natural gossip into a loyal neighbour. Even so, I felt that what Norman had said – and what he had presumably left the pub in order to avoid saying – told me quite a lot. Alan was a known philanderer, active locally. He had disappeared, and shortly afterwards, so had his wife.

  I left my second pint half-finished on the table, and walked out to my car. I couldn’t put this off any longer: it was time to visit the scene of the crime.

  Whoever had boarded up Jackie and Alan’s cottage – the landlord, presumably – had done a thorough job. I quickly saw that I wouldn’t be able to get into the house without some difficulty, not to mention some tools. For now, I’d have to make do with a quick look round the garden. The body was more likely to be in the garden than the house, anyway, I figured. I couldn’t really imagine Jackie burying her husband beneath the floorboards.

  There was a fair bit of garden, very overgrown now. Most of the land was at the side of the house, with only a small stretch at the front. The back yard was mainly laid to patio – and that, I remembered, had already been there when Alan and Jackie moved in.

  I kept a torch in the car, but not a spade, so a proper search was out of the immediate question. As I prodded around more or less aimlessly amid the brambles and frost-blackened weeds, I felt fear, as well as frustration – fear that I wouldn’t have the guts or the constancy to come back again, better prepared. And fear that I would.

  To do either would be to confront a question about myself that I would sooner have left unanswered: was I a man who believed that one is obliged to make sense of death? I’d never made, or especially tried to make, any sense out of life. But death, especially someone else’s death, was somehow a different kettle of ball games.

  “I’ve got a spade here.”

  The words, quietly spoken somewhere behind my left shoulder, made me leap, gasp and drop the torch, which landed a few yards away in a patch of mud. Norman picked it up and shone it in my face.

  “I saw you here earlier today, sitting outside in your car. I come by once or twice a week, to check everything’s still as it was. I followed you around the lanes, and into the pub. I’d have spoken to you if you hadn’t spoken to me. And now here you are, back again. Didn’t need to follow you this time. Guessed where you were headed.”

  I cleared my voice before speaking, but still it croaked. “From what I said in the pub?”

  Norman dropped the torch’s beam from my face, to the ground between us. “Didn’t know how much you knew. Still don’t know how you found out. But you know something, that’s clear.” He passed me a heavy, agricultural spade, blade end first, and said: “Over here.”

  The spot he led me to was deep in a small thicket of horticultural neglect, hidden from any view, not too near the house or the road. I could see his logic. As I took a moment to gather my thoughts before beginning the sweaty task of digging my own grave, I went through the motions of considering my options. What it came down to was this: Norman was a big bloke, a physical-looking man, and I wasn’t. I hoped he had a gun, or a blunt object, or at worst a knife. He hadn’t struck me as the naturally violent type. If I did what he wanted me to do, I hoped he’d end it quickly. End me quickly. If I tried to escape, he’d catch me, and probably finish me with the spade.

  That was what it came down to, my last attempt to make sense of death: that I’d rather die by a gun than by a spade.

  “It was your wife, then, was it? Alan was seeing your wife?” I was playing for time, of course, but only for more time to rest before beginning the digging. I was too far gone in fear and listless despair to try for a higher prize.

  “My wife?” said Norman. “I’m not married. I can’t be, see, I have to look after my mum, she’s been poorly.”

  As I turned the first sod, I was thinking: “I don’t know that many more people than Alan did. How long will it take them to realise I’m dead?” And I was thinking, if this bloke’s a psycho killer, he’s a bloody bone idle one. Two victims in three years? You wouldn’t think they’d allow it in these deregulated days. You’d think they’d have got some guy in Korea to do it f
or half the wages, twice the productivity.

  But then I realised that I was making too many assumptions. Norman had only two victims that I knew of – he could have had four hundred that I didn’t know of. I might be doing him an injustice, he might be the archetypal New Model Worker. I was pleased to think that. There’s comfort in numbers, even when there isn’t safety. Stupid, but true. Stupid, but human.

  Anyway, I dug down a few more feet, and after a while I unearthed Alan.

  “I’m to be sharing then, am I?” I said, putting down my spade. I was quite pleased with that. It showed a certain character, I thought, to go out with a quip on your lips.

  Norman reached into his coat pocket. Gun or knife, I wondered. Gun, I hoped. Blades are too personal.

  It was a mobile phone.

  “You call them,” said Norman, handing me the phone. “I’m no good at all that.”

  “Call them…?” My croak became a whisper.

  “The police,” said Norman. “Would you mind? I get all, you know, tongue-tied. With officials.”

  I looked at the phone. I didn’t know what it meant. I looked at Norman. I didn’t know what he meant, either. “You didn’t kill Alan?”

  “I didn’t mean to!” he said, his face flushing in the torchlight as if I’d offended or embarrassed him. “You know what these roads are like, round here, in winter. I never even saw him. First I saw of him, was when I stopped and went back to see what the noise was.” He choked, snorted his nose clear. “I thought it was a badger.”

  “When was this?” I said. To my relief, I found that my hands had stopped shaking sufficiently for me to light a cigarette. I drew the smoke in deep, and felt it save my life. I offered the packet to Norman.

  “Ta. I’m supposed to have given up last Christmas, but you know…When was it? Three years ago. Found out later Jackie’d kicked him out that same night. He must have been hitching, I suppose, though he was going in the wrong direction, silly bugger. Probably pissed or stoned, he usually was.”