by Neil Cross
Newell referred to a sheaf of documents. He cleared his throat.
He said: ‘So. Mr Shepherd. According to what you’ve told me here, it was you who phoned DS William Holloway at this station at 3.37 p.m. on—’ he referred to his notes, and read the date. ‘At this time you attempted to communicate certain information concerning the whereabouts of Joanne Grayling, who at that time was considered to be a missing person.’
‘That’s correct.’
‘Can you tell me why you did that?’
‘Yes. I had a dream.’
‘You had a dream.’
‘Yes.’
‘Could you give me a bit more detail?’
‘That’s all there is.’
‘Well now. Let’s see if it is. What did you dream about, exactly?’
‘Joanne Grayling.’
‘I see. And did you know Joanne Grayling?’
‘No.’
‘Had you ever met Joanne Grayling?’
‘No.’
‘To your knowledge, had you ever seen Joanne Grayling?’
‘No. Never.’
‘I see. And DS William Holloway?’
‘No.’
‘Well, you phoned him. You asked to speak to him.’
‘I did not.’
‘Then why are you here, Mr Shepherd?’
‘Not by name, I mean. Not specifically.’
There was a great deal more. Eventually Newell stopped. He composed himself and drew in a long breath. He tugged at an earlobe.
He asked if Shepherd wanted to clarify anything. Then he looked at his watch. He said: ‘Interview concludes,’ and recited the time. He removed the tape and sealed it with a label he took from his breast pocket. He asked Shepherd to counter-sign. Then he handed him a piece of paper that documented the purposes to which the tape could be put and the conditions in which it would be kept.
Newell excused himself. He left WPC Hadley in the corner.
Shepherd tried to read the handout. It was dull. He flattened it on the burned table. A headache pressed down on his eyes.
At length the door opened again. A gangling, funereal man in a suit and loosened tie entered the room.
‘Mr Shepherd?’
‘Yes.’
‘My name is James Ireland. Please come with me.’
He followed Ireland up a resounding flight of stairs into a small office cluttered with filing cabinets and paperwork in various degrees of disarray. Ireland sat behind the desk and invited Shepherd to sit. They were joined by a large woman in a carmine trouser suit and a fringed pashmina. She introduced herself to Shepherd as Dr Jenny Lowe and sat alongside him, just within his peripheral vision.
Ireland assured him again that he had not been charged with anything. He was not a suspect, but they were very keen to eliminate him from the inquiry. He had not been charged with anything. He could speak quite openly without fear of ridicule or censure.
He played a tape of Shepherd’s conversation with Holloway.
Sir, I am about to replace the handset.
Please. Don’t … Joanne is alive.
Who is this?
Please listen. I know how this sounds.
Ireland stopped the tape.
‘Is that your voice?’
‘Yes.’
Ireland massaged his temple with a thumb. He rested his eyes for a moment.
‘And you live in …’
‘North London,’ said Shepherd. ‘Near Highbury.’
‘Near the Arsenal?’
‘Quite.’
‘I’ve been there,’ said Ireland, ‘once or twice. When I was younger. To see Liverpool away. Couldn’t face it now. London’s a bit much for me.’
‘I know what you mean.’
‘I’ll bet. You don’t sound like a Londoner.’
‘No. I’m from Bristol.’
Something in the room tightened.
‘Oh, I see. Where in Bristol?’
‘Well, I was born in Frenchay. Then I lived in Redland.’
‘It’s nice, Redland. Nice area. When did you leave?’
‘Ooh.’ Shepherd pretended to count back. ‘Years ago. I don’t know. Five years. Six? Six years.’
‘And there’s no family?’
‘None.’
‘I see.’
‘My wife left me.’
‘I see. I’m sorry. So—actually—you have nobody to corroborate your claim to be the man who called Detective Sergeant Holloway.’
‘Do I need corroboration? You’ve got the tape. You can hear it’s me.’
‘We’ll have the tape properly analysed,’ said Ireland, cordially enough, ‘if I deem it necessary. But I’m hoping it won’t be. Can’t you think of anybody?’
‘Well. There’s my landlord. He was with me when I made the call.’
‘Your landlord?’
‘Yes.’
‘His name?’
‘Lenny.’
‘Lenny—?’
‘Kilminster.’
‘Lenny Kilminster. And Mr Kilminster’s address?’
‘The same. I lodge.’
Ireland sat back. He let Dr Lowe interrupt.
She said: ‘Can you tell us exactly why you made the call, Mr Shepherd?’
‘I wanted to help.’
‘And how did you think it would help?’
‘I don’t know.’
She looked at him for a long second. Then she deferred back to Ireland.
Ireland had exhausted his cultivated patience. He warned Shepherd that he could be charged with wasting police time, not to mention a number of more serious offences. He took some time about it, and went into some detail. Shepherd knitted his hands in his lap. Then Ireland excused himself and stomped from the office. The door rattled in its frame.
Lowe ignored Ireland’s exit. She sat on the edge of the desk and made a call. A couple of minutes passed while she rifled around in a capacious bag. Eventually she produced a video cassette. At the same time, a young officer appeared in the doorway, pushing before him a television and VCR on a wheeled, tubular metal trolley. The young officer plugged everything in, handed the remote control to Lowe and excused himself.
She pointed the remote at the video and, with a non-essential flick of the wrist, pressed PLAY. They watched the early evening BBC news report that broke the Joanne Grayling story. A reporter declaimed grimly in the Bristol sunshine. The low-rise, red-brick police station was behind her back.
Lowe pressed PAUSE.
‘Is this the report you saw?’
Shepherd said it was.
She fast-forwarded the tape.
‘And this?’
She showed him the ITN broadcast that went out the same day.
She stopped the tape, rewound it.
She said: ‘Now, can you tell me if these two reports have anything in common? Besides the obvious.’
He said: ‘Not that I can see.’
She asked him to look once more. They watched the tapes again. Shepherd leaned forward. He parted his beard like Victorian skirts and rested his jaw on his cupped hands. But he saw nothing.
‘No detail?’ she said. ‘Nothing strikes you as being at all strange?’
A band across his eyes was slowly tightening.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Look again,’ she said.
She read his expression. ‘Just once more.’
Rewind, fast-forward, pause. The reporter’s image froze and flickered laterally behind fuzzy stripes of poor tracking. Lowe approached the TV. She tapped the screen with her pen. Just behind the reporter’s shoulder, a man was moving into shot.
‘Watch him,’ she said.
She pressed PLAY. The man walked fully into frame. He walked to the door of t
he police station. He stopped and looked over his shoulder. The morning sun shone in his red hair.
She said: ‘That man is Detective Holloway.’
When Shepherd had been escorted back to the interview room Lowe lifted the phone and called Ireland back to his office.
She said: ‘He saw Holloway on TV. He’s in the background, walking into the station. ITN shows him leaving again, a bit later on. Who knows why he picked up on it? Perhaps it was just the red hair. Perhaps he entered the shot at a significant moment. Whatever: who knows? So, Shepherd goes to bed and has a nightmare about Joanne. And in the nightmare, his unconscious dredges up the image of the red-headed policeman he’d seen on TV twice that day.’
Ireland searched in his top drawer.
‘And by coincidence it was Holloway?’
‘Oh,’ she said, ‘there’s no real coincidence about it. He worked here, for God’s sake, and there were a thousand cameras stationed outside.’
Ireland slammed the drawer.
He glanced over the surface of his desk. He picked up a sheaf of paper, squinted at it, put it down again. He removed his glasses and lay them, upended, on the desk.
Distracted, he said: ‘It’s one more embarrassment I can do without.’
‘Jim,’ she said. ‘You saw him, for God’s sake. He’s like a penitent schoolboy.’
He patted the desk until he found his glasses again. Then he put them on.
‘But not a guilty one,’ she said. ‘He’s no more guilty than the poor woman who called to tell us she’d heard her dead husband’s voice on Crimewatch.’
She leaned forward and moved a greasy-cornered pile of A4 from a collapsing in-tray. She pointed. Ireland said ‘Ah’, and picked up a bottle of Pepto Bismol. He began to struggle with the childproof lid.
He said: ‘But some of the details were spot on—’
‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Rubbish. Look.’
From the mess on his desk she lifted a spiral-bound map of Bristol and the West Country.
‘Name a page,’ she said.
‘Twenty-four.’
He dropped the lid on the table and swallowed glutinous, bright pink liquid.
She flicked through the book. Then she lay it flat on the desk. Her finger hovered over page 24. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Give me a grid reference.’
‘3C.’
She stabbed her finger down on the page.
‘Right,’ she said. She rotated the book so Ireland could see it.
‘Look. To the right of my finger, about an inch: there’s the river Avon. If you look closely, you’ll see that my finger is actually resting on a railway line.’
His lips glistened pink, as if with cheap lipstick. He wiped them with the back of his hand.
She said: ‘Pick an urban environment and, almost by definition, you’re close to water and railways—depending on how you define “close”. And, one way or another, where there’s a railway there’s a shed.’
He took the map, examined it, put it down again. He belched and pressed the tips of his long fingers to his sternum.
‘That’s all very well and good,’ he said. ‘But it’s another coincidence and I’m not happy with it.’
‘Oh, it’s not coincidence at all,’ she said. ‘It’s just psychology. A lifetime of television murder mysteries are jumbled in his head. One night he’s disturbed by a news report about a missing girl. Who can say why? That night, his subconscious throws up a few of those images. He thinks, suddenly, he’s got the Shining. But he hasn’t. All he’s got is a low-grade mental health problem.’
He was nothing more than one of the nutters who dogged such investigations—who, indeed, had already dogged this one. The law of averages demanded that one of them would be right about something, one day. Clearly Shepherd was disturbed, but she didn’t think he was dangerous. And he had nothing to do with the death of Joanne Grayling.
Ireland gave the order to check Shepherd out and let him go. A couple of hours later, Newell returned to the holding cell. He showed Shepherd the door.
Neither Ireland nor Lowe returned to thank him for his cooperation.
Outside the station, Shepherd found a rotting wooden bench. He sat and collected his thoughts. It was nearly 4 p.m. He wanted to take a walk to get the smell of the station off him.
He slung the bag over his shoulder and headed to where he used to live.
It wasn’t far. He walked for perhaps twenty minutes. Then he set the bag down on the corner of Chandos Road, in sight of the newsagent where he used to buy the Sunday papers and sweets for the kids; the organic butcher where Rachel liked to buy their meat; the Italian restaurant where they sometimes ate a groggy Saturday brunch.
He knew by looking at the house that nobody was home.
A passing Jeep Cherokee slowed to look at him. He supposed he didn’t look much like a Redland house-owner any more. And the sportsbag on the pavement beside him was about the right size to stuff in a VCR.
He imagined Andrew Taylor glancing from the bedroom window and seeing Jack Shepherd, staring at the house from the corner. Andrew would have the cordless digital telephone in one hand, ready to call the police. He would be making notes: time, place, date and description. The man was six foot two or three, he would write. Middle-aged, white male. Big build. Shaved head, heavily bearded. Mid-to-late forties. Small, wire-framed spectacles. Olive drab army jacket with many pockets. Worn blue jeans, battered running shoes.
Shepherd smiled. He removed his spectacles and wiped his eyes. The house maintained an impassive countenance. It was moved in neither one way nor the other.
Strange, how he knew by the simple fact of proximity that it was empty. He wondered where the children were. Rachel.
He crossed the road. The cool, familiar shadow of the hedge passed across his shoulders.
At the side of the house, just beneath the kitchen window, they kept a spare key beneath a concrete plant pot. He didn’t know what kind of plant it contained, but it didn’t look well. The key was kept there for the children, at his suggestion. It was still there, in a zip-lock plastic freezer bag. Indeed, it might not have been moved since he put it there. He’d given the kids dire warning not to tell anybody. If somebody found the key and burgled them, he said, the insurance company would not replace the TV or the video or the Playstation. They rolled their eyes, all three of them, and elbowed and pinched and jostled one another. But they listened and they did as they were told.
He removed the key from the freezer bag and let himself in through the kitchen door. He walked into the musk of them, their compound smell. Four of them, who had been five. And the cat. It infused the walls, the floor, the air.
Issey Miyake, Natrel Plus.
The morning’s washing-up was piled in the sink: a few breakfast bowls, teaspoons, mugs, a buttery knife, a fork whose tines were sticky with seedless raspberry jam. A pot rimmed out with soggy egg. There was a scattering of damp crumbs beneath the toaster, a spillage of tea, milk. Cereal cartons had been left unclosed. He took the Crunchy Nut Cornflakes from the shelf, closed the inner bag and replaced the box in its proper slot on the shelf, between the Weetabix and the Special K.
He touched the wall.
The cat glared at him from the hallway door.
‘Hello, Hungry Joe,’ said Shepherd, quietly.
The cat swiped its tail once, then showed him its arse and undulated prissily away.
On the table next to the telephone in the hallway was a photograph of him. Andrew and Rachel, Dorset, 1992. It was taken by her father. Shepherd lifted the frame. As he adjusted its angle, the reflected light obscured first his face, then Rachel’s. He rubbed dust between thumb and forefinger. He put the photo back on the table.
He climbed the stairs. They creaked beneath his weight. He recalled sneaking up these stairs, late, after a work Christmas party.
W
hen he saw the chaos in the bathroom, he laughed once, out loud. The boys’ deodorant and shaving foam. He wondered when they started using it. Inside-out tights, an empty Tampax box, toothbrushes in a water-stained, chromium holder. Their bristles leaned as if shaped by a prevailing wind. Dove soap, Gillette shower gel. The portable radio on the window sill hadn’t been properly turned off. He could hear the low murmur of Radio 4. A small pair of boxer shorts had been trampled underfoot into the sodden bathmat. Somebody had left a Swatch on the shelf, next to a new but lidless tube of toothpaste that had been squeezed from the middle.
He sat on the edge of the bath. He watched a beam of sunlight move through twenty degrees.
In the twins’ disordered bedroom (DO NOT ENTER!!!, read the sign he had allowed them to Blu-tac to the door) he breathed the fungal air of male adolescence: the cheesy feet, the unwashed armpits, the sweaty bedding, the sharper top-notes of deodorant and aftershave. He ran his hand along the frame of the bunkbeds. There were new posters on the wall: Manchester United, Tupac Shakur, the Phantom Menace. Pamela Anderson in a red swimsuit. There was a new PC on a rickety workstation. On the chest of drawers, the portable TV and Playstation were veiled in dust. He drew his finger down the screen. With the darting tip of his tongue, he touched the dust that clung to his fingertip.
Next door, Annie’s room was pastel and neat, fragrant with perfume and soap. On her dressing table a collection of coffee mugs bloomed with grey mould. He picked up a mug, examined it, made a repulsed face, smiled. Her PC table was crowded with books and sheets of photocopied A4. He ran his palm along the crisp duvet cover. It released a burst of her scent, and for a moment he imagined she was behind him, over his shoulder.
‘Dad,’ she would say (he knew her so well), ‘you grew a beard.’
He entered the marital bedroom with some reluctance. Something had changed. The wardrobes were the same. The curtains. The dressing table with her perfumes and her makeup: a grubby white bowl of foundation, a tube of mascara clogged black round the rim. He pulled open a drawer, slowly closed it again. Her underwear, laundered and folded. Photographs had been jammed in the mirror’s frame. Rachel, the kids, her family. None of him.
