The Sleep of the Dead

by Tom Bradby

  Julia put her hands in her pockets. She thought this had all been festering in him for a long time.

  ‘But there is one thing about the statement,’ he continued. ‘It is the only admission I have ever heard from anyone that they had feelings for Sarah, apart from her husband.’ He leant forward and tapped Sarah’s picture with his pencil, the lead point touching the sardonic smile at the corner of her mouth. ‘And yet this was a woman who inspired strong feelings in men.’

  Julia remembered Sarah at the village fête in the summer after the Fords had moved to the village, in a see-through chiffon summer dress that gave everyone a clear view of sexy lingerie, throwing her head back and laughing as Julia’s father tried to teach her how to ‘toss the caber’.

  ‘Sarah provoked,’ Professor Malcolm went on, ‘she liked to provoke, she enjoyed the power she had, and once she was gone, there must have been much to hide … If she had a relationship, we still can’t be certain with whom, and it may indeed be more complex than that. Perhaps the pleasure for her was in the teasing, in the power …’ He looked at her. ‘What do you think?’

  Julia felt overwhelmed again by hatred for Sarah. Professor Malcolm seemed about to ask her something else, thought better of it, reached for the other statement he had been examining earlier and handed it to her. She glanced over it.

  ‘Adrian Rouse’s,’ she said.

  ‘Yes. Note the date. After the war. The war breaks out three weeks into the investigation, just as Barnaby and I are removed. Alan Ford is convinced his daughter is dead and wants to get away to forget. The others have no reason not to go. None is yet a suspect. But Rouse has something crucially important to say, which, at this point, he has still not said. After the war, he remembers, he took the dogs for a walk, and saw Robert Pascoe standing, covered in sweat and apparently highly agitated, by his front door. Pascoe appears to be in a hurry to remove his clothes and get into the house. Rouse says later that, before the war, he was only ever asked about his own movements and about Sarah …’ Professor Malcolm was looking at Julia. ‘Don’t you think that it might have occurred to him to tell the police what he’d seen?’

  Julia was thinking of the war diary that Adrian had given her and recalling that there were few hints within it of any suspicion of Pascoe’s guilt. She looked at her watch, wanting time to think. ‘I’ll have to go to lunch.’ She saw the disappointment on his face. ‘Why don’t you come?’

  He frowned. ‘I don’t think your mother will be very pleased to see me.’

  ‘She was civil to you at the passing-out parade.’

  ‘Yes, though bemused at my presence.’

  ‘She’ll be fine. She loves having guests. We don’t need to tell her what you’re doing.’

  Julia’s mother was polite, but no more. They stood around in the kitchen as Caroline was placing cutlery on a tray. Julia opened a bottle of white wine and poured each of them a glass.

  Professor Malcolm had brought with him a brown envelope that was frayed and worn close to the top. As Julia put down the glass, she knocked it off the end of the table. It fell in such a manner that one or two of the photographs within half slid out.

  Realizing that these were the scene-of-crime photographs, Julia hurried to pick them up, but it was too late. She watched her mother’s face move from shock to embarrassment. ‘I thought we’d eat on the patio, if that’s all right,’ Caroline said.

  Julia followed her mother out through the dining room to the terrace, where a large Indonesian umbrella gave the table just enough shade. Her mother put down yellow cloth table mats; Julia grabbed the cutlery and began to help.

  ‘Mum, I’m in some trouble. You’ve guessed as much.’

  Her mother was folding napkins.

  ‘Something went badly wrong in Beijing.’

  Julia rearranged the dessert fork and spoon on the placing she had just laid.

  ‘I have to stay at home for a while. They may have called you.’ She was disconcerted that Caroline was avoiding eye-contact. ‘Professor Malcolm has to conduct a review of the case here and … It’s an academic review. Just a formality. I needed to have something to take my mind off things so I said I would help.’

  Caroline’s shoulders sagged.

  Professor Malcolm emerged, sooner than Julia had hoped. Caroline looked up, smiled at him then walked back into the kitchen to begin bringing out the food.

  She had made a cold pasta salad, a plain green salad and garlic bread. Julia brought out the wine, then went to the hall to fish her sunglasses from her bag.

  They did not speak as they filled their plates. Julia had forgotten how hungry she was and began to shovel the food in. The pasta salad had sun-dried tomatoes with it, basil, bacon and olive oil, with Parmesan grated thickly on top.

  ‘I’m sorry if I have in any way offended you, Mrs Havilland,’ Professor Malcolm said. ‘I have … tricked Julia into helping me. The review is an unavoidable consequence of Pascoe’s release.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s only a formality.’

  He used the neatly folded napkin to wipe the corner of his mouth. He had finished his wine already, so Caroline leant forward to replenish it.

  Julia wondered if someone had told her mother about what had happened with Pascoe this morning and whether her hostility was therefore directed more against her daughter than their guest.

  ‘What’s the point?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘Going through the motions,’ the Professor replied. ‘Perhaps I can ask you. What’s your view of Pascoe’s release?’

  ‘I don’t have one.’

  Professor Malcolm tilted his head, a gesture Julia recognized as the closest he was able to get to charm. ‘Oh, but you must.’

  Caroline stared out towards the common. ‘I think a child was murdered and a child-molester was convicted. I hope he moves away.’

  ‘And what if he’s innocent?’

  ‘He’s not.’

  ‘Can you be sure?’

  ‘You can never be sure, Professor.’

  They continued to eat in silence, the only sound that of cutlery gently striking and scraping over china. Professor Malcolm put his knife and fork down and pushed his plate gently forward, leaning on his elbows. ‘What if I told you my view was that this crime was about anger – an act of rage directed against a beautiful woman and her unfortunate daughter that Pascoe could not have committed?’

  ‘I’d say you were not as confident of your conclusions as you pretend. And I’d say this village had been through enough.’

  ‘On Pascoe, I am confident.’

  ‘So this is an investigation?’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  They had finished, so Caroline stood, without offering them any more, and took their plates. ‘I remember you well, Professor, with your insinuations and innuendoes. The people of this village are good people.’

  Julia looked at her mother, who had reached a level of hostility that shocked her.

  ‘One of them wasn’t,’ Professor Malcolm responded.

  ‘And they caught him. He confessed and was convicted in a court of law.’

  ‘The weakest member of the community. In the end, the least able to defend himself.’

  ‘You make it sound like the Middle Ages.’

  ‘It always is when a child dies.’

  Caroline hesitated for a moment, then took the plates inside. Julia went with her. There was a bowl of strawberries on the sideboard and her mother picked it up with some side plates and returned to the terrace, leaving Julia no time to intervene.

  Caroline served them without comment and they ate in silence, all looking across to the common. Caroline turned towards the hedge and the shed in the corner. ‘Are you a gardener, Professor?’

  He nodded. Eagerly, Julia thought, as if wanting to make amends with this offer of neutral territory.

  Caroline asked him what he would recommend putting in a new flower-bed she intended to create beside the shed.

  Julia stood up and went inside to stack the dishwash
er. From the kitchen, she watched as her mother began to show Professor Malcolm around the garden. They stood in front of the flower-bed by the shed for a few minutes, then moved out of sight.

  Professor Malcolm came in as she switched on the machine. He apologized for not helping.

  ‘You can’t be that blunt,’ Julia said. ‘It’s rude, not clever. This is my home.’

  ‘Of course. Of course. Would you like me to stop? Perhaps I shouldn’t have started, I mean, I can easily hand it back and they can get somebody else.’ His penitence was not convincing.

  ‘No. I don’t want you to stop.’

  ‘But less blunt?’

  ‘Considerably less blunt. And why did you bring these?’ She was pointing at the brown envelope on the table with the photographs.

  ‘I’d like to go on to have a look at the crime scene when we’re done. I’m sorry if I was offensive. I did not mean to … hurt your mother.’ He gestured through to the living room. ‘Do you have … do you have any photographs?’

  ‘Of what?’

  ‘Sarah. Alice. Anything from the months before their deaths.’

  ‘Of course.’

  He noticed the hesitation in her voice. ‘Your mother is the other side of the garden. I left her with a trowel in her hand.’

  Stepping over Aristotle, who lay across the doorway, fast asleep, Julia led Professor Malcolm through to the sitting room, with its low roof and wooden beams. They never spent much time here in summer, but in winter it was warm and comfortable. Her mother had acquired, or probably made, new covers for the large sofa that ran along the wall, and the curtains flapped gently in the breeze. Professor Malcolm sat in what had once been her father’s chair, then changed his mind and moved to the end of the sofa, next to a large wooden box with a bouquet of flowers on top in a tall white vase.

  The photograph albums were on the top shelf and Julia had to pull over a chair from her mother’s desk to reach them. They were marked with gold lettering, by year. Julia took down the one marked 1981–3.

  She sank into the sofa next to him and opened the cover.

  ‘Family holiday in Scotland. Easter. My mother’s parents had an estate there. My father loved walking.’

  The first pages showed them all standing outside a squat, ugly Victorian building in a magnificent Highland glen. There was snow on the heather and they were wrapped up warm against the cold. Most of the pictures were of Julia and her mother, though there was a sequence of them rowing out into the lake with her grandfather.

  In the next section, Caroline had clearly been behind the camera, because there were several pictures of Julia’s father. They were on the beach, still wrapped up against the weather, but building sandcastles and playing hopscotch, barefoot. Her father’s sandy hair was longer and thicker than she remembered it and was tugged about by the wind. In one picture, he was trying to smooth it down.

  ‘He was a good-looking man,’ Professor Malcolm said, ‘and that looked like a fun holiday.’

  Julia wondered if he was regretting the absence of family life. ‘Yes. My father always found it hard to relax. Consequently, holidays weren’t restful, but they were exciting. He was exciting to be around.’ She looked up at him. ‘He was a brilliant officer. A leader.’

  Professor Malcolm smiled at her reassuringly.

  Julia had now reached their skiing holiday in the Cairngorms, which had followed the week at her grandparents’ house. There was a photograph of her father lying in a deckchair in a white turtle-neck sweater, Julia next to him, with one leg crossed over his. They were both holding mugs, squinting into the camera and laughing. She could remember her mother taking this picture.

  ‘Good memories.’ Professor Malcolm was smiling at her.

  Julia nodded.

  ‘It’s good to reaffirm them.’

  There were some photographs of her father in uniform, on the base, then a page of him playing rugby and one of him presenting awards at the regimental sports day. ‘Dad was promoted just before the skiing trip.’

  Julia handed the album to him and he squinted at it. ‘Hold on a second,’ he said, heaved himself from the sofa and went back out to the patio, before re-emerging through the doorway half a minute later clutching his reading glasses and twisting them in his hand, the way she remembered him doing in tutorials. He sat again and pulled the album across.

  ‘When did the Fords move in next door?’

  ‘Just after the skiing holiday. The removals lorry was in the drive when we arrived home.’ Julia turned the pages.

  ‘Slow down,’ he said. ‘There’s no rush.’

  ‘They’re all very samey.’

  ‘Well, not to me. What’s this?’

  ‘This is the summer. The village fête. My father manning “Toss the Caber”. That’s Sarah.’

  In the picture, Sarah had thrown back her head and was laughing at something Julia’s father had said. As Julia had recalled earlier, she could see the woman’s underwear through her dress. The feelings to which she had been prey at the time immediately returned: she felt uncomfortable when confronted with any image of herself looking overweight and gawky.

  ‘You’ve certainly changed a lot,’ he said. There was a moment’s silence while Professor Malcolm studied the pictures intently. ‘Sarah was very beautiful,’ he went on. ‘I suppose any young girl would wish she was like her, that she could attract similar attention.’

  Julia looked at the photograph on the opposite page of her mother and herself manning the cake stall, the pennants above them fluttering in the wind.

  ‘I can’t see Alice,’ he said.

  Julia flicked forward two or three pages and settled on a sequence of her father, herself and her mother in the garden with Alice. She and Alice were pictured jumping into the leaves. They were both smiling, their heads poking up out of a pile.

  ‘Alice came through the hedge quite a lot, especially towards the end. We could hear her parents, Alan and Sarah, arguing from our garden and she would just come through and sit quietly. My father was kind to her. He seemed very … fond of her.’

  Julia cleared her throat. ‘Alice asked him that day not to move the piles of leaves he was sweeping up so that we could jump in them and he agreed. He went to get the camera.’

  Julia turned the page and looked at a sequence covering Alice’s fifth birthday. She was wearing a pink dress and, in most of the photographs, Sarah was standing beside her. There were no pictures of Alan, or of anyone else, as though Alice and Sarah had been the only guests. In one photograph, the two of them were bending down to blow out the candles on the cake, which was shaped like a horse. Julia recognized her own shoulder and arm in the corner of the picture.

  There was a prolonged silence.

  Professor Malcolm lowered his head to look closer. ‘You know, I think …’ he turned back to the pictures of Alice looking out of the leaves ‘… there is something different.’ He pointed at the photograph of Alice and Sarah blowing out the candles on the cake. ‘The pictures of Alice and Sarah released to the media at the time, the ones we put on the wall earlier, they predate both these sequences, don’t they? Do you see that?’

  Julia did not understand what he was getting at.

  ‘Well, look. The daughter is like a mini version of the mother. They look alike anyway, but it’s more than that. They’ve both had their hair cut into short bobs. Alice’s clothes are more adult than you would expect in a girl of this age. The dress is pretty, but if it was on an adult, one would say it was … sexy. And …’ There was another long pause. ‘I think she’s wearing makeup.’

  Julia looked closer. ‘It was her birthday.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s not applied as a joke, is it? That’s neatly applied. And look …’ he turned back to the sequence with the leaves ‘… here. She’s wearing makeup here.’

  Julia felt the nerves in her stomach. She cleared her throat and nodded.

  ‘Did she often wear makeup?’

  ‘Quite often, yes.’

&
nbsp; ‘A five-year-old?’ Professor Malcolm continued to stare at the picture. ‘You know, this picture reminds me of that case in America – recent one – with that little girl beauty queen who was murdered. Do you remember it?’

  ‘Vaguely.’

  He went on studying the photograph in silence. Then, ‘It’s … it’s almost as if the little girl is being consciously fashioned in her mother’s image.’

  Julia hadn’t seen this before. Alice had always been pretty, a well-presented little girl. She had not noticed anything unusual about it at the time, or at least nothing significant. Or perhaps she had. She looked at Alice smiling into the camera and suddenly the smile and the makeup and the pink dress were making her uncomfortable.

  ‘What kind of mother was Sarah?’ he asked.

  ‘Hopeless. Totally disinterested and utterly self-absorbed.’ Julia thought about it some more. ‘I remember my mother telling me once that she had tried to send a taxi to pick up Alice from her new school.’

  ‘What sort of father was Alan?’

  Julia shrugged. ‘The opposite of Sarah. Attentive. Not around much. None of the fathers were. But affectionate when he was there.’

  ‘Did he play with her … with you, when he was around?’

  She frowned.

  ‘I mean,’ he explained, ‘was he the sort of father who got down on his knees and helped dress Barbie or …’

  She was shaking her head. ‘No, I guess not. He’s always been quite serious in a way. Incredibly kind, decent and thoughtful … but my father was more like what you’re getting at. He was serious, too, but sometimes he would switch into a different mode and he would come and play with me. In public, when anyone was around, my father behaved in a certain way – quite formal, but from time to time, in private, when it was just me and him, or Alice and me and him, then he would be really on our level.’ Julia tapped the page with her hand, emphasizing this point. ‘For instance, the dolls’ house I have upstairs, he built all the furniture for that in his workshop. In the shed – the original shed behind the garage. Alan would have gone and bought that kind of thing. Very thoughtful in that way, but it would never have occurred to him to build it.’