by Paul Charles
However, what with my making a racket and my threatening that the police were on their way, he’d probably be in a hurry to dispose of her and Jean’s remains before I’d a chance to make good on my threat. Taking for granted that John was probably mentally disturbed, would it be a worry to him that I was about to return with the cavalry? Or was he above all that? (In case you are interested, I tried the back entrance and there was no open door, neither was there a flat roof, let alone a flat roof with access to an open window.)
As I regained consciousness on the front doorstep that night I was convinced there was still someone behind the door. All the hall lights were off. I opened the letterbox ever so slightly and I swear to you I could hear his breathing. I shouted in through the letterbox – nothing coherent, just a loud scream.
No reaction.
I opened the letter box again and shouted in, ‘I know you’re in there, Harrison, and I’m not leaving until I get Mary!’
Still no reply.
‘Harrison!’ I repeated, ‘come on out, the game’s up!’
Come on out, the game’s up. Sorry? Was that supposed to scare the life out of him, or the conscience back into him? I couldn’t believe I’d shouted that. Obviously someone else agreed with me because I could hear laughter from the other side of the door. It was a quiet giggle at first but then it grew and grew until at last it had grown into full-scale laughter.
The hall light went on and I could hear footsteps on the other side of the door and then, slowly at first, the door started to creak open.
‘What the feck’s your problem, Buchanan–’ Harrison started, but before he’d a chance to get any more out I’d smashed the door full welt into his chest and rushed past him and up into his flat on the first floor.
You can imagine my surprise when all I found was a very tidy flat, well, tidy that was, apart from lots of drawings lying all over the floor and pinned all over the walls. No evil smells, no decomposing bodies, no Mary Skeffington tied up and helpless on the floor.
Yes, as I looked around the flat I was happy I hadn’t picked up on all of his clues. You see, in John Harrison’s case it’s lucky that I didn’t make a connection between all his wee quirks, because they were nothing more than that – quirks. They might have made him seem a little strange but the one thing they didn’t make him was a murderer. He was, quite simply, a fellow human who was trying to deal with the problems of life in the best way he knew how. That’s all he was guilty of.
With all of my overreacting he could have been forgiven if he’d done me some GBH. But no, he sat me down, genuinely concerned about my wellbeing and, after he’d showed me through to his bathroom so that I could tidy up the mess that was once my face, he made me a cup of tea. My bloodied face actually looked a lot worse than it was and with cold water and copious amounts of toilet roll, I was ready for my close-up again, Mr DeMille, although hopefully it wouldn’t turn out to be my swan song.
More importantly, I was ready to apologise to John Harrison for my actions and declare him totally innocent in all of this.
Me, well I was guilty of a lot more. And now is the time for my confession.
The pure and simple fact in all of this is that I was guilty.
If Jean Simpson and I had not been enjoying our encounters, she most definitely would not be missing and, as I feared, murdered. So yes, it was my fault that she was missing, presumed murdered. Absolutely. No doubt about it. Jean Simpson died because of our relationship. When we were enjoying our early sexual experiments, what we were doing had repercussions outside of our wee room with the ageing red carpet.
And now I was inside John Harrison’s wee room, acting and looking like a fool. Jean Simpson was missing and now Mary Skeffington was missing as well. I think John was now beginning to wonder about me and whether I could have been involved in either or both of their disappearances. What was it about girls who were involved with me? Jean Kerr had (thankfully, in her case) beaten a hasty retreat to Derby. Jean Simpson had disappeared from the face of the Earth several weeks since and now Mary Skeffington, the last of the trio, had vanished as well. I didn’t confess any of my fears in this area to John, but I would imagine he had reached a similar conclusion. Mind you, he wasn’t off the hook completely, was he? He’d also enjoyed a relationship of one kind and another with our trio of would-be Miss Houdinis.
We sat talking, John and I, for ages, each trying to convince ourselves, and each other, that we were neither involved in this nor responsible for the ongoing mystery. Besides, he was still convinced that Jean would show up sometime, somewhere and when she did, she’d be wearing her trademark miniskirt. His theory, and his worry about marrying her, was that Jean had never really been excited about the prospect of domestic bliss, staying at home cooking and washing for him. He had ruled out having children. John thought that if there was such an animal as a clean and well-dressed hippie who hosted a commune in a self-financing and well-kept house, it would be hard to hold Jean Simpson back from it. He also felt that she was very easily swayed, so, equally he figured she could have been swept off her feet by some cult or another. He’d been reading about that quite a bit recently, he said, and if I could find out which cult had captured her, then he, with his newfound knowledge, would help me find her and he, personally, would re-programme her. All very encouraging for Jean Simpson, but he offered no such theory or offer of help for Mary.
I asked him, would he take Jean Simpson back should she turn up.
‘No way José! She’s flown the nest and the nest is no longer there for her to come back to,’ he said, without a moment’s hesitation, just like a politician trouping out one of their well-used buzz phrases, in fact.
‘But should you not wait until you find out what’s happened to her before you go making any rash decisions?’ I offered, trying to be the voice of reason when in fact all my thoughts were preoccupied with Mary.
‘No, I don’t think so, David. We were growing apart before she disappeared. Maybe she was the one who’d the confidence to do something about it.’
I started to wonder, if John had already made such a definite decision about Jean did that also mean he’d made his decision to try to win back Mary again.
Perhaps he was reading my thoughts because he said, ‘I’ve made such a mess of things with my last three girlfriends. I need to try to work out where I went wrong before I try it again with another one. It’s just that, even when you find a girl and you think you love her, hey, and maybe even you do love her, it doesn’t really matter how much you love her, or how much she loves you, because you’re still going to be alone with your thoughts. No one can ever be as tight with you as you’d like them to be. We’d all love to know someone as well as we know ourselves, but that’s just never going to happen.’
We made small talk for another twenty minutes or so and then it was time for me to head off back home.
I felt lost.
I was worried, would other people, including WPC McGinley, come to the same conclusion I had, you know, the one about every girl I had a relationship with disappearing? I mean, Jean Kerr hadn’t really disappeared, sure – she’d left town but we knew where she’d gone to.
I took little comfort in the fact that, aside from John and I, no one in our weird little group was aware that Mary had even disappeared.
Chapter Thirty-Nine.
As I opened the door to Mary’s flat I was going through all the possible answers I could give to McGinley’s inevitable question, ‘So, Mr Buchanan, can you tell me how it is that every girl you’ve been biblical with disappears?’
I was mentally preparing my argument that Jean Kerr hadn’t technically disappeared when I heard sounds from within the flat.
I threw caution to the wind and burst into the living room expecting to see, and confront, the person responsible for both Jean and Mary’s disappearance.
‘Where’ve you been to this hour of the night you old stop-out?’ Mary Skeffington said, barely paying attention to me as she c
ontinued to unpack her overnight bag.
It was all I could do to remain standing on my feet. It took me what seemed like ages to catch my breath.
‘I could ask you the same question! I rang your mother to see where you were.’
‘I know, I spoke to her when I got in; she was beside herself with worry, David; you really scared her.’
‘But I hadn’t a clue where you were! I didn’t know what else to do!’
‘Well, I rang you from Wimbledon Station when I arrived back this afternoon and you weren’t in, and I didn’t want to be by myself so I went round to a friend’s flat and… well, I found a soft seat. We were chatting away for ages before I realised what time it was. I just got in, about twenty minutes ago. What on Earth has happened to your face?’
She was most amused when I told her I’d accused John Harrison of kidnapping her. She tried not to laugh when I told her about the dream, more of a nightmare, which I’d experienced while unconscious on John Harrison’s doorstep.
‘Who was this friend?’ I asked her defensively, when that little bit of strangeness between us had vanished.
‘Oh, just a girlfriend from work. Catherine.’
Catherine, I thought, she’d never mentioned a Catherine before. But she didn’t expand further and I didn’t ask her to. I tried to find a subtle question to get into it with her but I couldn’t think of one so I let the matter drop, for then at least.
I went to bed with mixed feelings. You know, happy that she was back and safe but worried about the unanswered (and unasked) questions.
I woke up in the same state I’d woken up for the previous couple of weeks: preoccupied with the missing Jean.
Where exactly do you start in your efforts to solve a crime? In a way, I suppose it’s like being a kid in a sweet shop: What do you eat first? The main problem would always seem to be that you would spend so much of your time looking from delight to delight that you’d hardly have had a chance to select something before a parent or a grown-up would come into the shop and pull you away.
I mean, in my case it wasn’t as if I was exactly spoilt for choice with clues or anything like that. I did have a multitude of suspects but I didn’t have a clue as to where to start with them. On the couple of occasions I’d gotten somewhere with my investigation, as in with Jean Kerr and John Harrison, I’d convinced myself not only of their guilt but also as to how they’d carried out the crime. What if it was someone I didn’t even know?
This approach held a lot of water. I mean where exactly was Jean Simpson on the night John came round to my flat, expecting to surprise us in the act? Who had she actually been out with and why? Had she been with a hippie perhaps? Had she, like John suggested, already run off with said hippie to a commune in the West Country? I couldn’t really see it myself. Jean Simpson – and Jean Kerr, for that matter – hated all things dirty. They hated, with a passion, boys who smelled bad. When Jean Kerr said that I had scrubbed up well, the emphasis had been on the word ‘scrubbed’. Now hippies, while not being exactly what you would describe as dirty, certainly could be a bit musty. This probably stemmed from the fact that they would crash straight from their living room to their bedroom (usually the same space) without feeling either the need or the desire for a visit to the bathroom. Neither did they seem keen to celebrate the arrival of each brand new day with a change of clothing. No, I doubt Jean Simpson could ever have abided that.
But she had to be somewhere – she had to have been with someone. You just don’t disappear into thin air. In telly-land the suspects are always a lot more considerate; they always hang around throughout the programme to allow you to build up a healthy suspicion of them. Yes, the writer and director will throw in the odd red herring here and there and they’ll take you on at least a few trips up the proverbial garden path. But eventually the long arm of the law will always extend just far enough to nick their man or, in a few exceptional cases, their woman. Invariably at that precise moment you exclaim: ‘I knew it was him (or her)!’ and, at least on some of the occasions you won’t have been fibbing.
I wondered just how many real life murders go unsolved. Just how many murderers get away with it, you know, just because the police haven’t always managed to put two and two together? It would have to be a fair number, I assessed, if only by the amount of attention WPC McGinley and her colleague weren’t paying to this particular crime.
If I could just think of the perfect crime, a perfect crime that fitted all of Jean Simpson’s circumstances, then perhaps I could come closer to solving this mystery and avoiding all the red herrings along the way.
‘How do the police trap killers?’ I asked Mary the following evening.
We’d just enjoyed a meal I’d cooked and Mary, surprisingly, had opened a second bottle of wine.
‘With evidence,’ she replied quickly, through a very definite sigh, ‘evidence is the vital source of justice.’
‘What kind of evidence?’
‘Oh, you know, a knife with fingerprints, or a gun with fingerprints? Or a gun that leaves incriminating gunpowder stains on the hand that held it in anger? Or perhaps even containers of poison which are found under the suspect’s sink and the poison turns out to be similar to the type used to kill the victim?’
‘Yes but we haven’t found any such evidence of Jean’s disappearance,’ I offered, starting to clear away the dishes.
‘David,’ she called after me, ‘if you’re going to commit the perfect crime you want to make sure that you destroy all of the evidence.’
All was quiet for a time, apart from the sound of me running the dishes under the tap. After about thirty or forty seconds she called out again.
‘Maybe you ensure there is no telltale evidence in the first place.’
‘Sorry?’ I said, returning to the living room.
‘Well, you know, if you stab someone – well, it’s messy isn’t it? There’d be blood all over the scene and perhaps even all over the murderer. And then you’re left with the knife and you can’t burn it. You could never destroy it completely.’
‘You could throw it in a river,’ I offered.
‘The police can drag a river,’ she said.
‘But they can’t drag the sea,’ I said.
‘No… but you’d always risk the chance of someone seeing you if you threw the knife from a boat or a bridge or something similar. If you threw it in from the coast, you’d risk the current washing it back in again.’
I thought her answers and observations proved that Mary had also been playing her games of just-suppose. I decided to see just what kind of conclusions she’d reached. Perhaps I was even worried that I’d figured somewhere in her ‘most likely’ scenario.
‘So, stabbings are out then?’
‘Yes David, stabbing is out. So are guns – too noisy, too messy, and too easy to trace the sale of the gun. On top of which, it’s much too complicated to get rid of the body. So is poison. Yes, poison is also out; it can take too long and once again you have to purchase the poison somewhere.’
‘Which leaves… what?’ I quizzed further.
‘Well, think about it yourself. What would you do? How would you commit the perfect crime?’
‘I’d probably come up with some elaborate plan whereby I was somewhere else, with several convenient witnesses at the time the murder took place; you know, thereby giving myself the perfect alibi.’
‘Ah, the Agatha Christie approach?’
‘Yes, probably.’
‘But don’t you see, David? That means that the body would have to be found, and the body always carries clues,’ she replied, polishing off the remains of her wine. ‘No, surely the perfect crime has to entail neither a visible body nor a visible instrument of destruction.’
‘You mean as is the case with Jean Simpson, for instance, where most people, including the police, think that she simply ran off somewhere and that no actual crime has been committed?’
‘Well I suppose so, yes.’
‘Yeah, th
at’s all fine, Mary, but even if she had just upped and run off surely she would still, at the very least, have rung her mother?’
‘Not necessarily.’
‘Oh come on.’
‘Oh come on yourself, David!’ Mary snapped, taking our game of just-suppose into one degree of anger. ‘Sometimes people just want to go missing. Maybe they feel they’ve made an almighty mess of their lives so far, and if they’re just allowed the chance to make a clean break, you know, get away from it all, they can start all over again in hopes that next time they’ll do it better. But for that to work the break must be total, if only so that they can really make a fresh start. Say for instance Jean moved to Sydney: What would be the likelihood of her meeting up with someone who knew her?’
‘Probably totally never,’ I replied, obediently.
‘Probably totally never?’ she laughed, as she repeated my words and paused to eagerly empty her glass of wine again. ‘Don’t you mean more than a million to one chance?’
‘Yes,’ I conceded.
‘And the odds drop a little, don’t they, if say, she moved to America, a little less for Asia, a little less again for Europe. Even less again if she had moved to Scotland and further still if it was Newcastle. The odds would drop further and further, wouldn’t they, the closer she moved to London? The odds would be down to something like ten to one if she just moved to the other side of London, say somewhere like Enfield.’
‘You’re not for one moment suggesting that Jean Simpson is in Enfield, are you?’
‘No, no! We’re not talking about Jean Simpson here, David. We’re talking about the perfect crime. We’re talking about what could have happened to someone like Jean Simpson. So say our particular victim had lived in the shadow of someone like Jean Kerr for most of her life. She moves to London and then she starts to find her own legs. She agrees to marry someone like John Harrison, she messes around with someone like you, someone like you would get it together with someone like me, someone like you would desert someone like her and then someone like her and someone like John would split up. Then someone like Jean Kerr, her original and great protector and model, would do a mental loop-the-loop and look like she’s about to head off to the nearest loony bin. So it would be quite forgivable, excusable and not exactly out of character if someone like Jean Simpson literally just took off and ran away.’
