by Jill McGown
‘I didn’t tell them anything else,’ she said, bracing herself for his reply.
The smile that had attracted her to him slowly appeared, for the first time in days. ‘Neither did I,’ he said, and Eleanor felt the anxiety slip away.
His eyes, alive again, took her in from head to toe, and back again. ‘Eleanor—’ he said, then suddenly, almost audibly, the barrier came back down. ‘I have to go,’ he said, walking to the door.
Eleanor tried not to think of the man she had met two months ago; the man who had called on Christmas Eve. The man who had fleetingly reappeared with the smile.
‘George?’ she said. ‘When did you start feeling ill?’
He turned, frowning. ‘When they arrested Marian,’ he said. ‘She has to be the mother-hen. Protecting her egg from predators. Offering herself up.’
Eleanor turned away from him. ‘Eggs are supposed to hatch out,’ she said.
She heard his footsteps coming towards her, felt his tentative hand touch her neck. As she turned, he walked away again, the front door closed, and she was on her own.
Joanna drove out of the vicarage, taking Judy Hill’s advice to check the house. There wasn’t much conviction about the action, but it was something to do, something that might, just might, make the police start looking elsewhere. There was still an hour till sunrise, so with any luck she should avoid the stares of the neighbours.
Her father’s car emerged from Castle Road. She doubted if he’d seen her, other than as another road-user. He had withdrawn into a world where other people didn’t exist. Except Eleanor Langton. Joanna had heard him leave even earlier than she had; what was so urgent that he had to visit her practically in the middle of the night? Eleanor Langton was doing her father no good, that much she did know: she had heard him during the night, walking up and down. The last time he’d had as bad an attack as this had been when he brought her home from hospital.
She drove into Stansfield, and took the right turn into the private housing estate where she and Graham had lived, remembering the first time they ever saw it. Before they were married, they had come here, looking for a house. What were now neat if yet to be established gardens had been a sea of mud and builders’ rubble, the houses approachable only by planks laid precariously on bricks.
The show house had been one of the expensive ones, beyond their range. So she and Graham had gone to look round one of the others, and she had got whistles from the workmen as she had picked her way up to the front door, still without the steps it needed. Graham had lifted her up, like a child. He had been excited about the house; it was just an ordinary house – one of the bedrooms was barely larger than the larder at the vicarage. ‘But it’ll be ours,’ he’d said.
They had got into trouble from the site foreman, who had shouted at them about its being private property, and his responsibility if they got hurt. If they wanted somewhere to do their courting, they could find somewhere a lot bloody safer than a building site.
They had bought the house a couple of doors away from that one. Joanna pulled up outside, her heart beating fast. It was almost as though he would be there when she went in, in a mood, as he always was when she’d been home.
Home. That was what had caused one of Graham’s rages; when she had called the vicarage home. Was that this time? She couldn’t remember clearly. Only the chimes, and Graham’s face. What had triggered the violence was lost.
But he wasn’t here, not now, not any more. There was no need for apprehension. It was an empty house, that was all.
She walked into the house, through the sitting room to the kitchen, feeling like a visitor, like someone who had come to feed the cat. It was unbelievably untidy, with every surface covered in either dust or whatever Graham happened to have put down and never picked up again. The ironing board was up, with the iron still on it. At least it was unplugged. Graham had been used to having someone who washed dishes and dusted and hoovered carpets for him, especially since the firm she had worked for had done a moonlight, leaving the gates locked and thousands of pounds of bad debts. She hadn’t been there long enough to get any recompense, and Graham hadn’t wanted her to apply for unemployment benefit. So she’d had no money, and the mortgage meant that there wasn’t much left over from Graham’s salary. Her mother had given her a fiver now and then, but after the first time, Joanna had made sure that Graham didn’t find out.
The kitchen was worse than the sitting room. There were dirty dishes in the sink, and she wished she hadn’t come. There were too many memories, too much grease clinging to the cooker, too many coffee mug rings on the formica, too much pain.
Through the archway, over which hung the painting that Graham had bought from a street-artist in Paris on the first day of their honeymoon weekend, to the stairs – and they hadn’t seen a brush for weeks. He had been brought up to think that men didn’t do that sort of thing, even if they had no alternative. The alternative was to carry on exactly as though someone was going to come along behind and make it all neat and clean again.
The bed was made – even Graham knew how to pull a duvet straight. He had changed the bedding at least once, she thought. It was the blue set, and it had been the pale yellow ones. She remembered everything about their last night in this house, except what had caused it all, just like at the vicarage. It was easier to remember the externals; the chiming clock, the yellow duvet.
She remembered the ambulance men; she remembered Graham saying that she’d fallen downstairs. She had gone along with it, though it was clear that no one at the hospital believed it. Her father thought it was because she was afraid to do anything else, but it wasn’t.
She sat on the bed, and looked round the room. Her slippers, which Graham had failed to pack in his remorseful co-operation with her mother, still lay where she had kicked them off that morning.
No, she had gone along with Graham’s story for a dozen different reasons. It was easier than admitting to strangers what had really happened. It was unthinkable to go to the police, to go through a court case. And besides, it hadn’t all been like that. They’d had fun. Often. They’d had fun buying the house, doing it up, furnishing it. The mortgage payments had got difficult once she had lost her job, but they’d managed. The garden had been hard work, because neither of them knew the first thing about it, and she had been wise enough by then not to seek advice from her father. But even it had been fun, and they’d done it in the end. They had a lawn, and flowers. Graham even had vegetables at the back. She stood and looked out of the window, but the snow covered everything.
Beneath the surface, there had been tension. She’d put it down to having to get used to one another. They were from different backgrounds; they had different opinions about how things should be. But everyone had to compromise, she had told herself, when they had had the odd argument, the occasional two-day huff. That had resolved nothing; she could see that now. And so the tension had gone on building, until at last it erupted into violence, and tears, and vows never to do it again. And forgiveness. But he had done it again, and again, until her parents couldn’t fail to notice. Their consequent concern had made matters worse; her mother had taken to calling unannounced, and Joanna had started going to see her more and more often to render such spot-checks unnecessary. It was as though everything had been planned, arranged, leading up to that night.
The externals. Like a silent movie. Pulling up outside, like today, after a visit to her mother. Graham, cold-shouldering her when she went in, picking up his evening paper and going upstairs with it. Following him up after a while, to see if she could get him out of his mood. She couldn’t remember what she had said, but she remembered that Graham hadn’t been listening, and that had upset her.
She frowned. A flash of memory, like a dream. She could see Graham, handing the paper to her, asking if she’d read something.
‘Yes,’ she had said, annoyed by the interruption. ‘I saw the paper at home.’
The little silence. She had dropped the paper on
to the bed.
She remembered trying to get to her feet, grabbing at the bed, but all she had got hold of was the yellow duvet which slid down, taking the paper with it. She could see the paper, as it was kicked under the bed in the struggle. Slow motion action replay.
Then her mind went blank, shutting out the memory, until the moment that she had realised it had stopped, and she could get away from him. She had made it downstairs, then had collapsed at the foot, unwittingly offering Graham his explanation of her injuries. She remembered hearing his voice on the phone. Then the ambulance men, and the hospital. Her mother and father. No Graham. She had asked the doctor to check, just in case. Being told that the baby was all right was the confirmation of what had merely been a possibility, unsought and unmentioned.
The bedroom was covered in Graham’s cast off clothes. The laundry basket was full, as though he’d thought she might come along and do his washing. He’d piled more things on top of it. His wardrobe only had some empty hangers in it; his drawer was stuffed full of unironed shirts. Two dry-cleaning bags lay on the floor, and underneath one she could see the corner of the paper, still under the bed.
She reached down and pulled it out, still open at the page he had wanted her to read. One side was advertisements for used cars, but that wasn’t likely, because they had just bought hers when Graham got a backdated increase. News items on the other side. She glanced at them. It was probably just something that had caught his eye. A funny misprint, or a bit of local bureaucracy gone mad.
She read the headings, COUNCIL VETOES SUNDAY OPENING; ASBESTOS SCARE – NO RISK, SAYS FIRM; NEW MOVES IN BUS DISPUTE; PENSIONER ROBBED.
Then, along the bottom, the one that made her eyes grow wide, and her face grow hot. It had to be it. It had to be. It couldn’t be a coincidence.
Morning. Judy’s eyes half-opened, then closed again, despite the angry buzzing by her left ear. After a moment, she sat up, and cancelled the alarm. At first, she wasn’t really aware of Michael’s non-presence; she had spent half of her married life waking up alone. Then she realised, and remembered. Michael had gone to Edinburgh.
He’d be there by now, she thought sleepily, looking at the clock. And his parents, thank the Lord, would be sleeping soundly in Nottingham.
She had arrived home to find Michael packing; for a moment, she had thought it was instant retribution. And when she had been told that Ian had come down with flu, and that Michael was going to have to go to Edinburgh in his place, her mistaken impression had struck her as irresistibly funny. She had had to feign a sudden need to race upstairs to the bathroom, where she had pulled the chain and turned on the bath taps, muffling the laughter, nervous, painful laughter, in a bath towel.
Mrs Hill had been discreetly anxious to know if everything was all right; she was doubtless irritated that another month of the limited time at Judy’s disposal had apparently slipped away. And she informed Judy that Michael’s train stopped at Nottingham, so she and Mr Hill had decided to go up with him, instead of waiting the extra day, since Judy was so busy. He would be glad of the company.
She had driven them all to the station, Michael being unhappy about leaving his car there at this time of the year. They had all remarked on the lack of heat in the car; they hadn’t been driving all over Stansfield in it half the night.
Michael had told her that he would be returning on the overnight train arriving in Stansfield at seven thirty-two on Wednesday morning. Judy had said she would meet it, and had queried the wisdom of travelling overnight to a meeting and overnight back again without a break. He had said that nothing would induce him to be in Scotland once Hogmanay had started. Somehow, she thought, that summed up the differences between them.
And the difference between him and Lloyd, she thought, her heart heavy. Once again, what should have been good had turned sour; once again, it had been her fault. She sighed, and was preparing herself to crawl out from under the warm duvet to begin another day, when the phone rang.
Lloyd? She picked it up almost timidly.
‘Sergeant Hill?’
Not Lloyd. Constable Sandwell’s voice.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Good morning, Bob.’
‘Morning, Sergeant. I’m sorry to ring so early, but I’ve got Mrs Elstow here, very anxious to see you. I said you weren’t due in until nine, but she said she’d wait.’
Judy took that in. ‘And you think I should come in now?’ she asked.
‘Well. It’s just that she seems to think that she’s found something that will help you with the case, and I thought she might change her mind if she had to wait. You know what they’re like.’
‘They’ covered anyone who wasn’t a police officer, in Sandwell’s book. He had been seconded to CID, and was proving useful.
‘She won’t tell me,’ he said. ‘Or anyone else.’
‘Right,’ said Judy. ‘I’m on my way.’
In under fifteen minutes, surpassing even her Christmas morning sprint, Judy was out in the bitter weather, persuading her car to start. Once it obliged, she got out, and cursed the ice as she scraped it off the windows, realising as she took this exercise that she hadn’t eaten since lunch time the previous day, and that she was ravenous.
Back into the ice-box, in which she seemed to be spending her entire life, and off on the twenty-minute journey, which she had made, one way or the other, six times in the last twelve hours.
Something kept teasing her mind; something she couldn’t catch hold of; at first, she dismissed it, thinking that it must be a fragment of a dream. But it wasn’t. It had something to do with the murder. Something Lloyd had said, but she was certain that she hadn’t written it down, which was odd, because she wrote up her notebook every night, and she wrote everything down. People laughed at her notes, but Lloyd knew why she took them. She had a dreadful memory. It probably wasn’t important. And if it had been something about the murder, she’d have jotted it down somewhere. Maybe just a word, or a question mark against a previous note. She would look through her notes as soon as she got time.
Joanna Elstow jumped up as she walked in, and Judy smiled at her, grateful to her for delaying the moment when she would see Lloyd.
‘Good morning, Joanna,’ she said, sounding a little like a head-mistress greeting a pupil. ‘Is there an interview room free?’ she asked Sandwell.
‘You can take your pick, Sergeant,’ he said.
‘Good.’ She led the way, and went into the first one, closing the door. ‘Take a seat,’ she said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I’ve been to the house,’ Joanna said.
‘Oh?’ Judy reached into her bag for her notebook. ‘Were there signs of someone else having been there?’
‘No,’ said Joanna, with a reluctant little smile. ‘Or if there was, she must have been as untidy as Graham. And if she was as untidy as Graham, there would have been signs.’
Judy smiled at the logic. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘It was always unlikely.’
Joanna nodded, and pushed a newspaper across the table to her. ‘But I found this,’ she said. ‘Graham asked me to read it.’
Judy frowned. ‘When?’ she asked, thinking for a moment that Joanna had been communing with the spirit world.
‘The day . . .’ Joanna faltered a little. ‘The last day I was there,’ she said. ‘The day I went to hospital.’ She leant over. ‘Look,’ she said, pointing to a news report.
COMA MAN DIES, read the headline, and Judy’s eyes widened as she read the report.
‘He must have known him,’ Joanna said.
Judy agreed that it was unlikely to be a coincidence. ‘Though they do happen,’ she warned Joanna.
Joanna smiled. ‘I know,’ she said.
Judy felt foolish then. She always found herself speaking to Joanna as if she were a child instead of a married woman. A widow, she reminded herself. About to become a mother. But a child. A child of the Byford vicarage; a protected, cushioned child who had become the victim of savagery.
Al
ong the corridor, into reception, through the CID room. Keep walking. Don’t stop to talk. Get it over with.
‘Hello,’ said Lloyd.
‘I’ve got Joanna Elstow here,’ she said.
Even if they hadn’t been at work, with the possibility of someone barging in, there was very little she could say. Perhaps they had said it all last night.
George didn’t like guns. He fumbled with the cartridges; it was cold in the study, but he hadn’t put on the electric fire.
He thought of Eleanor, and closed his eyes. Standing there in front of him, hands in pockets, barefooted in her jeans and sweater, her hair swept up in a careless knot on top of her head. Young, and beautiful, and free. Free as a bird.
He was awkward with the shotgun; it had been a long time since he’d shot anything. Marian did clay pigeon shooting at the castle, when they held competitions, in the summer. She’d once won a bottle of whisky.
His fingers were stiff; he flexed his hand, and laid the gun down on the desk as he stood up. Marian’s prize had reminded him that there was some brandy somewhere. A drink might relax him. Give him Dutch courage, at any rate. He pulled open the cupboard door, and revealed the bottle, with a tot left in it. No glass. He didn’t want to go out to the kitchen; he swigged the brandy from the bottle, surprised by the amount, by the suddenness of it on his throat. Pushing the stopper back, he stood for a moment with the empty bottle, remembering its origins.
Joanna and Graham had brought it with them when they’d come over for the silver wedding celebrations. Fourteen months ago. It was just after that evening that Joanna had sported a bruise for the first time, and told them some story to account for it. George threw the bottle into the empty grate behind the electric fire, but it didn’t break, didn’t even make much of a noise.
‘When did you start feeling ill?’ Eleanor’s question echoed in his mind. When they arrested Marian. Because Marian was offering herself up; guarding, protecting, defending her nest. It couldn’t go on. It mustn’t go on. He stared at the gun, then hoisted it to his shoulder, as if following a bird in flight.
