Faithful unto Death

by Caroline Graham

  Alan Hollingsworth did not reply. He was glancing at the clock, a giant sunburst of crystal rays and gilded face and figures. He looked dreadful. Hair matted, hanging in greasy hanks around his face. He hadn’t shaved for days and from the look—and smell—of him hadn’t washed either. Dark full moons of sweat saturated the underarms of his shirt. The rims of his eyelids and the corners of his mouth were encrusted with whitish yellow flakes.

  Perrot, deciding he would give six months of his pension to have the windows open, made so bold as to suggest it. At this Hollingsworth started shouting again, the gist this time being that Perrot should say what he’d come to say and get out.

  “Very well, sir,” said Constable Perrot, waving away an especially bloated bluebottle. “We’ve had one or two concerned . . . um . . .” About to say “rumours,” he decided the word sounded a bit gossipy. “Inquiries regarding the whereabouts of your wife. As I’m sure you appreciate, this visit in no way implies any accusation or suspicions on our part as to the lady’s wellbeing. But it is normal police procedure . . .”

  At this point Hollingsworth buried his head in his hands. His shoulders started to twitch, then jerk about violently. Strange, hysterical sounds came from his throat. Coarse sobs. Or they could have been guffaws. Then he threw his head back so savagely one would have thought his neck might snap. Perrot saw the face, crisscrossed with tears, but was still not sure whether the man had been laughing or crying.

  “Can I get you anything, Mr. Hollingsworth? A cup of tea perhaps?”

  “No.” The filthy, double cuffs of his shirt hung down loosely, covering the backs of his hands. He wiped his face and then his nose with one of them.

  “You’re plainly not very well, sir.”

  “I’m pissed, you stupid idiot.”

  Perversely, this insult, far from annoying Constable Perrot, produced in him a quiet confidence. To his mind the resident of this splendid property, by behaving no better than some rowdy council house layabout, had rejigged both the social and psychological balance of the encounter to his own benefit. The policeman unbuttoned the flap on the chest pocket of his shirt and produced a notebook and Biro.

  Hollingsworth picked up the nearest bottle, which was uncapped, poured a stream of liquid into a smeary tumbler and sloshed it down. The smell of his sweat became more pronounced and the degree of acridity increased. It occurred to Constable Perrot for the first time that Hollingsworth was not only despairing but possibly afraid.

  “Am I correct in understanding that Mrs. Hollingsworth is visiting her mother?” No reply. Constable Perrot repeated the question with much the same result. He waited a few moments than said, “If you refuse to help me here, sir, I’m afraid I must ask you to present yourself—”

  “I’m not going out!” Hollingsworth jumped up. He braced himself against the chair as if in readiness against a forcible removal. “I can’t leave the house!”

  “Please, calm yourself, Mr. Hollingsworth. This really is just routine procedure. Nothing to get upset about.” Even Perrot, unimaginative almost to the point of stolidity, knew that this was unlikely. The procedure may well be routine but the situation, he felt certain, would prove to be most irregular. He flipped open his notebook, clicked his pen and smiled encouragingly. “Am I right in thinking that your wife is visiting her mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “Could I have the address, please?”

  “What for?”

  “Just to satisfy ourselves as to her whereabouts, Mr. Hollingsworth.”

  “There’s no need, I assure you.”

  Constable Perrot waited, pen poised, patience on a monument. When it became plain that the proceedings would not continue until he gave a satisfactory reply, Hollingsworth suddenly leaned closer towards the policeman who had to force himself not to lean back.

  “Look, is this all confidential?”

  “Certainly, sir. Even if I decide to file a report,” he hoped Hollingsworth did not realise this was inevitable, “it would remain purely a police matter. Unless of course further circumstances dictated a different policy.”

  “My wife doesn’t have a mother. Actually, the vicar came round asking questions. He was quite persistent—you know what do-gooders are.”

  PC Perrot, who inevitably had had rather more experience with the way do-badders were, nodded agreeably.

  “I said the first thing that came into my head to get rid of him. But the truth is,” his voice cracked at this point and Perrot got the impression that he was struggling not to weep, “she’s left me.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Hollingsworth.” And he genuinely was. Colin Perrot, extremely contented with his own marital bargain—amiable, pretty wife, smashing teenage daughter and a pair of lively sons—briefly felt, by proxy, a touch of the anguish consuming the pathetic figure facing him. No wonder he was cursing and drinking and flailing around like one demented. Without realising they were doing so, the policeman’s fingers strayed to the frame of his chair seat and pressed the wood.

  “And before you ask, I don’t have an address.”

  “How long has Mrs. Hollingsworth been gone?”

  “I’m not sure.” Noticing Perrot’s look of disbelief he added, “Days and nights just seem to have run into each other. Three days, four maybe.”

  “Couldn’t you be a little more accurate, Mr. Hollingsworth?”

  “God, it’s something I’m trying to forget, man! Not dwell on.”

  “She hasn’t been in touch?”

  “No.”

  “So you have no idea of her whereabouts?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t have, would I?”

  “Did she leave a message?”

  “On my answerphone. Wiped, before you ask.”

  Very convenient, thought PC Perrot. He felt surprise at this sudden shift into cynicism and wondered what had provoked it. Perhaps the notion that, if Hollingsworth was all that desperately in love with his wife, he would have surely wished to retain the sound of her voice.

  “What was her state of mind when you last saw her?”

  “Just as usual.”

  “Do you have any idea why she chose to leave?”

  Hollingsworth shook his head. Or rather rocked it from side to side in his hands.

  “Is there another man involved? An affair?”

  “I find that hard to believe, and not just for reasons of vanity. Where would they have met? She never went anywhere except with me and the chances of secretly carrying on in a place this size are practically nil.”

  “You’re right there, sir.” It didn’t seem kind to add, as he truthfully could, that he would have been one of the first to know about it. “What did the message on your machine actually say?”

  “Simply that she was going away and not coming back.”

  “Did she go by car?”

  “No. She doesn’t drive.”

  “Would she be staying with a friend, do you think?”

  “I doubt it. She dropped them all when we got married.”

  “Mutual friends?”

  “We didn’t socialise. I worked long hours—money was terribly important to Simone. I don’t mean she was selfish or greedy, she wasn’t. But she’d had a hard time before she met me. A very hard time. Both as a child and a young woman. I sometimes felt that, however much I put in the bank, she would never feel really secure.”

  During this speech, the longest he had uttered, Hollingsworth seemed to have started to sober up. He was focusing now with a reasonable degree of accuracy on his interrogator and plainly gathering his wits. Perrot was unsure whether this would mean more intelligible information or a careful rein on the tongue. And, suspicious again, he asked himself why Hollingsworth might have any need to monitor his speech.

  “You mentioned your bank, Mr. Hollingsworth. Did your wife use the same one?”

  “No.”

  “Where was her account, please?”

  There had been a brief pause before Hollingsworth answered and when he did i
t was with an air of improvisation. “Lloyds.”

  Perrot was convinced that Hollingsworth had seized on the first name that came into his head. Yet it seemed foolish to lie about something so unsinister, not to mention easily checkable. Why not just tell the truth?

  “You’re sure about that, sir?”

  Hollingsworth was looking at the clock again, his eyes slipping and sliding over PC Perrot’s shoulder. Then, belatedly aware that he had been spoken to, “What?”

  The constable let it go. But he made a note of his impression that Hollingsworth was being deliberately evasive. PC Perrot’s reports were models of scrupulous recording, if a trifle long-winded. The comment had been made more than once at headquarters that here was another Perrot mini series, telling them more about whatever issue was in the air than any rational person would ever wish to know.

  “So, Mr. Hollingsworth, I suppose—”

  “Look, I’m not interested in your suppositions. I’ve answered your questions to the best of my ability and I have nothing else to say.” He got out of his chair in one fairly smooth movement, standing upright with comparative ease.

  Constable Perrot wondered if the man had been as drunk as he first appeared or if his apparent lack of sobriety was merely a ploy, a cover behind which he could reasonably be excused from understanding the questions put to him. But he had answered them all but the last, albeit in a somewhat dazed manner.

  Perrot started to feel a little out of his depth. Naturally, being a policeman, he had a suspicious mind but it was not usually engaged on matters of much psychological complexity. He concluded that he would get no further with Hollingsworth in his present mood and decided to call it a day. Putting away his notebook and retrieving his helmet from beneath the chair, he too rose to his feet and moved towards the door.

  “Thank you for being so cooperative, sir.”

  “Yes, yes.”

  Plainly the man couldn’t wait to get rid of him. In the hall PC Perrot, about to don his helmet, halted and, with what even the most ungifted amateur would have recognised as stagily risible urgency said, “Oh dear. Um, I wonder if I might use your toilet, sir?”

  “Oh, well. I’d rather you . . . It’s a bit of a mess.”

  “No problem, Mr. Hollingsworth.” Perrot had already set his foot on the stairs. “This way, is it?”

  “There’s one in the hall.”

  “Many thanks.” And up he went.

  The bathroom opened off the master bedroom. PC Perrot lifted the lavatory seat making quite a clatter then checked the vanity unit, medicine cabinet and the jars and bottles standing on the rim of the bath, all the while congratulating himself on this spur-of-the-moment inspiration. He coughed loudly to show he was still in there and started to run the hot tap. Then, downstairs, the phone rang and was immediately answered.

  Perrot seized his chance. Swift and silent, he stepped into the bedroom. He opened and closed drawers then checked out a large, white, fitted wardrobe decorated with gold. Then he returned to the bathroom, flushed the cistern and turned off the tap.

  Halfway down the stairs he stopped and tried to listen to Hollingsworth’s side of the telephone conversation. Unfortunately the noise from the pipes and reflooding cistern made this difficult. But, though Hollingsworth was speaking quietly, at one point the tone of his voice became quite ferocious, rising almost to a hiss.

  “What problem? For God’s sake, Blakeley. No, that won’t do! I need all of it, I told you . . .” More vocal sounds of quiet desperation followed before the receiver was laid down with unexpectedly gentle precision.

  Perrot reckoned this final gesture might have been in belated recollection that there was someone else in the house, perhaps presaging a foolish pretence that the call had never happened. He made a great deal of unnecessary noise running down the last half-dozen steps.

  “Very good of you, sir.” He spoke in a bright, newly relieved manner. “I’ll be off now then.”

  Hollingsworth was staring into space. The expression on his face was dreadful, the skin stretched drum-tight across the cheekbones, the eyeballs bulging. His lips, were drawn back in that savage grimace of anguish that, in the newspaper photographs of the victims of tragedy, seemed so cruelly to mimic radiant joy.

  PC Perrot hesitated in the hallway. He said, “Is there anything I can do?” and was relieved when there was no reply. Knowing that he should persist and that Hollingsworth was actually in quite a bad way, Perrot made an excuse to himself (the bloke really needed a doctor, not a copper) and left.

  His Open Text report, as always, left nothing out. Facts aplenty; descriptive notes in almost Proustian detail. His opinions as to the truthfulness, or not, of the interviewee. Times of arrival and departure correct to the minute. The result, Perrot felt sure, would lead to further and much more stringent questioning of Alan Hollingsworth.

  Unfortunately it was another forty-eight hours before the attention of anyone with enough authority to order such an investigation was drawn to the report, by which time the owner of Nightingales was in no condition to help anyone with their inquiries.

  The following morning at eleven o’clock Sarah Lawson came to collect her eggs. Avis Jennings, the doctor’s wife, had a cousin with a smallholding at Badger’s Drift where he kept free-range chickens and several ducks.

  Sarah had accepted an invitation to stay and have coffee which was rare, though Avis constantly asked, for she thought Sarah the most interesting person in the village by far and longed to know her better. But nearly always Sarah just paid for the eggs and with the exact money. It was as though being drawn even into the briefest of conversations over change was either a nuisance or a waste of time.

  But today, intrigued, Avis assumed, by her opening gambit, “You’ll never guess what I just saw!” Sarah was sitting, gently rocking back and forth by the stone-cold Aga, in the Jennings’ kitchen. She was wearing blue, as she nearly always did, a jerkin embroidered with peacock-coloured silks, a long, full skirt of washed-out indigo. And a necklace of cornflowers fitted together in the manner of a child’s daisy chain.

  “Easy to see what your favourite colour is,” said Avis. She wondered about quoting one of the few lines of poetry that still stuck in her mind from school. It was certainly appropriate. She cleared her throat. “ ‘I never saw a man who looked with such a wistful eye—’ ”

  “Don’t!” Sarah stopped rocking, her feet coming down hard against the stone-flagged floor. “I hate that poem.”

  “I’m . . . sorry.” Instead of being satisfied that she had finally scratched Sarah’s emotional surface, Avis felt awkward and uncouth. She was about to change the subject when Sarah spoke again.

  “There’s a painting by Van Gogh. A prison yard, mile-high walls. Almost circular, like a tower. The men trudge round and round, their heads down. Everything’s grey and wretched. But then, right at the top of the picture and so small you could almost miss it, there’s a butterfly.”

  “I think I know the one you mean,” lied Avis. “Isn’t it in the National Gallery?”

  “I’d go slowly mad if I couldn’t see the sky.”

  “Well, I shouldn’t think you’ve much to worry about.” A jolly laugh which didn’t really come off. “It’s not going to suddenly vanish. Not that there’s anything to vanish, of course,” she stumbled on. “Just emptiness, really. But . . . very, um, beautiful.”

  “Yes. One understands why people who believe in heaven think it must be up there.”

  Avis, glad to be occupied, bustled about getting the coffee. In honour of the occasion she took some beans out of the freezer. These were normally kept for Sunday morning when there was time for Dr. Jim, as everyone in the village including his wife called him, actually to savour the breakfast tipple rather than just slosh it down and run. Without quite knowing why, Avis pushed the jar of Maxwell House behind her food mixer as she got the grinder out.

  “This makes rather a noise, I’m afraid,” she screamed over the whizzing screech. She realise
d she should have spoken before switching on but the whole situation, no more than a storm in a teacup really, had got her really flustered. Not that Sarah had appeared critical. Indeed she had never been known to voice, even obliquely, an unkind word about anybody. This was not because she was not interested—quite the contrary. Sarah seemed more completely interested in whoever she was with and in their mutual surroundings than anyone Avis had ever come across. The degree and quality of her attention, once she had deigned to bestow it, was remarkable. Yet though not entirely without warmth, there was something deeply impersonal about it.

  Avis’s husband, miles from being a fanciful man, once said that spending time with Sarah was like standing in front of a mirror, one was observed with such precision and clarity. Avis thought it was more like being looked at through a camera lens.

  Pressing down the plunger of the cafetiére she now said, “Do you like milk or cream, Sarah?”

  “Milk’s fine.”

  “And sugar?”

  “No thanks.”

  Avis got down her best cups. Sarah had moved to the old wooden table underneath the window and was transferring the eggs from their grey, cardboard stacking sheets to a blue and white mottled bowl. She paused a moment, holding a speckly, pale tan one in the palm of her hand. There was a small feather still sticking to it and the darker brown freckles were rough against her skin.

  “Aren’t they the most beautiful things?” She balanced the final egg carefully on top of the rest. “I love looking at them. Why anyone ever puts them in a fridge is beyond me.”

  “Absolutely,” agreed Avis, vowing silently that from that moment on she never would.

  “Apart from anything else, they get so cold the shells crack when you boil them.”

  “Is that right?” Avis poured the coffee. It was only Sainsbury’s basic but it had a lovely oily sheen and smelt divine. “Would you like anything with it? A biscuit or some cake?”

  Sarah said “No thanks” again and half smiled. She didn’t rush to elaborate on or explain her brief refusal as most people of Avis’s acquaintance would have done. Nor, which was much more surprising, did she ask what the unguessable exciting thing was that Avis had seen just before her own arrival. Avis found this most impressive. She admired Sarah’s control enormously while at the same time, to a more modest degree, admiring her own, for she was dying for a slice of tipsy cake. Momentarily she wondered if Sarah might not be restraining her curiosity but was genuinely uninterested. Surely this could not be true. She probably wanted to appear a cut above ordinary human nosiness. Understandable.