by Gary Newman
‘You recognize it?’ Aunt Hertha asked with a smile. ‘I believe your father sold it just before he died.’
‘I know – he got about three thousand quid for it – add a couple of noughts to that for its present-day value. Lord knows who lives there now, but one thing’s sure: it won’t be much good as a holiday retreat. In the old guidebooks, Capel’s always described as quaint and remote . . .’
And then the penny dropped: I could have burst out laughing.
‘Did Pidgeon ask you about this picture?’
‘Oh, yes – he asked about almost all of them.’
‘And did you tell him it had once been a family holiday home?’
‘I suppose I might – yes.’
‘Excuse me a second, Aunt Hertha – I’m just going to dash down to the car for something.’
I came back with my OS Road Atlas of Britain, and opened it at the place-names index at the back.
‘I don’t think you told Pidgeon Capel was in Kent,’ I said with a chuckle, running my finger down the column of ‘Capel’ names. ‘The first one’s in Surrey, but nearly all the rest are in Wales – I think I know which I’d pitch for if I were a foreigner in Britain, especially if my starting-off point was here in the west of England.’
Aunt Hertha chuckled as she followed my indicating finger.
‘Yes, I see – well, I hope they’ll have a welcome in the valleys for Mr Pidgeon!’
‘There’s still the other question mark he left here with you.’
‘Ah,’ my aunt replied. ‘Mr Francis . . .’
‘Yes, and that was all Pidgeon asked you on that score: whether Mr Francis had been here?’
‘Mmm . . . he just said he’d been a fellow countryman of his who might have passed this way years ago in search of your grandfather. I explained that I’d never heard of him, and that in any case I’d only been in this house a few years.’
‘Pidgeon didn’t press the subject?’
‘No – is it very important?’
‘It’s just that in all my ferretings around, it’s the first time the name’s popped up, and then only from Pidgeon. I have to get it in frame . . .’
‘What’ll be your next move, then?’
‘The real Capel – my Capel – in Kent, I think, to see if it sparks off any memories.’
‘But not today, surely – you’re looking hollow-eyed. Let me drive you into town – see the abbey – and then we can have tea somewhere. And you must stay the night – have a clear head for tomorrow . . .’
Of course, Aunt Hertha was right, and the next morning, Friday, I set off refreshed, after the sort of sleep that zonks you out after you’ve gone without for a night or two. I lunched at Reading, then slipped on to the M25 and round the loop till I could join the M20, which I left at Stanford, and so made my way to the outskirts of Lympne in Kent.
I pulled up outside the castle, and had a look round. It was the first time I was there since I’d been a boy, when a weekend with Dad’s flying chum, Bill Wallace, always rounded off the summer fortnight we used to spend in Kent. Bill had written himself off in a car accident in the Seventies, and, so far as I knew, there hadn’t been a Mrs Bill, so God knew who’d be living in his house now. Still, it wasn’t far away, and there’d be no harm in looking.
Getting back into the car, I drove slowly along the lane that led to Hythe station, past the caravan site, and there it was . . . I parked the car in a space on the tarmac of the site, got out and started to walk down the hundred yards or so to the house. It was a lot smaller than it had seemed to me as a kid, of course, but a substantial sort of pre-war bungalow nonetheless – still standing on its own in the bland turf landscape, with the conical slate roof, and the chimney straight in the middle. The pebbledash of the outside walls was stained and the green paint of the front door and twin bay window frames was blotchy and cracked. There were faded blinds at the windows, and an old Ford Granada on the concrete apron to one side of the front drive.
All in all, Bill Wallace’s former bungalow was a picture of desolation and neglect: clearly nothing had been done to the building since he’d gone. I was about to turn away and go back to the car, when I glimpsed an elderly, white-moustached face peering at me from a crack in one of the blinds. I nodded and smiled in what I hoped was a reassuring way, and would have left at that point, but then the intent expression on the old man’s face focused into unmistakable recognition, and, yes – fear.
I stood and stared back, taking in the features. The mottled bald pate of the very old, with a white fringe, big, putty-coloured ears, a long, crease-jowled face, of the same putty hue, the reddened eyes of a bulldog, and the heavy, white moustache which covered the long upper lip. I was absolutely sure I’d never laid eyes on him in my life. In this day and age, to show fear on seeing a prowling stranger outside one’s isolated house was a natural enough reaction, but the recognition in the old man’s eyes . . .
Refixing my amiable grin, I stepped up the drive to the front door, with its billowing-sailed galleon in the stained-glass window, and pressed the doorbell button briefly, but with confidence. I waited thirty seconds, then glanced up: the gap in the blind had closed. Another half-minute passed, so I rang again, my effort being greeted this time by the rattling of bolts being run home inside. I stooped, and poked the flap of the letter-box open.
‘Excuse me,’ I said through the gap, ‘but I’m looking for –’
‘You again . . .’ came the elderly quaver. ‘I’ve told you before, he doesn’t live here any more – he’s dead – brown bread – understand? And if you don’t hop it now, I’ll ring the police.’
Baffled, I stood back – the old boy was clearly upset.
‘I’m terribly sorry if I’ve bothered you,’ I said, loudly enough for my words to be heard through the door. ‘I’ll be going now – I shan’t trouble you again.’
‘And see you don’t!’ came the muffled response from behind the closed door.
I retraced my steps along the lane, with the scared old eyes boring into my back from the gap in the blind all the way down to the caravan site, where I got into my car again. I started the engine, then reversed carefully – I didn’t think the old guy in Bill Wallace’s former bungalow would have been able to read the number plate at that distance – back on to the road to Lympne and so up back to the M20 and eastwards in the direction of the A20 and Capel-le-Ferne.
What had all that been about? I thought as I bowled along in the tinstream. What had the old man meant by ‘he’d told me before’? I hadn’t been down there for donkey’s years – no, he must have been confusing me with someone else. Bill Wallace had been one of nature’s extroverts, and there must still have been droves of people who remembered him from way back, so what more natural than that, finding themselves driving past, at least some of them should stop off from time to time at his old house and ask after him? But I couldn’t dismiss so easily the recognition in the old man’s eyes when he’d seen me on his drive – you can’t blag that, any more than you can hide it.
And I felt a sort of sinking feeling when I remembered the marker nature had put on me – the eyes. To have one green and one brown must be the perquisite of very few, and what were the odds that someone else similarly marked had called before at the bungalow in search of Bill Wallace? To add to my unease, I remembered the white cliffs that had formed the termini of my past unconscious walkabouts – there were white cliffs not a million miles from where I was driving now . . .
Just then my attention was claimed by the first scatter of bungalows that formed the outriders to Capel, and I drove down the coast road that skirted East Wear Bay. Soon the familiar, squat Norman tower of the church hove into view above the ribbon of asymmetrical houses, and, yes – there it was – the house in Maud Woodruff’s old watercolour.
I slowed down to a crawl till I was almost level with the bungalow. Apart from the depressing sprawl all around, it was fairly unchanged, only the window frames were PVC now, and the door a glossy, shrieking white
in what looked like plastic. The garden, too, had been tarted up with pebbles, decking and the rest.
I was just about to pull up, when the Sold – Subject To . . . sign in the garden and the curtainless windows told their own story. Whether Pidgeon or the mysterious Mr Francis had passed that way, or whether I’d somehow zombied my way down there in some amnesic state in the past – as I’d apparently done at Bill Wallace’s old place at Lympne – there’d be nobody in to tell me. I contented myself with taking a mental note of the Folkestone agency on the signboard and drove straight on.
When I finally did get home to Essex and my lighthouse, my heart sank as I spotted, parked on the headland, the car which had previously brought DS Morris and DC Conlon into my life three days before. Morris got out of their car as I got out of mine, and ambled up to me with a relaxed smile on his careworn face.
‘Ah, Mr Rolvenden!’ he exclaimed jovially, ‘we thought we’d lost you . . .’
Chapter Twenty-Four
Once inside the lighthouse, the two officers took up their now customary places at either side of the cane sofa in the sitting room.
‘Been on a business trip?’ Morris kicked off civilly.
‘No, I’ve been on a visit to an aunt in Wiltshire, on family business. Have there been any, er . . . developments?’
‘Mrs Hague hasn’t turned up yet, if that’s what you mean, Mr Rolvenden: it’s just that there are a couple of loose ends you can help us tie up.’
‘If I can . . .’
‘Have you ever been to the Sir Colin Campbell pub or the Hatim Tai café in London?’
‘Can’t say I have, Sergeant – not by name.’
There was a short pause.
‘“Not by name . . .”’ Morris did his irritating echoing act, while his shadow took notes, in between bouts of staring intently at me.
‘What I mean,’ I began to elaborate, ‘is that I may have gone past such places – I’m in London pretty often – or even into one of them on some occasion or other, without really registering their names.’
‘That’s fair, Mr Rolvenden,’ Morris said evenly, ‘very fair, so let’s try it with some times . . .’
‘You weren’t in the vicinity of the Sir Colin Campbell on Farringdon Road,’ DC Conlon piped up, as he read from his notes, ‘at 12.26 on Monday, 14th April, sir? Or the Hatim Tai café, also on Farringdon Road, at 12.31 on the same day?’
‘Ah,’ I said. ‘With you now . . . On that day I’d been in town to see my agent, Eve Solander, and afterwards I went to look up some places marked on an old street map I’d been following up, in connection with research I’m doing for a book. I was in the Farringdon Road around the times you mention, and I may have passed by those two places, which were among a number I was checking out. I didn’t remember the names particularly, because they didn’t turn out to be of any significance to my research.’
‘Are you working on the book now?’ Morris asked.
‘Er, no . . . it’s just at the mental planning stage.’
The ghost of a smile played on the Detective Sergeant’s lips, but he let that pass.
‘And on your 14th April trip to London,’ he went on, ‘d’you recall stopping off at the Triada Health Club, also on Farringdon Road?’
So that was where I’d come across the London branch of the Colchester health club! The one whose blue-and-white van had triggered off my speculation as to where Pat Hague might have been going after Leah and I had met her in sports gear at the filling station at Old Heath on 26th April. What, though, if Pat had been making for the London one? I was beginning to see the method behind Morris’s questioning . . .
‘It was marked,’ I started to explain, ‘or rather the site was marked, on the old London street map I was following up. Again, the health club didn’t signify in my researches, and I didn’t actually go into it.’
‘You don’t happen to have this old map by you at the moment, do you, Mr Rolvenden?’
I got up, went over to the bureau, and came back with the 1871 London street plan that had come with my grandfather’s things from Jersey. I unfolded it carefully, and handed it to Morris, who took the edges gingerly in his hands.
‘Certainly looks old enough,’ he said indifferently, ‘but the pencil marks could’ve been put there yesterday . . .’
With this casually uttered, implicit slur on my veracity, the Detective Sergeant refolded the map and handed it back to me. But what he’d said was true enough: the pencilled crosses could have been put there far more recently than 1899. Perhaps I’d been too taken up by the thrill of the chase sufficiently to rate that possibility. All sorts of speculations began to open up in my mind, then Morris brought me back to the matter in hand with an abrupt change of tack.
‘You’ve not been well, I understand, Mr Rolvenden?’
My first thought ran to my doctor, but then I recalled DC Conlon’s visit to the bathroom on the detectives’ last visit here: he’d have seen my tablet bottles on the window sill there . . .
‘Bit of a breakdown,’ I explained briefly. ‘Months ago – I’m well over it now.’
‘Good to know that! I suppose it must be a funny sort of life, being a writer – I believe you’re the first one I’ve ever met – doing your head in all the time, trying to come up with new ideas, and living all on your own here – you do live on your own, Mr Rolvenden?’
‘I’m divorced.’
‘Quite so, quite so – I’m sure it all gets a bit much for you, at times.’
‘I cope, Sergeant.’
Morris clasped his hands together in front of him, then looked briefly down at his shoes, while Conlon’s little eyes bored steadfastly into me from his corner of the sofa, his notebook and pen at the ready.
‘We’ve quite a bit of data,’ Morris said. ‘I wonder if you’d like to help us by getting your account of things on paper, Mr Rolvenden.’
‘A statement, you mean?’
It was all familiar from films and the telly, but this was real . . .
‘Of course, you can have a solicitor present, if you like.’
‘There’s the one I had in Suffolk,’ I thought aloud, ‘for the divorce, but apart from him, I don’t think I know any solicitors.’
‘Up to you, of course, Mr Rolvenden,’ Morris said with a relaxed shrug.
I was tired, and just wanted to get it all over.
‘All right, then,’ I said, ‘but I can’t tell you any more than I’ve told you already.’
The statement was taken in the big station in Colchester – ‘E’ Division HQ – instead of the local nick in Wivenhoe, as I’d expected, which I took as an indication of how seriously they were taking Pat Hague’s disappearance. I had to give a detailed – and I mean detailed – account of my movements since I’d first followed up the crosses on the old London street plan on 14th April. They went over and over it all before I signed the thing and was able – on condition that I kept them informed of my whereabouts till further notice – to go out into South Street again and flop into my car.
I sat in the car for a few minutes, thinking about the figure I must have cut in the police station: that of a cracked-up, menopausal male, with a broken marriage behind him, latching on to Pat Hague as a sort of last chance. They’d no doubt have imagined it as a stormy relationship – maybe they thought that, in my obsessive jealousy, I’d been stalking her to the health club in London? As well as to the nearby ethnic café, where maybe she went after workouts? My row with Pat at the saleroom in Walberswick, too, would have tended to confirm the detectives’ suspicions about this.
As for my story about my sussing out pencilled crosses on the old street map, well, Morris’s obvious indifference on my showing him the street plan was an indication of what he’d thought about that excuse. And DC Conlon would no doubt have got his exact timings of my moochings round the Farringdon Road area on 14th April from CCTV cameras in the neighbourhood. They’d have been especially interested, too, I was sure, in my angry response to Pat’s abs
ence when I’d gone round to the boathouse on the day – the hour – of her disappearance, in response to her teasing ‘Pidgeon pie’ email. I’d rattled the door handle and banged on the shutters in my impotent rage – maybe, in the minds of the police, that was when I’d snapped and gone off and found Pat, with dire results . . .
They’d doubtless be seeing my flight to Jersey, then over to France, in the light of the above scenario; after all, it was behaviour entirely in keeping with a man who’s just done something whose consequences are too awful to face. Perhaps the detectives had pictured me, cornered and out of resources, making my way to the white cliffs of Normandy to end it all, then thinking better of it. Why shouldn’t I have then dreamt up a tale about unhappy coincidences, while researching an imaginary book – a book for which Morris now knew there weren’t even any preliminary notes – and so come back to England, wily and prepared, to face the music . . . Or something along those lines.
Perhaps it was only because they still had to find Pat, dead or alive, that I was on the loose now: wind me up, let me go, and see where I went. The outlook was far from rosy, but now, with all the day’s impressions crowding in on me, I was too confused to think straight, let alone lay sensible plans. I really must talk to Leah. In spite of my weariness, I went out to the car and drove straight over to her flat in the university grounds.
Her little kitchen smelt of fresh paint as, half an hour later, I sat there devouring a pizza and describing what had happened to me since we’d last spoken.
‘Keep away from London,’ Leah said, ‘until this is all settled. The main thing is, the police still haven’t found Pat, and it’s all circumstantial so far. Did you tell them about the old man in Lympne, and how he reacted when you came to his door?’
‘No, I didn’t – I see what you’re getting at: it’d give them a handle to suggest I was a sort of sleepwalker, not responsible for my actions. I just told them I’d visited some scenes of my boyhood – Malmesbury and Lympne.’
‘Did you tell them about the bungalow in Capel-le-Ferne?’
