Pleasure and a Calling

by Phil Hogan

  She was an error in the same class as Zoe – or, for that matter, Marrineau: the flaw in face-to-face relations that demeans the mystery, reveals beauty as a sham. It is like a work of art. You walk towards it until all you can see is the paint. And when you back off again, what you had is gone for ever. Nothing is the same. You know too much. And now I knew Abigail too much. I felt the pain of loss, but what would happen when the pain subsided? Did knowing all this change anything? Or would I forget in time, lower my guard, and repeat the mistake again and again?

  Lasting love was not here in one place, but everywhere. The intimacy of serial love – that was the key, not this shallow simulation, this spastic avatar of feeling. Just look at this, I thought, picturing the town spread out before me, every house a box of treasure. The town was a whole family of love. To focus, as I had foolishly done with Abigail, was to lose focus. One moved on, up the stony path, round the bend, along a fresh, thrilling precipice.

  I increased my step, fuelled by the notion. I thought of the Finches, the first household I had visited with my notebook and camera all those years ago. I wondered how they were doing. They had moved from Holland Road to The Maples. Perhaps I would look them up. Their son, who had been at the grammar school, would be grown up now, perhaps with his own young family. Where was he? I could find out. I could find out now if I wanted to. I could find out about anyone, old or new.

  I crossed the little bridge, walking quickly. A funfair had begun to set up on the Common, charging the air with diesel fumes and the hum of generators. The tennis courts, glimpsed between the trees and bushes, were empty. A man was sitting on a bench near the cenotaph, legs crossed, eating a sandwich. A seagull – presumably lost on some migration – stood watching him from a fence pole, folding and unfolding wings, as if uncertain whether to take off. Stay, I thought, you’ll love it here. If seagulls had brains, I would say what I want to say every time I sell a house: you’ve come to the right place. I still believed that.

  I reached the edge of the Common and walked up the hill to my flat. My car sat in the courtyard. Approaching the door, I put my hand in my pocket and took out a key. But the key in my hand, with its fibrous twist of brown string and crumpled manila tag, was Abigail’s. Had I, could I have – distracted by my thoughts – stupidly posted my own key through her letterbox? But wait, no … I had locked her door. I searched my pockets quickly, and here it was, my key. And now I froze on the spot. I had locked her door with the key she had given Sharp. It was his key – the key I had found in his wallet, the key I had now used myself on numerous occasions – that was now lying on her doormat. The key, with its little red heart-shaped charm, that Abigail had given to her dead lover.

  My blood was suddenly thumping so loudly, my mind so noisy with confusion, I didn’t hear the car pull into the courtyard as I stood facing the door, puzzling at the two keys, one in each hand, and trying to work it out. It was fine, I realized. I still had her key. It was early closing at the library, but she wouldn’t be home until ten past five. And it was now … I looked at my watch: 1.28. All I had to do was get back over there, unlock the door, and exchange this key for the other. I was an idiot but all was well. The heat and chaos of thought subsided. I exhaled audibly.

  ‘Mr Heming?’

  I turned round. Here were my two police officers, their faces impassive, the younger one squinting slightly in the sunlight. The front door was behind me now. But all I could think, in that moment, as they stood there, unreadably calm, was that they were looking right through me, through the door and through the walls, through to where my keys – my hundreds of keys – hung like links of armour, investing the room with their dim golden light.

  ‘Would you mind if we came in?’

  ‘IN?’ I ANSWERED, MOVING towards them, away from the door, away from the flat. ‘In where?’ My heart was hammering.

  ‘This is your flat?’

  ‘Of course not. It’s one of the properties we manage.’

  ‘But you were just going in?’

  ‘No, Inspector. I was just coming out. The tenant is away. I have to arrange to get a plumber in for him. I was assessing the cistern.’

  ‘Is it urgent?’ the younger man asked.

  ‘I have tied the ballcock up with a piece of string,’ I said. ‘For now.’

  ‘You’re a handyman too?’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to pop in and check,’ I said. I held Abigail’s key out to him on its loop of string, the label visible with my name on it. He didn’t move.

  The senior officer looked impatient. ‘I don’t think that will be necessary. And it’s Sergeant, sir. Detective Sergeant Monks. This is DC Roberts.’

  ‘Of course. Forgive me.’

  ‘It’s rather odd that no one at your office seemed to know where you live, Mr Heming,’ he said. ‘Don’t you keep staff records?’

  ‘Of course we do. An oversight, I imagine.’

  ‘And the electoral roll?’ DC Roberts chipped in. ‘You’re a regular man of mystery, Mr Heming.’

  ‘Not at all. They probably spelled my name with two Ms. Or perhaps you did and they didn’t. That often happens. Despite all the signs around town for everyone to see.’

  Monks blinked at Roberts, who gazed down at his notebook and pursed his lips.

  ‘But in that case,’ I said, ‘what led you here? Intuition?’

  ‘It seems we were misinformed.’

  ‘So what can I help you with?’

  ‘A few questions. Perhaps at the station?’

  ‘Now?’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, sir,’ said Monks.

  I looked at my watch. ‘Well, I am rather busy.’

  ‘If you wouldn’t mind, sir. This is a murder inquiry.’

  ‘Is it? Shall I follow in my car?’

  ‘Probably best if you just accompany us in ours, sir.’

  I had never had occasion to go to the police station, though I knew where it was, hidden away behind the shops in a sooty, squat redbrick building. Steps led up to small heavy doors and a small strip-lit anteroom with more beyond. It had the oppressive air of a basement. An officer on the desk logged my arrival without a great deal of interest and pushed a button that allowed further entry. The senior detective held the door while the younger man followed me closely (did they think I was going to make a run for it?) down a corridor with numbered rooms off to the sides, thick windows in the doors.

  ‘Will this take long?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t think so, sir,’ said Monks.

  He swung open the door to an empty room and seated me at a table. He sat down and asked for my name, age and occupation. I gave as my address the empty designer apartment overlooking the river. Now he summoned a uniformed officer, who stood behind me and said nothing. Monks himself left the room. The minutes ticked by. Clearly he was trying to get me rattled, though knowing that didn’t make me less so. Part of me feared that they would soon be busy breaking down the door of the riverside apartment in the hope of finding tweed clothing to match fibres found under the fingernails of the victim (though the tweed clothing in question had long been disposed of), or checking my toothbrush for DNA consistent with droplets of sweat or dried spittle on his clothing. Of course, they would find not so much as a stick of furniture and wonder why.

  It was twenty-five minutes before Monks returned, with DC Roberts but with no apology for the delay. He switched on a tape recorder, and said who he was, who I was, the names of Roberts and the other officer, and the date and time.

  ‘Just saves time, sir,’ he said. He had a file in front of him.

  ‘Am I a suspect? Or something?’

  ‘Would you prefer a lawyer to be present?’

  ‘No, of course not. Why should I?’

  ‘Why indeed, sir.’

  He reassured me that I wasn’t under arrest. I was free to go whenever I pleased, though I imagined that could change the second I tried to leave. I crossed my legs and tried to appear relaxed. My big worry at this poi
nt was that I could be here, helping the police with their enquiries, for hours. Whatever happened here was unlikely to be worse than Abigail arriving home to find Sharp’s copy of her key, knowing that it was I who had left it there.

  For obvious reasons Abigail had kept her silence about Sharp. It was why she wanted to leave town – to put this horror behind her and return to her uncomplicated life in London where she had a network of friends and colleagues. She too probably felt her involvement with me was a mistake, an attraction arising from an instinct to be comforted. Finding the key would change all that. Now the horror was on her doormat. Now she would come forward, do the right thing (the thing she probably always imagined she would do as a principled young woman interested in poetry and cycling), declare herself as the other woman, reveal Sharp’s missing matching luggage, pour cold water on the absurd theory of his having had an affair with Mrs Cookson and jab the finger of guilt at me, perhaps with a frightened, uncontrollable scream.

  ‘In your own words …’ Monks was saying, reiterating that this was simply a witness statement. We needed to go through the whole story once more – the moment I had arrived at the Sharps’ that day, the state of the house, precisely what Mrs Sharp had said, precisely what had occurred between us and so on.

  ‘Between us?’

  ‘Everything. She was in some distress. Did you try to comfort her?’

  ‘Well, yes, of course, to an extent.’

  ‘Everything,’ he said.

  I retold the story – the mess, Mrs Sharp’s bandaged hand, Sharp’s alleged infidelities, the tale of the dog, allegedly killed by Sharp. Should I mention the handkerchief I’d lent her when she was crying?

  ‘Ah yes, the dog …’

  Every now and then he interrupted to ask about, confirm, clarify or elaborate on something. DC Roberts, his notebook open, watched me, and said nothing. What was his problem? I couldn’t believe they had solid evidence of my involvement. All they knew for sure was that I was around on the day, alongside Mrs Sharp. Perhaps they thought she and I were in cahoots. That’s what the remark about comforting her was about. Obviously they were just fishing.

  By now many more details of the case had trickled out of the press and into the town. Sharp’s body had been out for a week in the open in warm weather. Rats, cats and crows had pecked and nibbled at it; foxes had carried off chunks of the poor man. (According to the Sentinel, the Cooksons had recently quarrelled with a neighbour who kept chickens over Mrs C’s habit of putting out food for foxes in the evening.) What was left of Sharp was badly decomposed. The police hadn’t been able to prove their pet theory that the body had been moved – as it would have to have been, for example, if Sharp had died in the fight at home with his wife. Perhaps they were still trying to make a case against Mrs Sharp acting alone – that she had in fact followed her husband to the Cooksons and then hit him with something hard. But there had been two different sorts of injuries: one trauma caused by some unidentified blunt impact, which may or may not have been the patio stones, the other a smack in the head with a weapon that had left a distinct impression, though no one was saying what, or even which blow had killed him. But murder in any event, they had now stated. Perhaps Sharp had stepped backwards, fallen and cracked his head on the patio and then been finished off by Mrs Sharp or persons unknown. This was what was going through the minds of the police and the townsfolk, though none of the various scenarios entirely made sense. However you put together the pieces there were always one or two that seemed to come from a different, missing puzzle.

  I reached the end of my statement. We seemed to be winding up. Unbelievably, over two hours had passed since they’d picked me up. The senior man had his hands flat on the file in front of him now, as if he might open it. ‘We’ll just need to rerun the tape, check that everything’s in order, Mr Heming. Technology and all that.’

  ‘Of course.’

  DC Roberts left the room. DS Monks asked about the business – whether I was the sole owner, how many staff I employed and so on. What was this now? Had we finished? Was this just small talk?

  ‘Actually, there are one or two other matters. When you were leaving the Sharps’ on that day, and you told Mrs Sharp you’d be back later with your sales forms, what happened?’

  ‘What do you mean “happened”?’

  ‘Where did you go?’

  ‘Probably straight to the office. It was a Saturday. Quite busy, I imagine. Probably I got caught up in something.’

  ‘OK, and that’s why you didn’t return. Not that Saturday, or Sunday, or Monday – or even Tuesday or Wednesday. Mrs Sharp said she had to call your office on Thursday. This tallies with the diary in your office – Mrs Pegg registered the call.’

  ‘Wendy, yes, she’s very efficient.’

  ‘But even then, according to Mrs Pegg’s record, someone had to attend in your place. Miss Katya Stan-ka …’

  ‘Stankaviciene, yes. Soon to be Jones,’ I added with a quick smile.

  He looked at me.

  ‘She’s engaged to a Welshman.’

  ‘So why the delay?’

  ‘Katya?’

  ‘Mrs Sharp. Don’t you need the business?’

  ‘To tell you the truth, I did wonder, given the attitude of the husband, whether the Sharps might not be more trouble than they were worth. After all, the man from Worde & Hulme was practically thrown out on to the street by Mr Sharp.’

  ‘True, although now, by this time, of course – the Thursday afterwards, almost a week later – Mr Sharp was lying dead in the garden of your other clients, Mr and Mrs Cookson.’

  ‘Tragically, yes, though I could hardly have known that.’

  Monks gazed thoughtfully at me for what must have been a good half-minute while Roberts closed his notebook and waited. Then Monks said, ‘Does the name Damato mean anything to you?’

  My heart almost stopped dead. But then I immediately realized he was talking about the company I had set up to handle my property and finances. I preferred to keep it private, but it wouldn’t have been impossible for a competent investigator to link me, and my agency, with the William R. Heming listed as the sole director of Damato Associates, which owned the riverside apartments and other properties dotted around town. This was not a disaster. If you enquired further – for example, with the tax authorities – you would find that William R. Heming paid what he owed promptly and without argument through a London accountant, who also handled financial transactions and movements of monies on his behalf. None of this was illegal, though I was aware that people who liked their privacy – or secrecy, as Zoe would say – were regarded with suspicion. For someone with an interest in not being noticed, it goes without saying that I didn’t want to be suspected.

  ‘Mr Heming?’

  ‘I won’t deny that it does.’

  ‘I’m sure this is just tittle-tattle,’ he said. ‘Someone raking up the past.’ From his file he pulled out a photocopy of a newspaper cutting and slid it across the table. ‘Ancient news from the Norwich Coroner’s Court,’ he continued.

  When I saw it, my heart started pounding again.

  It concerned an inquest into the death of Harold Buckshaw, forty-seven, an unmarried council worker. There was no picture. The headline, over one column, read ‘Tragedy of Former Parks Man’.

  ‘This is twenty-seven years ago,’ I managed to say.

  The lifeless body of Mr Buckshaw, the court heard, had been found by a dog-walker in shallow water following a wintry night. A post-mortem examination found that he had been drinking heavily. The previous August, Mr Buckshaw had been acquitted by Norfolk magistrates in connection with the abduction of two children. Witnesses said that Mr Buckshaw had been depressed when he lost his job with the parks department and was regularly seen drunk in the locality. A police witness said that Mr Buckshaw had previously reported two assaults on his person and criminal damage to a window at his council flat in Lower Eastley. On the evening before Mr Buckshaw’s body was found, two young women com
ing out of the Wherry public house saw him being assaulted by two youths. The cause of death was drowning. The coroner returned a verdict of misadventure.

  Someone had circled the reference to the abduction in red and written ‘THIS IS HEMING! Ask him about the DAMATOS!’

  ‘So what about the Damatos?’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ I said. ‘The Damatos lived opposite.’

  Monks scratched his nose. ‘The case notes tell us that your local police spoke to your father, but no action was taken.’

  ‘Well, why would it? I had nothing to do with it. And I was barely older than they were.’

  ‘You were ten. These other children were three.’

  I shrugged. ‘What can I say?’

  ‘Ah, Memory Lane,’ Monks said, opening the file again. ‘I don’t know what you would make of this letter. It appears to be from the headmaster of your old school to your mother.’

  Again, it was a photocopy.

  Dear Mrs Heming,

  Thank you for your accompanying letter of 12th July and kind donation. I do appreciate your frankness and help in this matter. A Treasure Trove indeed. Though, I trust, not Pandora’s Box! As you can imagine, I am as shocked as you are that William has intruded on the privacy and property of the other boys with such disappointing disregard for the acceptable norms of behaviour – or even risk of discovery! That it appears to have gone on for so long is of particular concern. Certainly, had you not withdrawn him from school on account of the other matter, I am afraid William would certainly have been expelled, for technically this is theft, though I appreciate the items stolen – greetings cards, letters, a ball of rubber bands, various personal gewgaws that boys will collect – are of little value in themselves. In the light of the latter observation, I think it best that we do not attempt to return these items to their rightful owners. As far as the school is concerned, we are prepared to put this episode behind us and move forward. I will return the chest, of course.