A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

  There’s no car registered in her name, nor any other motor vehicle.’

  ‘The last trace, then?’

  ‘The address in Gresham Gardens. She’s still registered with a local GP there, but it’s probably by default. Just because her name’s never been transferred to another doctor’s list.’ Sarah added wistfully, ‘For a moment I thought we might have got something when the utility records for Gresham Gardens showed the occupier of the flat to be someone called Marsh. I thought it might be a name the Chetwoods had used, but this Marsh, whoever he was, had been there for some time beforehand and went on paying the bills for two years after the Chetwoods left, so I would imagine he was just the landlord, subletting.’ She poured the wine, and went on with the same air of concentration. ‘So, after drawing a blank on her, my contact tried him. James Robert Chetwood. Family home Weston Manor Farm, Coin Rogers, Gloucestershire.’

  ‘And I said Wiltshire.’

  ‘Oh, but it was easy enough to find. Chetwood’s an unusual name. It’s the Joneses and Patels that cause all the problems.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘Nothing in any of the data banks. Though he’s been off the map for longer than she has. Five years without filing a tax return. Last occupation, director of a company called Amrita.

  Fellow director, Mr Asif Ebrahim. Stated business: import, goods unspecified; You said rugs, I think?’

  ‘And other ethnic stuff. Fabrics, pots, lamps, that garden furniture - what is it? - wicker? Cane? Anything he happened to see on his travels, really.’

  ‘Well, the company’s moribund now.’

  ‘My God, he’s been bloody thorough, hasn’t he?’ Joe’s anger came out of nowhere and took him by surprise. ‘Gone and fallen off the edge of the bloody planet.’

  Ignoring this outburst, Sarah said, ‘Was his business a success?’

  Joe gave a bark of a laugh. ‘I wouldn’t have said business was Chetwood’s strong point. He put in the minimum of effort. Only ever wanted enough money to keep the wolf from the door.’

  ‘And did the company have a base? A warehouse? An office?’

  ‘Don’t think so. I always had the feeling he ran it with a mobile phone and the back of an envelope. He was allergic to paperwork, ignored it on principle. I’m surprised he got around to setting up a company at all.’

  ‘Perhaps Mr Ebrahim was the commercial half of the partnership.’

  ‘I never met Mr Ebrahim.’

  ‘But Chetwood travelled to buy the stock?’

  ‘He travelled all the time, yes.’

  ‘Did he go on his own or with her?’

  Suddenly Joe was back five years, to a summer day at the farmhouse outside Hereford. He was standing in the kitchen, watching Jenna unfold a length of Indian silk. The silk was ruby red. It fired with gold when it caught the sun. As she pulled it higher into the air, the sun caught her dress too, cutting through the flimsy cotton until she might have been standing there in naked silhouette. She was talking, but it was a while before he heard what she said. / could have stayed for months, Joe! Oh, the beauty of the place, and the people, and the crazy music, just like a treeful of birds, and the way everyone looks as though they’ve found the secret of life. Then her mischievous laugh. But I didn’t love the sanitation, Joe.

  And the stench. They haven’t found the secret of that yet!

  Which makes me a bit of a poser, doesn’t it? A bit of a fake.

  She’d laughed again, almost naked in the sunlight.

  The image was still clear in his mind as he answered Sarah.

  ‘They went to India together a few times in the early days. But then Chetwood began to go on his own. I’m not sure why.’

  ‘When you say the early days?’

  ‘I mean the first couple of years they were together.’

  ‘That’s when you still saw them?’

  ‘Not often - but yes, I still saw them. They rented this farmhouse near Hereford.’

  ‘What was it called?’

  ‘Pawsey Farm. Funny name.’

  ‘And later?’

  ‘Oh, I never saw them then. Apart from that time in Gresham Gardens.’

  ‘Well, I can tell you one thing, for what it’s worth. If she’s still living in this country, she can’t have done any travelling in the last eighteen months. She hasn’t renewed her passport, you see. It’s out of date.’

  Joe stared at her while he tried to make sense of this. ‘They can’t be abroad, then?’

  ‘I’m not sure that quite follows, does it? She could be living abroad, and unable to leave. Forced to stay put. Or perfectly happy to stay put.’

  Groaning, Joe rubbed both hands down his face. ‘Oh well.

  I never thought it was going to be easy. I sort of knew they weren’t going to turn up just like that. But thanks all the same, Sarah. And thank your man, will you, for covering so much ground in such a short time.’

  ‘Oh, it’s no skin off his nose. Makes a change from his usual suspects.’ Getting up, she went to the counter and began to unwrap the vegetables. ‘But I certainly wouldn’t give up yet, Joe. Family and friends are still your best bet, you know.

  Historically. Statistically. People usually get found because they’ve kept in contact with someone from their past.’

  ‘Jenna hasn’t kept in touch with anyone, I know she hasn’t.

  And Chetwood - well, I’d have heard.’

  Sarah turned, knife in hand. ‘Are you sure about that? It could be anyone. Childhood friend, drinking mate, business associate, favourite granny, brother, sister, travelling companion. “What about Mr Ebrahim? What about Chetwood’s family? His old friends?’

  ‘Not his family,’ Joe declared unhesitatingly. ‘No love lost there.’

  ‘But they might know of someone. You’d be surprised.’

  ‘Would I?’

  ‘It’s definitely worth a try.’

  Joe watched her chopping the carrots, working the knife like a professional, sweeping the slices expertly off the board into the wok, and felt a fresh wave of gratitude.

  Coming up behind her, he looped his arms round her waist.

  Half joking but half serious too, he said, ‘What would I do without you?’

  But, for Sarah, praise belonged to the same category as tenderness, it was definitely suspect, and she frowned disapprovingly as she reached for the potatoes.

  ‘Okay,’ Joe announced brightly, ‘if it’s a family connection you’re looking for …’ He went and fetched Alan’s birthday card.

  Wiping her hands on a towel, Sarah examined the card.

  ‘There’s no obvious reason to think it’s from her though, is there?’

  ‘Except she always signed with a happy-face just like this.

  And a single X when she was unhappy. And the postmark doesn’t seem to be local.’

  She took the envelope from him and peered at it closely.

  He asked tentatively, ‘No chance of your contact getting it unscrambled, I suppose?’

  ‘Forensic stuff is farmed out, requisitioned, accounted for.

  It’s not like running something through a computer. No, it won’t be possible, I’m afraid. No chance. Sorry.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘It’s really tod difficult,’ she said, as though he’d continued to argue the point. ‘Too many procedures.”

  Nevertheless, before they went to bed he saw her examining the envelope again, holding it up close to a table lamp and moving it this way and that. And the next morning, before she left to do her Christmas shopping, he found her wrapping the envelope in a plastic bag and putting in her handbag. She said in a curt tone, ‘There’s an expert witness we used in a benefit fraud the other day. No promises though.’ Then, as if to cover herself: ‘I still say his family’s your best bet, Joe. By a long way. Why don’t you go and ask them?’

  She made it sound straightforward, but nothing about Chetwood had ever been straightforward, certainly not what he chose to represent as his history, an ever-shift
ing mixture of fact, obfuscation and downright fantasy. Only once had Joe heard him talk about his family in any serious way, and that was barely an hour after they’d met. The conversation, like everything else about that night, was emblazoned on Joe’s memory, forever fixed by the image of a tall figure balanced on a parapet, a feather’s touch from death.

  It began with a shout.

  He was lying on his bed where he had fallen, half-undressed and drifting towards sleep. It was a Saturday night in the hall of residence, five weeks into his first term at Bristol, and for once Joe had managed to stay the manageable side of drunk.

  In every other way, though, the big night of the week had followed the usual pattern. The party had begun in the ground-floor bar soon after six with the cheapest drinks, the more the better, beer and throat-stripping Bulgarian red which left stains on your teeth and time-bombs in your head, then, following some immutable timetable, the crowd had gravitated upstairs, into the corridors and communal kitchens and rooms that boasted low lights and music systems, until every doorway seemed to disgorge smoke, illegal and otherwise, the stink of spilt beer and the murmur of prostrate bodies, glimpsed darkly through the fug.

  The shout actually sounded twice. The first time, it barely registered on Joe’s consciousness: just another drunken yell in the general din. The second time, though, it came at a roar from bang outside his door with no possibility of missing a single word.

  ‘Some stupid bastard on the roof!’

  Joe might still have ignored it if the same voice hadn’t laughed raucously, ‘For Chris’ sake, I’m telling you for real -

  there’s some guy doing a fucking balancing act on the fucking parapet.’

  Even then, Joe emerged from his soporific haze with huge reluctance. It had to be a joke. No one would laugh like that unless it was a joke. And a parapet didn’t necessarily have to be perched over gut-dropping infinity to be a real live authentic parapet, especially when described by a giggling wine-head.

  He got up before he could change his mind, rolling out of bed and pulling on some trousers and reaching for the door in one unified movement. He found the owner of the voice propped against the wall opposite and extracted some slurred directions which led him up to the next floor, to the end of a corridor where six or seven people were gathered tensely around an open window. Outside, holding on to the frame, a girl was crouching in a gutter behind a low parapet, pleading with the rooftop wanderer, somewhere out of view to the right.

  The girl came to a despondent halt and, looking back at the waiting group, shrugged helplessly. A ginger-haired guy with an angry high-pitched voice announced that he was going to phone for the emergency services and strode off self-importantly.

  The group was clustered tightly round the window. A girl backed out to let Joe in, gesturing him forward as if to hand over responsibility. Thrusting his head out of the window, Joe saw the parapet-walker just three or four yards away, clearly visible against a near-full moon, standing immobile on the ledge. He also saw the bricks sitting at intervals along the parapet, but didn’t realise their significance. Instead, he took in the stillness of the tall figure, the straight back, the hands hanging loosely but precisely at his sides, the up-tilted face and seemingly absorbed gaze, and said, ‘Good view tonight?’

  ‘Absolutely,’ came the soft unhurried reply. ‘Really remarkable.’ .

  ‘And if someone’s called the emergency services?’

  ‘Oh shit. Have they really?’

  ‘Afraid so.’

  A groan. ‘No innocent deed ever goes unpunished.’

  Even then he took his time. He Stretched both arms out very wide, palms down, fingers rigid, like someone preparing to dive, and took a long slow breath before lowering his arms and stepping backwards into the gutter.

  From somewhere far below, a ragged cheer went up, some voices shouted friendly exhortations, and the walker raised a hand in salute, like a sportsman leaving the pitch.

  Joe stood back. The knot of spectators unravelled itself to let the girl clamber in through the window, then drew back still further as Chetwood appeared and dropped lightly down onto the floor. There was a silence, a moment of almost farcical suspense, before the group realised that Chetwood’s quizzical smile was all they were going to get by way of an explanation, and then the recriminations began, a couple of jibes that rapidly ballooned into a display of collective anger. Chetwood stared at them with an air of bafflement before catching Joe’s eye and gesturing him away with a tip of his head.

  Chetwood set a fast pace until they reached the gates, when he slowed to take a backward glance over his shoulder. Following his gaze, Joe saw a home-made banner hanging from the recently occupied parapet. Druce Money is Blood Money.

  ‘Who’s Druce?’ Joe asked as they continued into the town.

  ‘What is Druce. An arms company. I wanted to hang it on the science building, but the roof’s locked.’

  ‘What’s the deal?’

  ‘The dealy He winced painfully at the word. ‘The deal is that Druce kills more people in Africa than malaria and old age put together, and the university’s colluding in a disgusting PR whitewash by letting them endow the new science block.’

  This kept Joe quiet for some time; he didn’t even know there was a new science block.

  They reached shops and brightly lit windows. ‘I thought they were going to lynch me back there,’ his new companion commented without apparent resentment.

  ‘You frightened them. They thought you were going to jump.’

  ‘Which just goes to show how wrong people can be when they think in narrow formulaic terms.’

  ‘Without better information you can’t really blame them.’

  ‘But I told them I was okay.’

  ‘Come on. Not a lot of people could do what you did without running a high risk of being very un-okay. Ending up as a nasty muddle on the ground. Especially after a few drinks.’

  His fellow walker shot him an approving look, and Joe had the feeling he had gone some way to redeeming himself for his ignorance of Druce.

  ‘A muddle. Yes, that’s good. A muddle it is. But you see, I never drink.’

  ‘They weren’t to know that though, were they?’

  ‘Well, I’ve never fallen yet. And I certainly don’t intend to start now.’

  Joe slowed. ‘You do this regularly?’

  The tall figure walked on for a couple of yards before turning and standing in the fluorescent glare of a chemist’s window, which leached all colour from his skin. With his mass of wavy dark hair, his striking eyes and strong features, his eyebrows like two brush-strokes, he might have been a still photograph in black and white. ‘Look, I stayed up there to rescue a cat, that’s all. I heard the thing crying and I thought it needed help, and when I got to it of course the bloody thing laughed in my face and hopped away over the roof. So on my way back I decided to look for a star or two. Wanted to find Altair, but no go. Too many street lights.’ He turned up one palm in a gesture of having made his case. ‘So, you see, I was a consenting adult, doing my thing in private. No need for everyone to go ballistic.’

  It wouldn’t be the last time that one of Chetwood’s explanations left Joe with the suspicion that he’d been presented with something colourful that boiled down to rather less than the truth. ‘You were playing to the crowd.’

  ‘On the contrary - I was ignoring them.’

  Feeling the need to argue against his complacency, Joe said, ‘You knew they were worried though. You could easily have come in before you did.’

  Chetwood considered this with apparent gravity. ‘You’re right,’ he said at last. ‘What a bad person I am.’

  And with that he came forward almost shyly and proffered a hand. ‘I’m Chetwood. And you’re?’

  ‘Joe McGrath. Reading law.’

  ‘Law.’ He sucked in an admiring breath. ‘How very …

  upright.’

  ‘You?’ Joe asked automatically.

  ‘Ah well, the
university and I seem to disagree on that. I—’

  He broke off as a siren whooped, coming closer. They turned to see a fire engine shoot across an intersection that led to the hall of residence.

  ‘Oops,’ Chetwood said.

  ‘We should go and tell them.’

  ‘I think not. Explanations, Joe - they never do any good.’

  The night was cold, Joe’s T-shirt was thin. He would have turned back then but Chetwood wouldn’t hear of it. ‘You saved me from the mob,’ he said. ‘The least I can do is buy you breakfast.’

  Joe wavered. For years afterwards, he would remember how close he had come to heading home and how different his life might have been if he had. As it was, Chetwood turned and walked on and began to talk to Joe as if he was right behind him, which, after striding fast to catch up, he was.

  ‘In the East, you know, they regard outer balance as a sign of inner harmony. Of equilibrium and spiritual peace … Nice if you can get it.’ With more along the same lines, delivered in a discursive style, Chetwood led the way unerringly to a steamy all-night cafe at the bottom of town, where they sat at a table patterned with cigarette burns and the milky smears of a hasty cloth, and ordered bacon and eggs.

  Sliding an elbow onto the table, propping his head low on one hand, Chetwood fixed Joe with a benign gaze and began to ask questions in a desultory way. Where did Joe came from?

  What sort of school had he been to? What family did he have?

  Out of habit or caution, Joe kept his replies short, but Chetwood weighed each at length, as if fitting them into an altogether larger picture. ‘Just a father,’ he repeated back to Joe. ‘No mother?’

  ‘No. She died.’

  ‘No sisters or brothers?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Stepmother? Second family?’

  Joe shook his head.

  Chetwood sat up a little and scrutinised Joe afresh. ‘Get on with him?’