A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

  ‘A teacher?’ For an instant her expression lifted with surprise and pleasure. ‘Yes … he’ll make a good teacher.’

  ‘He’s keen to get it tied up as quickly as possible.’

  ‘To get what… ?’

  ‘The sale of the house.’

  ‘Ah.’

  ‘If you agree.’

  ‘Yes, yes,’ she said uncertainly. ‘Of course.’

  ‘The easiest thing would be a power of attorney. I could get something drawn up in the morning and drop it over at lunchtime.’

  Her pace faltered again.

  ‘We could meet in town if you’d prefer.’

  Suddenly she seemed to realise what she’d been drawn into.

  She stopped and looked around, as if for escape. ‘Can’t you do it for me? Sign this thing?’

  ‘Not possible, I’m afraid. But there’s nothing after this.

  You don’t have sign anything else.’

  They walked on.

  ‘Shall I come here, then?’

  She shook her head, so he suggested the Royal Oak at twelve. He repeated it to be sure, and this time she gave a small nod.

  Twice, her breath emerged in a plume as if she were about to speak, and twice she stayed silent.

  ‘And what about lunch afterwards?’

  She glanced up at him as if he were mad.

  ‘Nothing elaborate.’

  Her eyes hunted across the ground. ‘If you like.’

  ‘I’d like it very much.’

  They rounded a corner and the cottage appeared as a smudge beyond the curtain of snow. Remembering the chill kitchen, Joe’s anger pricked at him again. ‘How can you live in a place like this, Jenna? How can you stand it?’

  ‘Oh, but I like it here, Joe.’

  ‘But to have no heating?’

  ‘We light fires.’

  ‘And the damp. The mildew. The lino.’

  ‘We’ve been happy here,’ she said firmly, and there was a ring in her voice that warned him against discussion.

  The path narrowed and slipping her arm free of his she went on ahead.

  ‘Did I see you in London one day?’ Joe asked. ‘In Oxford Street, in the rain?’

  Her head turned a little, but she kept walking.

  ‘Did I frighten you? You probably thought it was some lunatic.’

  ‘No, I…’ Silence.

  ‘But you were there?’

  ‘I’ve only been to London once …’ She stopped and swung around impatiently, as if she had no more time for pretence. ‘I did see you,’ she confessed. ‘But I couldn’t believe it was you.

  I… ran away.’

  ‘I don’t blame you.’

  ‘I couldn’t face you, I’m afraid. I couldn’t face anything then.’

  She walked on and they didn’t speak again till they reached the cottage.

  ‘You sang the Messiah,’ he asked kindly.

  For the first time, she smiled faintly. ‘At a friend’s house.

  Four of us. Just a couple of the quieter choruses. It was lovely.

  But your advertisement, Joe …’ She shook her head, not at all displeased.

  ‘You saw it all right?’

  ‘One of my friends saw it.’

  She walked down to the car with him. As they came within sight of the front of the cottage she glanced towards the windows a couple of times, nervously it seemed to Joe, and he wondered if Chetwood was back, though there was no sign of another car and no smoke from the chimneys.

  In the end he asked her straight out: ‘Is he back?’

  ‘No. But any minute.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be easier if I just waited?’

  She shook her head adamantly.

  ‘What about my car tracks?’ he said, more to point out the absurdity of the situation than to alarm her.

  ‘I’ll say it was our neighbour.’

  ‘But what would it matter, Jenna? I only saw Chetwood yesterday.’

  She turned to face him, wide-eyed. ‘Because he’ll know that I told you about Sam. He’ll know straight away. And he’ll be very angry.’

  ‘So what?’

  ‘I couldn’t do that to him, Joe. Not after all he’s done for me. He’s been so good to me. You can’t imagine.’

  ‘He looks after you, Jen? He’s kind to you?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ she said unhesitatingly.

  When he bent to kiss her, her cheek was like ice.

  He smiled, ‘Tomorrow at twelve then?’

  She took a step backwards and immediately the drifting snow seemed to put an impossible distance between them.

  They found him a small overheated room at the back of the Royal Oak - he was lucky to get anything this close to Christmas, the manager informed him crisply - and he slept badly to dreams of snow and darkness, and to the clatter of food deliveries well before dawn.

  After a cooked breakfast that sat uneasily on his stomach, he called Anna and told her to report him off sick. ‘Shall I say you’ve got a bad case of flu, Joe? Because so far as Harry’s Christmas spirit is concerned, it might as well be Easter. We think he’s had his wife’s credit card bill.’ They settled on a bad cold. ‘Happy Christmas, Joe.’

  He remembered with a sinking heart that it was Christmas Day tomorrow and he had nothing to give his father, and no food.

  It had stopped snowing in the night, the wind had dropped, and a high mackerel haze covered the sky. He found a solicitors’

  firm by the simple expedient of walking the town till he saw a brass plate. The firm had two partners and, it seemed, plenty of business to wrap up before the Christmas break starting at one o’clock. It was almost an hour before he emerged with a power of attorney, correctly spelt - the secretary had typed Marcus with a k first time round - and the assurance that the office wouldn’t shut a second before one o’clock if he needed someone to witness the signature.

  In the hall of the Royal Oak, people spoke in festive voices, loud and forced. Some joked about the snow - if a white Christmas came with the booking, they’d certainly be coming again next year - some complained excitedly about the dangerous driving conditions, some laughed hugely for no apparent reason; and their voices seemed to grow more raucous as the morning went on, though Joe knew it was only the effect of waiting.

  He left it till two before making a move.

  The gritting lorries had been out as far as the forked valleys, but the road turned white as he crossed the bridge into the small middle valley. Driving low alongside the dancing river, Joe twice felt the wheel go dead in his hands and the back wheels slip.

  The angled turn-off to the Arcadian valley looked disturbingly steep under three inches of snow. He saw a sign he hadn’t seen yesterday which read ‘Nant Garth’. Performing his U-turn twenty yards up the road, he took a run at the lane and made it to the first corner before the wheels spun uselessly. Trickling back down the hill, he tried again and didn’t even make it to the first corner.

  He reckoned half an hour on foot, but quickly amended this to an hour because of his shoes and the drifts coming off the fields. There were recent vehicle tracks along the valley road, some of them tractor-sized, others car-width but with deep treads. One of the cottages had smoke coming out of the chimney and a four-wheel drive outside, but he pressed on.

  He reached the woods at last and saw fresh car tracks running on ahead of him. Coming to the left turn, the car tracks branched off towards the cottage and one moment it seemed to him the tracks were leaving, the next coming, and only logic told him it was impossible to tell the difference.

  He climbed on, and in the unobscured light saw the clearing long before he reached it. Through the last of the trees, balanced on the brilliance of the white slope, the cottage appeared solid and empty. No smoke, and no Volvo.

  He paused and heard a silence that was muffled and unresonant. Nearing the cottage, he saw that curtains had been drawn across the lower windows, and when he went round to the back the kitchen door was locked. The snow in the yard was
heavily trampled and scored with tracks - human, car, pony, dog - but it wasn’t till he went to the door of the stable and saw the padlock that he faced the possibility they had gone for good. The path leading up into the woods had seen at least one human and one dog since the snow stopped falling, but no pony. He looked for a gap in the curtains at the front and, through a minute crack at the left-hand window, thought he saw bare floorboards where packing cases had been.

  Back in the valley he trudged up the track to the cottage.

  with the smoking chimney. The woman who came to the door was fortyish with a shock of prematurely white hair in a, utilitarian bob and a pleasant scrubbed face. She was wearing an apron and brought with her the smell of baking. With her quiet voice and ready smile, she might have come straight out of one of those amber-hued advertisements for Mr Kipling’s Cakes.

  ‘All I know,’ she said, ‘is that they’re called Evans.’

  When he laughed from sheer disbelief, she laughed with him, a little uncertainly. ‘Oh, you mean, as opposed to Jones!* ‘

  she cried, delighted to have got the joke.

  They were standing on the front step in the cold, but she didn’t seem to mind. She was quite happy to talk.

  That was all she knew about the two of them, she said; their name. ‘They always kept themselves to themselves. Polite, oh very much so, but not people to socialise. Not at all.’ She couldn’t remember exactly how long they’d been up the hill. A year? Maybe a little more. Oh yes, they were renting the place, that was definite, because, you see, it had been her mother-in-law’s home until she passed away two years ago. God bless her, and now it had come to her husband. But the letting itself, that was done through an agent in Builth Wells, who took up the references and collected the rent. She couldn’t tell Joe any more than that.

  Then she hesitated. ‘Strange you should come asking today, though, because I think we might have seen the last of them. It must have been midday I saw them leaving. I noticed especially because they looked loaded up, like. Both cars they had, and the estate car sitting very low, like it was full to the brim. Oh,’

  she added, ‘and the horsebox hitched on behind.’

  He left his phone number and asked if she’d be good enough to tell him if his friends came back.

  ‘Delighted,’ she said. ‘To be quite honest, we were surprised they stayed this long. We thought they’d be gone once winter came. It’s prone to damp, that cottage. Always has been.’

  She waved him off as though it had been a real pleasure to see him. So far up the valley, he supposed she didn’t get many.

  Chapter Eight

  It was two months before Joe and Alan achieved their long-promised walk. Christmas had been too busy and perhaps too troubled, though neither of them would have admitted to that.

  Then Alan had weekend duties he couldn’t avoid, and Joe had to fly to Hong Kong on business. Finally, after some confusion over dates - Alan had it down for the wrong week - they were set for the last Sunday in February.

  Joe spent the Saturday with his father, food shopping, unclogging gutters, sweeping a couple of floors. The employment agency had provided a cleaner who had thus far fulfilled the main requirement of the job, which was not to walk out, and if she left more dust than she picked up she was still a long, long way short of dismissal.

  It was Joe’s first visit since Christmas, and the sprigs of holly which he’d brought in from the garden and stuck in a mug on the dining table had dried to paper. Christmas lunch had been just as scrappy, the product of Joe’s trawl through a smugly empty-shelved supermarket late on Christmas Eve: a battery chicken which bled its weight in water, some frozen vegetables with no taste, packet gravy, and roast potatoes which refused to crisp. They finished the meal with stewed apple and custard out of the store cupboard. But if Joe had failed on the food he made up for it on the wine, with a fine Burgundy and some vintage port. Whether it was the wine or the remembrance of Christmases past, but his father didn’t rush back to his computer after the meal. Instead they talked, or rather his father reminisced about the old days and Joe jogged his memory now and again. At one point, talking of Joe’s mother, the old man’s eyes sparkled with tears, he pulled out a handkerchief and lifted his spectacles to dab furiously at his eyes. ‘She was an extraordinary woman,’ he breathed in an unsteady voice. ‘There’s not a day I don’t miss her. Not a day I don’t remember the last time I saw her alive and well. Smiling as they wheeled her away.’

  After two glasses of port the old man fell asleep in front of the television. When Joe brought tea and cake a couple of hours later, he had woken in an altogether more acerbic mood.

  ‘Not off to the Laskeys yet?’ he asked with a pointed look at the clock. Joe said he’d be going over later if that was all right.

  Then, to mollify the old man, but also from a need to talk it through with someone, Joe told him about the search for Jenna, and how, once found, he had succeeded in losing her again. He mentioned the drowning accident and Jenna’s anguish. But not killing or confessions. Like a secret accomplice, he held those words guiltily to his heart.

  The old man listened with his usual air of touchy disdain, scoffing under his breath, lifting his eyebrows in a show of weary amazement; none of which quite succeeded in hiding his considerable interest. He demanded details, protested at Joe’s sloppy reporting, pounced on inconsistencies and batted them straight back for clarification. Repetitions were treated to an impatient wave. ‘Yes, yes - you said that.’ Joe felt as if he were in court.

  The observations, when they came, were delivered crisply.

  He’d never heard of a development down by the builder’s merchant. The houses around there were still in private ownership, people were doing them up, spending money on them.

  And worth far more than forty thousand, he thought. In fact, closer to sixty, he was willing to bet on it. ‘No, someone’s having you on, Joe. You and the Laskeys.’ His tone, which bordered on the sympathetic, suggested this wouldn’t be difficult.

  As for Wales, well, it was an obvious spot to hide, wasn’t it? Dark, damp and all those valleys. In the next breath, he proclaimed the inoffensiveness of damp, that there was nothing wrong with it in the kitchen, it was in the nature of kitchens to be damp, certainly nobody ever died of damp, not in a kitchen, and it was ridiculous to talk about it in the same breath as bodily neglect (not in fact the term Joe had used). Inconvenient it might be, but not neglectful. ‘Only children and plants suffer from neglect,’ he declared. As for the pony being moved, this was no indication that the Chetwoods had left the place for good. Welsh ponies were bred to live on the hills all year round, surely Joe knew that. The Chetwoods might simply have been transporting the animal to a winter pasture. As for the heavily loaded car, there was only the neighbour’s word for that, and how long was the neighbour’s drive? A hundred yards. The snow thick? Quite. No, this talk of doing a moonlight flit was a bit overdramatic - one of the old man’s favourite rebukes. No, they’d just wanted to escape for the day so as to avoid Joe. They’d probably got back that very evening. ‘And this false name,’ he sneered. ‘Evans, indeed. Obviously, he owes money. I always said he’d turn out to be a scoundrel.

  What else could it be? You say Jenna couldn’t offer a reason for all this hiding up valleys?’

  Joe framed his evasion carefully. ‘She said she wanted a quiet life.’

  ‘There you are - he owes money.’

  Finally, the handing down of the judgement, delivered in a brisk professional tone. ‘Well, I don’t know what you mean by the search going wrong. You found her. You saw her. She didn’t want to have anything to do with the outside world. I’d say the case was closed. Nothing more to be done. Nothing more to be said.’

  This speech certainly seemed to close the subject for the old man. He didn’t mention it again over Christmas, nor in the following weeks when they spoke on the phone. These conversations were anyway sporadic, not because Joe didn’t call regularly - twice a week when h
e was in London, once a week when abroad - but because his father left most calls to the peremptory tones of the answering machine. The few times when, the old man snatched up the phone and barked his own distinctive greeting, it was to make it clear that he was far too busy to chat, and after a few one-sided enquiries Joe gave up.

  Now, as Joe balanced on a chair, changing an outside light-bulb in the darkness and drizzle of the February night, he became aware of his father peering up at him from the kitchen door. It was the first time the old man had left the computer since Joe’s arrival.

  ‘Never use that light.’

  ‘The more lights the better. Next time I’ll bring one of those bulbs that comes on automatically when it gets dark.’

  Normally this would have been enough to provoke a frown, but the old man let it pass. He hovered for a while, staring out into the garden, before vanishing again. A minute later, he was back.

  ‘Did you say you were going walking with Alan tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No news on the Jenna business?’

  No.’

  ‘Didn’t manage to find her again?’

  Joe had fitted the glass back onto the light-casing but was having trouble getting the fixing screw to grip. ‘I haven’t been looking.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘The Laskeys didn’t want to go on with it.’

  ‘Ah.’ A small grunt of satisfaction. ‘That’s what I said, wasn’t it? No point.’ Then, in a tone that attempted to be casual: ‘So what’s happened to the famous house sale?’

  ‘It must have fallen through, I suppose.’

  The old man had been laying the ground patiently, and now he had his reward. ‘Well, of course it’s fallen through!

  With good reason!’

  If Joe was to get the rest of the story within a reasonable space of time he knew better than to show less than total interest. He looked down. ‘You’ve heard something. Dad?’

  ‘No more than anyone could have found out with a simple phone call.’

  Joe climbed down from the chair. ‘And what was that, Dad?’

  ‘I checked with the planners, that’s all. Nothing elaborate.