A Death Divided

by Clare Francis

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘He’s in the front room,’ she said.

  ‘How is he?’

  She shrugged as though it would be futile to explain.

  ‘Are the police with him?’

  ‘No, no. Go straight in.’

  Joe found Chetwood in the dingy room with the browning wallpaper. He was sitting hunched over a wood fire that smoked damply without flame. The room was lit by the unforgiving glare of a single overhead bulb; when Chetwood glanced round, his face appeared as a mask of harsh black shadows and sudden lines. Seeing Joe, his expression seemed to collapse gently, his mouth to drop.

  ‘I’m so very sorry,’ Joe said.

  Chetwood clambered to his feet and in one swift movement came forward and, throwing an arm around Joe’s neck, embraced him in a bear hug, the sleeve of his heavy waxed jacket pushing into Joe’s face. Pulling away rapidly, Chetwood paced back to the fire and made a gesture of appeal or welcome: a brief lift of both arms. ‘Good of you to come, Joe.’

  ‘I came with Alan.’

  Chetwood’s gaze sharpened, he glanced towards the door.

  ‘Is he here?’

  ‘He’s gone. He’s on his way home.’

  With a slow nod, a dulling of the eyes, Chetwood sat down again on the edge of the seat, shoulders bowed, forearms resting heavily on his knees. Joe sat opposite on an easy-chair whose springs threatened collapse so that like Chetwood he took refuge on the edge.

  ‘Sorry about the cold,’ Chetwood muttered. ‘Absolute crap, this fire.’ He pushed irritably at the logs, before retreating deeper inside his jacket, hunching the collar up around his ears.

  ‘How’re you doing, Chetwood?’

  Chetwood gazed at him distractedly. The? Oh, I’ve done my crying, Joe. Done it all yesterday. All cried out.’ He reached for the glass of wine standing on the tiled hearth and took a long swig. ‘Now I’m just angry.’ He had spoken flatly, but now he went on with something approaching the genuine emotion.

  ‘Angry that she didn’t call me. Angry that she was such a great actress. Angry that she fooled me, because fool me she did, Joe. Good and proper.’

  'She gave no sign?’

  ‘Oh, she gave signs all right - but all the wrong ones. Never seemed better. I mean, better than for a long time. Not a hint.

  Not a whisper. Not even a phone call, for Christ’s sake.’ He took another swig of wine, draining the glass, and Joe had the feeling it wasn’t his first drink of the evening. ‘We had a deal, you see. We had a deal that she’d always tell me if she was feeling low. Didn’t have to be a big speech, a word was enough, but she had to tell me. And she’d always told he in the past.

  Always.’

  ‘Had she talked of suicide?’

  ‘Oh, in the early days, yeah. A couple of times. Sure! But not for years. Not recently. No, she was happier than for a long time. I mean, she was full of plans.’ He gestured into space with his glass. ‘Plans to sell some paintings. To buy some more ponies.’ The glass described a circle of the shabby room.

  ‘To do this place up. I mean, serious plans.’

  The dog trotted in and, lifting its nose to identify Joe’s scent, ignored him and went to Chetwood’s side. Pulling the dog close, Chetwood buried his face in the broad black neck, and stayed there for quite a while. ‘Hey, boy. Hey.’ Emerging at last, he said in a tone of disbelief, ‘She left the animals, Joe.

  That’s what gets me. She left the animals without food or water. She couldn’t stand the thought of suffering, it drove her mad - and then she went and left the bloody animals.’

  ‘Perhaps she thought she’d be found straight away and someone would come and take care of them.’

  The fierceness of Chetwood’s frown said he wasn’t persuaded, not by a long chalk, and Joe tried again.

  ‘Presumably she wasn’t in any state to think too logically.’

  ‘But I spoke to her! I spoke to her on the phone. She sounded fine. She sounded great! Christ, we were talking about holidays and going abroad together. I tell you - she sounded fine!’ In the next breath, Chetwood swore at the fire, and punched at the logs with the side of his fist.

  Looking into the sullen glow of the fire, Joe wondered how far depressives were prepared to go when planning their suicides, how elaborate was their subterfuge, and he guessed that the resolute ones derived some final satisfaction from leaving nothing to chance.

  ‘When did you last speak to Jenna?’ Joe asked.

  ‘God, you sound like the fucking police!’ Chetwood barked.

  Instantly, he withdrew the remark with a flick of his hand, a grimace of contrition. ‘I was in there all morning. Three, four hours. I tell you, Joe, I thought they’d never stop. Talking like a bad film script. How did you get on with your wife? — that sort of thing. As if I took her to the dam and helped her over the edge myself, for God’s sake.’

  Remembering the cars parked outside, Joe said, ‘But what are they doing here now? What are they up to?’

  But Chetwood chose not to listen, or not to answer.

  Holding his glass up to the baleful light, as if to check it was empty, he stood up abruptly and started across the room.

  ‘Drink, Joe?’ Hardly waiting to catch Joe’s nod, he went out and returned almost immediately with a wine bottle and a fresh glass. ‘You’ve met Pym, haven’t you?’ he said expansively, as if it was a drinks party.

  The farmer’s wife had appeared in the doorway. ‘Hello,’

  she said again to Joe.

  ‘We met the other day.’

  ‘No - you met at Pawsey Farm,’ Chetwood corrected him.

  ‘You met at dinner.’

  With a jolt of memory Joe looked at Pym again. She had looked very different then, dark-haired, even black-haired; he supposed it must have been dyed. The style had been different too: long with a fringe. And he seemed to remember her in bright reds - dress, scarf, lipstick; possibly all three. As the memory took shape, he positioned her at the dinner table, sitting on Chetwood’s right: Pym, the organic farmer’s wife.

  She had laughed a lot, she had said something heartfelt about the state of the planet, she and her husband had left at midnight because they had to get up early to tend the animals.

  ‘I’ll be a couple of hours at the most,’ she was saying to Chetwood. ‘But I can come back sooner if you need me.’

  Setting the wine down, Chetwood went and wrapped his arms so completely around her short frame that for a moment she seemed to disappear. His eyes were tight shut, his mouth clamped with fierce emotion.

  With a nod to Joe, Pym left, only to put her head back round the door as Chetwood was pouring the second glass of wine. ‘The police say they’ve finished,’ she announced. ‘They’re just leaving.’

  By way of confirmation a car door slammed beyond the window, an engine started.

  ‘About bloody time,’ Chetwood muttered, and barged out of the room. Joe heard voices, a second engine coughed into life, revved and faded, then Chetwood was back in the room, scooping up the wine bottle, draining his glass and beckoning to Joe, all in one furious movement. ‘Leave the glass,’ Chetwood called over his shoulder as they sped through the kitchen.

  Joe paused to close the door and wondered if he should turn out some lights as well.

  Two more cars were on the move, reversing or driving slowly away, as Joe followed Chetwood and the dog across the small yard to the woodland path. plunging into the darkness, Chetwood’s pace did not slacken. Joe’s eyes were slow to adjust, and he had the sense of blundering into the unknown.

  At first the feeble light from the cottage illuminated Chetwood’s free hand as it swung back hastily in a pendulum, making a dim intermittent beacon, but then there was no light from anywhere and no hand to see, and Joe strained to make out Chetwood’s form against the deeper darkness. Twice a branch reached out to brush Joe’s face, now and again his feet stumbled and jarred on the sudden lifts and falls of the path; but he walked on blindly, trusting to the
sound of Chetwood’s footsteps.

  ‘Okay?’ Chetwood called.

  ‘Fine,’ Joe replied.

  The path started to climb steadily, and Joe knew it was here or very close to here that he had found Jenna. Either his night-vision was improving or the darkness had relented a little, because soon after this he began to make out the occasional tree looming up like a tall sentry, and thickets like giant ink spots, while high above the dark canopy he caught the glimmer of stars.

  After a time, the branches seemed to fall back and the stars to grow steadily brighter, while a faint blue glow appeared in the sky somewhere ahead, giving shape and distance to Chetwood’s body. Finally, as the trees parted and dwindled and the sky expanded, Joe saw a quarter moon balanced above the line of a hill: new or old, he couldn’t tell. They were approaching a clearing, or perhaps it was the tree-line, because now there was nothing in front of him but hills and a high dome of stars. It seemed to Joe he had never seen so many stars, the sky was milky with them, then he realised he could see them low down below the hills as well, reproduced in a perfect water-mirror. He could get no perspective on the water - one moment the hills seemed close, the next miles away - but however wide the water, however far it ran, it was utterly smooth and still and without sound. He felt he had never been in a place so remote.

  ‘Watch out for the steps,’ Chetwood called from away to the right, and Joe heard feet striking wood, once, twice, then the skittering of the dog’s claws, before a handle turned, or a latch, and the footsteps receded a little, and shuffled.

  A pitched roof rose up against the stars, then Joe made out the faint lines of a verandah. He had just found the first step when a flame flared and he saw through an open door Chetwood’s face and hands illuminated by a match he was putting to a lamp. The flame caught, and a golden light spread its glow through the windows and out onto the verandah of a long wooden cabin.

  ‘Not much heat left! The bastards!’

  While Chetwood padded purposefully around - he had removed his shoes - Joe closed the door behind him, and stared. The cabin was built of pale wood the colour of honey and smelt sweetly of resin. It was the size of a large bungalow, the sort of thing you’d expect to see in Scandinavia, and perhaps that was where it had come from. At one end there was a kitchen built of reclaimed pine, old shutters by the look of them, and an antique pine table with ladder-backed chairs; towards the centre, a sitting area with two big sofas and a low table in front of a free-standing stove with a polished metal flue rising through an open-beamed roof; and, partitioned off at the far end, what he took to be the bedroom and bathroom.

  Behind the sitting area was, an artist’s easel and stacks of canvases, and hanging on the walls above, the paintings to prove it. There were bookcases jammed with books, silk wall-panels, and everywhere fine furniture, most of it antique, some in natural wood, some lime-washed, some french-polished: sideboards, dressers, console tables, decked with fabulous pieces of china, jade and marble: bowls, vases, orbs and carvings. The sofas had cotton throws in rich colours, the windows gauzy drapes and the floors huge rugs, all from the East, all exquisite. The effect was exotic, confident, and utterly enchanting.

  Chetwood had been busy with his chores, riddling the stove, throwing in wood, opening vents. He lit two more lamps and adjusted the wicks, then, pacifying the dog, who had been slavering and dancing with excitement, opened a tin and fed him. All the time Chetwood muttered and grumbled under his breath: ‘Bastards… For Christ’s sake…’ Once or twice on his rounds he saw something that made him stop in his tracks and shake his head or throw a hand in the air in a gesture of disbelief.

  Then, catching sight of Joe by the door, Chetwood waved him forward impatiently. ‘Sit down, for God’s sake! It’ll warm up in a minute. The bastards must have left all the doors open.’

  On his way back to the kitchen he looked down at his hand and gave a sigh of exasperation. ‘For Christ’s sake!’ He attempted to brush something off his hands, and when that failed rubbed them furiously against his trouser leg. ‘Fairy dust! Everywhere!’

  As Joe took his jacket off he saw that it was true, that there was fingerprint dust on most of the surfaces and on his own hand from touching the door handle.

  Chetwood clapped two glasses down on the table with a fresh bottle of wine to augment the half-empty one he’d brought from the cottage.

  Joe said, ‘Why were the police here, Chetwood? What were they looking for?’

  Filling Joe’s glass, Chetwood tipped the bottle so steeply that some of the wine shot up over the rim. ‘I told you - they think I helped her to jump.’ If his glare acknowledged the bluntness of this remark, it also affirmed his right to say it.

  ‘Why? What reason?’

  Chetwood would have shrugged the question off but Joe cut in firmly, ‘Tell me. Everything.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ Chetwood complained with a rhetorical sigh.

  He sat heavily on the sofa opposite, but not before draining his glass and pouring another. It occurred to Joe then and at several points in the next couple of hours to try to get him to slow down on the drinking front, but, inhibited by the enormity of what had happened to Chetwood, and by his own inability to offer much in the way of support, he said nothing.

  The man’s wife had died; he had the right to drink himself into oblivion.

  ‘Yeah … well, I was in London. Pym got hold of me. Said she couldn’t find Jenna, said the animals had been left hungry.

  I came straight back. Found the note. Searched for her. Told the police. Thought of the weir. Went there. Found Jenna’s car.

  The police began a search, and soon after that some kids found her a couple of miles downstream.’ Sitting against the end of the sofa, Chetwood slid a little lower in his seat, the arm with the wine at full stretch, the other bent back over his head. His eyes were heavy and red-rimmed. For a moment they became vacant, as if he were miles away, and Joe remembered how characteristic this was of him, how he would do this even in the middle of a conversation, and how often in the past Joe had been caught between annoyance and the fear that he’d been boring him.

  ‘When was she found?’

  Chetwood rubbed his eyelids savagely. ‘Ten o’clock? Yeah, that’s what they said - ten.’

  ‘Yesterday morning?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Identified her.’ This time when he paused his gaze was far from vacant. ‘Told them what there was to tell. About Sam’s death - all that stuff. Then they came back this morning. Asked me if I’d like to accompany them back to the station for another chat - as in it’s time to call your lawyer!’

  He gave a sardonic smile, but Joe didn’t smile with him.

  He was too busy trying not to show his alarm. He leant forward in his seat and asked carefully, ‘Is that what they said - that you should have a lawyer?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  ‘And did you ask for one?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ Chetwood scoffed.

  Again, Joe made a conscious effort to appear calm. ‘Did they tape this “chat” ?’

  ‘I didn’t notice.’

  ‘Look, Chetwood, I’m no expert on police procedure, but I’m damn sure they have to inform you if they’re taping things.’

  ‘Maybe they did - I can’t remember.’ Then, with a conciliatory gesture, a spreading of his fingers: ‘I’d had no sleep, for Christ’s sake. It was some God-awful hour - eight. I didn’t get to sleep till five - six - I don’t know. Okay, I think they taped it. I think they told me. So what? There was nothing I could tell them, was there?’

  ‘What did they want to know?’

  ‘Oh… everything about Jenna. Our lives, our history, who Jenna’s doctor was, what medication she was on. What you’d expect.’ The drink was getting to him, and the tiredness: he was fighting to keep his eyelids open, his voice was sinking.

  ‘What did her note say?’

  ‘What it was always going to say. That
she blamed herself for Sam’s death.’

  ‘No other reason?’

  ‘It was plenty enough reason for her. So it seems.’

  ‘It was in her handwriting?’

  Chetwood cast Joe a disparaging look. ‘For God’s sake, Joe - she wrote it, okay?’

  ‘What exactly did she say?’

  Chetwood deposited his glass on the table before sitting up with a grunt of exertion. ‘Only read it a couple of times before the police took it away. So, not exactly. But I suppose’ - he might have been recounting a shopping list for all the life there was in his voice - ‘she talked about feeling responsible for Sam’s death. About what a lovely person he was - a beautiful trusting human being, I think she said. About it not being right to forgive or forget what had happened. And’ - he narrowed his eyes with the effort of memory - ‘she said: Allow me this.’

  He repeated it under his breath. ‘Allow me this. Well, she didn’t give us much choice, did she?’

  ‘How did Sam die?’

  ‘He fell from the weir.’

  ‘And why did Jenna feel responsible?’

  ‘She felt she should have done more to stop him.’

  ‘It was suicide then?’

  Chetwood frowned at Joe as if he were being exceptionally dim. ‘I told you - he fell accidentally. He was an impulsive kid, full of crazy ideas, and that night he was a bit drunk - probably more than a bit drunk - and when he announced he was going to walk the weir, Jenna didn’t take him too seriously. And then when she realised, it was too late. He’d gone.’

  ‘Walking the weir - what was that, a joke?’

  ‘A game. But best not attempted late at night with too much drink inside you.’ Without appearing to notice the irony, Chetwood reached for the bottle and refilled their glasses. Then the refrain: ‘He was just a kid.’