The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

“I’m fine, Roger, but it doesn’t matter how I am. How are you?”

  “I’m OK, thanks,” he said straight away. “The two policemen have been very nice to me.”

  “I’ll bet they have,” I said, and I glanced around at Pascoe. “You haven’t told them anything silly have you? You haven’t told them you have done anything just to keep them happy?”

  “I just told them that I was hiding in the insect farm. I don’t know anything about it. I was hiding in the insect farm.”

  I was confused.

  “What do you mean ‘hiding in the insect farm’? When were you hiding in the insect farm?”

  I swear that my next sentence was going to be something like “you were in bed when Harriet was killed”, but I was interrupted by Pascoe from behind me.

  “During the fire,” he said. “Roger has just been confirming to us what we had already believed. That he was hiding in the insect farm during the fire.”

  “What bloody fire?” I said.

  Pascoe looked back at me. Now it was his turn to be confused.

  “The fire that killed your parents,” he said.

  “What? What’s that got to do with Harriet?”

  “Harriet?” said Pascoe. “Mrs Maguire? Nothing. Why do you ask that?”

  “Why? Because as far as I know, that’s what you and Wallace are investigating. My wife’s disappearance. You’ve arrested Brendan bloody Harcourt and had to let him go, and now you have arrested Roger. Are you saying that that’s nothing to do with Harriet?”

  “Sit down, please,” said Pascoe. “Let me explain.”

  I didn’t want to sit down, but I reckoned we would get to the point sooner if I obeyed, and so I did. And all the while Roger was sitting alongside me, saying nothing.

  “We are investigating the disappearance of your wife. But as you know we have also kept open the file on the fire at your parents’ house. The fire was never explained, and your dad did have quite a big insurance policy, so it has remained an open inquiry. We don’t have any choice in the matter. You also know that at one time we had an idea that Roger might know more about it than he let on. We asked you about it at the time, but you were adamant that it couldn’t be the case, and so we let the matter go.”

  “Yes, I remember all that,” I said. “So why are you raising it again now?”

  “Because of something Roger said to someone else at the day centre which caused them to think he knew about something criminal. They were sufficiently concerned about it to inform us, which they did earlier this morning, and so we reopened the file to take a look.”

  “What?” I said. “What did he say? Who did he say it to?”

  “I am not at liberty to tell you that,” said Pascoe, “but I can tell you that we felt we had no choice but to ask Roger about it. And when I tell you what it was, I hope you will understand why.”

  “And why didn’t you wait for me?”

  “Because, Jonathan,” he said slowly, “if you don’t mind me saying so, it seems to us that you will do anything to protect your brother, and if you were here you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from interrupting every question we asked. As it is,” and now he looked pleased with himself, “your brother Roger has cleared up the mystery, and we can all go back to the way we were before.”

  “Cleared up the mystery of the fire?”

  “No,” said Pascoe, “cleared up the mystery about what he said at the day centre.”

  “And what was that?”

  “He told one of the other pupils there – is that what you call them? Pupils? Anyway one of the other men – that he had been involved in a killing.”

  “What? He can’t have.”

  “I know, but you can see why we had to take it seriously. Anyway in all the circumstances, we had to ask Roger about it, and we now have done so. It took him a while to tell us, but it turned out that he was talking about something or other living in the insect farm. Something that had been doing a lot of damage to some of his other creatures in the insect farm. Did he have to kill some cockroaches or something? I think he must have felt very badly about it, and so when he talked about it at the day centre, obviously it came out as something like a confession.”

  “And was it Terry, the Down-syndrome kid?”

  “I shouldn’t really tell you this, but as no harm has been done – he told Terry and Terry told his dad, so by the time it went through all the Chinese whispers, it came out as a killing. Anyway,” he said, “I hope you understand why we had to check it out. And I hope you understand why we had to check it out without you being present. But Roger has cleared it up on his own now, and so, if you want to, you can take him home.”

  I felt a constriction in my chest and realized that I’d been taking short breaths since first seeing Roger in the interrogation room. I filled my lungs to capacity to get the air flowing through me. It tasted like freedom.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  More passing days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and on every waking hour I expected to receive the phone call or the knock on the door which would bring the news that someone had seen Harriet on the train on that Tuesday, or that one of the neighbours had seen her coming to the flat, or that I had been spotted in the early hours of Wednesday morning labouring under a heavy load, and that therefore I was now a suspect.

  “Can you tell me what was in the bundle you were seen carrying at four in the morning, Mr Maguire?” Neither of my imagined interrogators were Wallace or Pascoe. The question was asked by the clichéd concave face of a man with wire-rimmed specs and a sweaty brow, and I could give no answer. I knew that any hope I might have of staying out of prison rested entirely on luck, and that it must be extraordinarily unlikely that anyone could have the amount of good fortune that would be needed for none of these things to come to light. I was also acutely aware that I was adding to the risk I was facing when I had a lot of leaflets printed showing Harriet’s photograph with the message “Have you seen this woman?” with the reward of £500 proposed by her father. The last thing I needed was for someone who had travelled on the train on that Tuesday to remember her as a fellow passenger. Did I deliberately choose a photograph of Harriet where the light came from the side and slightly distorted the features of her face? I guess I did, but the police had no reference point from reality, and none of our other friends ever mentioned it.

  Probably as much from their sense of guilt as from their concern, Martin and Jed helped me to distribute the leaflets outside King’s Cross station. Both apologized for not telling me what was happening between Harriet and Brendan, and I used their embarrassment to squeeze out more detail.

  “In the end I just think she was worn down by his persistence,” Martin told me. We were in a burger bar opposite King’s Cross station, taking a break from a session of stopping people in the street outside to show them Harriet’s picture.

  “You shouldn’t really blame her,” said Jed. “I know that sounds like a stupid thing to say, but you’ve got to try to understand. It was a very tough ask for her to be away from you for weeks and weeks on end. All the rest of us were going out and doing the normal pairing-off. She was being asked to live the life of a nun.”

  The pain these thoughts caused to me were not part of any act. I had no need to pretend to be a distraught husband – I was distraught. Hearing any detail of Harriet’s infidelity cut me to the core every bit as much as it would have done had she been with me still.

  We neither saw nor heard anything further of Brendan during this period, and I did not seek him out. Martin and Jed told me that he had taken the trip up and down on the train to Newcastle, apparently looking out of the window as if to do so might yield some clue as to what had happened to her. If he had ever had his suspicions, he was too shamefaced, I assumed, to come and ask me about them. Eventually Jed, Martin and Brendan returned to Newcastle and I went back to work at the library, where, for several months I had to endure the pitying glances of colleagues, before eventually my little
tragedy became just another part of my pathetic life’s story.

  Ideally I would like to be able to record that Brendan was charged with Harriet’s murder, found guilty and went on to spend the next twenty years in prison. In my mind, this would be a suitable punishment for having slept with my wife. The law, however, failed to see it that way. The absence of a body made it more or less impossible, the police kept on telling me, to prove that a crime had even taken place, let alone that Harriet had been murdered.

  And so that was it. That was the story of Harriet Maguire, née Chalfont, born 1952, who went missing in 1973 and was never heard from again. I had no insurance to cash in, no funeral plans to make. As far as the wider world was concerned, it was almost as though she had never existed. I was back at my job, Roger went back to regular attendance at the day centre, and we all got on with our lives. I never managed to get anything resembling an answer from him about what happened to the body I had buried in a box full of soil and worms in the insect farm in a shed in the allotment site just two hundred yards or so from our flat. Every attempt at securing an explanation was met with a change of subject or a blank stare, and after a while I just gave up trying.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  In the few years after Harriet’s death, I left the library service and opened a small bookshop in Clapham High Street. We specialized in travel books and have done reasonably well. I never married again – after all, I was already married, and never sought a divorce or an annulment. Harriet had been the single love of my life, and I never felt that I wanted to try to replace her.

  Roger and I carried on in our own way. After another five years had passed, we moved to a small house just around the corner from the flat. It was a proper semi-detached; I thought our mother would have approved. We did not need to move the insect farm again, and the oversized shed on the allotment has continued to accommodate Roger’s ambitions.

  I lost touch with Martin and Jed, although one day, perhaps seven or eight years after what happened, I ran into Martin in the street and he told me that he thought Brendan had emigrated to Canada and was married with children. The news left me cold, and I felt no curiosity to know any more.

  As expected, I never saw Harriet’s parents again after that last Christmas and, in 1983, ten years after the disappearance of their daughter, I heard that Mr Chalfont had died in Singapore, and that his wife was returning to England. She did not contact me and I made no attempt to contact her.

  Last month, just a few weeks before my birthday, Roger and I were having breakfast in our small kitchen when, quite out of nowhere, he asked me what date it was.

  “April 17th, I think. Why do you ask?”

  “Two weeks from your birthday?”

  “Yes, that’s right, Roger. Another bloody birthday. Two weeks away.”

  “And how old will you be?”

  “I will be fifty-seven. Why, what do you have in mind?”

  “The same age that Dad was when he died.”

  “Yes, I believe so,” and something rang a bell from a long long time ago. Something he had asked me about decades earlier.

  Two weeks later, on my fifty-seventh birthday, my older brother Roger gave me a very unusual present. He woke up and changed whatever remains of the rest of my life. His was the gift of revelation.

  The day began as usual – an early start for me, waking and listening to the radio. It was Saturday and I had been awake for half an hour before I remembered that it was my birthday. The years have brought me many acquaintances but very few friends and, as I come to consider it, there is no other person in the world, other than Roger and myself, who could spontaneously recite the date of my birthday. I considered waking Roger a little earlier than usual, just so we could do some silly birthday stuff, but then I remember thinking: fifty-seven? What the hell. It’s not fifty, it’s not sixty, it’s not even fifty-five. No big deal. Let him sleep.

  After an hour or so I swung my legs out of bed, put on my dressing gown, and ambled through to my older brother’s room. For some reason I have got into the habit of looking at Roger for just a few moments before I rouse him from his sleep, and yesterday, not for the first time, I felt a little frisson of envy of the life that Roger leads. His appearance was of a man with no worries, no responsibilities, nothing to plan for or even much to remember. Yesterday seems very much like today, which will be very much like tomorrow.

  I reckon that he looks younger than his sixty-three years. He has few lines for a man of his age, and his hair is thick and dark. Meanwhile I have no doubt that the cares and responsibilities which have thus fallen upon me have made me look older than my now fifty-seven years, and so I guess that Roger and I look more like twins than anything else. Now, as always since we were small boys, he is probably rather better-looking than I am.

  For the very first time in his life – or certainly in the time that I have been taking care of him – Roger woke up and opened his eyes spontaneously. I had been about to nudge him awake as I always do, holding his shoulder and starting to move him gently backwards and forwards. Always Roger goes from totally asleep to totally awake in an instant, with no gradation in between the two states. However, on this occasion, as I was about to take hold of him, his eyes popped open, he beamed me a big big smile and said, “Happy birthday, Jonathan.” I nearly fell backwards from the shock.

  “Roger!” I said. “You scared the living daylights out of me. Have you been lying there awake and waiting for me to come in?”

  “How old are you today?” he said, totally ignoring my question. “Fifty-seven, is it?”

  “Yes, it is, Roger. Fifty-seven. How clever of you to remember.”

  Roger covered his mouth, just as he often did when something felt too exciting for him to cope with. His eyes shone, wide and innocent, exactly as they had half a century ago in anticipation of some treat or other.

  “I have something for you.”

  “You do? That’s great, Roger, what is it?” I began to anticipate what he might have made in his craft lesson at the day centre, and readied myself for seeming to appreciate a fly swat or a wooden device for making it easier to pull my feet out of rubber wellingtons. Instead of that, Roger leapt out of bed and a moment later he had pulled open the drawer in which we kept his pullovers. I assumed that he had secreted whatever it was at the back of a drawer, except that he kept on pulling until it fell out, and all of the folded-up clothes spilt onto the floor.

  “Roger?” I said. “What on earth?” But I didn’t have time for any further enquiry because Roger had turned the drawer upside down, and I saw something that looked like an envelope attached with Sellotape to the bottom. Roger was picking away at the corners of the tape and soon had released the envelope. He turned and handed it to me. I looked down at it, genuinely and utterly confused. The paper was yellowing and brittle with age, and I did not have the smallest clue as to what it could contain. I turned it over and saw some words written in ink, as from an old-fashioned fountain pen. A moment later I felt an echo from a distant time, another life, a long long time ago. I recognized the shaky handwriting as my father’s and squinted in the half-light to read what it said.

  “To be given to Jonathan on his 57th birthday.”

  I continued to stare down at the envelope in total amazement, and then I looked back at Roger, lost for words. I had so many questions that I did not know where to begin. All I was getting back from Roger in response was the sunshine of an almighty grin, as from a small boy who has been sworn to secrecy and, despite many temptations and all the odds against doing so, has managed to keep his promise. Here I was, looking at my supposed mentally handicapped older brother, who had managed to keep a secret for not far short of forty years.

  “Roger? What the hell?…” I tried and failed to find the right words. “Is this from Dad? You’ve kept it all this time?” Roger was too excited to answer, but just stood still, smiling and nodding vigorously. Clearly he was beside himself with delight that he had completed a task that he
must have been asked to undertake all those years ago. “And has this letter been stuck to the drawer since Dad died?”

  Roger shook his head, and now I remembered that we hadn’t even bought the chest of drawers until after the fire in which Mum and Dad had been killed.

  “He told me to keep it in the insect farm and so I did. I put it underneath the drawers when we bought the flat.”

  “So how long before he died did he give it to you?”

  “One day,” said Roger, and sat back on the bed, as though tired after the completion of his life’s work. He looked neither happy nor sad to recall the day our parents had died.

  Oddly enough, I could not bring myself to open the letter there and then. These events were so unexpected and weird for me that I felt that I needed to take them on board before I did so. My eyes were blinking to try once again to focus on the stale yellow pages and the watery lines of blue ink.

  “What’s for breakfast?” asked Roger.

  “As it’s my birthday and therefore rather a special occasion,” I said, “I thought we might have a pickled bat brains on walnut bread with stale doughnuts.”

  Roger put one finger to his lips as though considering the offer, and then shook his head.

  “Nice idea, Jonathan,” he said, “but I think I’ll just have toast and Marmite and then maybe a banana.”

  “Coming right up,” I said.

  Fifteen minutes later, as Roger ate his food and stared into the middle distance, I was looking again at the envelope and thinking. I was still reeling at the idea of Roger keeping it safe and secret from me for all this time, and had not the slightest notion of what could be in it. I glanced again at Roger, saw that he was in something of a trance, and inserted my thumb under the flap of the envelope and slid it along, tearing as I went. Inside was a single sheet of A4 paper, covered in tiny writing in the same trembling hand. I put on my specs and began to read.

  My dear Jonathan.

  If things have gone as your mother and I intend, you will be reading this on the morning of your fifty-seventh birthday. There is nothing especially significant about the date, except that I wanted to choose a moment a very long time from now, but one that Roger would have a chance of remembering. I am thinking that if he waits until you are the same age as I am when I am writing this, it might stick in his mind. I hope that it has. If not, and you are reading this sooner, then so be it.