Chapter 25
Greenall said, 'We were happy enough, not deliriously happy, but when does that ever last past the first few months? I was probably more content than Mary. Well, I'd done more, achieved more, relatively speaking. Whenever I felt dissatisfied I just had to look back to when I was a scruffy half-educated kid running round the back streets of Derby. God knows how I even got qualified enough to get into the RAF at the lowest level. But I did. And I did well. I learn fast. Barely ten years later I was commissioned, I was married to Mary. And of course, above all, I was flying.'
He smiled to himself, like a man who remembers glory.
Pascoe said casually, 'This is interesting. You needn't say anything you realize that? It may be used as evidence. I'll keep a record of it unless you prefer to write it yourself.'
It was a pretty feeble version of the correct procedure. And he ought to get Greenall to sign a declaration saying that he had been cautioned and still wanted to make a statement and have someone else write it down for him. But his instinct told him that he must take the minimum risk of fracturing this fragile mood. For a moment he thought he'd gone too far already but after a brief pause the man continued as though Pascoe had not spoken.
'I'd met Mary when I was stationed on Cyprus. She was teaching at the military school there. We liked each other from the first. Marriage might have come eventually, but when she found she was pregnant, it had to come at once. That might have been the trouble. Rushing things is never good. I know that now. But Alison was born and we were happy. Very happy. Once Alison got to school age, though, Mary got restless. She wanted to work again. I didn't like it too much and with me moving around from time to time, it wasn't all that easy anyway. But she insisted on it and when, twice within the space of four or five years, she had to give it up, you'd have thought she was the breadwinner and I was earning the pin-money.'
He shook his head at the incredibility of the thought.
'The second time was when I was posted to Hanover. She even suggested it might be better for Alison's schooling if she and the girl stayed in England for a while. I didn't think it was Alison she was really thinking of. Anyway, she came. And a few months later it looked as if things were turning right for her. One of the teachers at the local British School in Linden fell seriously ill. Mary was ideal for the post. On the spot, fully qualified, with just the right kind of experience. Things seemed to get back together for us for a while after that. There'd been a lot of rowing. She'd even managed to get the girl turned against me. Well, I expect there were faults on both sides. But now, for a time, everything seemed OK.'
He sighed deeply.
'Are you sure you won't have a drink?' he asked suddenly.
'No, thanks. But if you want one…'
'No,' he said emphatically. 'I can take it or leave it. She met Dinwoodie there, you know. He was deputy head, or some such thing. There was also some kind of drama group he was involved in and soon Mary was mixed up in it too. I got a bit concerned about how much of her time it was taking up, but I didn't want to rock the boat, things seemed to be going so well. So I didn't say much. But other people were saying things. Not directly to me. But after a bit you begin to notice silences, intonations. So I started going along myself. I couldn't do it regularly, but I thought if I took an interest, made myself useful with lights and so on… well, I don't know what I thought. Mary wasn't all that enthusiastic, but she didn't seem to mind. They were rehearsing for some local festival; Shakespeare. The Krauts love Shakespeare, God knows why. I didn't want to appear pig-ignorant, so I set out to read a bit myself. They were just doing scenes. Mary and Dinwoodie were doing a bit from Hamlet, the scene when he tells Gertrude what a whore she's been, then kills old Polonius behind the curtain. I read that play through a dozen times. I reckon I knew as much about it as anyone in that damned drama group. I just wanted to impress, you understand. I wasn't really suspicious, not any more. If they'd been doing a scene from Romeo and Juliet perhaps, but somehow with Mary acting as his mother, it didn't seem that there was anything to worry about. Stupid, really, isn't it?'
Pascoe nodded, not quite sure what he was acquiescing to.
'Even when I caught them at it, I didn't do anything rash. I told myself it was just a once-off thing, quickly over. I wasn't going to let her get away with it, of course. She deserved to be punished. I made that quite clear to her. I thought I might send the girl back to England to boarding-school, get her out of the way later. Meanwhile, though, I wanted to keep a low profile. I thought of the scandal it would cause in the mess, I could see all my hard work to get on over the years coming to nothing and, in any case, it was nearly the end of the school year and I knew that Dinwoodie's contract was up and he was returning to the UK. So I let things slide for a while. And the end of term came. And Dinwoodie went. And I came home from a few days on an exercise and found that Mary had disappeared and Alison with her. And after that, well, things went into a spin.'
As he talked now, first hesitations, then often lengthy gaps, began to appear in his speech, but Pascoe was able to fill it in from his long telephone conversation with an RAF records officer who had been extremely cooperative when the Choker case was mentioned.
Greenall had at first attempted to cover up, pretending that his wife and child had gone back to England for a holiday, though clearly not another person at the school or on the station believed this. He himself had returned to the UK on a fortnight's leave which he overstayed when his efforts to track them down were unavailing. This was the first stage in the long downhill slide his career now began to take. It didn't all happen at once. There were plunges and recoveries. He received a letter from his wife, explaining her motives, wanting to put everything on a civilized level. They met in a London hotel lounge to talk things over. The meeting ended with him striking her across the face and rushing across to the reception desk where a young girl, just arrived with her parents, was terrified to be embraced by this demented stranger and dragged towards the door.
That was the last contact for some time. Mary clearly decided, probably for a combination of religious and personal reasons, that disappearance was a better bet than any remedy of the law. Perhaps to keep their heads down, perhaps because the mid-seventies was a very bad time for expatriate teachers to try to filter back into the home system, they decided to abandon education for cultivation and went into the Garden Centre business. Certainly if they maintained any contact with the RAF world at all, reports of Greenall's condition would not have encouraged them to let him know their whereabouts. Drink and a growing oddness of behaviour patterns had resulted in first the loss of his flying status, then, after a period of breakdown, discharge on medical grounds.
All this over a period of nearly three years.
'So,' said Greenall, 'I woke up one morning and found I was back in civvy street. No wife, no daughter, no commission, no career. And no flying. I had to get that back to start with. Do you understand? Down here even when I was on the crest of the wave, I always felt there was something, I don't know, sort of pulling me back to where I started. Up there, it was different. Still is. Up there I was… am…'
'King of infinite space?' offered Pascoe.
'Yes. Right. That's it. King of infinite space. So I did an instructor's course. Just basic stuff. Work on trainers, that kind of thing. I knew I would never get back in the big boys again, but this way at least I got my feet off the ground. And there was work in it. I got a job down at a flying club in Surrey. Twice the size of this. I really enjoyed it, all of it, even the ground staff side.'
His speech, mirroring his mental recovery, had begun to flow freely again. Pottle would explain this, thought Pascoe. And probably advise me to listen carefully for the return of disjunction.
'And did you see your wife again in this time?'
'Neither saw nor heard from her,' said Greenall. 'When I got myself together, I started looking. I played your game, detective that is. Not an easy business, is it? I went to the address on that one letter, but it was a boarding-house, no forwarding address. I tried local schools, then the Department of Education. They couldn't or wouldn't help. No, it wasn't easy.'
'Police?' suggested Pascoe. 'Did you try them?'
'Why?' said Greenall, surprised. 'It had nothing to do with the police. In the end, I stopped trying. I didn't give up, you understand. Just settled to play a waiting game. I knew that somehow, one day, something… well, I was right. There in the paper, just a paragraph. Tragic accident. Man chewed to death by machine at Agricultural Show. Mr Peter Dinwoodie. Leaving wife, Mary; daughter, Alison. Pure chance. But more than chance. The paper I saw it
