went in the back door.” She looked up into Wexford's face. “I wasn't so heavy as I am now. I could move faster and I was quite strong. I had to be.” She reached for the water but most of it she had spilled over Wexford. Burden refilled the glass and she drank from it. “We went into the bathroom. He was in there, the man. He was lying on the floor and there was-blood.”
At this point Wexford had to interrupt her, trying to keep the sternness out of his voice, “Mrs. McNeil, think what you are saying. You told us you thought this man might have died of a heart attack.”
“No, he didn't. I shouldn't have said that. Ronald-oh, it was so terrible, he had a gun. He had a license for it, it was all above-board. He took his shotgun with him when he went into the house.”
Wexford stopped her. His voice had become very grave.
“Are you saying your husband shot this man? That's a very serious accusation, Mrs. McNeil.”
“I said to him, ‘Did you shoot him?’ and Ronald said, ‘He came at me with a knife. I backed away and he came after me, I had to defend myself.’ ”
“All right. What happened then?”
“My husband said that we must move him, we couldn't leave him there. You see, Ronald had shot him. No one would have believed it was in self-defense.”
You might have put it to the test, Wexford thought. You might just have decided late in the day that honesty was the best policy. What a catalog of folly all this was-yet he believed it. These two self-appointed vigilantes had somehow convinced themselves that it was their job to police that house. Or had it all been a simple but voracious curiosity? A need in their dull lives to trespass and transgress in ways more suited to the pranks of children?
“You moved him?” he said.
“Ronald couldn't have done it alone. He needed me to help.” She seemed pathetically proud of it. “We dared not leave him there, not with all those other people coming in.”
“So you took him down to the cellar?” said Burden.
“He wasn't wearing any clothes-well, just his underclothes. That's why he went into the bathroom, Ronald said. He thought perhaps he could have a bath or just wash himself.”
Ghoulishly, she began to giggle, a sound not unlike her sobs, quite different from the Tredown women's cackling. “We wrapped him up in newspaper to take him downstairs. There was newspaper in the cellar. I went down and fetched the paper and we wrapped him in that. We put him in the cellar and my husband piled logs on top of him and boards and boxes and we left him. Ronald said that would have to do until he could think of some way to get rid of him. Burn him perhaps or bury him but he didn't know where.”
“But you never did?”
“No, we never did.” She lifted to them a woebegone face. “Ronald had his first stroke the next day. He couldn't have burnt or buried anyone after that.”
“Mrs. McNeil, did you shut the cellar door when you left?”
She shook her head. “Not then. I did when I went back.”
The heart of Kingsmarkham was no place to be on a Saturday evening, especially if you were over forty. It had once been a quiet country town, sleepy and peaceful, but now you might as well have been in Piccadilly Circus. The binge drinkers were out in force, spilling out of the pubs and clubs on to the pavement because this was an exceptionally warm November. Wexford told Donaldson to drive them to the little pub on the Kingsbrook called the Gooseberry Bush and not to wait for them, they would walk home from there. The place wasn't crowded but it wasn't exactly deserted either. Young people without cars disliked the half-hour walk from the town along footpaths bordering water meadows. The car park was full of the transport used by the middle-aged. If you turned your back to it, as Wexford said, if you pretended it wasn't there, you could look instead from your table at a clear starry sky and a moon shedding its pale light on to meadows bisected by dark hedges, willows fringing the Kingsbrook.
“That was awful,” he said flatly. “I should have been tougher but I felt so sorry for her.”
“Did she say any more after I'd gone?” Burden had left the house and gone outside to sit in the car.
“Only that they'd never moved the body. I mean they'd never done what she says they intended, that is burn it or bury it. Well, we know they didn't. They moved house, leaving the body in there, covered by all the logs.”
Burden ordered drinks for them without asking Wexford what he wanted. He knew. “That's how it was when Damon and I found it.”
“Her husband died. I suppose the shock of knowing he'd killed a man caused his first stroke. She kept thinking she would go back into the bungalow and take a look, see if it could remain there, but she didn't. Not till two years ago. Mrs. Pickford asked her to tea. She says she went over there on the bus and got there a bit early. Grimble's key was still under the stone by the back door. She went in and down the stairs.”
“The place must have stunk.”
“I know. All she said was that there was a faint smell of decay in the cellar. Of ‘something gone bad’ was the way she put it. She pulled off some of the logs-God knows what she thought that would achieve-and when she saw what was underneath-well, you know what it must have been two years ago-she just fled. ‘It frightened me,’ she said. ‘I was so frightened.’ She ran out, lumbered out, I suppose, the poor old thing, slamming the door behind her.”
“No doubt that's why I had a job getting it open.”
“She staggered up the stairs, went home, and tried to forget about it, I suppose.” Wexford lifted his glass, savored the claret that filled it, and sighed a little. “I'm going back tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow's Sunday.”
“Can't be helped. The better the day, the better the deed, as my grandad said, or if he didn't he should have.”
“Are we going to charge her at least with concealing a death?”
“I don't know if I'd have the heart,” said Wexford, “but I must eventually. I showed her the photo of the T-shirt, but it was plain she didn't recognize it. All she'd seen of him through the window was the orange anorak.”
“What became of the knife?” Burden asked.
The lost father couldn't be the man they were looking for, could he? The time was right, eleven years ago, disappeared in June, a male, the right sort of age as far as Carina Laxton could tell the age. If the DNA, that ultimate certain proof, was right… Two people were alive to provide it, those two daughters. Barry Vine's first thought when he had read the piece in the “News Review” was that he must immediately tell Wexford but it was Saturday night and the next day part two of Selina Hexham's memoir would appear. There might be something in tomorrow's installment to make it impossible for Alan Hexham to be their man.
He drove home and read it again. Nowhere did the writer say she positively knew her father was dead and knew how he died; nowhere did she say whether she and her sister had ever heard from him in the intervening years. She might say so in the next installment. Would he be justified in showing it to Wexford at this hour when he didn't know if the whole thing would turn out to make it impossible that Alan Hexham's was the body in Grimble's trench? Selina might write that her father had phoned home a year later without saying where he was or that they had had a postcard from Australia. His imagination working away, Barry forgot for a moment that whatever might appear tomorrow, Selina Hexham had already written it, perhaps a year ago, and wasn't feverishly penning her memories now for a newspaper due to publish them in a few hours' time. Then he remembered, told himself not to be ridiculous, to wait till tomorrow and settled down to his Linda di Chamounix CD.
14
The Sunday Times, News Review, 5 November 2006 Part Two of Gone Without Trace: The Lost Father
My mother knew he was dead. She knew it from that first day, the day we all went to the police together. She didn't say that to the police or to us, of course she didn't, but years later she told me she had known it from the first. There was no other explanation for his staying away for twenty-four hours without getting in touch with her. She knew when she was loved and she knew herself to be a sensitive, perceptive woman who would quickly have been able to tell if her husband was seeing another woman. It was this self-knowledge which perhaps made it worse when the rumor spread round our neighborhood, at our school, even at the church where Mum sometimes went, that Dad had run off with Denise Cole. There were other theories for his disappearance, of course: he was
