Читать книгу: «So He Takes the Dog»
So He Takes the Dog
Jonathan Buckley
for Susanne Hillen and Bruno
Table of Contents
Cover Page
Title Page
Dedication
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
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29
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31
P.S. Ideas, interviews & features…
About the author
Narratives and Lives Jonathan Buckley talks to Louise Tucker
LIFE at a Glance
Ten Great Novels
Read on
Have You Read? Other Novels by Jonathan Buckley
If You Loved This, You Might Like…Chosen by Jonathan Buckley
About the Author
Praise
By the same author
Copyright
About the Publisher
1
This happened ten years ago, more or less. It’s mid-morning on the second day of January, in the modest but immaculate little bungalow that is home to Benjamin and Christine Kemp. Having clambered over the stile of New Year’s Day, the Kemps are now setting out on their trek across the bleak moorland of yet another year of conjoined medium-level misery. Christine is in the kitchen. A row of brass ornaments is laid out on a tea towel on the breakfast table and she is polishing her way down the line. Her husband is there as well, reading the paper. They have recently retired, both of them. For more than forty years, from the year before he married Christine, Benjamin worked for the local council, in the rates department; Christine typed and filed medical records at the hospital for a couple of decades, after raising their daughter, Elisabeth, who at the age of nineteen married a French shopkeeper she’d met on holiday six months previously. Elisabeth then went to live in a village near Limoges, and might as well be living in a village in Tibet for all her parents see of her nowadays.
Benjamin is trying to recall who gave them that horrible brass horse with the spindly legs and massive head when Christine opens a cupboard and the door squeaks. She sighs into the cupboard, and it’s like the chill breeze that heralds the storm. ‘Are you ever going to fix this?’ she asks.
‘Yes, dear,’ replies Benjamin.
‘And when would that be?’
‘Soon.’
‘How soon?’
‘This afternoon.’
‘That would be nice. Please do it.’
‘Yes, dear.’
She closes the cupboard and opens another one. There’s a sharp hiccup of irritation and she turns round, showing him the small round handle that’s just come off in her hand. She presents it to him, Exhibit 3227 in the never-ending case of Kemp versus Kemp. ‘Why does it always take you so long to do the tiniest little job?’
‘And why is the tiniest little job always my job?’
‘You said you’d do it. It’s not as if you’re rushed off your feet, is it?’
‘No, dearest. It’s not as if I’m rushed off my feet. You’re quite right.’
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘When are you going to fix it?’
‘This afternoon, dear. After I’ve fixed the squeak that I alone can fix.’ And so on. They have each other now, all day long. Just each other, all day, every day. It’s too much; it’s not enough.
The niggling becomes a raised-voice row, and as usual it’s Benjamin who retreats. What can he say? That he hasn’t fixed the bloody cupboard door because he’s bored out of his head, today as every day, the same as she is? What would be the point? He puts down the paper and leaves the room. ‘That’s right,’ Christine calls after him, ‘you just walk away.’ She hears him picking the keys off the table in the hall. ‘Where are you going?’
‘Out.’
‘Out where?’ He doesn’t answer. ‘What about that blasted dog?’ she yells. So he takes the dog, a decision which is really going to knock a divot out of his day.
Milo, that’s the dog’s name. Milo is a sullen and overfed mongrel, part labrador, part something very much less handsome. They get into the car, Milo beside his driver, and they drive down to the seafront, where Benjamin – seeing that the tide is out – turns eastwards, towards the headland, and parks in the very last bay, where the road comes to an end against the cliffs. They walk on the beach all the way to Straight Point, and there Benjamin takes a rest. He sits on a rock, feeds a handful of biscuits to the dog, stares at the sea. The scene could not be more appropriate to his mood: the sky is a filthy old sponge, the air is thick and cold and damp, the sea is an infinite pavement of grey sludge. It’s not truly raining, but there’s so much water in the air that he’s getting soaked as he sits. He watches Milo moping around the pools, picking a path through the dull green slime that coats the rocks. When you’re feeling despondent, gazing into a mirror can make you feel worse, and this is the same: the longer he stays here, the gloomier Benjamin is becoming. He whistles for the dog, and they set off back towards town.
It was a rough night, the night before, and the sea has dumped piles of bladderwrack and rubbish in a thick continuous scum at the foot of the cliffs. Nose lowered, Milo is following the line of seaweed and flotsam, pausing now and again to root about in whatever’s been washed up. Short of breath, Benjamin stops again, and the dog disappears into a corral of stone blocks that fell off the rockface in the autumn. When Benjamin reaches the stones, Milo has moved on: his tail is visible, about fifty yards off, wagging above a hummock of sand, between two car-sized slabs. Benjamin whistles, but Milo doesn’t come to him. Having been ignored three or four times, he walks a few steps closer and sees that the dog is standing in a long wide groove that the tide has scoured in the sand, and has shoved his muzzle into a well-stuffed black bin liner. Benjamin waits. The dog’s pulling something out of the bag, a thick cable or a length of stout rope, and he’s having a good chew at it. There’s no hurry. Benjamin waits, eyes closed, dozing on his feet.
Milo is still busy with the oversized rope when Benjamin opens his eyes again. The dog’s head is snapping from one side to the other, as if playing tug-of-war, and he’s making a low snarling noise, of a sort Benjamin has never heard from him before. ‘Here, boy,’ calls Benjamin, but there is no response. He’s covered about half the distance to the bin liner when he notices there’s something peculiar about the rope, about the rigidness of it, and the sharp angle at which it’s bending. A moment later he stops – or is stopped, because he’s reacting before he knows exactly what it is he’s reacting to. Then he sees that the thing that Milo’s gnawing isn’t a rope or a cable: it’s an arm, and the bin liner is a body in a waterlogged coat, partly covered by sand. The legs, in sodden grey tracksuit bottoms, are twisted as if they’ve no bones in them, and there’s a gash in one shin, with a mush of dark green stuff coming out, where something, possibly Milo, has taken a few bites out of it. Eyeless, teeth agape, a purple-black face lies wrapped in a veil of wet hair. Beside it a naked arm emerges from the sand at a low angle, the rotted palm directed skywards, as if to make a catch. Scraps of skin dangle from the fingertips, like a shredded glove of black muslin. Worm-like things, white and slick as lard, are squirming in the earhole.
Benjamin is in shock, as who wouldn’t be? He’s a gentle old man who has reached the age of sixty-seven without ever seeing anything very nasty, and this is very nasty indeed. It’s so nasty it’s not real. Traumatised, he’s looking at the mouldering head and the empty eyes, and it’s like a display from a chamber of horrors, a dummy of a man who’s been ripped to bits. He stares and stares, as if the body might go back to being a bin liner if he stares long enough, but soon he is seeing the corpse for what it is, a dead man, a real person destroyed. And while Benjamin is being transfixed by the dead man, Milo is continuing his wrestle with the cadaver’s right arm, a struggle that ends with a gristly tearing sound and the dog flying backwards, bringing away a hand and a length of forearm, with ribbons of muscle trailing off it.
The dog goes cantering off down the beach, with the limb in his jaws. ‘Come here,’ calls Benjamin. ‘Here. Here,’ he yells. Several repetitions later, Milo at last obeys, bringing the half-arm with him. ‘Drop, boy,’ Benjamin orders. ‘Drop. Drop. Drop.’ Milo cocks his head, inviting Benjamin to wrestle the thing from him. ‘Drop. For Christ’s sake, drop.’ The beast is not trained in any way. This is another of Benjamin’s multitudinous domestic crimes: he brings this flatulent mutt into the house and can’t be bothered teaching it the basics of civilised canine behaviour. A stick is needed, something he can chuck to make the dog lay down his plaything. From the ridge of tidal debris he takes a length of wood and flings it over Milo’s head. Milo watches it fly and fall to earth. A second stick is similarly spurned. ‘Drop. Good boy. Drop. Drop.’ As a rule Benjamin doesn’t swear. Benjamin swears once or twice a year, when things with Christine get out of control, but he’s almost hysterical now. ‘Drop the bloody thing. Please, please, please drop. Put it down. Down. Put the bloody thing down. Now. Drop it. Drop.’ Milo deposits the limb on the ground, gives it a shove with his snout, and grabs it the instant Benjamin makes a move.
All Benjamin can think to do is walk towards the town and hope that Milo, losing interest, will relinquish his burden en route. As fast as he can, which isn’t fast, he strides across the sand, attended by his faithful hound. Every now and then Milo deposits his portion of corpse on the ground, turns it with his nose, and takes it up again. ‘Leave it, for Christ’s sake,’ shouts Benjamin, looking the other way. The road isn’t much further. ‘Stay. Stay there,’ yells Benjamin. ‘Sit. Stay. For God’s sake, stay.’ Milo sits, and the moment Benjamin turns his back, the dog gets up again to follow in his master’s wake. They are about a quarter of a mile from the beach-grave when, out of the corner of his eye, Benjamin glimpses Milo running alongside, his head held up, with nothing waggling out of it. The half-arm has gone. Disinclined to search for it, Benjamin scans the environs quickly, then hurries towards the car.
And that’s how we found the body, in two instalments: most of it lying close to its burial place, ravaged by seagulls and platoons of crawling wildlife, in addition to the routine self-destruction of the dead; and the right forearm and hand, a few hundred yards away, lying on a cushion of seaweed and chewed to buggery.
2
You couldn’t have called it a face: stripped of most of its edibles, it was a bonehead with a partial cladding of jellied flesh, plus the semi-attached remnants of a beard. Putting a name to the wreckage, however, was easy. Ian, for one, needed no time to make the identification: seeing the beard and the rotten trainers and the ripped-up coat, he said straight away: ‘This will be Henry.’ Under the coat there was a rag of a T-shirt and under the rag of a T-shirt there was another rag of a T-shirt, and another one under that, half a dozen of them, all of them torn and the colour of butcher’s aprons that haven’t been washed for a year. ‘One of them will have SeaShed printed on it, I’ll bet you,’ said Ian. ‘It’s Henry.’ And when they got him on the slab and started unpeeling the wrappings, the last layer before the skin had SeaShed on it.
Some seaside towns have a dolphin that swims with the fishing boats, some have an inquisitive seal that’s famous for a summer, or a monster seagull that snatches burgers from holidaymakers’ hands. This place had Henry, the hobo of the beach. A lot of people knew Henry, by sight if nothing else. If you went down to the beach at the start of the day and waited, sooner or later you’d see Henry, guaranteed. Any day, whatever the weather, you’d see him. Rip van Winkle, he was known as, or Captain Birdseye, or Robinson Crusoe, or Howard, as in Howard Hughes.
He was slightly taller than average, about six foot, and broad in the shoulders, but skinny. He looked like a once-hefty man who’d been whittled down by years of living in the open air. When he walked his T-shirts used to flap on his body like towels on the back of a chair, and the legs of his jeans were mostly empty air. In his first summer here that’s what Henry wore, every day: a pair of jeans that ended up the colour of salt and frayed halfway up to his knees, and a T-shirt advertising some long-gone medical conference in Acapulco. When the weather cooled, Henry added another T-shirt, and he kept on adding layers until, deep into his first winter on the beach, someone gave him a second-hand overcoat, the one the corpse was wearing.
He was already old-looking when he arrived, but nobody knew how many years Henry had clocked up. Look at the face and you’d think he wasn’t far short of seventy, but living rough can easily add a decade to the appearance, so all you could say was that he was somewhere between his late fifties and late sixties, probably. Watch him walking, though, and you’d be confused, because Henry used to move across the beach at the speed of a man in his prime, a fit man at that. Like a mechanical scarecrow in overdrive he’d appear by the cliffs, and within five minutes he’d have covered half a mile of sand, as though there were somewhere he had to be, an urgent appointment at the other end of the beach. Head down, as if striding into a gale, he’d follow a line close to the water’s edge, with not a glance to right or left, even when the beach was packed, and he’d keep on going, slaloming through the children, all the way to the harbour and all the way back to Straight Point. No heatwave could slow him down and no downpour could put him off: alone on the beach there was Henry, his T-shirt plastered to his ribs, the tramp in a hurry, battering his head through the deluge. You could watch him until he was out of sight, fleeing into the rain and spray, and if you waited long enough you’d see him return, most likely, charging out of the mist, his beard like a hank of sea-soaked cloth.
Ian first came across Henry only a week after starting at the station. It was late on a Sunday afternoon in August and Ian was on the beach with that month’s girlfriend. Some kids were playing volleyball and Henry – coming from the direction of the harbour – was heading right for them, full throttle, eyes fixed on the ground. He was going to plough right into the net, thought Ian, and then, ten yards short, Henry suddenly came to a stop, an absolute standstill, as if there were a glass wall running across the beach and he’d just crashed into it. The kids had noticed him now, and they were looking at him, wondering what was up, waiting for him to move, but Henry was in a world of his own. He was like a man-sized puppet dangling from invisible strings: his mouth was hanging open, his arms dangling by his sides, and his eyes were staring over to his right, towards the town. Of course, there would have been plenty to stare at on a day like this, lots of of nicely filled swimwear, but Henry didn’t seem to be seeing any of the girls. Ian and his girlfriend were quite near, near enough to notice that Henry was wearing an Adidas trainer on one foot and a Reebok on the other, and from where they were sitting it seemed that Henry wasn’t looking at anything in particular: the eyes were wide open and aimed towards the road, but they were blank, like puppet eyes. And then he did this shudder or jump, as though someone had just clapped their hands by his ears, and he was off again, swerving round the volleyball game. Off around the headland he went, oblivious of everyone.
A few weeks later Ian encountered him again, in town this time, gazing into a shop window. Ian was having a moment with a local nuisance out on the street, about a car that’d been separated from its rightful owner, and on the other side of the road there stood Henry, reading a small ad in the window. It was only a postcard with a photo of a dinghy stuck to it, but all the time Ian and this lad were talking – a good ten minutes – Henry was studying the card. When he was done, Ian crossed over and took up a position a couple of shopfronts away. Something about this dinghy was really troubling Henry. His nose was on the glass and he was frowning as if the advert simply did not make any sense. For a couple of minutes Ian kept an eye on him. Henry didn’t budge: his face was locked in this expression of bewilderment. Finally Ian went up to him. ‘Everything all right, sir?’ he asked.
Henry turned, smiled graciously, said nothing.
‘Are you OK, sir?’
‘Yes. Thank you,’ Henry responded, nodding slowly, drawling the words as if, after deep thought, he was deciding that he was indeed, on balance, OK. ‘And you?’ Henry enquired. ‘Is everything all right with you?’
‘Yes, thank you, sir.’
‘Yes,’ Henry mused, giving Ian a benign, mild, examining kind of look that made Ian feel somewhat uncomfortable. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Good.’ It was a fresh day, a two-T-shirt day, and Henry was wearing a white buttoned-collar shirt over them, open like a jacket. Wavy lines of salt were all over his jeans, but the ensemble was remarkably clean, Ian observed. What’s more, Henry had whiter teeth than Ian, though his beard looked like something you’d find hanging off the walls of a cave and his hair was a mess, an inch-thick carpet of grey matting. You could lob a dart on to the top of his head and it wouldn’t reach the scalp. ‘Well,’ said Henry, pushing a shirt button through the wrong buttonhole, ‘I should be going. Thank you, officer.’
‘Just thought I’d check, sir.’
‘Yes,’ said Henry. ‘Thank you,’ he added, with a sincerity that wasn’t altogether convincing.
‘Hope you didn’t mind me asking.’
‘No,’ replied Henry vaguely, examining askance the photo of the dinghy. ‘No. Not at all.’ His fingers fastened the buttons of his cuffs, then worked them free again. ‘Well, goodbye,’ he said, and he sauntered away, gazing at the sky, in imitation of a carefree stroll, or that’s how it seemed.
This was the first occasion on which Ian spoke to Henry. Not long after, in January, the acquaintance was renewed, after a call from Mrs Darrow. Dear Mrs Darrow was a serial complainant. If a party started up within a mile of her house, Mrs Darrow would be on the phone within the half-hour to protest about the noise. If a camper van were to be left in a nearby car park overnight, Mrs D would be on the blower, reporting an invasion of tinkers. Now Mrs Darrow had called in to say that there was a naked man wading in the water. She could see him clearly from her window, cavorting in the sea, making a display of himself. Would we please do something about it right away? Ian was sent down to the beach to have a word with Henry.
It was a couple of degrees above freezing and an aggressive wind was slicing in off the sea. The water was chopping up heavily, but Henry was out there, frisking around in the buff while Ian stood on the shore, beckoning this nutcase to come out. Henry noticed Ian. He waved back at him and dived under, as if he thought Ian might be waving for the fun of it. Ian took a couple of steps into the water; he started yelling. Eventually Henry got the point and staggered out, starkers and shrivelled and turning blue.
‘Good morning,’ Ian called.
‘Good morning,’ Henry replied.
‘We meet again,’ said Ian, and Henry smiled, having no idea what Ian was talking about. ‘We’ve had a complaint, sir,’ Ian went on.
Long pause. ‘I see.’
‘From a lady.’
Longer pause. ‘I see.’
‘About your attire. Lack of.’
Even longer pause. ‘Yes.’
‘I’m afraid I’ll have to ask you to cover yourself up.’
Very long pause. ‘Someone has complained?’
‘Yes, sir. A lady.’
Henry looked around. There was no one in sight except Ian.
‘I take your point, sir,’ said Ian. ‘But the lady has seen you and has lodged a complaint.’
Once more Henry considered the vast frigid vacancy of the beach. ‘Got a telescope, has she?’
‘I think we must assume that she has.’
‘And I’m blocking the view?’
‘So it would appear.’
Henry’s skin had by now turned the colour of a dead mackerel and his private parts looked like three tiny acorns in a nest of singed grass. He was on the brink of hypothermia but he was talking to Ian as if they had just happened to bump into each other on a street corner. ‘Can’t she look the other way?’
‘It would appear not. Where are your clothes, sir?’ asked Ian, by now alarmed at Henry’s hue.
Henry pointed inland, but Ian could not make out what he was pointing at. Together they walked across the sand, Ian and this shaggy nude lunatic, chatting about the weather. On a low mound of sand there lay a small pile of clothes and a towel that would have done fine for lightly rubbing down a chihuahua after its bath. Ian handed him the tiny towel and Henry took it. He held it in one hand, by his side. They regarded Henry’s meagre wardrobe and the big red nylon bag lying nearby – a laundry sack, which Henry used to sleep in, until someone gave him a proper sleeping bag.
‘Do you have any swimming trunks, sir?’
‘No, I do not,’ Henry regretfully admitted.
The next day Ian bought him a pair of swimming trunks, but before long Mrs D was back on the line, offended again by the exposure of Henry’s genitals. Ian returned to the beach. The wind was Siberian and the waves were going twenty different directions at once. Henry was frolicking in groin-high water, slamming his head in the foam. Summoned, he trudged out of the sea. ‘Henry, you’re underdressed,’ Ian observed. ‘You’re not wearing them.’
At a loss, Henry frowned. ‘What?’
‘Your nice new trunks,’ Ian explained. ‘The trunks I got for you.’
‘Yes?’ Henry responded, still baffled.
‘The trunks I got you last week?’
‘Yes,’ said Henry, the light dawning.
‘You’re not wearing them.’
‘No, I’m not.’
‘She’s complained again.’
A blank pause. ‘Who has?’
‘The woman.’
‘The woman?’
‘The lady with the telescope. The one who complained last week. Before we acquired the trunks.’
Long pause. ‘I see.’
‘What’s the problem? Don’t you like them? I thought you liked them.’
‘Oh no. I like them.’
‘So where are they? Over there?’ asked Ian, pointing towards a dash of red on the rocks.
‘Yes,’ Henry confirmed.
‘Why not there?’ asked Ian, pointing to Henry’s nether regions.
‘They’re not dry.’
‘Come again?’
‘It’s a horrible feeling, putting on wet clothes.’
Ian sympathised, but insisted that Henry must make himself decent. This was not to be their last conversation about Henry’s swimwear.
For almost three years Henry was here, but he was in residence intermittently, which is why nobody was worried when he’d been missing for a while. He’d left the town before, for weeks at a time, months at a stretch, so no one thought anything of it. But it was odd that he’d gone missing in winter, because previously it was always in summer that he went away.
3
The post-mortem established that Henry was not as old as had been thought, probably nearer fifty than sixty, and that he’d been under the sand for a couple of weeks or thereabouts, before the sea scooped him out to lie in the open air, where he’d remained for a day or so before the arrival of Milo. It was also discovered that he had died because someone had inserted a knife into his chest cavity. Examination of his clothing revealed two small slits in the outer T-shirt; in the layer underneath there were two matching slits, and so on, all the way through to the flesh. Decomposition and wildlife activity had made a mess of the flesh itself, but not enough to eradicate wholly the two wounds, which had been inflicted by a thin-bladed weapon held in the attacker’s right hand. One blow had pierced the heart; the other struck a rib, chipping the bone. No signs of defence injuries were discovered on the remnants of his hands, so the attack seemed to have been sudden and brief.
Henry slept on the beach near Straight Point, or in the grass above the cliffs, but most often under the bushes of The Maer, so that’s where we searched for his belongings, though nobody could be sure what belongings there were to find, other than the sleeping bag: the superfluous swimming trunks might have been discarded long ago and it was possible that every item of Henry’s clothing was on his back when he was found. For a whole day a squad combed The Maer in the quest for Henry’s estate, while another squad worked out from the crime scene, looking for a weapon. The next day we began to trawl the whole beach. Come nightfall we’d gathered a few dozen bottles and cans, a couple of camping gas cylinders, three paperbacks, half a deckchair, a syringe, enough driftwood to build a replica of the Golden Hind, and a backpack containing one lady’s hairbrush, one condom (unused), twenty-four pence in loose change and a substantial quantity of sand. And no weapon.
At this stage of a homicide enquiry we should have been talking to the victim’s family, talking to his friends, establishing the patterns of his behaviour, his habits and routines and so on. In this case, however, we were a few hundred yards behind the starting line, because we didn’t yet know the man’s full name. No identification was found on the body, so we had no route to the next of kin, and there were no known friends to interview. We knew something of the pattern of his days – sleep, go for a walk, sleep – but that was the lot. So George Whittam decides to call in the press.
Within the hour Ronnie Houghton arrives at the incident room. For the past couple of years, after a decade in telesales and advertising freesheets, Ronnie has been reporting on the misdemeanours of our district’s druggies, shoplifters, joyriders and after-hours brawlers. He’s thirty or thereabouts but as eager as a twenty-year-old, and just as naïve. One day, he knows, he’s going to get the story that will bring him the big-money transfer to London and a national byline. Eyes twitching at the thought that this might be the big one, Ronnie absorbs the facts, or the selection of facts that George has judged it useful to broadcast at this point. When the battery of his tape recorder goes flat, one minute into the briefing, Ronnie switches to shorthand, scribbling as though he’s taking dictation from God Almighty. A minute later it’s over. Half a page of notes and that’s it. ‘OK. OK,’ says Ronnie, trying not to show his disappointment, perusing his scrawl. ‘OK. I’ve got all that. Got a picture?’ he asks, but of course we haven’t got a picture – that’s one reason he’s here. SHOCK DEATH OF LOCAL CHARACTER is Ronnie’s headline. ‘We’re appealing to the public for information. If anyone out there has a recent picture of Henry, we’d like them to pass it on to us,’ says Detective Chief Inspector Whittan (sic).
That’s on the Saturday, and the next day the Reverend Beal makes his contribution. Gas heaters beside the altar supply a dash of warm colour but no heat that’s perceptible to the congregation. The windows are trickling and the air has a taste like fog. Today, therefore, only the hardcore are in attendance, packed for warmth into the front four pews, except for young Michael Trethowen, also known as Mystic Mike, who’s occupying his traditional berth nearer the back, swaddled in the customary brown duffel coat. Beal moves things along as briskly as is decent, but he takes his time with the sermon. There must be a heater up in the pulpit. It’s a head-numbingly tedious recital on the theme of the new year, the hopes thereof, the challenges thereof, the responsibilities thereof, et cetera, et cetera. Towards the end of his oration he mentions the dreadful event. His voice drops to a hush of compassion, his face is the face of a man bruised by the sufferings of the world. He urges us to take to heart the lessons of Henry’s lonely life and lonely death, to think about what his death tells us about our society, to keep the poor man and his family (wherever they may be) in our thoughts, to pray that the killer be apprehended soon. All nod solemnly, thinking: ‘Amen to the last bit anyway.’ Alice, however, doesn’t nod when told to think of Henry, even though she’s had Henry in her thoughts for longer than any of them. She simply closes her eyes and meshes her fingers on her lap, and it’s as if she’s no longer listening to Beal but instead is in touch with the soul of Henry, or calling for him silently. Her face has no expression that you could describe. It’s perfectly still and beautiful, and distant, and almost frightening. It’s like looking at the face of a praying woman on a tomb from centuries ago.
Business concluded, the Reverend Beal takes up his station outside the door for the leave-taking. Shuffling his feet on the gravel, he shakes hands with them all, has a few words for everyone, and they in turn have a few words for him.
‘Lovely sermon.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And how is your daughter?’
‘Fine, thank you.’ A halo of breath hangs around his head. ‘Keep moving,’ he’s thinking. ‘Thank you and keep moving.’ It’s like prize-giving day without the prizes. But he singles out Alice for a lingering clasp and meaningful eyes, as if she has an understanding that the rest of them lack, or perhaps it’s just because she’s the wife of a man who, he suspects, hasn’t yet found a lodging for Christ in his heart. ‘A ghastly business. Ghastly,’ he says, with a three-second look of pity. Alice bows her head and says nothing.
4
Benjamin Kemp had nothing substantial to add to his original statement. With wide and watery eyes he stared aghast at Milo and the rug on which he was slumbering, as if the dog had brought Henry’s remains into the house and spread them out around him. ‘I saw him a few times, walking on the beach,’ said Benjamin, shaking his head disbelievingly. He kept scratching the back of his head and there was a tremble round his mouth when he wasn’t talking. Christine sat on the chair opposite, watching her husband’s quivering mouth, and there was no discernible affection in her eyes, none at all. She seemed embarrassed by his lack of backbone and annoyed by the trouble he was putting her to. Looking out of the window, she frowned at the falling rain, vexed by what the day was up to. ‘And what about you, Mrs Kemp?’ asked Ian, pretending not to have noticed the discordancy of the household. ‘Is there anything you can tell us about Henry?’ She blinked, frozenly amazed by the question. Why on earth should she know anything about the disreputable old codger?
Five minutes later she was showing us out. ‘I’m sure someone will be able to give you more help,’ she said at the door, in apology for her useless spouse.
We begin the house-to-house slog, to assemble the victim profile. One of the first calls is at the home of Mr and Mrs Fazakerly, whose home overlooks The Maer. Kevin Fazakerly is an independent financial adviser; Sophie, his wife, arranges big parties, conferences, weddings, business events and so on. Lucrative lines of work, evidently. The driveway is fancy brick, scrubbed clean as the day it was laid, and the front of the house – a sort of neo-Georgian mansion, but with extra-wide windows – is likewise immaculate. No salt damage to the paintwork and it appears that no seagull has emptied its bowels anywhere on this patch of real estate. Inside, as expected, it’s a show home: you’re tempted to touch the walls to check if they’re still wet. Instantly you know there are no kids. Sophie ushers us into the kitchen, which is not a lot bigger than a squash court. We sit around the breakfast bar, a little pier of top-grade Scandinavian timber. You could perform open-heart surgery in this room, with no risk of infection.
Kevin and Sophie are both in their mid forties. Sophie is wearing tight pale jeans and white socks and narrow little white trainers with very white laces, and up top there’s an odd bright-blue zippered cardigan thing, with the zip pulled right up to the neck. She’s as tightly done up as a parachute in a backpack, so you get the feeling she might inflate to three times her size when she gets undressed. When you look at Kevin you think of some fourth-division American golfer, runner-up in the North Dakota Invitational, 1986. His hair has a retro ruler-straight parting and sticks out at the front in a little horizontal quiff, and over his shirt he has this horrible salmon-pink floppy cashmere jumper. The jeans are a bit baggier than Sophie’s, but precisely the same shade. We receive the impression that they’ve got things to say on the issue of Henry. Tea is made, biscuits arranged on a plate that perhaps has been designed solely for this function: the Jan-Arne Simonsen Biscuit Plate, £100, plus postage and packing. It is suggested we carry our cups through to the living room. We troop across the acres of laminated floor. The living room is a little longer than the driveway and under-furnished with angular scarlet chairs and a pair of low-backed sofas, all of the same design.
Side by side on one of the sofas sit Kevin and Sophie, facing the two policemen. ‘Isn’t it terrible?’ says Sophie, stroking a thumbnail rapidly with the thumb of her other hand. ‘How could it happen?’ she wants to know. Kevin pats her knee consolingly and concurs about the terribleness of what has happened, its incomprehensibility. ‘It’s awful,’ says Sophie. ‘Just awful.’ Sophie examines Kevin’s hand – his fingernails are pathologically well-maintained, the sort of hands you see in adverts for very expensive watches. ‘To think it happened on our doorstep.’ It’s another boisterous evening. The rain is ticking quickly on the windows and the trees in the front garden are in spasm. Sophie touches Kevin’s hand and he pats her knee; she touches his hand, he pats her knee. They can’t get through a minute without touching each other. When a gust rattles something metallic up the drive, Sophie grabs at a cushion. It’s as if the monster’s out there in the gloom, making an assessment of the security arrangements, and we’re their last protection.
‘His name was Henry,’ Kevin tells us, but he doesn’t know his surname. ‘He used to pitch camp out on The Maer,’ he adds, looking to his wife for verification, and Sophie agrees that Henry used to sleep on The Maer. At night, she adds, they would sometimes see him settling down for the night, in the shelter of the trees. Once or twice he waved to her, when she was at the bedroom window, and she waved back, but they never spoke. ‘Kept himself to himself,’ observes Kevin.
‘Nobody knew much about him,’ Sophie contributes. Kevin tries to recall the last time he saw Henry, but cannot; Sophie also tries, and sadly draws a blank. Twenty minutes we’re there, learning nothing, reassuring the Fazakerlys that they are not going to be murdered in their beds, but to lock up at night anyway. Of course they’ll lock up at night. They always do, always have done. Kevin as a kid used to lock his toy cupboard at night, you just know he did. They’re more likely to piss on their twelve-foot hand-woven organically dyed Turkish rug than leave a window open after bedtime.
We might as well have been interviewing ourselves, but Ian loves these house calls, even if he doesn’t take a liking to the residents, which is the case in about fifty per cent of our visits. He gets a buzz from checking out where people live, because Ian is convinced that a very large proportion of our fellow citizens are less than entirely sane, and it’s only when you get inside their houses that you see what lies behind the day-to-day normalness. Sometimes you have to look hard, but there’s inevitably something, a crack in the mask. And as far as Ian is concerned, our fruitless session with Mr and Mrs Fazakerly has proved his case. ‘Weird as Mormons,’ he murmurs, the moment Sophie has closed the door. ‘Did you see the framed menus? In the hall?’
‘I did.’
‘Signed by the chef, for fuck’s sake.’
‘And his handshake? Get more grip from an empty glove.’
‘Creepy creepy creepy. But’, Ian goes on, raising a finger for the point that would settle the issue, ‘did you clock the microwave?’
‘Everyone’s got a microwave.’
‘Yeah. But on top of it? Obvious as a bus.’
‘What?’
‘You didn’t notice?’
He taps a fingertip beside an eye, dipping an eyebrow to signify shrewdness. ‘Nothing wasted on this boy. Chief Inspector Mowbray, the early years. You were there.’
‘Yes, OK. What was it?’
‘An item from Peggy’s purple shelf. Debbie Does Dallas.’
‘Who’s Peggy?’
In the drive, under a sort of extended porch, there is a new Mazda MX5, gold. ‘This’ll be hers,’ Ian instantly concludes. ‘The master vehicle is in the garage, bet you. Kev’s more a Mercedes kind of guy. This dinky wee machine is the lady wife’s.’
‘Who’s Peggy?’
Ian gives the Mazda a once-over. He peers through the windscreen at something on the front seat, putting the finishing touches to his profile of the Fazakerlys. ‘Granny Thistle,’ he answers. ‘She’s on the list for tomorrow morning,’ and then he explains.
The first thing you need to know about Peggy Thurlow, says Ian, is that she regards it as a point of honour never to be nice to tourists, no matter how servile they may be. She’s never been known to smile at anyone who is clearly Not From Around Here, and has a reputation for being less than overwhelmingly warm to most non-outsiders too. Peggy’s views on citizenship are hardline: you don’t really belong to this town unless you have roots that go back three generations or more. Peggy’s roots reach back to the nineteenth century and the family of her husband – the late Mr Thurlow, a cheery old fellow by all accounts, whose love of Peggy was for many people one of life’s great mysteries – have been here since the Jurassic era. Pure-bred indigenous customers are generally on firmer ground with Peggy, but she’s prone to sudden reversals. Just because you’re in her good books on a Tuesday, there’s no guarantee that you’ll still be in favour come Friday, because Peggy is a gossip magnet and as changeable as a baby. Peggy has something on everyone and you’re guilty until proven innocent in her private judicial system. She’s either for you or against you, with very little in the way of middle ground. Someone passes on a rumour that you’ve been hitting the bottle and yelling at the kids – you’re cast out into the darkness, pending evidence to the contrary. The warmth of human kindness is buried pretty deep within the heart of Peggy, but if you’re one of the happy band that has earned her approval, she couldn’t be nicer. You want a box of grade-A Cuban cigars for your recently promoted husband? Peggy will get them for you. You need an obscure magazine, Peggy will supply it for you: Japanese Malt Whisky Review, The Kite-Flyer, Canoes and Canoeists – no problem. She also has a sideline in personal finance, for those of the favoured few whose pay packets occasionally fail to meet outgoings. Rumour has it she once loaned a client a couple of grand, at very advantageous rates, to subsidise the acquisition of an E-Type Jag. Then again, woe betide anyone who doesn’t repay on the stipulated date. Some hapless sod once settled up a couple of days past the deadline and Peggy burned his ears off with a lecture on the virtue of thrift.
When we walk into Peggy’s shop the next morning, her reaction seems to suggest that she thinks she might recognise Ian, but she holds back the half-smile until he flips the badge. Ask a little kid to describe a lovely old granny and Peggy is more or less what you’d get: about five-one, approximately oval in silhouette, purple-grey candy-floss hair, soft fat face, tweedy skirt and chunky cable-knit cardigan with big leather buttons. ‘And what can I do for you gentlemen?’ she asks, and her eyes have the look that you see in people’s eyes when they learn that some unexpected money is coming to them. She’s standing behind the counter and right behind her head, at eye level, is Peggy’s purple shelf. There’s a tray of batteries and a selection of key rings and cigarette lighters, and alongside them there are Peggy’s adult videos. The slipcases have been removed and masking tape stuck on to the spines, and Peggy has written non-offensive versions of the titles on to the masking tape – or rather, that seems to be the idea, but the lettering is in thick inch-high capitals, purple, and even a ten-year-old slow-wit could work them out: S ME, F ME; EBONY GANG-B; SURFER F-FEST. It’s hard to imagine how it goes. What do the grubby punters say to her? ‘Box of matches, packet of extra-strong mints, Exchange & Mart. Oh, and Butt-F Bonanza up there, next to Keep on F-ing. Any good? Really? OK, I’ll take that as well, while you’re at it.’ Perhaps the cuddly little old porn peddler assigns you to the ranks of the damned if you ask.
Sure enough, Peggy has something on Henry – not much, but more than anyone else so far. Every twenty days, ‘regular as clock-work’, Henry would come into the shop to buy a packet of twenty cigarettes. Surprisingly, given Henry’s rootless status, Peggy seems to have been well disposed towards him: he was her only customer for unfiltered cigarettes, she says, and she always made sure she had a packet in stock, just for Henry. His name was Henry Yarrow and he used to be an engineer, but what kind of engineer, and where he was an engineer, and when, she couldn’t say. He was from Minehead, she knew that much. Earlier that morning we’d been talking to a neighbour of the Fazakerlys and she’d said that she’d heard from someone that Henry’s name was McBain, or McCain, or McSwain, or something like that. Beginning with Mc and ending with -ain, anyway. Had Peggy heard that his name was Yarrow or had he told her himself? ‘He told me that was his name,’ Peggy replies, the implication being that she is not the sort of person to pass off mere hearsay as fact.
‘Definitely Yarrow?’ asks Ian, making a note.
Peggy bristles at this, as if she’d been accused of lying. Offended, she locks her arms across her chest, a picture of indignant rectitude, with her library of red-hot muck behind her. But Ian soon wins her round, thanking her for her valuable information, nodding at the name he’s written on his pad, as if it’s a word in code and any minute now the letters will rearrange themselves and give us a vital clue. Gratitude accepted, Peggy gives us her personal impressions of Mr Yarrow: very polite, always cheerful, didn’t smell at all, except sometimes in summer, but we’re all a bit ripe then, aren’t we? Then she starts on the questioning. Where exactly was he found? When? Who found him? What did we think had happened? Any leads? Ian fends her off, with heavy use of boyish charm. In the end she settles for knowing that Henry wasn’t freshly dead when the unfortunate member of the public stumbled across him. ‘Poor man,’ Peggy laments. ‘Poor poor man.’ And her head does this slow sad shake as if her good angel is whispering in her ear: ‘Shake head sadly now.’ More than anything, you know she’s irked at not having winkled more information from us.
We resumed the house-to-house trudge and Ian soon had another case for his gallery of the weird. Within sight of the Fazakerlys’ palace there was the home of the hearty Miss Ryle, who had turned her residence into something out of Heidi. On the outside all was normal: an ordinary pebble-dashed semi, with a neat little garden out front. Inside, it was all wooden walls, wooden ceilings, damned great cowbells hanging in the hall and on the landings, photos and terrible paintings of snow and ice and rocks in every room, and all the way up the stairs. In the kitchen there were dozens of bits of cloth in frames, stitched with rustic sayings and proverbs in German and French, with borders of tiny flowers. Most of an entire wall was taken up by a huge aerial photo of some mountain-top hut, with glaciers left, right and centre, and above the fireplace in the front room there was an enormous curved horn, a monster trumpet, as long as an oar. ‘Makes your head swim when you blow it,’ grinned Miss Ryle, as if confessing to a penchant for cocaine. Miss Ryle knows nothing about Henry. She was in Switzerland for much of December, she told us. ‘I’m always in Switzerland,’ she admitted cheerily, waving a stout arm in the direction of the mighty trumpet.
And down the road, three minutes’ walk from the Heidi house, there lived Miss Leith, similarly nearing fifty, similarly single, but with a liking for inappropriately vivid make-up and fuchsia-coloured shoes. Miss Leith also had a prodigious fondness for those disgusting little porcelain figurines of cheeky shepherds wooing busty peasant lasses, and cute old hobos offering roses to winsome young lovelies on park benches, and rosy-cheeked moppets with baskets of kittens. It was like sitting in a souvenir shop, surrounded by display cases full of heart-tugging tat. From Miss Leith, however, we learned that Henry’s name was Henry Ellis, or so she’d heard from someone. She can’t recall who that someone might have been.
Not far from Miss Leith and Miss Ryle lived Mr Jonathan Imber – early fifties, also unmarried, and quite understandably so. Mr Imber, a bearded gentleman, had turned his house into a shrine to Old Spice, the famous fragrance for men. He had assembled what he believed to be (and who are we to argue?) the country’s (possibly Europe’s, but not – sadly – the world’s) most comprehensive collection of Old Spice receptacles (not merely aftershave – talcum powder, too, and deodorants), dating back to the year of the brand’s creation. Misinterpreting a facial twitch as a glimmer of interest from Ian, he began to talk us through the Old Spice story. For Mr Imber the changing shape of his aftershave flasks is a story as engrossing as the evolution of Homo sapiens. ‘My little pastime,’ he called it, and suddenly ‘pastime’ became the most miserable word in the English language, a word for people who have not enough in their lives for their allotted time, for whom time is something that has to be got through. Mr Imber knew Henry by sight, but knew nothing about him; he didn’t even know he was dead.
A check was run, and there was no Yarrow family in the Minehead area that was missing a senior member who was once an engineer, or missing a senior member who was anything, come to that. ‘Interesting,’ Ian remarked after morning prayers, after we’d been told the Minehead search had drawn a blank. ‘Why would he lie about his name?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Covering his tracks.’
‘Possible. Or he’s just saying, “Fuck off and leave me alone.” Could be that.’
‘Why the different names? Why not stick to one?’
‘Prevent himself getting bored. I don’t know.’
We had no idea. A dozen people were working on Henry and nothing but Henry. By day four we had seven different surnames, and we were getting nowhere.
Then, late one afternoon at the end of the first week, a woman came into the North Street station, laden with carrier bags. ‘I don’t know if this will be any use,’ she sighed, dumping the shopping. She pushed an envelope across the counter. Inside there was a photograph of the woman and two small girls stamping on the ruins of a sandcastle. Sweet-looking kids, her daughters presumably, deduced the lad on duty, not getting it. ‘There,’ said the woman, putting a fingernail on the picture. ‘I think that’s him, the dead man. The tramp.’ In the background, obscured by sea mist and out of focus for good measure, stood someone who might well have been Henry, perhaps watching the girls. The face wasn’t much more than a beard and two dots for eyes, but the boys in the darkroom blew it up, cropped it, did a bit of magic on it to make the features crisper, and what you had in the end still wasn’t a terrific portrait but it was a lot better than nothing, and it was all we had, so it was printed and made into a flyer, and up it went on a hundred lamp-posts.
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