Engleby (39 page)

Once in the passenger seat, she made the best of it, saying how grateful she was and what a lucky coincidence it had been.

I was overwhelmed by her presence.

And in a minute, maybe two, it was over – as we crossed the river bridge. The ridiculous shortness of our journey together summed up everything that I hated about time and living.

It enraged me. When we came to the junction with Chesterton Road, I turned left in order to loop round the short one-way system, back eastward for a bit, then right and down into the quiet terrace where she lived.

But I didn’t loop round. I was too angry. I went left up Victoria Road, then swung right at random, by a church – where else – and drove hard through a modern estate, then left and right and onto Histon Road, going north. It was late and the road was clear and I put my right foot down hard.

Jennifer began protesting, asking me to stop. Her charm was gone. By taking the wrong road then accelerating hard I’d forfeited the intimacy we’d had for that wonderful two minutes. The only reason I’d not taken her home was because I wanted to keep her with me; I didn’t mean any harm. But the more I drove, the more it became impossible to return: she was backing me into a corner, and I didn’t know how to deal with her.

She’d become a whiny, frightened, selfish child – though you could tell she didn’t know quite how frightened to be. Sometimes she’d stop saying things like, ‘For Christ’s sake, you lunatic. Just stop’, and try to be reasonable or what she thought of as charming. ‘Listen, Mike. I don’t know what you’re playing at, but, look, let’s just stop and talk about it.’

But she wasn’t charming any more. Not to me. She was no more charming than the man behind the counter in the Basingstoke record shop.

Then she tried being silently sulky for a bit as I drove through Histon. It’s extraordinary the faith that women place in sulking. Someone should tell them that far from impressing people, filling them with remorse or changing their minds, this routine merely makes them – the sulkers – look ridiculous.

It wasn’t a road I knew. It wasn’t one of those that led to Over Wrought or Nether World or any of those villages with their Wheatsheafs and Red Lions. It was a flat Fenland strip and the large villages were stuck to it like settlements on a trade route, though with gnomes in their lamplit gardens.

In one of them – Cottingham, Cotham? – I swung off the main road down a village street with a signpost bearing two names I couldn’t read. As we left the village, the road was narrower, with higher hedgerows, a proper country lane at last, dark and uninhabited.

Then we came too soon to the outskirts of another village, Rampton, and I was furious that nowhere was there open country, fields and fens and trees. Everywhere there seemed to be cheap buildings, low shelters for people who would never raise their eyes.

By this time, Jennifer had started screaming and swearing at me, hammering my arms on the steering wheel. She was trying to impress on me how desperate she was, how serious this was, that she was prepared to risk making us crash. I pushed her away.

In the village there were no lights on, but I saw a fork ahead. The upper road led straight out again, presumably, and on to the second named village I’d seen on the previous signpost. The lower road was marked ‘Dead end’ or ‘No through road’ – or something that suggested it went nowhere. So I swung down it. A dead end was what I wanted. I had to shut her up. I couldn’t go on driving all night, and her hysterical behaviour had left me no escape back into normality.

The road bent at right angles to the left. It stopped being made up and became concrete. I switched the headlights on to full beam and about a hundred yards ahead I could see that it stopped altogether and became a farm track. This really was the end.

I lay on the bed in my Bayswater flat, panting and sweating under the assault of memory.

Presumably it was the word ‘Rampton’, the name of the village, which I’d heard when Deputy Chief Constable Bolton mentioned it, that had slowly worked its way through my mind’s defences and precipitated the recall.

What I didn’t know for sure was whether the sequence of events it had eventually unlocked in my memory was a true or false account of what had taken place.

I drank more whisky and eventually I slept.

Two months passed and the story went cold. There were no arrests and no developments.

Then I went into work one Friday, roughly ten weeks after the police press conference, to find a message on my desk from Felicity Maddox, the sarcastic newsroom secretary.

‘Please ring Chief Inspector Cannon. Urgent.’ There was a number, and then, still in Felicity’s writing, ‘He says “confidentiality guaranteed” !? F.’

I could feel her eyes on me as I picked the message slip up off the desk, but I showed no emotion.

‘When did this guy ring?’ I called over.

‘It says on the paper,’ said Felicity. ‘Under “Date and Time of Call”, oddly enough.’

‘Right.’ It was the day before. ‘I’m going out now, I’ve got to go and see someone, so—’

‘Aren’t you going to ring your policeman?’

‘No, no, that’s just about a story I’m working on, a long-term project. There’s no rush. I’ll call him later.’

‘Can’t think why you bothered coming in.’

‘It’s for the banter, Felicity. I can’t resist it.’ Her own coin, I thought, but it didn’t seem to register.

My heart was squeezed every time I thought of the word ‘Urgent’. There was something about it. I couldn’t pretend to myself that Cannon just wanted a chat for old times’ sake.

I took the Central Line home and tried to put my flat in order. I wrote cheques for a couple of utility bills; I turned off the boiler and made sure all the windows were double-locked. I took the photobooth picture of Jennifer with Anne out from my desk drawer, took it over to the window overlooking the garden square and looked at it.

There she was: my fate, my self. I kissed her face. Or rather, I kissed the cheap photopaper that had been squeezed damp from the side of the machine. I felt no remorse or sadness.

Then I took my file of newspaper cuttings about Jen’s disappearance and put a match to them in the fireplace.

After a moment’s hesitation, I threw the picture in as well. Now she was gone. The edge didn’t curl up as it’s meant to; but I did see Jen’s eyes look into mine one last time. I felt as though someone was prising my ribs apart with their bare hands.

When everything was quite burned, I swept the ashes out and emptied the pan down the toilet, which I flushed until every speck was gone.

I wondered what to do about Margaret. Best to find out what Cannon wanted first. I dialled the number and after being put on hold for a minute, got through to a young woman.

‘Can I speak to Chief Inspector Cannon, please?’

‘Who’s speaking, please?’

‘Michael Watson.’

‘Will he know what it’s in regard to?’

I breathed in hard. ‘I’m not able to predict that.’

‘Pardon?’

‘I’m returning his call.’

There was a pause, then suddenly Cannon was on the line.

‘Mr Engleby. Thank you for calling back.’ He sounded exhilarated. ‘We’ve had the devil’s own job tracking you down. Thank goodness for your old school. They pointed us in the right direction.’

Cannon had become more confident with age; he’d also acquired a bit of bogus golf-club polish to his voice.

‘Good,’ I said.

‘I expect you know what I’m calling in connection with.’

‘Not really.’

‘The case of Jennifer Arkland. I’m sure you remember.’

‘Yes. Of course.’

‘One or two things have come to light. I’d very much like to talk to you again. I’d like you to come up here and see me.’

‘I can’t come today.’

‘Yes, you can, Mr Engleby. I’m sending a car for you. Are you at home?’

‘Yes.’

‘My man will be with you in a few minutes. I didn’t come to your newspaper because I didn’t want to make a scene in front of your colleagues. I have been requested by the family to play this very low key for reasons of press and publicity. In return for that, I’d appreciate your full co-operation. Please don’t leave your house. Otherwise I shall issue a warrant for your arrest. I can play it rough if you prefer.’

‘I understand.’

I put the phone down. I felt all right. He wasn’t arresting me; it was all quite amicable. If they really thought I’d killed Jennifer, if they really had hard evidence, they’d have marched in and grabbed me. They’d have taken no chances. That’s how the plods operate.

I called Margaret at work and told her I was going to Edinburgh and that I’d ring the next day. She received this news coolly, but things were not that good between us since I’d been spending less time in Holloway. I was relieved that she wasn’t too inquisitive.

The bell rang and two reasonable policemen took me away to a tactfully unmarked maroon Volvo. We stopped for a sandwich and fizzy orange drink at a garage in East Finchley before we hit the North Circular. By two o’clock I was seated in the interview room in Mill Road police station.

A constable in shirtsleeves sat with me, saying nothing. I had a cup of tea in a styrofoam cup. I asked if I could smoke and he nodded, so I lit up a Rothman’s, knocking the ash into a little tin ashtray on the table. One wall was clouded glass and I presumed it was a one-way, though that seemed a bit hi-tech for Mill Road. There was a cassette recorder on the table, housed in an odd, non-commercial wooden box.

What was I thinking as I waited? I don’t know. Does one ever really think? I seemed just to drift through it. In order to keep itself functioning under pressure, the brain releases chemicals that make the bizarre and the frightening seem normal. The Nat Sci Tripos taught me that homo saps who did not have this brain function were unsuccessful in reproduction, presumably because they couldn’t handle stress and got themselves killed a lot by animals or other saps. So we who were chosen, we survivors, have it in spades.

Oddly enough, it can work too well. It can sometimes render crises not just normal or dealable-with, but strangely flat. I had to keep on reminding myself to stay alert – that I was in danger.

Cannon came in, all beer belly and bluster. He shook my hand, sat down and lit up with orange fingers.

‘See you haven’t stopped either,’ he said with a grin. This was a false note because he didn’t know I smoked; I hadn’t had one when he came to my room in college. He hadn’t offered me one.

He swung his feet up onto the table. He was wearing brown suede shoes with uneven wear to the soles.

‘So let’s have a chat about Jennifer, shall we, Mike? Hang about. Better turn the old squawkbox on, hadn’t we? Is there a tape in, John? Jolly good. Here we go then. Date, 19 June, 1988. Time 14.24 hours. Those present . . .’

‘What happened to Peck?’ I said.

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Peck. The policeman who was in charge before.’

‘He took early retirement on health grounds. He lives in Huntingdon. Follows the case, though. Anyway, Mike, I’ve been having a little think about you. Why did you change your name to Watson?’

‘I got a job for a magazine, but they wanted to hire women. So I took the name Michèle Watt. It was a joke. It was a mixture between my own first name and the surname of a famous scientist.’ I paused. ‘James Watt. But the magazine misprinted it as “Watts”. Then eventually it wasn’t necessary to pretend to be a woman any more. And I moved to another paper, where I wanted to be a man again, but my professional identity was sort of bound up with this Michèle Watts, so I just changed it as little as I could to make a clean start.’

Cannon looked at me, then at the tape machine, as though to make sure it had got all that down OK. He raised an eyebrow.

‘So you pretended to be a girl, then there was a misprint, then you pretended to be someone else again. Have I got that right?’

‘More or less.’

‘I see. It wasn’t because you were trying to disguise who you really were?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Did you change your name by deed poll?’

‘No.’

‘But you have credit cards in the name of M.K. Watson.’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s a fraud, Mike, isn’t it?’

‘It’s harmless.’

‘Ever been in trouble with the police – under either of your names?’

‘No.’

‘Never caught, were you? I asked around the shops a bit. At the time Jennifer disappeared. I showed your picture to a few people. Off-licences and that. I noticed the booze in your room – vermouth and gin – and I wasn’t sure how a boy on a full grant could afford it.’

‘I worked in the holidays.’

‘Some of the shopkeepers weren’t happy with you.’

I didn’t say anything. I thought carefully. I could say, ‘I don’t have a record’; but I didn’t see how that would help. So I stayed silent.

‘I’ve done a lot of checking, in fact,’ said Cannon. ‘You became a bit of a hobby of mine, to tell the truth, Mike. I’ve had my eye on you off and on for all these years. You know, it’s like blokes you were at school with. You’re not in touch all the time, but out of the corner of your eye, you’re sort of aware of what they’re up to. Know what I mean?’