All Things Undying

SIXTEEN

‘There were men shouting, screaming, praying and dying all around them. The cold water was starting to take its toll. The minutes passed into hours and still there was nothing but darkness… After three hours he could no longer feel his legs. From the waist down he was paralysed by the penetrating coldness of the water… He also admits, with some candour, that one thing that kept going through his mind all night while he hung on to the raft, was that he had never had a woman, and he could not leave the world in that condition.’Ken Small, The Forgotten Dead, Bloomsbury, 1988, pp.46-47

The rest of the day, I couldn’t shake the feeling that Susan’s murder was related to a reading, and that kept bringing me back to the mysterious disappearance of Jon’s first wife, Beth. What if Jon had murdered Beth? What if he believed Susan Parker was getting messages from Beth, his victim, from the great beyond, and what if he thought Susan was going to rat him out?

There were a lot of ifs in that statement.

Even though Jon was married to my best friend, and as much as I liked him, Jon had – for the moment, at least – shot straight to the top of my suspect list. The only difficulty with this theory was my husband. Paul was Jon’s alibi.

Lying next to Paul in bed that night, I said, ‘Tell me about your sailing trip.’

Paul tugged on the duvet and tucked it under his chin. ‘Well, the first race was Saturday…’

‘Start before the race, when you left home.’

Paul turned his head on the pillow and studied me quizzically. ‘We sailed to Cowes…’

‘No, before that.’

‘OK. Wednesday morning I got up, staggered to the loo, showered, shaved, brushed my teeth…’

‘Not that early, silly.’

Paul propped himself up on one elbow. ‘What’s going on, Hannah?’

‘I was just wondering, is all. After you sailed out of the Dart Marina, was Jon with you the whole time?’

‘Of course he was! He was at the helm.’

‘Thursday and Friday, too?’

‘Where else would he be? We were stripping the boat of non-essentials, getting her ready to race.’

‘Jon didn’t slip away, even for a few hours?’

Paul’s eyes widened, comprehension dawning. ‘If you’re asking me whether Jon had time to get himself from Cowes to Dartmouth and back again…’

‘That’s exactly what I’m wondering.’

‘What are you smoking, Hannah? Jon didn’t have a car, for one thing. And even if he’d rented a car, Cowes is on the Isle of Wight. It’s an island, remember? Water all around? There’d be a ferry involved.’ He pressed to my lips a finger that smelled like lavender soap. ‘And before you go off on another wild tangent, we kipped aboard Biding Thyme, so there was no sneaking out of the hotel room at night, either.’

I sighed, stretched out my arm and began playing with a lock of his hair, twisting it around my finger.

Paul closed his eyes. ‘May I go to sleep now?’

‘Certainly.’ I kissed the tip of his nose goodnight, lay down and stared at the concentric circles of light my bedside lamp was casting on the ceiling.

‘Maybe Alison would have been more secure in her relationship with Jon if they’d been able to have a child together,’ I mused, speaking more to the ceiling than to my husband.

Next to me, Paul stirred. ‘Well, that would never happen, would it?’

‘Didn’t, but could have.’

‘Not possible, Hannah. Jon had a vasectomy.’

I shot straight up into a sitting position, leaned over my husband. ‘What did you say?’

Without opening his eyes, Paul repeated. ‘Jon had a vasectomy.’

‘That’s what I thought you said.’ I plopped back on to my pillow, my brain reeling. ‘Are you sure?’

Paul nodded.

‘One hundred per cent positive?’

‘What’s it going to take, Hannah? A signed affidavit from his surgeon?’

‘When?’ I asked.

‘A year or so after Kitty was born.’

I sat bolt upright, stunned by the news. ‘Jeeze, Paul! Jon told you that?’

‘One night at the Cherub, when we were here on the exchange, in fact.’ He turned on his side to look at me. ‘Jon was feeling no pain at the time, and he let it slip. Frankly, I’d forgotten all about it until now.’

‘From talking to Alison, I don’t think she knows.’

‘That would surprise me very much. Jon and Alison seem very close.’

‘Maybe so, but take it from me, Alison’s clueless.’ I folded my pillow in half and propped it behind my back. ‘OK, you’re a guy. You tell me. Why would Jon keep his vasectomy a secret from Alison?’

‘Perhaps he was afraid she would leave him if she found out he couldn’t father her children?’

‘Could be,’ I agreed. ‘But aren’t vasectomies reversible?’

‘Sometimes. But the surgery would have to be private, not on the NHS’s dime. Maybe money was an issue.’

With Paul to alibi him, I was willing to scratch Jon off my list of suspects in Susan Parker’s murder, but something still didn’t compute. Why would a happily married man with only one child decide to have a vasectomy? Clearly, he didn’t want to have any more children with Beth. So, maybe he wasn’t as happily married as everybody thought.

Next to me, Paul began to saw logs.

I elbowed him awake. ‘We have to ask him, Paul.’

‘Ask who what?’ he snuffled.

‘Jon. Invite him to meet you at the pub. Ask him why he got that vasectomy.’

‘You’re not going to let me get any sleep until I agree, right?’

‘I see you understand.’

‘OK, I’ll try.’

‘Do or not do,’ I quoted, channeling Yoda. ‘There is no try.’

When Paul and I walked into the Cherub just before noon the following day, Jon was already there, sitting at a table in the corner, nursing a pint. When he caught sight of us, he shot to his feet. ‘Hi, Hannah. I didn’t know you’d be coming, or I’d have brought Alison along.’

He kissed the air next to my cheek. ‘Name your poison, folks.’

While Jon went to the bar to fetch a shandy for Paul and a lemon and lime for me, we sat down. ‘You go first,’ I whispered.

After the arrival of our drinks and the usual pleasantries, Paul took the lead. ‘Actually, Jon, we didn’t invite Alison on purpose. There’s something Hannah and I want to ask you.’

Jon sipped his lager, winked at me. ‘Very mysterious.’

‘Before we go any further,’ Paul continued, ‘I want you to assure me that you didn’t have anything to do with Beth’s disappearance.’

Jon’s eyebrows shot into the stratosphere. ‘Christ, Ives! How can you even think that?’

‘I don’t believe you did, but a couple of things that we’ve found out recently simply don’t add up.’

Jon ran a hand nervously through what was left of his silk-fine hair. ‘Like what?’

‘Your vasectomy, for starters.’

‘How did you…?’ Jon looked genuinely surprised.

‘You told me. Remember? Right here in the Cherub. After England won the Tournoi de France in 1997?’

‘I did?’

Paul nodded.

‘I must have been shit-faced.’

‘You might say that.’ Paul waited for that to sink in before asking, ‘So, why does a perfectly healthy man decide to have himself fixed…?’

Jon seemed to crumple before us, his body shrinking two sizes within his freshly pressed Cambridge blue shirt.

I finally spoke up. ‘Alison doesn’t know, does she?’

Jon closed his eyes, wagged his head, confirming my suspicions. ‘I always meant to tell her, but the time never seemed right.’ He looked up, his pale eyes somber. ‘It started out as just a little deception. I don’t know how it got so out of hand. I may even have broken the law.’

Now I was really confused. ‘Broken the law? Honestly, Jon, I don’t see the connection.’

Jon took a deep breath, let it out slowly, making us wait. ‘I didn’t tell the police that Beth committed suicide.’

I looked at Paul and Paul looked at me, then we both stared slack-jawed at Jon.

‘There was a note. It wasn’t…’ He sighed, shook his head. ‘It wasn’t addressed to me, it was for Kitty. But she was so young, just learning to read, really. I couldn’t show it to her then, could I? And later? Well, I’d met Alison by then. Fell head over heels in love with her.’ He smiled ruefully. ‘Kitty took to Alison right away, too. How could I tell my daughter that her mum was a suicide, and that it was her fault?’

‘Your pronouns are confusing me, Jon,’ I said. ‘Whose fault? Surely you don’t mean that Kitty…’

Jon raised a hand, cutting me off. ‘After Kitty was born, Beth had a severe case of post-partum depression bordering at times on psychosis. One day, I came into the nursery and caught Beth holding a pillow over the baby’s face.’ What little color remained in Jon’s face promptly drained away. He gulped some of his lager, regained composure. ‘We got Beth into treatment, of course, but I couldn’t trust her alone with Kitty after that, not even for a minute. It took all the money we had, but I hired a nanny. When the nanny wasn’t available, or I had to be out of town, Kitty stayed with her grandmother in Exeter, or my mother would come to us.

‘We kept Beth’s condition quiet, of course. In public, she’d appear to be fine, but at home, she’d sometimes sink into depression for days at a time. And when she refused to take her medication…’ Jon let the sentence die, while I filled the silence with all kinds of horror scenarios gleaned from watching too many cop shows on television.

‘I see,’ Paul said. ‘You couldn’t take a chance of having any more children with Beth.’

Jon nodded glumly. ‘Beth refused to have her tubes tied, so I had to do something.’

‘Why didn’t you tell Alison?’ I wanted to know. ‘Why did you let her go on believing it was her fault she couldn’t have any children?’

‘I’m not proud of it, Hannah. It’s just that I loved Alison so much, I was afraid that she’d leave me if she knew.’

‘I don’t think you know Alison very well, then, Jon.’

‘What happened to the suicide note?’ Paul asked.

Jon stared at the ancient ship timbers that held up the ceiling of the fourteenth-century building. ‘It was a horrid, rambling thing. Beth in full off-meds mode. “I’m going to kill myself before I kill my child.” On and on and on. I was going to destroy the note, Ives, but in the end, I couldn’t. It’s in a safety deposit box at the bank.’

‘But why keep the note secret from the police?’ I wondered aloud. ‘Was there a suicide clause in Beth’s life insurance policy or something?’

‘It was nothing to do with life insurance!’ Jon exploded, slamming his fist on the table so hard that I had to grab my glass to keep it from toppling. ‘Don’t you understand? It was all about Kitty. I couldn’t burden a six-year-old with the knowledge that her mother was so unsuited to motherhood that she killed herself over it!’

Jon covered his eyes with his hands, breathing deeply. ‘At dinner that night?’ he continued in a calmer tone of voice. ‘When Susan Parker said she felt a pain in her head, I knew that my suspicions were right.’

So, Susan Parker had gotten to him. ‘What suspicions?’

Jon spread his hands out on the tabletop, fingers splayed. ‘My father had a German Luger from the Second World War. When he died, it came to me. I kept it in a box on the top of the wardrobe in the bedroom. The gun went missing the day Beth did.’

‘Jesus!’ In that instant, I saw it all. Beth, balancing on the stern of BidingThyme, aiming the gun at her head, pulling the trigger. Beth and the gun toppling backwards into the sea, leaving only the tiniest speck of blood to mark her passing.

Paul reached out, squeezed his friend’s shoulder. ‘You should tell the police.’

Jon blinked back tears. ‘Why? It’s not going to change anything. Accident or suicide, Beth is just as dead.’

I reached out and covered one of Jon’s hands with mine. ‘But Alison needs to know, Jon. Tell her. Tell her everything. She thinks you’re still deeply in love with Beth.’

‘I’ve really fucked up, haven’t I?’ Jon lay his head on his hands and began to cry.