Half Broken Things

July

Steph was pressing the little studs on Charlie’s pale green shorts and tucking in his T-shirt, wondering which of his several hats he might wear today. It was going to be hot again, too hot for jam making, really, but the fruit had been picked yesterday and would not last out the day.

‘We’re going to make jam, Charlie,’ she told him. ‘Aren’t we? Are you going to help me make the jam? Are you going to have a taste of the jam?’ She popped an acorn shaped hat of green gingham on his head. Charlie looked back at her coolly. It was a morning on which Sally had, surprisingly, left calmly and in good time, so Charlie had already had a peaceful breakfast with Steph and apparently was scrutinising the day ahead with equanimity. They were both startled by the sudden loud pang-pang-pang of Sally’s doorbell.

A very tall, elderly man wearing smeared glasses and dressed in a light linen jacket and an open-necked shirt stood on the doorstep. He raised his panama hat and smiled experimentally. ‘How do you do. I hope Sally told you to expect me?’

He asked this in a way that suggested he assumed she would have, so Steph felt somehow in the wrong when she told him that Sally had not. The man wriggled his full lips. ‘Oh, dear. I did tell Sally. I told her expressly that I would visit today. I was supposed to pop in yesterday evening, which frankly would have been more convenient, but she rang and said Charlie was too tired. So I said I would come today instead, and she said I would have to be here early. Do I take it I’ve missed her?’ He looked at Charlie for the first time and chucked him under the chin. ‘Hello, young man! Helloooh!’

Steph wondered how she could ask him who he was without sounding rude or suspicious. Before she could say anything he turned from Charlie, who now had hold of one of his forefingers, and said, ‘And you must be Nanny, am I correct?’ The words were followed by a parting of the lips, offering Steph a view of greyish teeth that appeared to be huddling in his mouth for shelter.

‘I’m the childminder. Steph.’

‘Well, how do you do, Steph. I’m Charlie’s grandfather. Mr Brookes, or Reverend Brookes if you like, but in mufti today, not in fancy dress! Actually I’m on holiday.’ He grinned at her. The sun was falling directly on his face, and Steph, seeing nothing beyond the obscuring rainbow glint of grease across the lenses of his glasses, could not be certain if his eyes were friendly.

‘Oh. Oh, that’s nice. Nice weather for you.’

‘Yes, only wouldn’t you just know it- I gather it’s wet where I’m going! I’m off later, you see, for a week’s walking. Up north, probably in the rain! Anyway, I thought I’d pop over before I head off, and see my grandson. I did tell Sally I would, but evidently she’s forgotten to tell you. Eh, Charlie?’

‘Oh.’

So this was the, what was it Sally had called him? The uptight bugger, the miserable old sod, the one Sally preferred when he was depressed. Steph’s heart went out to him. He was just old and awkward, a big embarrassment of a man, too tall for his clothes and too helpless to clean his glasses, yet here he was on the doorstep making an effort. But what could she do?

‘Well, I’m sorry Sally’s not here; but we were just going. Charlie and me, we were-’

‘Going? Going where?’

‘Oh, we don’t stay here. We don’t spend the day here. Didn’t Sally tell you? We always-’ She stopped. It was clear from the falling of the man’s already long face that Sally had told him nothing at all. Steph could almost hear it, Sally barking down the phone at him that he’d better be early and she wouldn’t be hanging around, she would have to get to work, and he would have to sort it out with Steph. It was suddenly much less surprising that Sally had gone off so promptly today; she had deliberately left the two of them to deal with each other. Steph immediately felt rather sorry for herself, as well as for him. In fact Charlie’s grandfather was not at all as she had imagined him. He was quite kind-looking, really, just a bit unfamiliar with babies.

‘I take him up to my house. There’s lots of room and the garden and everything, and a pool.’ She added, ‘Sally knows. We keep lots of his stuff up there, there’s nothing here for him. And, er, well- well, I need to get off, they’re expecting us. Takes a little while, what with the pushchair.’

‘Oh. Oh, I see, yes, I’m sure, but you see, I’ve come nearly eighteen miles. Though of course you’ve got your routine, I wouldn’t want to…’

‘Well, come on in for a minute, anyway,’ Steph said, comfortably. He was nice, she was deciding. And he had come specially, and must be wearing that hat just as a sort a joke. It was typical of Sally to take against him. Sally did seem always to be furious with the wrong people. ‘Come on in and have a cup of coffee. What a shame, you coming all this way and Sally never saying.’

Charlie’s granddad seemed as mystified by the cluttered house as Steph was. He stood frowning, looking round the kitchen as if he were wondering if he could bear to stay in such a muddle even long enough to drink a cup of coffee.

‘Tell you what,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother with the coffee. I’ll give you a lift. And then perhaps I could spend-’

‘Oh, no! No, don’t, there’s no need, honest. Kettle’s on, won’t take a minute. And we like the walk. Don’t we, Charlie? It’s only a mile, it’s just along the road, really. We count the cars, don’t we, Charlie?’

‘Along the road? The top road? That settles it. They tear along there, there’s no proper pavement, is there, and they just tear along… it’s not safe. No, never mind the coffee, I’m giving you a lift. What can Sally be thinking of? I’ll have to speak to her. So dangerous!’ He had already found his car keys.

Steph tried to protest. ‘But we always walk! I’m careful! I wouldn’t let anything happen to him!’

‘I’m sure you wouldn’t, but I won’t have it. I’m taking you in the car.’

‘Oh, but you can’t! I’ve just remembered. You won’t have a car seat. And Charlie’s is in Sally’s car, and she’s gone to work, and she wouldn’t like it. He’s got to be in a proper car seat. He’s only safe if he’s in a proper car seat, she says. So we can’t come with you.’

The man gave a dismissive tut. ‘Oh really, as if that were the point. Anyway, there’s a car seat in the hall. I’m sure I saw one in the hall, on the way in.’

Steph had not noticed. There it was, partly hidden under a thrown-down jumper of Philip’s. She remembered now. Philip’s car was a BMW two-seater, so they had gone to France in Sally’s Volvo, folding the back seat down flat to make room for the cases of wine. The car seat had been taken out and, true to form, Sally had not yet put it back.

Mr Brookes’s car was almost as crammed with things as Sally’s usually was. While Steph tugged the rear seat belt round the car seat, Mr Brookes cleared stuff out from the front so that Steph could sit there. He first chucked over some books, folders and a number of cardboard tubes, and then he brought out several boxes with no lids, that contained bundles of brightly coloured paper strips held by elastic bands. They all carried the same words: SAVE YOUR LYCHGATE. Several identical strips were stuck all over the windows and rear windscreen of his car. He opened the boot and began rearranging things to make room for the boxes.

‘What are they?’ Steph asked.

‘Oh, a parish project of mine. Car stickers, good for awareness-raising. I’ve still got plenty, printer was most obliging, twenty thousand cost hardly any more than five. Want some?’

‘But what is it, a- whatever, a lychgate?’

‘Oh, the lychgate’s where you park a coffin if it’s raining. You must have seen them, quite a lot of churches have them. We’ve done a bit of a blitz on ours, coat of paint, got a few plants in containers round it, that kind of thing. Petunias and busy lizzies, mainly. Trying to get a volunteer warden scheme going for the watering, discourage the graffiti merchants.’

‘Sounds nice,’ was all Steph could find to say.

Perhaps because all she could do was sit there passively, Steph felt, as soon as she was in the car, that Charlie’s granddad was trying to take over. He said, ‘Stephanie, please don’t think I’m being at all critical of you. But the thought of a pushchair on this road, well. But it’s not you, it’s Sally I blame.’

‘But I’m careful, I stay on the grass, we’ve never once had any trouble. I- oh, turn off here, the next left, this is the drive. Where it says Private Drive.’ The car swung in suddenly. ‘You could just drop us here,’ Steph said, optimistically.

‘Oh no. No, I’ll take you right up. In any case, I should like, if there’s no objection, to stay for a few minutes. I don’t see much of my grandson, after all. Do I, Charlie?’

He turned to Charlie in the back and beamed luridly, and Steph wondered, gazing at his nostrils, which opened much too wide when he smiled, if perhaps she didn’t like him so much after all. Still, she thought, turning back and staring through the windscreen, it won’t do any harm. She would prefer not to be giving Jean and Michael the fright of an unexpected visitor, but he wouldn’t stay long. They had coped with Sally coming here, and that woman Shelley, so they could easily manage this.

Michael had moved the croquet hoops off the side lawn, which he would mow later on, and had set them out ready for a game on the stretch of grass between the back of the house and the pool pavilion. He was fetching the mallets and balls and carrying them round when he heard the sound of the car. Jean appeared at the kitchen door. Together, exchanging a look, they made their way quickly round the side of the house to the front. Steph had stepped out of the car and was hurrying towards them with an appeasing but doubtful smile. Jean stopped and was wiping her hands on her apron and Michael stood some distance behind her, tossing two croquet balls up and down in one hand. They tried to smile back.

‘It’s okay!’ she said breathlessly, as she reached them, ‘honest, it’s okay. I couldn’t help it. It’s only Charlie’s granddad.’ Jean and Michael looked past her to the back of the figure bending into the rear of the car, fiddling with the straps of the car seat. Michael stopped his half-hearted juggling with the croquet balls. ‘Only I couldn’t help it. He just turned up at Sally’s, and then he wouldn’t let me bring Charlie along the road in the pushchair. He’s okay, though. He never sees Charlie and he wants to stay a minute. Just act ordinary.’

‘Oh, Jesus Christ,’ Michael said slowly. He was staring at the man, who was now smiling broadly and walking towards them with Charlie in his arms. ‘Jesus fucking Christ.’ He stepped back a few paces, but it was too late to disappear. He had been seen. ‘Jean, go on and say hello.’

Mr Brookes pulled off his hat and called out, ‘How do you do! Forgive my descending on you out of the blue, did Stephanie explain? Bit of communication breakdown, I’m afraid! Here we go, young man!’ He shifted one arm under Charlie’s bottom and handed him over to Steph. Then he extended a hand towards Jean. I’m Charlie’s grandfather. Gordon Brookes. And you’re…?’

‘Er, Jean,’ she said, in a voice that sounded out of practice. ‘I’m Jean. Hello.’ Steph bit her lip. Jean looked rather wild, standing there in a strawberry smeared apron, her hair wandering. She sounded rather out of it, too.

‘What a marvellous house!’ the man was saying, taking Jean’s hand and pumping it while he looked past her at the faзade. ‘Have you lived here long?’

‘Quite long,’ she managed to say, suspiciously.

‘What’s the period? The usual hotchpotch? Tudor origins, later additions? Glorious stone!’ The man was turning his full charm and attention equally on Jean and the house, and Jean seemed about to collapse under it. Steph shot Michael a darting look. Michael must see what was happening. Why was he simply staring, and not doing something to rescue her?

And why was Charlie’s grandfather now staring so hard at Michael? The smile had gone, and his mouth was opening and closing. ‘You? My God. You. I- I’m going to- My God, it is you, you’re the- the-’ Gordon Brookes’s face was reddening.

‘Steph,’ Michael said quietly, ‘Steph, take Jean and Charlie indoors. Please, go now. Now. Right now.’ He took a step backwards.

Gordon Brookes was advancing, and growing agitated. He gasped, ‘It’s not, is it? It is! It’s you! You little, you…! My figures, my St John and St Catharine. Oh good God… you-’

Being a man capable of fury yet unused to physical contact of any kind, least of all fighting, Gordon Brookes did not move smoothly, but his hands flew up and one fist caught Michael on the shoulder, half pushing, half punching. The blow seemed to take him almost as much by surprise as it did Michael, but he followed it with another before Michael could raise his arms to protect his head. Gordon Brookes had long ago been civilised into churchy mental habits, so it was a shock to him to realise that hitting somebody could feel, while unfamiliar, the only natural and appropriate thing to be doing. His outrage was overtaking all his beliefs about the pointlessness of violence; he was instead almost dancing, animated by an angry energy that he would never, ever have imagined he could expend on any response as ‘mindless’ as punching someone about the face. He landed a hard kick on Michael’s leg. Michael’s whimpering stopped him for a moment. He raised a shaking hand. ‘That curate… that poor man. You… have you any idea what you did? We know you did it, you know! I’m getting the police down here, right now! Good God, you’re- you won’t get away with this-!’

‘Steph, take Jean and Charlie away, now. Do it.’ Michael’s voice was wavering, and when he lowered his arms from his head, his eyes and lips fluttered with fear. Yet he did not move from the spot where he stood, nor take his eyes away from Gordon Brookes. Brookes moved in again, this time kicking wildly.

‘Steph, go! Go, for Christ’s sake!’

Steph, still holding Charlie, managed to pull at Jean’s arm and she, now dumbly bewildered, allowed herself to be led. They hurried in the direction of the house. And Steph even managed to prevent them both from looking back when, a moment later, they heard the hard crack of a croquet ball against the side of Gordon Brookes’s head and the first of his long, despairing cries.

Michael got him helpless on the ground, though not completely unconscious, after seven or eight blows. But he would not be quiet. Michael dropped the croquet balls, raced down into the walled garden and returned with the wheelbarrow to find Gordon Brookes attempting to crawl in the direction of his car, shrieking in disbelief and pain. Sweating and weeping with the massive effort, Michael dragged him up by the shoulders. He began to resist, and succeeded in scratching Michael’s face. He would not go in the wheelbarrow, but after another blow on the side of the head with a croquet ball he gave a squealing kind of scream and Michael hauled him over and left him draped across it. He heaved the barrow up and pushed it slowly and windingly round to the back. Setting down the barrow on the grass at one side, out of sight of the kitchen windows, he stood up and took several deep breaths. Gordon Brookes lay quiet at last, and limp, facing downwards, his clothes more off than on. Michael wiped his eyes and looked round.

There were roses still blooming against the wall. Was it only yesterday he had wondered about the best time to prune them? He looked down at the wheelbarrow. That would be just the kind of thing Gordon Brookes would know, and now here he was, bleeding from the side of his head that was beginning to look like a cut aubergine. Michael looked away, shaking with pity for the man and with fear for himself. For it was terrifying, how quickly it was possible to go from one to the other, from considering the pruning of roses and setting out croquet hoops, to this moment, looking at a bleeding man heaped in a wheelbarrow and facing the inevitability of the next step. More terrifying still was how much further Michael now had to go. From not far off, birds were singing above the snuffling sounds coming from the man’s slack mouth. But when Michael breathed in he could smell roses and warm grass. He grew still, and then quiet, and then he wiped his hands over his eyes again, crossed the lawn and entered the kitchen. Steph and Jean were standing in silence, waiting. Charlie waved and jiggled in Steph’s arms when Michael appeared in the doorway.

‘Right,’ he said, still breathless, ‘don’t worry. Stay here for a bit. I want you to stay here, okay? Make some tea.’

But neither of them could reply. Steph opened her mouth first. ‘l don’t know what I did, I don’t understand. Why-’

‘Never mind, I’ll explain. It’ll be all right,’ Michael said, tightly. ‘It’ll be all right. I’ll make it all right. I’ve got to-’ And then he began to feel that strange thing at work again, that way he actually could begin to believe himself when he had other people to convince. ‘It’s okay. It’s just that, well, I know him. I mean he knows me, he knows about this thing I did. He’d bring the police here and we’d all, well- think about it. See? I’d end up in jail. We all might.’ He smiled grimly. ‘You see? What with everything. The stuff I did, the fines, us, the things here. It’d finish everything. I mean, we’ve got to- you see? Look, just stay in here for a while. I’ll deal with it. We’ve got to be normal.’

‘All right,’ Jean said, finding her strength. ‘All right.’ She took a deep breath and smiled round bravely. ‘We’ll just be normal. Won’t we? We’ll just get on and make our jam, won’t we, Steph? The fruit’s all hulled already.’ In the moment’s silence after she spoke it became understood that neither she nor Steph would ask Michael exactly what he was going to do when he went back outside, and he would not volunteer to tell. They all knew.

Michael wheeled the barrow slowly round, limping from the kicks he had taken on his legs, and stopped at the side of the pool. He had begun to shake again just at the thought of touching Gordon Brookes, who was sliding so far over to one side that his head almost scraped along the grass. He did not dare think about what else he now had to do to him, and could not look at the face as he heaved him over and pulled him off the wheelbarrow. Laboriously, closing his eyes when he could, he dragged him to the edge of the water; it felt as if Gordon Brookes were filled with loose stones. Then he seemed to become aware of what was happening; he mouthed and moaned, and succeeded in raising one hand, flexing his fingers for a second over Michael’s bare arm and scratching hard. Michael hissed in pain. Gordon Brookes gurgled and coughed, and his moans rose to pitiful yelping when Michael hauled him over and tipped him into the pool. He landed with a crack on the water. Michael followed, feeling through the cold shock on his groin the warm flow of his own urine. Gordon Brookes, revived by the slap of the water, flailed desperately, as if trying to grab armfuls of it. But he did not have the strength to protest much when Michael grabbed the back of his head and pushed it under. Michael turned away from the sight of the mouth taking great choking bites of water but could do nothing to avoid hearing the panicked snatches of screams as, time after time, Gordon Brookes managed to force his head up hard enough under Michael’s hands to snatch at the air. Michael’s legs were shaking so much that but for the water he would have collapsed. For it came as a dreadful, slow-dawning shock, how long it took. It was unbelievably long; incredible how much fight and life and air and struggle there was in one man, how often his arms tried to reach and grab at Michael’s hands, and how hopelessly; Michael was filled with a kind of respectful horror until, almost exasperated and suddenly fearing that he might not be able to finish this, he gave a great roar, thrust the head down deep into the water with both hands and held it there. Brookes’s mouth, still gaping and searching, surfaced only twice more. In its final, slackening, waterlogged gasp Michael thought he heard a note of sorrow. For at least ten minutes more he stood holding his head under, until long after the last throes had stopped. Michael turned his face up to the sky and saw merely a flat, blurred blue through his stinging eyes. Nor, as the minutes passed, could he hear very much, save his own bitter sobbing and the slap of water as the waves made by Gordon Brookes’s thrashing arms smacked and subsided against the pool walls.

Michael waded down the length of the pool and hauled himself up. He sank onto the grass at the side and lay stretched out, shaking and weeping, until he had to turn his head and vomit. He shifted some feet away and lay down again. He closed his eyes. The sun’s heat pulsed down on him, water dripped from his clothes and soaked around him into the grass, flies buzzed over and landed on his still-twitching body. Then he began to sense that the air carried another scent, freighted with sweetness. He could hear that in the kitchen someone had turned on the radio. Voices from a studio somewhere had started up in polite and amused discussion. The sound rose and mingled and was borne along, bubbling in a commixture with boiling strawberries and sugar that perfumed and corrupted the air. Michael opened his eyes and watched butterflies pass above him. Turning his head, he saw two or three ants among the droplets of water, scaling blades of grass inches from his face. It seemed, then, that life was continuing. He refused to focus on the gently lapping water of the pool some yards away but could not help seeing that its surface sparkled under the sun, as before. Was it outrageous or miraculous, he wondered, that it could look so much the same when everything had changed? How could it be the same if, the next time this bright, turquoise water flew upwards in glittering drops into the sun-laden air, it were to be Steph’s hand flicking little playful splashes onto Charlie’s golden shoulders, rather than Gordon Brookes’s desperate, dying limbs jerking and grabbing for a few more seconds of life? Was it possible that you could just lift a corner of this pretty world that Gordon Brookes was suddenly no longer a part of, push him out and drop the corner back in place, and go on as before? For it really did seem as if that were what was happening. Michael closed his eyes again, breathing in sun and the smell of fruit. The voices on the radio stopped, there was a second’s pause, a burst of laughter, then the tap of polite applause. Another voice, and then came the pips. He had just killed a man while people somewhere chatted and an audience clapped. Life was just going on. And it was incredible to him, as well as a little unnerving, that it was not just other things that were going on as before, but that he himself was, too. Here he was, lying wet on the grass but feeling the same sun, hearing the same birds and voices, smelling the same flowers and fruits. The thought comforted him. He knew he should be changed. He should be inconsolable, but instead was soothed. He knew himself to be filthy, but felt cleansed.

There would be more to do, of course. Michael lay out on the grass for a long time, dozing and thinking, the sun washing him with calm. He glanced at the pool once or twice, fascinated by the tinting of the water around Gordon Brookes’s submerged head, until he vomited again. He got up and stretched, made his way into the bathroom of the pool pavilion and washed himself all over. He thought further. There was so much to think about, so many crucial details that he must get right that his head was now filling entirely with them; there seemed to be no space left now for simple terror about the next stage. Nor could he afford to be appalled. He was beginning to realise that if he carried on being sick he would not be able to see the thing through. So he would have to behave as if a part of himself were simply absent. It would be like acting. Neither outrageously callous, nor miraculously calm, just acting. Only in that way would he be able to do what had to be done, but it would not be him. Something at his core would be uninvolved.

He presented himself almost nonchalantly at the kitchen door. Inside, the heat was as thick as paint. Steph and Charlie were dozing in the Windsor chair, apparently stupefied by strawberry fumes and just waiting to melt down completely. Jean looked up, with a hot frown, from stirring the glooping, crimson, boiling bath on the stove. She scraped a tide of scum off the surface of the jam with a wooden spoon and blatted it into the sink, then moved over to the fridge and took out a saucer.

‘There are some things we have to do,’ Michael said, uncertainly. Steph opened her eyes and murmured. She had not been asleep, after all.

‘Oh! Oh, at last it’s done! It’s setting!’ Jean stood with one forefinger held up. ‘Steph, it’s done it, it’s set. We’ve got a set!’

‘Well, thank God for that,’ Steph said.

It takes forever to get a set on strawberry jam, I know that now. That day, as I got tireder and tireder, and hotter and hotter, watching the fruit boiling and waiting for a set, I began to regret embarking on the whole thing. I was tempted to tip the whole sticky mess in the bin and forget about jam altogether. Steph thought I should. It’s not worth it, she said. She went completely floppy that day, as if she were suddenly too exhausted to take anything in. Bin it, she said. But you can’t, can you? You think: if this next little test on a saucer popped in the fridge for a minute doesn’t set, it’s never going to. If this one doesn’t set I’m binning the lot and I’m giving up on jam, full stop. And of course the next test doesn’t set, but you don’t carry out your little threat to yourself. You realise the threat came from the part of yourself that wants to see you fail, and the better side of you thinks: oh no, I’ve gone this far- I’ve picked fruit and hulled it, measured sugar, washed and warmed jars, I’ve stood here stirring and testing till I’m at boiling point myself- I’ve made too much mess to give up on it all now. But even as you stand there knowing you’ve got to see it through, you’re starting to wish you’d set about it differently. Added pectin from a jar, used some apples or red currants, something. You begin to think you’ll never, ever get a set and somehow it’s your fault. And then suddenly it sets. So it’s all come right in the end, and the struggle has been worth it. Then you understand that this combination of self-chastisement and wisdom after the event was not helpful in any way whatsoever.

We very much regret the vicar, all of us. I’m going to put down as exactly as I can what happened, and then you’ll see that although Michael did it, it’s impossible to say who was responsible. Was it Steph’s fault for bringing the vicar here? She had no idea that he and Michael had, as it were, met before. Mine, perhaps? I’m practically an old woman, but could I have done anything to prevent it? The shock of this stranger turning up with Steph and Charlie was considerable, the shock when he suddenly lashed out at Michael more considerable still, but I am not saying I was too shocked to know what was happening. It simply did not occur to me to do anything other than what Michael asked of me. I wanted to do as he asked. But suppose I had resisted, or said something to Mr Brookes right at the beginning such as, Oh, now, let’s all calm down, we can sort this out, surely? But no, I just went back into the house as Michael told me to. And look, even if Michael had instead forced me into the house and threatened me with violence if I tried to interfere, I still wouldn’t have been able to prevent what happened, so where’s the difference? So I, and Steph too- we did what he told us to. We went into the house and got on with the jam.

So, was it Michael’s responsibility, entirely? Not in my opinion. He responded to a crisis, that is all, and in the only way open to him. Because that man would have got the police down here, and that would have been the end. By then there were too many things to answer for: the church figures, Miranda, the house, the money. Not to mention Michael’s previous misdemeanours, of which I had heard the gist. What would have happened to us then, Charlie included? Michael was only seeking to protect his own, and why should that be considered an admirable impulse in some circumstances and not in others?

But it was a puzzling, upsetting day, and the difficulty in getting the jam to set was just a small part of it. And it may sound trivial, but when I got the jam to set it changed my outlook. I suddenly believed that we could achieve anything, and come out of this mess all right, and more than that, I saw that we absolutely had to. Had to. It all became clear.

What happened was this. We had to give immediate consideration to the unpleasant fact that it was a very hot day. Now please do not think I write of this with anything like relish. We were all horrified by what had taken place, all but immobilised by the magnitude of it, as well as filled with disgust at its implications. But it had to be thought of. The degrading of flesh is horribly quick. Well, you know what would happen to meat left out on a hot day. In a matter of a few hours the man’s presence would be obvious. So after we had talked the whole thing over and made decisions about how to proceed, Michael went back outside, pushed the wheelbarrow into the shallow end of the pool, then he dragged the body to the edge of the steps and hauled it up into the barrow and managed to pull it back up onto the grass. Then I helped him drag Mr Brookes’s clothes off him. That was when I first cried, at the sight of his dripping fawn socks and sorry green underpants. It was so sad. I thought of him getting dressed that morning, not knowing what would happen, and it seemed so unfair. The world is deceptive, it looks so solid, yet people can leave it so abruptly. Perhaps that is the purpose of vicars, actually, to explain that to the rest of us. Steph picked up his broken glasses and the panama hat from the front drive and I took the hat with the clothes, got the worst of the stains out and hung everything over the Aga to dry off. Together she and I raked over the gravel where they had kicked it about fighting, while Michael took the wheelbarrow with the body in it and pulled it off the grass and up the steps into the pool pavilion, out of the sun. The bathroom had no window and was quite cool, and he managed to tip the man into the bath, where at least he would be out of sight, for the time being.

Then I had a brainwave. At least the other two said it was a brainwave, but to me it seemed suddenly obvious. I remembered that there were sacks and sacks of salt tablets for the water softener lying stacked in the utility room. I had been reading up about preserving methods; the jam, you see, using sugar, is one way of preserving fruit, and of course salting is what you do to meat or fish. The sacks weighed a lot, over 20 kilogrammes each. Steph could barely lift one, and Michael did not let me even try. But she and Michael between them, using the barrow again, fetched nine or ten sacks of the salt and emptied them over the sorry sight in the bath, packing it in all around him. He was completely covered, which made us all feel much better. Even more important, we could be confident that he would not smell.

Then the three of us together tried to make sense of the pool instruction book that Michael brought from the room with all the pool machinery. (A mistake: trying to understand complex machinery isn’t an ideal team activity, and we were all very upset and agitated. Things got quite snappy.) But eventually we worked out how to drain the pool. The odd thing was it already looked quite all right again, but none of us fancied going back in that water. We had to fix up a pump that sucked all the water out, and attach the pump to a hose that drew it all the way across the grass and let it run out down onto the long paddock. Of course it took hours, which turned out to be a blessing. It forced us to take the time to think.

Because we had to work out what to do next. Steph remembered that almost the first thing Mr Brookes had told her was that he was on his way up north on holiday, and sure enough when we looked in the boot of his car, there were his backpack, anorak, walking boots and so on. Going by the maps he had with him it looked as if he was going to the Pennine Way. There didn’t seem to be any bookings with hotels or anything, but perhaps he was planning to take pot luck, stopping when he felt like it or booking a day or so ahead once he was up there. Or he might have been planning to camp; he might have been meeting up with friends who were bringing the tent. We just didn’t know. If he was going on holiday with other people he might be reported missing almost at once; otherwise we would have several days’ grace. But in any case his car was still here and that was, of course, a problem.

Steph is a clever girl. While we were grappling with the question of the car she went rather quiet, and then she suddenly came out with something her art teacher had told her. She had once done a watercolour of some trees and painted the trunks brown. Her teacher said, if I sent you out and said come back when you’ve found a brown tree trunk, I would never see you again. Why have you given me brown tree trunks? Well, Steph said, wood is brown, see? The whole room was full of tables and chairs, she said, all wooden, and brown, as you’d expect. But why look at tables and chairs if you’re trying to paint a tree, he asked her. Go and look at trees. And don’t think, he said, that I am teaching you to draw and paint, I am teaching you to look. People don’t see what is actually there unless they look. Artists must learn to look, most people never do. They see only what they expect to see.

Up until then I hadn’t really been getting her point, but she explained it. The point was, the vicar’s car might have been seen this morning, in the village, outside Sally’s, perhaps even turning off up our drive, and so while we had to get rid of it, we had better not try and say he had never been here. We had to get ready to say that he had been here, but had left after spending a bit of time with Charlie. Then she said that Mr Brookes had better drive back through the village again, this afternoon, so that somebody might see him again, and confirm what we would say about him leaving here. Well, this sounded mad to Michael and me.

‘You’re as tall as him,’ Steph told Michael, ‘and there’s that hat he was wearing so the hair won’t matter. You just have to drive through the village in his car, wearing his clothes. Somebody’s bound to notice the car, aren’t they, with all those stickers on the windows. You couldn’t miss it.’

They were sitting with mugs of tea at the kitchen table. The sandwiches that Jean had made just in case anyone felt like lunch sat untouched. Only Charlie’s appetite was unchecked; today Steph was trying him on banana. Michael pushed his empty mug away.

‘But I’m not him! I can act like somebody else, I can’t be somebody else.’

‘But I’ve explained. The thing about most people,’ Steph told him with weary patience, ‘is they see what they expect to see. Like me and the tree trunks. Nobody’s going to say oh yes, I saw somebody wearing Mr Brookes’s clothes and hat, driving Mr Brookes’s car, in the village on Wednesday afternoon. They’re going to say they saw him. He’s not the vicar of the church here, is he, so it’s not like anybody actually knows him, it’s just the impression they’ll remember.’

‘But what’s the point? Why take the risk? Why don’t I just drive the car off and dump it?’

Jean said quietly, ‘Because if you do that, and if somebody in the village saw Steph and Charlie in the car this morning, the police will know he was here. If we deny he was here, they’ll be suspicious. And if we admit he was here but just say he left, the police will have this place down as the last place he was seen. They’ll be very interested in us, they might be suspicious enough to turn the whole place over. Dig up the garden.’

‘So? We’ll have got rid of the car by then, and we can dump him too. He won’t even be here.’

‘No. But Miranda is. What if they find her? And anyway,’ she said, ‘how long before they find out more about us? Find out everything?’

Steph said, ‘And haven’t you ever watched those detective things on telly? They can find traces of people, you know, even a hair or a bit of spit or something. If they really look hard, they’ll find something. We’ve got to do something that shows he left here. Even though he didn’t. If somebody thinks they saw him later on, it makes it really look like he left here, doesn’t it? And then we’ll be left alone.’

So Michael put on Gordon Brookes’s dried and pressed clothes and his hat, removed the broken lenses from his glasses and put those on too. Jean managed to stop him, just in time, from touching the car without gloves. She found some thin plastic ones in the box with the silver polish. A backpack with Michael’s own clothes went into the car, and Gordon Brookes’s backpack, boots, anorak and Charlie’s car seat came out. Four hours after Gordon Brookes had driven his grandson up to the house, Michael drove his car back down the drive and along the road into the village. He was alarmed but pleased to see a knot of people, mainly elderly ladies and youths in baggy clothes, at a bus stop, and a man sitting outside the village shop next to a banked table of fruit and vegetables. He pressed the hat further down and drove by without turning his head.

The tank was more than half full. With the map open on the passenger seat he drove, according to what had been decided with Jean and Steph, first to the M4. He joined the M5 northeast of Bristol and left it at junction 19. By half past two that day he had parked Gordon Brookes’s car at the far end of the Avon Gorge Nature Reserve, in an almost empty car park displaying a warning about theft from vehicles. Here and there little heaps of ice-blue fragments of windscreen glass glittered on the ground.

A picnic was in progress nearby on a patch of grass dotted with tables, rubbish bins and notices about litter, dog walking and wild flowers. Keeping as far away as possible but remaining within sight of the picnickers, Michael took his backpack from the boot and set off down the path, marked with fat yellow arrows, towards Nightingale Valley at the heart of the wood. The path rose and fell along the steep, thickly planted banks of Leigh Woods. From the map Michael had hoped for a more remote, less public sort of place; there were arrows and maps everywhere, even little metal badges on some of the trees. But it was simple enough to keep his head down and ignore the grunted ‘g’afternoons’ of the few people he met, most of whom sped past him on mountain bikes. He doubted if any one of them saw anything more of him than his feet, or would remember seeing even those. Where the path branched Michael took always the smaller and less-frequented one, and after an hour or so of walking, and checking that the path was deserted in front and behind him, he scrambled up a bank thick with brambles and bracken. He found a place where a stand of rhododendrons under some conifers made almost a secret room, several feet wide but only about five feet high, and he crouched inside, panting, waiting until he was sure that the only sounds he could hear were his own breathing, and birdsong. He looked round to make sure that he was quite out of sight. Very carefully and quietly, he pulled his own clothes from the backpack, slipped out of Gordon Brookes’s things and put on his own, as quickly as he could under the low concealing arches of the rhododendron. He placed Gordon Brookes’s clothes- jacket, shirt, trousers, shoes, hat and glasses- in the backpack, and fastened it up. He settled back onto the ground and waited. Strange, how birds calling in woods sounded somehow hollow and far away. He lay listening to the stillness, broken by the wind sighing through the trees above him and from time to time by murmuring voices, a crying child, from the path below. Once, a dog came crashing by quite close to him before being whistled away back to its owners. The afternoon passed. It seemed to Michael, overwhelmed now by fatigue, that he was waiting here only until he could be granted some sort of permission to admit how tired he was. His eyes drooped and he leaned back on his backpack.

Steph set off at the usual time to take Charlie back to Sally’s, tucking a cotton blanket around him in case he might feel a slight chill from the evening air. She called out to Jean that she was off now, and crunched away across the gravel. She had adjusted the pushchair seat so that Charlie was now facing outwards, to see the direction in which he was going, rather than facing her. He was old enough now to want to take an interest in the things around him and no longer needed to keep Steph constantly in his sight. But that was not the reason, or not the only one, why she had done it. Although she did not understand how it was possible, she knew that outwardly she was behaving quite normally. She knew too that Charlie had seen nothing ‘unpleasant’ and that, as Sally had remarked, he did not know his grandfather from the Archbishop of Canterbury; yet there was something in his long, considering stare that she did not feel quite equal to tonight.

Still, she was finding on her familiar walk this evening that she noticed the same things: the length of her own shadow slanting in front of her, the summer smells of grass under her feet and the sweet cow parsley at the roadside that sprang back bruised from the pushchair wheels. And when others carried on behaving normally it was even easier; Bill was stationed, as usual on a sunny evening, in his chair outside the shop, reading the Bath Chronicle. He lowered the paper and sent a grunt of recognition her way.

Sally arrived back in her usual manner. As usual Steph was waiting with a peaceful, immaculate Charlie in her arms.

‘Oh, hi, Steph. God, I’m shattered. Look, did Gordon turn up here today? Sorry! Forgot to say. Everything all right?’

Steph smiled. ‘Charlie’s granddad?’ She looked down at Charlie, widened her eyes and shook her head at him and he, laughing, reached for her hair. She was suddenly afraid that Sally might choose right now to pay attention to what she was saying, to look her hard in the eye and probe. She could manage this better, she felt, if she told it to Charlie. So she planted a raspberry on one of Charlie’s hands and prattled at him.

‘Oh, yes! Charlie saw his granddad today, didn’t he? Didn’t you! Didn’t you, Charlie-arlie, you saw your granddad, didn’t you?’

When she looked up Sally was at the sink sponging at a mark on the front of her blouse. ‘Bloody nuisance, clean this morning. Bloody mayonnaise, plopped out of a sandwich straight onto my boob. So- did he stay more than five minutes? Did he behave himself? What did you think of him?’

‘Oh, yes, he gave us a lift. Yes, I put Charlie in the car seat, don’t worry. I’ve brought it back. He gave us a lift up all the way there and then he stayed for a while. He was pleased to see Charlie, I think. I thought he was nice.’ Well, that’s true, she was thinking. All that’s true.

Sally snorted. ‘Oh, yes, he can put on nice. He hasn’t been near Charlie for months, so don’t be fooled.’

‘Well, you wouldn’t, would you? You might not feel up to it. Not if your wife had just died.’

‘That was months ago!’

‘But he got depressed just after, you said. Didn’t you say he was depressed?’

‘Yeah, he says he’s on Prozac. Who isn’t? I suppose you got the whole lychgate story?’ She had thrown the cloth back in the sink now and was pouring a glass of wine. ‘I reckon he just claims to be depressed, to make me feel sorry for him.’ She swallowed some of her drink. ‘Maybe the Pennine Way’ll perk him up. Did he tell you about that? He’s off up there on holiday. They used to do it every year, the Pennine Way, only last year they missed it because Wendy- that’s Simon’s mother- she was too ill. So Gordon’s off this year on his own.’

‘Aw, that’s sad. He must miss her.’

‘I suppose. If you ask me he feels guilty. They were never that close, according to Simon. Anyway, you’re off now, are you? Here, I’ll take him. God, he’s getting heavy, isn’t he? See you tomorrow.’

‘Yeah. ‘Bye then. Night-night, Charlie.’

When Michael woke, it seemed as though the sheltering woods had turned against him. The wind had risen and now filled the trees with a sound like breaking waves; his bed under the rhododendrons was sunless and damp. It was only seven o’clock and the sun had not quite set, yet he was cold and lost, feeling a kind of loneliness in his bones that told him that it was too late to be out. He listened until he was sure everything was quiet. Cyclists, walkers and dogs had left the paths and birds had deserted the air. Picking up the backpack, he scrambled down the bank to the path and continued along it until he reached the point where the edge of the woods met the banks of the River Avon. From here a broad path, he knew from the map, followed the riverbank all the way into Bristol. He met nobody until he had almost reached the suspension bridge. From here onwards other people passed him on the path, not the manic mountain bikers of the afternoon, but young, evening people from the city flitting about in small groups or strolling in couples, absorbed in one another, thinking about having a drink soon and finding a place for dinner, wondering if they should have booked. Michael tried to slow his pace to match theirs. The country merged into town; the path became the pavement of a ‘waterside development’ passing by buildings that, unless they were brand new, had been prettified and adapted for purposes other than the ones for which they were built. Warehouses were galleries, boathouses were wine bars. He crossed the river by a footbridge into Hotwells and from there, passing the moored barges and houseboats, restaurants, shops and pubs along the river, he trudged into the centre of the city. At Temple Meads station he caught a train.

When he got out at Chippenham it was quite dark. He was so hungry and exhausted, as well as parched with thirst, that he was tempted for a moment to take a taxi the rest of the way. Instead he bought a can of Coke from a vending machine outside the station, heaved the backpack up on his shoulder again and set off on foot through the town. When he reached the roundabout on the outskirts, where there were no pedestrians, he halted. Cars were still streaming round, shooting off at tortuous exits to McDonald’s, Sainsbury’s or the DIY store. He felt too visible. The next and final part of his journey was in some ways the most difficult; if he kept to the roads, which would soon be emptier of homing traffic, he might be noticed. There were no proper pavements, and a lone man walking along the roadside in the dark might be more memorable to a passing driver than the same man making his way along the streets of Bristol or Chippenham. God forbid, he might be stopped by a police patrol car; they had a habit of cropping up, and he still had Gordon Brookes’s clothes and car keys in his bag. He climbed a stile and set off on the last eleven miles to the manor, following the line of the road through the fields, keeping on the far side of the hedges.

Michael returned late that night, after midnight. We had waited up. His appearance was a shock. Steph and I had collected our wits hours ago and had been going about things as normal and that being so, of course we looked more or less the same, except that our worry showed. Michael had aged in a few hours.

All that day I had taken my cue from Steph and although my head was full of Michael, I had carried on as normal. While she was occupied with Charlie I potted the jam and labelled the jars. We had both been surprised by how easy it was to get on with the usual things, even though every single minute we were thinking of Michael. We mentioned him to each other on and off throughout the day, wondering how he was managing things, hoping he would find the strength for it all and not forget any important detail. But we did not fool each other, Steph and I. We both knew that the other one was thinking of nothing else. I kept the frown from my face for her sake, and she smiled and sang to Charlie for mine. Not being hungry myself, I nevertheless made a cake that afternoon, and for me she ate some of it. But we longed to have Michael home. I have never before in my life so much wanted for a day to be over, and that is saying something, for I have had other difficult days in my life.

Steph was calm that day. Some stillness seemed to come over her, and in fact after that day it never left her. From that day on, her mind went into a permanent and steady gliding state. She opted for it, I think. She decided to keep her mind in a neutral, unfearing territory somewhere between helplessness and trust.

There was a breeze that afternoon after the still heat of the morning, not ideal swimming weather. But once the pool had refilled Steph spent some time in it with Charlie while I sat out nearby and watched. I am sure that it helped us both, to see and hear Charlie just as happy and excited in the water as he had ever been. Something compelled us, I believe, to fill the garden and the pool with playful noise. It was necessary to exorcise any lingering spirit of ugliness. And it is certain that nothing sees off the looming atmosphere of strife that adults create around themselves faster than a delighted, shrieking child.

But Michael’s appearance when he returned brought back to us the awfulness of what was happening. He was starving, but he couldn’t eat until he had had a bath, he said. Steph went up to run it for him. We were all hungry by then, as Steph and I had not been able to eat until he was home safe. I had roasted a chicken, and we sat in the kitchen until quite late, eating with our fingers. It began as a performance that we all consented to appear in for the sake of the others, and slowly it mellowed into something else that was less of a charade, because our relief and happiness to be together again were real. Afterwards Michael needed another bath, he said.

That night we were all exhausted, but we hardly slept. I lay awake wondering if I should feel guilty. Or rather, wondering if I actually did feel guilty- wondering, really, if this sleepless going-over of my life was a sense of guilt. Michael, not me, had done the deed, of course. But was it his proximity to me that had turned him into the kind of person who could do it, I mean kill another person? I dwelled on this for a time. Does the mere presence of one person whose hands are not exactly clean make it inevitable that another person will sooner or later dirty theirs? I lay in bed getting quite depressed, because despite all my efforts, it seemed that all this might go back to me and Mother.

Mother’s own baby ‘wasn’t born right’ and died when she was three, eight years before I came along. I suppose they’d tried to have more babies of their own in that time. So I was meant to fill the space that was left, I suppose, which I now know to have been a doomed hope, because nobody can ever replace another. Charlie consoles us all but he does not, nor do we want him to, replace Miranda. Miranda’s tiny spot on this earth will always be precious and it lies in a place of its own, somewhere beyond a margin that Charlie cannot cross. All that Miranda meant to us remains with us and in us.

It didn’t work, me and Mother. Not that direct or cruel comparisons were made, for the first little girl was never mentioned, but I didn’t shape up. Perhaps Mother tried, at the beginning. I know I did, probably right up until the time that Father died. It was around then that she first told me the truth about my real mother. She wouldn’t have dared to while Father was alive. She told me only to hurt me or, as she put it, to get me off my high horse about going to university. Because my real mother hadn’t died, after all. She hadn’t been the frail, tragic heroine in an air raid I’d made her into. I was the natural daughter of a ‘common prostitute’, who’d had me and handed me over to a children’s home the minute she’d been able to. And hadn’t she (Mother) and Father done enough, bringing me up as their own, even handing over valuable property (the clock)? Did I not think, in the circumstances, that I should be a little more grateful, content with what I had (a secretarial course)? It was the theme whose many variations have played over and over in my life until I came here, that good things- opportunity, security, affection, happiness- should come to me, if at all, only second-hand, and in second rate scraps.

But I remember that I was not really listening to all that, for my mind had just stopped and could not go any further. It stopped, just like that, at the idea that my real mother had not died when I was five. Which meant that she was still alive. Inside I was rejoicing, and I decided there and then that I would hold on to this feeling. I did not recognise it for what it was. It was hope. That’s what hope is, isn’t it, something between a decision and a feeling; it is the giving of permission to oneself to be optimistic about things yet to be. I had not developed the knack, nor ever did. It has always taken effort. But then I was thinking, as soon as I can I’ll find her. I’ll track her down. Exactly how I had no idea, but it certainly would not be with Mother’s help. In fact I should probably have to be very patient and wait at least until I was twenty-one, when, it seemed to me, I would suddenly, magically know how to go about it. I could imagine the uproar it would cause. But I rejoiced also that Mother had just created a purpose for me and would never know it, because I was going to keep very quiet about it. I was intrigued by the prostitute part, and frankly unbelieving- I knew, because I could just sense it, that even if it were true there would be a reason for it. Something must have happened to her, something she couldn’t help. I would find her and make everything all right.

I’m getting to the guilt part of it. So, with my beautiful secret, the years went by. Twenty-one came and went, of course. Mother got worse and really did need looking after. I got sour, as I think I mentioned. So by the time I was forty-six, on that day eighteen years ago when the buddleia outside Mother’s window offended me so deeply, I am afraid there was a bit of a row. I am afraid my patience deserted me and I raged at Mother about the incontinence. At the heart of it was her notion that I was only worthy to clear up her mess, and yes, I admit that I shouted at her, and not for the first time. She of course screamed back, along the usual lines. But this time she added something. She said it wasn’t her fault I was still here. What’s that supposed to mean, I yelled at her. And then she said, in the way you would, the only way you could say it if you’d been saving it up for about thirty years, that if I hadn’t been so stupid and gullible over the clock, I could have left years ago.

I got it out of her, finally. She had spoken to Christie’s. They had told her that that series of numbered, unsigned Vulliamy clocks are the earliest and best. The records, the first surviving Vulliamy Clock Book, begin with Number 297, delivered in 1797. Mine was 169, predating the known records by at least ten years. It would have fetched about Ј1,700, possibly Ј2,000, in the early nineteen-fifties. The longcase clock had been worth at least ten times what I’d got for it. More than enough to go to university.

Mother herself had always had a shrewd idea that it was worth something, though Father would never spell out to her how much. That was why she had checked up and, of course, why she was furious that the clock was mentioned specifically in Father’s will as going to me. But why didn’t you tell me, I asked her, why? Of course I knew the answer: if I wanted to flounce off on my high horse and sell it to some two-bit shop, that was my own lookout. She loved it, telling me all this.

It explained Mr Hapgood’s three bedroom house in Rectory Fields. I think I’d realised something of the sort.

Anyway, since I’ve told this much, I might as well tell it all.

It wasn’t even Mother’s bombshell over the clock that day that did it, in the end, nor the way she kept quiet so that the money for university never came my way. No, it was what she went on to tell me about my real mother that really did it.

You see, I hadn’t quite realised until that day that I had been living all those years, all of my life to date, not with the hope that I would find her, but living on that hope. It had been feeding me. And with what Mother told me, the hope died. That day, I saw that I would never know how it felt to come first with somebody. I had been holding on to the chance that I might still come first with my real mother, once I found her. But what Mother told me, the information she tossed at me as if it didn’t matter, was that although my mother had not died when I was five, she had died since. She had been alive, all those years ago, when Mother first told me I was a prostitute’s bastard. But now she was dead.

It will keep for later, what happened next. It still makes me cry to think about it and really I think I’ve said enough on that subject for now. I have searched my conscience and concluded that what I did was not my fault.

So let me get back to that night after Michael came home. I did sleep a little, burdened still with something that, on balance, was not a feeling of guilt. This may surprise you if you are the sort of person who puts people like Michael, Steph and me in a different category from other people. But for some reason I find myself incapable of believing that I am significantly worse than everyone else.

Michael slept dreamlessly and woke early. But Steph was lying on her back staring at the ceiling, and he could tell that she had been like that for hours. Even in the half-light, he thought her features had sharpened overnight; around her mouth it seemed that an old tightness had returned. Turning on his side, he reached out and, starting at her hairline, with one finger traced the line of her profile. When he touched her forehead she did not move, but when he reached the soft little lift of flesh between the base of her nose and her upper lip she tipped back her head and caught his finger in her mouth. They had done this before so many times that it was by now their customary foreplay. But Steph did not this time keep hold of his finger, running her teeth gently along its length. She did not then turn to him without letting go for a moment, and take her mouth to his, and only then gently remove his hand and place it between her legs. Instead she took his finger from her mouth and pressed hard, dry kisses all over his hand, pulled the fingers open and smoothed his palm over her face. Her cheeks were wet. Michael drew her close and they held each other tight in the silence of the room. Outside, the first creamy light of the day was melting to yellow sunshine. They heard Jean get up and go downstairs. Then they lay listening to the yammering of the birds as light tried to burn through the curtains, until Steph’s body relaxed against his and slowly she drew him into her. They did not hurry; all too soon this sweet time would be over, anyway.

By six o’clock the next morning we were all downstairs. I had made a pot of tea and got out all the maps I could find, for I had already begun to grapple with the practicalities and had an inkling of how we would have to proceed. We had been set upon a path that we simply had to follow to the end. We had no choice. We hated the necessity for it, and wished desperately that we could undo the events of the day before. I could tell by their faces when they joined me at the table that Michael and Steph felt this, too.

There was so much more to do, and in some ways it would be even worse than what had been done yesterday. And there was the extra worry of not knowing how much time we had. So if I say that we became brutally practical, don’t misunderstand. I mean it only in the sense that one might say it of people attending to the consequences of accident or misfortune: firemen or paramedics or surgeons. (That was, in fact, exactly what we were doing.) There is a need to get the job done, and what it looks like, or feels like, to attend to it must not be allowed to interfere with physical skill, courage or resolve to see it through. What good ever comes of people ceasing to think clearly? So we became brutally practical, but we never acted with brutality. We merely mustered the strength, for one another’s sakes, to do what we had to. In fact I would go as far as to say that in our case, the killing of that man was attended by nothing but regret. Even what we did next was carried out only because we had to, and it was done with respect, even with something like tenderness.

He couldn’t stay here, at Walden. That was certain. Not just for the obvious reason that he might be found but because he would somehow dirty our surroundings. We were already thinking of the poor soul as a kind of pollutant. Wherever we might have put him, and there were dozens of places where he could have been buried, we just could not bear to keep him anywhere on the premises. The earth here was Miranda’s, and her presence sanctified it. I imagined myself lying in bed in a week’s time at four in the morning, knowing that he was lying not far off, and I knew that unless he was got rid of I should never feel that this place was ours or was quite clean, ever again. We had to get him away. We had to put far from us the ugly, terrible thing that Michael had been forced to do, we had to take ourselves beyond the whole episode. If we could, we would rid ourselves even of the memory of what had happened. We had to be allowed to go on as before and that would not be possible if he were anywhere close by. Besides, what if the police came digging?

No, he would have to go, and this brought a number of considerations. For one thing, I could not leave the house. Quite apart from my own inclinations (I had not felt like leaving the house since my day in Bath) I was the house sitter and what if Shelley telephoned about anything? Steph also would have to carry on as before, appearing each day at Sally’s and looking after Charlie. So it would be up to Michael alone. He would have to do it by himself, and here came the first of several quite appalling practical difficulties. Michael could barely lift him. In one piece, I mean.

Jean seemed to know that the police would not do anything about the disappearance of an adult until at least forty-eight hours had elapsed. Even then they would point out that people have a perfect right to absent themselves without being considered as having gone missing. But eventually the police would have to take it seriously, and when they did, she told them, they would be sure to come asking questions. Neither Michael nor what remained of Gordon Brookes must be anywhere near Walden when that happened. Michael’s presence was in itself a problem, because trivial though it now seemed, the matter of his unpaid fines meant that he could not risk giving the police either his real name or a false one. By this time tomorrow Michael would have to be well clear, and the business of disposing of Gordon Brookes under way. Jean waved an arm over the maps that covered the table.

‘I’m trying to work out where you could go. But it’s hard to tell,’ she said, apologetically. ‘A map only tells you so much.’

‘As long as it’s quiet places,’ Michael said. ‘And a long way from here. Just write me down a route and I’ll improvise.’

Steph squinted at the maps, then at Michael. ‘It’s hard on your own,’ she said, suddenly eager, ‘trying to read a map and drive. You need somebody with you. Jean, he needs somebody with him, doesn’t he? Jean, suppose I go as well?’

But of course she knew even as she asked that it was out of the question. Steph and Jean must stay, and carry on precisely as they would if Gordon Brookes had actually visited and left, as Steph had already told Sally he had. Nothing must change on the surface; life must go on in its usual way. Meanwhile in their heads, they must create a yesterday in which everything had happened as it should have done, and as they would claim it had. They must construct a yesterday like a film that would play over and over in the imagination, with conversations and events whose details they must rehearse until they were as real as memories. This must be the yesterday they would reel back to and remember and talk of, when they were asked about it.

‘Steph, of course you can’t go with him.’

Michael said, ‘You’ve got things to do here. You have to stay here and wait. If they come, you’ve got to be here to tell them. You tell them Mr Brookes stayed all morning but he left before lunch. He spent the morning with Charlie, right?’

Steph stared at them both for a few moments. Then she said, ‘With Charlie and me. He wasn’t used to babies. He just watched. We were outside on the playmat; me and Charlie played with his cars and the blue rabbit.’

‘Mainly he watched. But he did put on the Cookie Monster glove puppet and did some funny voices for him,’ Jean suggested.

‘Charlie hates that puppet,’ Steph said. ‘Mr Brookes just watched. He didn’t seem very happy.’

‘Yes! You’re right, he did seem withdrawn. Perhaps he was depressed, but we hadn’t met him before so we thought it was just shyness,’ Jean said. ‘He said very little. He didn’t say anything about his holiday. But he read to Charlie out of one of his books.’

‘Yes, he read him The Very Hungry Caterpillar. Then he carried Charlie round the garden and showed him the flowers. Oh, yes, and he gave him his bottle,’ Steph said, with finality. ‘Don’t you remember?’

‘Now you’ve mentioned it,’ Jean said, ‘yes, I think I do.’

‘We said to ourselves when he’d gone, what a nice man.’

‘Very serious, and quiet, but nice. And we noticed how he said goodbye to Charlie, didn’t we?’

‘Yes, oh yes. We noticed-what?’

‘How he whispered in his ear and held him tight, and for such a long time. How his eyes were watering when he handed him back, as if he were leaving for the other side of the world! After he’d gone, we said, well, he clearly adores that grandson of his.’

‘We said, lucky little Charlie.’

‘So we did.’

‘And we thought no more about it.’

Michael put on gumboots, found goggles, heavy gardening gloves, a long gardening apron. Jean found two rolls of plastic bin liners and a bag of carefully folded supermarket carrier bags that she had saved from Michael’s shopping trips. He fetched the chain saw and took it, with bin liners and bags, to the pool pavilion. Carefully he closed the French windows behind him, entered the bathroom and closed that door too. A little later, when Steph and Jean heard, faintly, the cough of the motor, they did not remark upon it to each other. They were busy. There were the clothes from yesterday to burn, including shoes and a panama hat. There were the clothes Gordon Brookes had packed for his holiday, the backpack itself, his walking boots and anorak, too. Together they carried armloads down between the vegetable rows to the patch of ground behind the walled garden. Michael had forbidden them to use petrol, so Jean scattered a whole box of firelighters under a heap of kindling, sloshed a bottle of methylated spirit over it and flung in a match. She and Steph stood back and watched as flames whirled upwards, sucking breath out of the air that began to tremble against the sky. It was still early, but presently it would be time to fetch Charlie. Steadily they began to feed the fire. It would smoulder for at least a day and a night, giving off the choking smells of charring and melting cotton, canvas and plastic, but without discussing it, Jean and Steph both knew that they wanted the first and fiercest blazing of Gordon Brookes’s belongings to be over before Charlie came. They wanted to give him a nice, ordinary day. They all needed it, and they would try to make it so, despite the edgy smell of burning that would hang in the air, and the constant background noise of raw grating, as a chainsaw blade some distance away met and sliced into something solid, yet wet-sounding.

The surface of the day passed. In the house the hours and minutes presented themselves and were filled conventionally. Outside it clouded over and rained for a short time, reducing the fire to sullen smoking and keeping them indoors. Charlie was now eating variously coloured forms of creamy slop that Steph prepared for him, and he slept off his lunch of mashed banana and avocado while she began on a drawing of a jar of honeysuckle that she had picked and placed on the kitchen table. But even after the rain the day remained close and muggy. Steph’s head began to ache and she fell asleep.

Jean fussed around over unnecessary jobs in the house, with a set look on her face. Late in the afternoon, after Steph had left to take Charlie back, she began to assemble and wrap sandwiches, cake and fruit. She filled flasks with tea. She brought down rugs, and folded clean clothes for Michael and put them in his backpack. It soothed her to have such sensible, innocuous things to do. An aspiration to wholesomeness felt important and necessary now, so as she worked on the preparations she kept well to the back of her mind the actual purpose of the journey. And she curbed a wish to whirl round tackling six things at once, and forced herself to move slowly, concentrating on doing everything that a good mother should to ensure that Michael would be as comfortable as possible in the circumstances.

But she was fretting about Michael’s being disqualified to drive, and the van’s being uninsured, details that he had overlooked so often in the past that it seemed to Jean that perhaps it was pernickety to worry about them now. She had not worried, had she, the countless times he had gone off in the van with her careful shopping list in his hand, smiling and pretending not to hear the last minute things she would be reminding him about at the door. ‘Only get asparagus if it’s English, don’t forget. Oh, shampoo! Shampoo, I forgot! Oh, just anything, as long as it’s for dry hair. No, get Wella. Or Pantene, but make sure it’s for dry hair. Oh, anything will do.’ But those trips had been short and local. Then there was the van itself. It was perfect in one way, being solid-sided. But it was old, a liability on a long journey.

Among the keys in the teapot had been sets of car keys. Jean had never even looked properly inside the double doors of the old stable buildings farthest from the house, but now, with the keys in her hand, she made her way across the gravel, past the log store and outbuildings flanking the courtyard, round to the line of disused stables. She unlocked the doors and hauled them open. There were three cars. She dismissed the sports car at once. There was a large jeep-like thing that looked new and tough, just right for a long journey, but it was full of seats and had windows all the way round it. There seemed to be no boot to speak of. The other car was a more ordinary-looking thing- a Mercedes, Jean thought, knowing little about cars- that seemed solid and safe. Most important, it had what looked like an ordinary boot. Satisfied, Jean returned to the house.

Michael emerged from the pool pavilion that evening at around eight o’clock. He pulled off the boots and stripped, and wearing only underpants, walked straight into the pool. He did not swim, but simply stood twisting his hands in the water, scooping it up over his shoulders and torso, rubbing cupped handfuls of it over and over his face. He plunged his head under for a few moments and when he brought it up again, he was shivering. Still he stood with his arms clasped round himself, his eyes clamped tight shut and teeth clattering. It was early July, but when the sun had set it had taken all the heat from the air, leaving a coolness in the sky that claimed the evening for itself. He tramped out of the water and back to the house, looking pinched; a stooped, walking ache, Jean thought, watching him through the kitchen window. She handed him a towel at the door, because he would not come inside.

And still he was not finished. He went back to the poolside through the greying light, and got dressed. He once again put on the gumboots and then unhooked from the wall the hose that was used for cleaning the pool, and took it into the pavilion. Inside, he snapped on the lights. A brash yellow glare spilled through the windows onto the grass outside, and as he moved around, daggers of light and shadow lurched and split on the surface of the pool. In the bathroom he ran sharp jets of water up and down the walls and ceiling, and over and around the sealed bags on the floor. He lifted the circular drain cover, and then he shot blades of water into every corner of the bathroom, every surface and angle, until he had sliced and whipped every crumb of salt, every hair, every shard and unnameable remnant of Gordon Brookes down into the drain, and watched them disappear. Then he returned to the poolside and replaced the hose, pulled off the boots and clothes and waded in again, where he lay, floating, shivering and weeping with cold and shock. This time when he came back to the house Jean demanded that he go upstairs and get in a hot bath. Afterwards he tried to rest, but could not sleep. Later Steph tiptoed in with a tray, but he could not eat. Jean picked up his soaked, stained clothes from the poolside and put them in a bag to burn later.

It was about one o’clock in the morning when Michael backed the Mercedes out of the stable garage and across the drive to the edge of the side lawn that led down towards the pool. Through the dark the sound of the wheels on gravel was confiding but dismissive, like the gentle rustling of paper being scrunched carelessly in large hands. Next he drove his own van into the stable garage and locked the doors. Silently he made his way across to the pool pavilion, and under the private light of a slice of moon he began the solitary ferrying of bags from the bathroom to the open boot of the car. He could not help counting them. There were thirty-one of them, a fact that he found strangely helpful. Michael’s memory of the man was beginning to seem implausible now; any idea that Gordon Brookes had until very recently been a living, talking person now seemed unreliable. In fact it was difficult even to sustain the thought of him as a dead, silent person any more. It seemed like some trick of perception, too dislocated from the ponderous, overwhelmingly physical and troublesome fact of these thirty-one filled bags to be true. Gordon Brookes had, in the course of events since yesterday, been receding in the way that Michael now imagined must happen when an animal goes for slaughter. For how else could it be done? Since he had been living here he had seen them on the road now and then, those lorries with slatted sides whose interiors clattered with caged life, and he had overtaken one once on a slope, glimpsing as his van strained past a tender nose pushed up against the slats, trailing strings of slime, and one silk-lashed, fearful eye. How could anyone go about the task of transforming that into a number of pink rolled joints on polystyrene trays, unless some human mental law came into force, some benign slackening of the logic that bound the two states together by the act of killing?

So it must be with Gordon Brookes. Gordon Brookes must now be thought of as a packaging, transport and disposal operation. The separation of the man- alive, talking, gesturing- from the stuff he was made of- lumps of gristle, bones, offal, cords of muscle and fat- was essential if Michael were not to go mad. He was still aghast from the discovery of just how much stuff there was and how in all its appalling quantity it had split and spurted, and how parts of it stank, too.

Jean and Steph prowled round between the car and the lighted kitchen doorway, trying to help Michael without looking at or touching the bags. They loaded his food, backpack, blankets and torch into the car, went back for a spade, a pickaxe and the maps. Jean hovered, thinking, and added another sweater, two long raincoats and boots, a box of Charlie’s baby wipes, a bottle of brandy. Just as Michael was ready to go Steph tore back to the house and returned with a photograph of herself, Charlie and Jean. Michael looked at it and tucked it in the top pocket of his shirt.

It seemed somehow too cheery, even profane, to wave at the departing car. Jean and Steph walked alongside as Michael edged it round to the front, and then they stood, each raising a hand, as they heard from the sudden silence that the car’s wheels had left the gravel of the courtyard and reached the start of the drive that threw its black ribbon down into the night.

What I remember thinking most about the day before Michael set off with the bags was how ordinary it must have looked on the surface. Steph and I kept well clear of the pool, and that was all, really, apart from the smoking bonfire that we went out to see to in turns, every now and then.

Once again it was the house that rescued us, with its demands and its rewards. I found things to do: dusting as usual, flowers to arrange, the hearth to sweep, bathrooms and the kitchen to clean. One of the tiebacks of the drawing room curtains had lost one of its tassels, so I sewed it back on. Oh, it’s never-ending, the upkeep of a house like this. A house like this claims a number of one’s daily hours no matter what, and it’s a pleasure to surrender them to it. Because when the flowers are freshened up, the silver cleaned, and the whiff of beeswax and the faint, delicious oil smell from the Aga mix and spread themselves through the rooms, it feels like a reward, or rather, a contract honoured. What a rich repayment for one’s willing attentions to a house, to be given a home in return. With Michael so conspicuously absent and the noise of the saw going on in the background, I thought this on and off during the day, until it seemed to me that we owed it to the house itself, and not only to one another, to keep strong. It may sound silly but it was as if the house would be hurt, too, if we were to neglect it now, or fail to see things through. I worried too, of course. Towards evening I got busy with things that I thought Michael might need, and that kept me occupied until it was time for him to go.

We were grateful for an uneventful day that day. Steph managed to sleep in the afternoon but I could not, for thinking of Michael. She took Charlie back to Sally’s as usual, and when she returned she reported that Sally had been absolutely the same as ever. This was as we had hoped. Steph still seemed to be existing in this half-sleep, taking in things, responding and reporting back as if her brain were some patient machine. There was no question of panic. All in all, things were going well. But that night, after Michael had left, I was reluctant to go to bed. Tired out though I was, I stayed up and walked round the house, going from room to room, slowly and quietly, so as not to wake Steph. I believe I was seeking comfort. Eventually I went to bed and lay awake, praying that Michael would be all right.

For two weeks nothing happened. With Michael away, the grass grew. Jean felt she walked through the lawn, rather than across it. She would go slowly, with eyes down on her way back from cutting flowers, and ache for Michael’s return. Life had become more modest; an air of quiet waiting descended, befitting a household that is observing a period of formal mourning.

One evening in the middle of July Steph entered Sally’s house with Charlie to find Sally sitting red-eyed in the kitchen. She took Charlie from Steph’s arms unceremoniously, with none of the singsong endearments that Steph considered phoney in any case. The silence was uncomfortable so for once Steph, who expected Sally to initiate the talking, started first.

‘All right, Sally?’

Sally answered by sinking her head into Charlie’s neck. When her face reappeared she said, ‘There’s a problem with Gordon. Or there might be, they don’t really know.’

‘Gordon?’

‘You know, Mr Brookes, Charlie’s granddad. They don’t know where he is. The police, I mean.’

‘But he’s on holiday, isn’t he? Didn’t he go off walking or something?’

‘He was meant to be back a week ago. His church lot just thought he must be taking a few extra days, but now the police have found his car. It was abandoned.’

Steph swallowed. ‘Oh, no!’ She could not for a moment remember what she was supposed to know and what she was not, so she sat down hard in a chair. What did the police know? Had they found Michael? Sally’s face disappeared back into Charlie’s clothes again and she began to rock gently. Steph looked round and forced herself to think. ‘Want me to put the kettle on?’ she said.

Sally nodded, her head still buried. Steph rose, filled it and switched it on. As she was washing mugs- every mug in the house seemed to be in the sink- she said in a worried voice, ‘So the police- what is it they’re saying, exactly?’

Sally presented her exhausted face again. ‘They’ve found his car, or what’s left of it. It was miles and miles from here- in a lay-by someplace near Chepstow, all vandalised and burnt out. They don’t know how it got there. It’s miles and miles from where he’s supposed to be. He’s supposed to be up north.’

‘You mean, he isn’t, then? Then where is he?’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, Steph, that’s what I’m telling you! They don’t know. They say he won’t have left the car there. They say it was probably stolen and dumped there and set alight.’

Steph drew in a shocked breath. ‘Oh, Sally! They’re not saying he- he wasn’t, you know, in it, was he?’

Sally seemed slightly surprised. ‘No, of course not. They don’t know where he is. That’s what I’m saying. They don’t know if the theft of the car’s got something to do with where he is, or if it’s a separate thing altogether. But the police want to find the people who took the car. Obviously.’

‘But are they… I mean they must be… are they looking for him? Up north, I mean?’ Steph asked, picking up the kettle. It was easier, she was finding, to ask questions casually when she was doing something else at the same time. She filled their coffee mugs and brought them to the table.

Sally shook her head. ‘They won’t even say he’s definitely missing, they say he could have left the car somewhere to go off walking, assuming it’d be safe for days and days. I think they’re making enquiries up there, along the Pennine Way, but they’re not even sure he went. Nobody would steal a car up there and bring it all the way down here, according to them. So they think it was nicked from round here, and he never went up north. They said he could’ve changed his plans and decided to do his walking down south instead of going all the way up there.’ She sighed. ‘I don’t know exactly what they’re doing. They don’t know what they’re doing, if you ask me.’

‘Maybe he did change his mind. You said he used to go up north and walk there with his wife, didn’t you? Maybe at the last minute he couldn’t face it on his own and went somewhere else instead. Here, I’ll take Charlie while you have your coffee.’

Sally looked at Steph with respect and interest as she handed him over. ‘That is possible,’ she said, nodding. She drank some of her coffee but as she put down her mug her face crumpled. ‘But those awful people… the people that took the car, you don’t think… I mean maybe they… you know, they might have… you know, hurt him… and just left him somewhere. Oh God!’

‘But what for?’

‘Oh God, Steph, I don’t know! That’s what the police are for, isn’t it? And there is such a thing as motiveless crime, you know.’ She blew her nose on a paper tissue from her sleeve and looked up. ‘That’s not the only thing, anyway. The point is I had to ring Simon in Nepal to tell him. I’ve rung the place he’s in anyway, it’s just this tiny hospital. I couldn’t actually speak to him. I was going to tell him he should come home, only he can’t. He’s ill.’ Her eyes filled with tears again. ‘All this time, for over a month, he’s been really ill. That’s why he hasn’t phoned. And he can’t travel yet, so I’ll have to go and be with him and bring him home. I’ve got to go to Nepal.’

‘What about Charlie? You’re not taking Charlie, are you? Shall I… I mean, it’d be better, wouldn’t it? It’d help, wouldn’t it, if we had him at the manor?’

Sally looked gratefully at her, as more tears ran down her cheeks. Charlie, interested, began mimicking her sniffles with little grunts of his own. ‘Would you, Steph? Could you, I mean if it’s no trouble? I haven’t got anyone else he’s so happy with. He’s so good with you.’

‘Of course! Of course I’ll look after him. And of course it’s no trouble. Is it, Charlie?’

‘And look, as long as you don’t need to… I mean, I’ve been a bit outspoken about Simon and his dad. Not that it’s not all true but it’s been a difficult time, you know? I mean, I’ve told the firm I’ve got to go to Nepal, and I’ve told Philip. They’re OK about it and so’s he, but I suppose everybody wants to know where they stand. I can understand it.’

‘How long are you going for?’

‘That’s what I’m saying, I don’t know. I’ve got to get some jabs first anyway, and I can’t get a flight for another ten days. And I’ll be away three weeks. Minimum, it might be longer. Simon’s got this recurrent thing, he might be all right to travel soon or he might not. Why, is that a problem?’ Having got the favour sealed, Sally was now ready to defend her right to ask it.

‘No, of course it isn’t,’ Steph told her smoothly. ‘We’ll be fine. You can stay away as long as you like.’

If we needed encouragement to feel that what we were doing was appropriate and somehow meant, was perhaps even being surveyed and assisted from beyond by some approving deity, we got it, with this news of the car being burned out and abandoned. Over the next few days, as Sally got her trip to Nepal organised, Steph heard new snippets from her. The vicar’s depression and recent erratic habits did us no harm to start with. More and more of his parishioners were adding to the picture of a man with a skewed sense of proportion, a man making a terrible fuss over one lychgate, a man brooding about trouble with his bishop over a recent church theft, as well as his wife’s death and the break-up of his son’s marriage. Sally stopped short of mentioning suicide, at least to Steph, but the thought hung in the air between them whenever Gordon was spoken of.

But for the car not simply to be discovered (as we assumed it would eventually be) where Michael had left it, but to have been stolen, in all probability by joyriders, then vandalised and set alight somewhere just over the border into Wales, was a minor miracle. Because it muddied the picture. Should the police be combing the Pennine Way for an accident victim? Tracking down the brats who had stolen the car and establishing what they might have done with the car’s owner in the course of their thuggery? Dragging rivers? Alerting the ports? The Somerset police now had to work with the Welsh police and two different police authorities up in the Pennines, which was requiring additional layers of effort.

The day after Sally left for Nepal, the police came. A uniformed officer, with the words liaison and community in his title, I recall. We were ready, of course. He seemed particularly anxious that he wasn’t disturbing us and said he wouldn’t take very long. There was concern about the whereabouts of Mr Brookes, and he merely wanted to corroborate, if he could, what was already known about the day Mr Brookes came to see his grandson. He opened up his notebook. Mr Brookes, according to his information, had told his daughter-in-law on the telephone the previous evening, and remarked to the parish secretary that morning, that he was going to visit his grandson before heading up north on holiday. Could he start with our names? Yes, I confirmed, I was the house sitter, and did he want Town and Country’s number? No, he didn’t think that would be necessary. Steph was my niece, staying with me for the time being. (We decided that we should be quite open about the house sitting, in case the police knew of the Standish-Caves. It was wiser also to stick to the aunt and niece story that Steph had told Sally right at the beginning, just in case there should be any cross-referencing.) When I said this I watched him look at Steph, playing on the drawing room floor with Charlie, that lovely hair swinging over her face. She looked up, pushing back her hair and smiling at him with her strange, green-gold eyes.

He had more questions, which we answered. Yes, Mr Brookes had kindly brought them down here from Sally’s house that morning. His mood? Difficult to say, as we had not met him before, but he had seemed a quiet sort of man, pleased to see Charlie but in a muted sort of way. Perhaps a little preoccupied. You might think, Steph said hesitatingly, and she hoped it didn’t sound cheeky, you might think that vicars would be happier than other people, believing in Jesus and all that. The policeman said he supposed vicars had their fair share of problems like everybody else, and in fact several members of Mr Brookes’s parish reported that he had been a changed man in the months since his wife passed away. We paused at this point for long sympathetic murmurs, which for myself were quite sincere. Yes, the police officer said, quite chatty now, Mr Brookes was always known to have been a workaholic, but had lately been driving himself even harder, throwing himself into things. We told him that Mr Brookes had left here at some time between twelve and half-past, after refusing an invitation to lunch. Yes, the policeman said, the man who ran the shop in the village believed he might have seen his car. That must have been quite soon after. The policeman pulled the rubber band back over his notebook and thanked us.

Seeing him to the door, I said, meaning it in a way that I truly don’t understand, that I hoped poor Mr Brookes was all right. The policeman said (and this was unofficial) that if you asked him the poor man had done away with himself, possibly from the Clifton Suspension Bridge. Left the car somewhere in the vicinity, from where it was later nicked, and driven by joyriders, most probably, straight up the M5 and into Wales. A lot of that went on, joyriding over the Severn Bridge, but could you get the Bridge Authorities to co-operate in a clamp down? You could not. And Mr Brookes wouldn’t be the first, it drew suicides like a magnet, that place, and if you asked him they should shut off pedestrian access to the Clifton Bridge, full stop. People were always tipping themselves off it, often at night; he wouldn’t be the first, poor devil- on average it was about ten a year. And it was notorious, the Bristol Channel. The tides could wash a body up and down the estuary for weeks and months before they had finished with it. I do hope you’re wrong, I said. So do I, he said, so do I. They were keeping an open mind. But if that was what had happened, and he wasn’t saying it had, mind, then it would all ‘tie in’.