Not Safe After Dark

CARRION

Isn’t it strange the way two strangers might strike up a casual acquaintance due simply to a quirk of fate? And isn’t it even stranger how that innocent meeting might so completely alter the life of one of them? That was exactly what happened when Edward Grainger and I met in a pub one wet September lunchtime, only weeks before his tragic loss.

I work in a bank in the City. It’s a dull job, enlivened only by the occasional surge of adrenalin when the pound takes yet another plunge on the foreign exchange markets, and most lunchtimes I like to get out of the office and take refuge in the Mason’s Arms.

As a rule, I will drink half a pint of Guinness with a slice of quiche or a cheese roll, say, and perhaps, once in a while, treat myself to a steak and kidney pie. As I eat, I work at the Times crossword, which I never seem able to finish before my glass is empty, and after my meal I enjoy a cigarette. I know the vile things are bad for me, but I can’t quite seem to give them up. Besides, how bad can one cigarette a day be? And only five days a week, at that.

Given its location in the City, the Mason’s Arms is generally busy, noisy and smoky by half past twelve on a weekday, and that suits me just fine. Lost in the crowd, buffeted by conversation and laughter that require no response on my part, I can concentrate on my crossword or allow my mind to drift in directions that the constant application of little grey cells to columns of figures precludes.

That particular lunchtime I found myself leaving the office a few minutes later than usual due to an important telephone conversation with an overseas client. The short walk also took longer because I had to struggle against the wind and rain with my rather flimsy umbrella. When I got to the Arms, as I had taken to calling it, I found my usual little corner table already taken by a stranger in a pinstripe suit. I could hardly tell him to sod off, so I carried my drink over and sat opposite him.

As he read his Times, I studied his features closely. I would guess his age at about forty-five – mostly because of the wrinkles around his eyes and the grey hair around his temples and ears – but having said that, I would have to admit that the overall effect of his face was one of youthfulness. He had bright blue eyes and a healthy, ruddy complexion, and he showed no sign of that dark, shadowy stubble that makes so many men look downright repulsive, not to mention sinister.

After I had finished my ham roll, I lit my cigarette and wrestled with eight down, letting the ebb and flow of conversation drift over me until a voice seemed to single itself out from the crowd and speak directly to me.

Startled, I noticed the man opposite looking at me in a way that suggested he had just spoken.

‘Pardon?’ I said. ‘I was miles away.’

‘“Crippen,”’ he said. ‘Eight down. “Quiet prince upset for this murderer.” It’s an anagram of “prince” and “p” for silent.’

‘Yes, I do see that, thank you very much.’ If my tone was a little frosty, it served the bugger right. I hate it when people solve my crossword clues for me, the same way I hate anyone reading over my shoulder. Takes all the fun out of it.

His face dropped when he saw the look I gave him.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘Very rude of me. Didn’t think.’

‘It’s all right.’ I put the crossword aside and flicked a column of ash at the floor.

‘Look, you wouldn’t happen to know anything about septic tanks, would you?’ he asked.

‘I’m afraid not.’ As far as conversational gambits went, this fellow wasn’t exactly heading for the top of the class in my book.

‘Oh. Pity. You see, we’re having one installed in a couple of weeks, my wife Harriet and I. I’m just not sure what kind of mess to expect.’

‘Well, I suppose they’ll have to dig the garden up,’ I told him. ‘But I can’t honestly say I’ve ever seen one, so I don’t know how big they are.’

He smiled. ‘Well, that’s the point, isn’t it? You’re not supposed to see them. We’re moving to the country, you know, to Hampshire.’

‘Why are you moving?’ I asked. And though I surprised myself by asking such a personal question of a complete stranger, it felt natural enough.

He sipped his gin and tonic before replying. ‘It’s for Harriet, mostly,’ he said. ‘Wants the country air. Not that I’d knock it, mind you. And it’s a beautiful cottage, or it will be after the renovations. Seventeenth century. I’ll keep the flat in town, of course, go down to the country at weekends. Yes, I’m sure it’ll work out.’

‘I hope so,’ I told him. Then I excused myself and headed back to the bank, it being almost one-thirty and Mr Beamish, the branch manager, being a real stickler for punctuality.

As time went on, our conversations became a regular feature of my lunchtime visits to the Arms, though I would be hard pushed now to think of everything we discussed: politics, of course, on which we disagreed; books, on which we agreed far more than we would have imagined; and marriage, about which we couldn’t quite make up our minds. Sometimes, we would just work on the crossword together in silence.

He also talked about weekends at the country house, of autumn walks in the woods, the occasional hovercraft trip to the Isle of Wight, quiet nights with a good bottle of claret, a hefty volume of Trollope, and a log fire crackling in the hearth.

Though I had never fancied country living myself, I must admit that Edward’s accounts made me quite envious. So much so that when Evelyn brought up the subject at home after watching a documentary on the Cotswolds, I thought it might become a real possibility for us, too, in a year or two’s time.

Edward and I never met at any other times or places – ours was a purely casual arrangement – but I like to think that a sort of friendship developed. Sometimes he didn’t turn up at all. He worked in international finance, he told me, and now and then he had to sacrifice his lunch hour for emergency meetings or telephone calls from strange time zones. Occasionally, he had to go abroad for a few days. But when he did come, we usually contrived to sit together and chat over our drinks and rolls for half an hour or so.

During that time, I didn’t find out very much more about his private life, and if I were to come to any conclusions they would be due entirely to my reading between the lines.

I didn’t ask Edward about his wife’s occupation, for example, but somehow I got the impression that she spent most of her time at home cooking, cake-decorating, cleaning, sewing, knitting and such. What people used to call a ‘housewife’ in the old days. I suppose now she could call herself an ‘estate manager’ down in Hampshire. As far as their relationship went, it sounded perfectly normal to me.

Though I had never met Harriet, I’m sure you can imagine how shocked I was on that bright, windy Thursday in early October when Edward came in a quarter of an hour later than usual, looking drawn and haggard, and told me that his wife had disappeared.

Naturally, I tried to comfort him as best I could over the following weeks, at least as far as our brief and irregular meetings allowed. But there was little I could do. For the most part, I could only look on sadly as Edward lost weight and his former ruddy complexion turned wan. Soon he came to remind me of the wretched youth in Keats’s poem: ‘Alone and palely loitering’.

Weeks passed, and still there was no sign of Harriet. Theories as to her disappearance varied, as they do in cases like this. One tabloid speculated that she had been abducted by a serial killer, then chopped up and buried somewhere. A local doctor suggested that she could have suffered some form of amnesia. If so, he went on, she might easily have wandered off and ended up living on the streets of London with the thousands of other lost and lonely souls. One neighbour, Edward told me, speculated that Harriet could have been actually planning her escape for some time and had simply taken off for America, Ireland or France to start a new life under a new name. With a new man, of course. Astonishingly, Edward also told me that even he had come under police suspicion at one time, albeit not for long.

Christmas came and went. It was about as cheerful as a wet weekend in July, the way it usually is for families whose children have all grown up and left home. Edward seemed to have gained a little colour when I saw him after the holidays. Or perhaps the Arctic winds we had that January had rubbed his skin raw. Anyway, it was around then that he started dropping in at the Arms for lunch less and less frequently.

By the beginning of February I hadn’t seen him for three weeks, and I was slipping easily back into my old routine of doing the crossword over lunch. I missed his company, of course, and I was certainly curious about Harriet, but we are creatures of habit, are we not? And old habits are deeply ingrained.

It was near the end of March when I saw him next, but it wasn’t in the Arms. No, I had come into the West End to shop one Saturday afternoon, mostly to get out of the way while Evelyn was busy planting the herbaceous borders. I hate gardening, and if I’m around I usually get roped in.

Anyway, I was browsing downstairs in the fiction section of Waterstone’s on Charing Cross Road, when I saw Edward across the table of new releases. It took me a moment to recognize him because he was wearing casual clothes and seemed to have done something to remove the grey from his hair. He was also fingering the new Will Self paperback, which one would hardly expect of a Trollope man.

On second glance, though, I realized it was definitely Edward and that the pretty young blonde with the prominent breasts didn’t just happen to be standing beside him; she was with him. Surely this couldn’t be the elusive Harriet?

Then a strange thing happened. Edward caught my eye as I walked over, and I saw a very odd look pass over his features. For a moment, I could have sworn, he wanted to turn tail and avoid me. But I got to him before he could retreat.

‘Edward,’ I said. ‘It’s good to see you.’ Then I looked at the blonde. I could see her roots. ‘I see Harriet has turned up, then,’ I said with a smile.

Edward cleared his throat and the blonde merely frowned. ‘Well… er…’ he said. ‘Not exactly. I mean, no, she hasn’t. This is Joyce.’ He put his arm around the blonde’s shoulders and looked down at her with obvious pride and passion.

I said hello to Joyce as Edward haltingly explained our relationship, such as it was, then he made excuses and they hurried up the stairs as if the place were on fire. That was the last time I ever clapped eyes on Edward Grainger.

About a year after the incident in Waterstone’s, something so profound, so shocking and so unexpected happened to me that my life was never to be the same again. I fell in love.

Like most people my age, I had long thought myself immune to powerful passions, long settled into a sedate and comfortable existence with little in the way of strong emotion to upset its even keel. If I have unsatisfied or unrequited hopes and wishes, then I am in good company, for who hasn’t? If I regret some of the sacrifices I have made for the comforts I have gained, who doesn’t? And if I sometimes feel that my life lacks adventure, lacks spice, then again, who doesn’t? In all that, I felt, I was perfectly normal.

Life, it had come to seem to me, was a slow betrayal of the dreams of one’s youth and a gradual decline from the desires of one’s adolescence. Little did I know what a fragile illusion all that was until I met Katrina.

Imagine, if you can, my utter amazement when the bells started to ring, the earth moved and a sudden spring came into my step every time I saw her. Absurd, I told myself, she’ll never pay the least attention to an old fuddy-duddy like you. But she did. Oh, indeed she did. Love truly must be blind if such a gorgeous creature as Katrina could give herself to me.

Katrina came to work for the branch in summer, and by autumn we were meeting clandestinely whenever we could. She lived alone in a tiny bedsit in Kennington, which was convenient, if a bit cramped. But what is a little discomfort to a pair of lovers? We were consumed with a passion that could no more be stopped than an avalanche or a tidal wave. It picked us up, tossed us about like rag dolls and threw us back on the ground dazed, dazzled and breathless. I couldn’t get enough of her sad eyes, her soft red lips, her small breasts with the nipples hard as acorns when we made love, her skin like warm brown silk.

Needless to say, this affair made life very difficult both at work and at home, but I think I managed to cope well enough under the circumstances. I know I succeeded in hiding it from Evelyn, for I surely would have felt the repercussions had I not.

We went on meeting furtively for almost a year, during which time our passion did not abate in the least. Katrina never once asked me to abandon my marriage and live with her, but I wanted to. Oh God, how I wanted to. Only the thought of all the trouble, all the upheaval, that such a move would cause prevented me. For Evelyn wouldn’t take it lying down. So, like many others embroiled in affairs, I simply let it run on, perhaps hoping vaguely that some deus ex machina would come along and solve my problems for me.

Then, one day, after an excruciatingly painful Christmas spent away from Katrina, Evelyn reminded me of a conversation we had had some time ago about getting a country cottage, and pointed out the ideal place in an estate agent’s brochure: a rundown, isolated cottage in Oxfordshire, going for a song.

Furiously, I began to think of how such a move might prevent me from seeing Katrina as often as I needed to. We would have to sell the Dulwich house, of course, but the Oxfordshire cottage was indeed going for such an unbelievably low price that I might be able to afford a small flat in town.

At a pinch, however, Evelyn might suggest I could commute. The thought of that was unbearable. Though Katrina and I wouldn’t be separated totally, anything other than a quick session after work before the train home would be impossible. And neither of us wanted to live like that. A quickie in the back of a car is so sordid, and we were passionately, romantically in love.

On the other hand, I could hardly crush Evelyn’s dreams of a place in the country without thinking up a damn good explanation as to why we should simply stay put. And I couldn’t. The price was right, and we might not have another chance for years. Even with the renovations that would need to be done, we worked out, we could still easily afford it.

And so we took the plunge and bought the cottage. To say I was a soul in torment might sound like an exaggeration, but believe me, it doesn’t even come close to describing how wretched I really felt as I signed on the dotted line.

We had sent Sam Halsey, a jack-of-all-trades in the renovation business, over to Oxfordshire on a number of occasions to assess what needed doing and how it could be done to our liking and to our budget. One of his complaints was that, due to its isolation and to the odd whims of its previous owners, the toilet arrangements were far from adequate.

After much deliberation, one afternoon at the house in Dulwich, Sam said, ‘Of course, you could have a septic tank put in.’

‘A what?’ I said.

‘A septic tank. Perfectly respectable. Lots of country folk have them. Of course, you’ll need some carrion.’

‘I’m sorry, Sam, I don’t follow you.’

‘Carrion. To get the whole process going. Now, some of the younger chaps in the business will tell you a bit of compost will do the job just fine, but don’t believe them. Don’t you believe them. My old boss told me-’

Sam’s voice faded into the background as, suddenly, it hit me. I thought of my old lunchtime companion, Edward Grainger, and that guilty look that flitted across his features the time I saw him in Waterstone’s with Joyce, the blonde.

I remembered the tragedy of his wife’s disappearance, and how, after that, I saw less and less of him.

And I remembered how the disappearance occurred around the time they were having a septic tank installed at their cottage in Hampshire. Carrion, indeed.

And then I thought of my Katrina, my beautiful, beautiful Katrina, who took my breath away with her sad eyes and her skin like warm brown silk.

And, lastly, I thought of Evelyn. Life just isn’t fair, is it? Some people don’t simply fade away quietly into the obscurity from whence they came when you want rid of them, do they? No, they have to cause trouble, create scenes, make unreasonable demands and generally do their damnedest to ruin your hopes of a decent and happy future without them. They just won’t go away. Well, as I have already explained, Evelyn is one of those people. I’m certain of it.

On the other hand, people disappear all the time, don’t they? And people change. Harriet changed into Joyce, didn’t she? Sometimes you just have to give a little kick-start to get the process going, like the carrion in the septic tank, and then nature takes care of the rest.

‘Penny for them?’

‘What? Oh, I’m sorry, Sam. Miles away.’

‘That’s all right. I was just saying as how you’ll need some carrion for the septic tank. My old boss swore by it, he did.’

At that moment, Evelyn passed by the open French windows in his shabby beige cardigan, secateurs in hand. Wisps of grey hair blew in the March wind like spiders’ webs, and his glasses had slipped down his nose. Yes, people disappear all the time, don’t they? And if it can happen to wives, I thought, then it can bloody well happen to husbands too.

‘Yes, Sam,’ I said slowly. ‘Yes, I suppose we will. Don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.’