The Living and the Dead in Winsford

FOUR
41

All children disappear.

In every family there’s a story about Tommy or Charlie or little Belinda who disappeared and were not seen again for a whole hour. Or two or three. We made a programme about that — in addition to that one in which Alice Myrman became notorious for having hidden her dead husband in the wood-shed — about those kinds of disappearances. With happy endings — or at least I assume that was the intention. It was never broadcast for various reasons, but together with a colleague I met at least twenty parents who told us about similar experiences.

It’s all about fear, of course. The unparalleled worry a parent feels when they don’t know where their child is. They clasp their hands and pray to God, despite the fact that they haven’t prayed or been to church since they were confirmed at a summer camp with horse-riding a hundred years ago.

And it happens to everybody, almost everybody. Those desperate minutes and hours when Death is an unwelcome guest standing in the porch. We all have memories like that: there must be a reason.

In my family it was Gunsan who disappeared. It was a few years before Death actually came for real, and so it was a foretaste. I recall it with almost photographic accuracy.

In fact it’s my mother I remember most clearly in that context, not so many of the other details. We were on holiday in Denmark and had rented a house for a week, or perhaps two, not far from a place called Gut — we joked a bit about the name. It was not far from the North Sea, albeit not adjacent to it. My brother Göran wasn’t there, presumably he was at some summer camp or other.

Me and Gunsan, my mother and my father. Four of us. And one afternoon we couldn’t find Gunsan. She was only five at the time, and it may well be that I was supposed to keep an eye on her. Made sure that she stayed in or around the house and didn’t go running off somewhere. There was a busy road not far from the house.

But it was only my father and I who went looking for her. My mother stayed at the kitchen table claiming that she was incapable of standing up. He legs simply couldn’t carry her, she impressed upon us, but we must make sure that we came back with Gunsan, otherwise she wouldn’t be responsible for the consequences.

That’s exactly what she said: ‘I won’t be responsible for the consequences if you come back without Gun.’

I can see her now at that table in the well-lit kitchen, sitting on her hands for some reason and staring out of the window. I have never seen her looking like that before. My father tries to explain to her that nothing serious will have happened, and there is nothing to be gained by her not joining in the search. It would be better for all three of us to go out looking, each in a different direction — surely that’s obvious.

Then my mother turns her head and stares at us, at my father and me: that is the brief sequence I remember most vividly. She looks at first one, then the other of us, and says once again: ‘Go and find Gun. I won’t be responsible for the consequences if you come back without her.’

Her voice sounds like a knife scraping at the bottom of a saucepan, and both my father and I realize that there is something wrong with her. But we don’t have time to worry about that now, and hurry out to go looking for my younger sister.

When I find her she is walking towards me along a path coming from some sand dunes where we have been playing several times before. She is totally unconcerned about the trouble she has caused, is singing a song and even carrying a bunch of flowers that I suspect she might have found in a churchyard that is also not far away. All in all she has been missing for about an hour — at least, that’s the estimate I make afterwards.

I ask my mother why she behaved in that strange way. I’m only thirteen years old, but I’ve been in secondary school for a year and begun to have my eyes opened to the way the world works. I want answers to most things.

But I don’t get an answer to this question, my mother merely gives me a look that says it’s not possible to explain everything to a thirteen-year-old. I remember feeling annoyed with her for several days. When I take up the matter with my father, he looks worried but simply says: ‘That’s the way it is, Maria. Somebody always has to stay at home, and the one who does so knows that in a way that you and I simply can’t understand.’

If we hadn’t found Gunsan, my mother would have taken leave of her senses: that is the fact of the matter that both he and I try to avoid spelling out.

When it eventually happens for real, it’s as if my mother has had time to prepare herself. Gunsan stays alive for quite a few more years.

I follow my mother’s example two days before Christmas forty-two years later. I stay inside the house, or only just outside it, for the whole day. Go no further than the yard and the garden. It’s a cold day, and there is even a light snowfall in the early afternoon. I investigate the little stable building, something I haven’t done before — all I’ve done is fetch firewood from the bunker at the gable end. But there really isn’t much to investigate and certainly no trace of a dog. Just junk, and more junk — it must be very many years since a horse last stood in here. The only thing I might find useful is a lantern; I think it is designed to burn some kind of oil, and despite the fact that it’s filthy and rusty I take it into the house to examine it more closely.

How I could possibly be interested in something like that, now that darkness has fallen again, is way beyond my comprehension. I have a headache that is getting worse, and realize that it is due to the fact that I haven’t eaten or drunk anything all day. Perhaps all the wine I drank yesterday is also making its presence felt. I take out the remains of the soup, but the mere sight of it makes me feel sick and I put the jar back in the fridge. I drink a glass of apple juice and eat a few dry biscuits instead — it’s simply not possible to force anything else down. Apart from two headache pills and another mouthful of juice. By seven o’clock Castor has been away for twenty hours. . I remember letting him out just after making my attempt at finding the passwords last night.

Twenty hours on a moor. The temperature has been round about zero all the time. How long is it possible for. .?

Nevertheless I shout and I shout. And shout and shout.

Why shouldn’t I shout?

About an hour later I am possessed by some sort of urge to act logically. I sit there with paper and pencil and try to put things into perspective. I write down the following facts and try to find a thread linking them together — it seems to me that there must be one:

The dead pheasants

The silver-coloured rental car

The man calling himself G

Samos

Taza

Professor Soblewski’s e-mail

Mark Britton

Jeremy Britton

Death

Castor’s disappearance

I eventually cross out several of them. All that remains is the pheasants, the rented car and Castor. And Death, although I would prefer to cross that out as well. I decide that the rest are irrelevant, at least in the current situation. After a while I add two questions:

Is Martin really dead?

In which case how do I know that?

And after having sat perfectly still for several minutes, staring at my piece of paper, I manage to revert to a thought I recall having had several days ago, before I read that last e-mail from Soblewski:

An accomplice?

Might it be that. .?

Would it be possible that. .?

It takes quite some time to make these trains of thought comprehensible, and that has no doubt to do with my state of mind. Castor has gone missing and I’m on the edge of a nervous breakdown: there’s no point in my pretending otherwise, and I don’t do so.

But if I do go back to that question about a possible accomplice that I raised some time ago — the only possible way for Martin to keep himself incognito if he did manage to get out of that rat-filled bunker — what exactly do I think? Well, I think that realistically there is only one possible accomplice.

Professor Soblewski.

Isn’t that the case? I ask myself. What other scenarios would be possible? In what other way could Martin have reacted without it being known that. . that his wife left him to die in an old bunker from the Second World War? Who would he have trusted to be his confidant if he decided to take the matter into his own hands and get his own back? As he walked along that beach, shuddering and filled with hatred. Because that surely has to be when he decided to solve the problem.

Soblewski, of course. The professor’s house is not far away — certainly no more than a three-hour walk. He and Martin had sat talking and making plans for half the night, so even if Martin wasn’t actually looking for a comrade-in-arms, Soblewski’s must have been the first name to occur to him, and his first move after getting out must have been to return to Soblewski’s house.

What would the implications of that be? What exactly are the implications of this way of thinking?

Despite my predicament it’s not all that difficult to answer that question. It would quite simply mean that Martin and Soblewski are fully acquainted with all the e-mail correspondence that has taken place since I came to Exmoor.

Furthermore: that Soblewski’s own messages to Martin are fictitious, invented with the aim of not making me suspect anything. In particular I am not supposed to suspect anything when Soblewski, almost in passing, mentions that a dead body has been found not far from his home.

Surely this must be a possible set-up?

Yes indeed, I’m forced to concede that it is indeed a possible set-up.

And it also produces a link — a series of threads — between the various facts I scribbled down on that sheet of paper.

How many people in the world would Castor voluntarily go off with if they shouted for him?

I crunch up that sheet of paper and throw it into the fire. There is thunder inside my head. Are there any more false e-mails in addition to those from Soblewski? What’s the situation with those more or less aggressive messages from G, which have dried up over the last few days? Might they also have been written by my husband and his accomplice?

It dawns on me that I haven’t been out to shout for Castor for quite a while, and — to demonstrate to myself that there is a credible and possible alternative to the conclusions I’m close to drawing — I get dressed and go out to shout for him for at least half an hour.

In various directions, but without leaving the garden.

In my mind’s eye I can see how he has sunk down so deep into a quagmire out on the moor that only his head is still above ground. He’s trying to turn it so that he can see from which direction his missus is coming to rescue him: but in the end he accepts that any such solution simply isn’t going to happen. It’s better to just close your eyes and give up your miserable dog’s life. It’s better to abandon any such vain hope.

Or else. . Or else he’s lying and licking his chops on a bed in a guest house somewhere not far away. Dunster or Minehead or Lynmouth, why not? Lying there and watching his master, the man sitting over there in the armchair with a glass of beer and a newspaper, who has just materialized out of nowhere. .

In neither case is there much point in his missus standing out there in the dark shouting for him in a voice that increasingly resembles that faint scraping of a knife on the bottom of a saucepan.

But you go on shouting even so. You do that. As long as you have something to do, no matter how useless it is, you carry on doing it: because that’s how you stop yourself from going out of your mind.

You shout and shout.

And when I’ve finished shouting I fall asleep on the sofa yet again.