Engleby. Part 20

'I am not proposing at the moment to give further details about the young woman's body and this is for reasons of consideration for her family, and I know you will understand that.'

Bolton paused hammily and poured himself a gla.s.s of water. There was utter silence in the room and in the broadcast.

He coughed and resumed. 'I am further able to tell you that tests carried out yesterday evening and comparisons with existing dental records enable us to announce that the young woman has been identified as Jennifer Arkland, a 21-year-old student from Lymington in Hamps.h.i.+re, who went missing in February, 1974.

'I can further confirm that we will be pursuing our inquiries into this case with the utmost urgency. The case has never been closed, though it has been recla.s.sified from one of "Missing" to one of "Murder" as of today. We have been in touch with the deceased's family, and I understand that it is her mother's intention to make a statement in the near future. In the meantime, I would ask all of you to respect their privacy at what must be a very difficult time for them.

'I would like to end by congratulating my colleagues on the extremely swift and professional way that they reacted to this discovery. I know that this exceedingly sad case of a young person disappearing on the threshold of adult life was not only the cause of much public sympathy at the time, but also has long been something that my colleagues were determined to bring to a satisfactory conclusion one day. I know that Chief Inspector Cannon is one of many officers who consider the pride and reputation of their force to depend on a successful outcome to this case and I want to stress that I have every confidence in them.

'If you have any questions you would like to ask me or my colleagues, then this is the moment. We have a time limit of fifteen minutes here, so I'm afraid you can ask only one question each. The gentleman in the blue blazer will bring the microphone to you and I'd be grateful if you could wait for him to reach you before you begin your question. Yes. We'll start with you. The gentleman in the front with the grey anorak.'

'Have you been able to date the time of death? I mean, how soon was it after she disappeared?'

Bolton nodded to the pathologist, Hedgecoe. 'We can't be certain,' she said. 'But soon afterwards. Certainly within months, I should say.'

'So it's possible she was alive for some time?'

'On the scientific evidence, yes.'

'But on the circ.u.mstantial evidence,' said Bolton, 'it seems unlikely.'

'Have you completely ruled out natural causes?'

'Yes,' said Hedgecoe. 'In our view it's impossible for the head injury to have been accidental.'

'There's also the question of the interment,' said Bolton. 'Unless you're suggesting that she died in an accident and then someone buried her. Which would anyway be a serious crime.'

'Can I ask Chief Inspector Cannon if he'll be re-interviewing old suspects or starting from fresh. Is he in charge and what's his line of inquiry going to be?'

'I think that's four questions,' said Bolton.

Cannon leant forward eagerly. 'First of all, I'd like to stress that this file has never been closed. So all our records are up to date and accessible. It's not a question of "reopening" anything, merely of continuing with an ongoing inquiry.'

'Does the discovery of the body give you new forensic evidence?'

'You mean scientific evidence?'

'Yes.'

'It's possible. It's too early to say.'

'Do the recent techniques used in clearing the suspect in the double murder in Narborough in Leicesters.h.i.+re the so-called DNA testing have any bearing on-'

I fired the 'Off' b.u.t.ton on the remote control and the screen flashed away into darkness.

Over the next few days, the national papers disinterred, as it were, the whole story and printed many heart-stopping pictures of Jennifer.

There were at least three interviews with Anne, now head of a neighbourhood law centre in south London, and two with Molly, a GP in Staffords.h.i.+re with plump twin girls though none with the unfortunate Robin Wilson who, although he presumably long ago dispensed with the National Health psychiatric services, lives 'quietly' somewhere in Wales, where he teaches at the local college. There was also a 'quote' from Malini Coomaretcetera, a New York paediatric consultant; from Stewart Forres ('director of the edgy 1982 cult British film Sheet Lightning Sheet Lightning') and from his 'ex-wife Hannah Waters, who played Jennifer in the police reconstruction of her last night alive and is currently with the Bristol Old Vic theatre company'.

That 'ex' shook me up a bit. How fast other people had moved onward in their lives. I hadn't been to see the Forres film because the word 'edgy' put me off. It's code for 'the men all swear a lot'. ('Feisty' means the women all swear a lot.) I hardly ever swear myself and find it irritating. Perhaps I was also jealous of Stewart.

Eventually, I stopped reading the coverage. I couldn't stand another article about 1970s fas.h.i.+ons, Abba or tank tops. This kind of decade-drivel used to be the territory of Chick's Own Chick's Own or or Bunty Bunty but has now run through whole sections of once-serious newspapers. but has now run through whole sections of once-serious newspapers.

On the following Monday I was telephoned by Tony Ball at home, and this was unusual, in fact unprecedented. He was ringing to suggest I do a big 'background' piece on Jennifer for the following Sunday.

'But you didn't like the thing I did about the new Master.'

'This is different, though. It's more your line of country. I remember that great piece you did on the Ripper. All that footwork in Bradford.'

'This isn't a serial killer, Tony.'

'How do we know?'

'Because there aren't any other bodies.'

'Could be linked to other unsolved crimes. Just that they haven't made the connection yet.'

'It looks like a straightforward domestic. It's bound to have been the boyfriend.'

I talked my way out of it, and for a time all went quiet. Ball still had no idea I'd been to the same university, let alone that I'd known Jen; and I certainly wasn't going to tell him now.

Then, a little over a week after Jen's body was discovered, Mrs Arkland made a statement for the television cameras. She read it in a comfortable-looking lounge, dimly lit by a couple of table lamps in front of drawn curtains. She had grown plumper over the years and her hair was grey.

You could still see in her face the happy housewife who had sent her eldest daughter off to university before turning her attention back to the three still at home, but her eyes were glaucous and bulky with pain.

'My eldest daughter Jennifer would have been thirty-five,' she said in a pitiless, accusing voice. 'No day has pa.s.sed since her disappearance without my first thought on waking being of her. Not a single day. I have felt her presence in everything I have done. I have heard her voice in all my thoughts. I have taken her back inside myself.'

She looked down at her paper through the bottom of her bifocals. 'My husband died some years ago. He never recovered from the shock of losing Jennifer, from the agony of not knowing where she was. I thank G.o.d he did not live to see this dreadful day and to know the worst. My other daughters have suffered too. They have lost a sister and a father and I have not been the mother to them that I should have been.'

She looked down again and breathed in deeply. It was difficult to watch. I pictured people all over the country crying.

'I shall not be giving any interviews to the press or making any further comment. I ask all of you to leave me and my family alone. You will get nothing from us.

'We shall shortly be able to give Jennifer the funeral that has for so long been denied her. It will be a private ceremony at a private location. So we will bring this terrible story to a close. That much at least is a relief for us, and I would like to thank the police for their help and understanding both at the time of Jennifer's disappearance and over the last ten days.'

It seemed as though she could hardly bear the weight of her own head. Although she read from a prepared script, her voice didn't run smoothly; it seemed to have silted up with age, with the gravel of her fourteen years' wait.

'I would like finally to appeal to anyone who may know anything that might help us bring to justice the person or people who killed my daughter. I ask this not for revenge. It's too late for that. But I hope that any parent listening will understand why it is important that whoever was responsible for this terrible deed should be apprehended. If only so that no other family may suffer what we have been through.'

She took off her gla.s.ses and stared into the camera. 'I never stopped hoping. I never, ever gave up hope that one day Jennifer would walk up the drive, alive and well, with some explanation of where she'd been. Now I have finally despaired. I know that now we can be reunited only at my death. Good night.'

For several days I didn't see anyone, even Margaret.

I felt that my life was on two paths. There was the one I knew about and understood: Margaret, the paper, Charlotte and her friends, work, people, drinks and all the stuff of living in London Sat.u.r.day afternoon, the football crowds on their way to Highbury, the kettle on, a film in the evening, Chinese dinner, having enough money. All this had grown slowly better. I'd become more adept at being with other people; I'd lowered my expectations of them and learned to let my mind drift into neutral when they spoke. That sense of happiness just out beyond my reach I'm not sure I'd grasped that exactly, but I'd got something close to it, contentment maybe, or at least a functioning routine with regular rewards.

But then there was the second path or strand, which I didn't understand at all, and I felt this was princ.i.p.ally because I couldn't remember parts of it. Here I was with a memory that others a.s.sured me was freakish in its recall of facts and dates and long pa.s.sages of writing; yet actions and events in my own past that really should have been able to remember themselves without prompting from even a workaday, let alone a Rolls-Royce, memory they weren't there. They were not only unstored, unregistered, not indexed; it was as if these things had never happened.

So perhaps they hadn't.

About two weeks after the police press conference, on a Sunday afternoon, I began to feel uneasy.

Then I started to have symptoms of panic, such as I had had in the course of The Birthday Party The Birthday Party. I paced up and down my Bayswater flat. I put some music on, then took it off again.

I felt that events which should have been attached to given dates however artificial and downright wrong it was to think of time in that way had shaken themselves loose and were happening again, as for the first time. What we childishly called 'the past' was somehow present. And, as at that moment when I had run outside the old church, everything seemed to be happening at once now.

I did what I always did: took pills and alcohol and tried to hold on. I went to sit on the bed, wrapping my arms tight round my ribs.

I'd had lunch at the Mill. I did know that. That much was sure. I went in there on my way back from the Sidgwick Site, where I'd been to a history lecture on Garibaldi and the unification of Italy. The lecturer was a woman called Dr Elizabeth Stich. I generally preferred the Anchor for its views and thought the Mill overrated, but for some reason, perhaps just for a change, I went in and sat at a table. I had a pint of bitter and ordered from the 'baked potato with various fillings' part of the menu. Probably with cheese. Good value. Jennifer was at the adjacent table with Robin Wilson. He leant forward to talk to her; they were having a conversation of the kind known as 'heavy' and didn't want others to hear. I noticed his jacket and tee s.h.i.+rt ride up at the back. Jennifer sat back against the wooden settle in a slightly defensive posture; she wore a floral print skirt. I could see her bare legs. She had a sharp patella that gave a fetching inverted-triangle shape to the knee. She was smoking a cigarette and trying not to laugh, but her eyes looked concerned and vulnerable as Robin's low voice went urgently on.

I have that picture of her with utter clarity. They talk of memories being 'etched' in the mind and you think of acid on a steel plate. That's how fixed that image is for me. Yet it's more living than the etching metaphor suggests. There's blood and breath and movement and fleeting colour. She is alive, G.o.d d.a.m.n it, she is alive. She looks so poised, with that womanly concern beginning to override the girlish humour. I will always remember that balanced, beautiful woman/girl expression in her face. She was twenty-one.

They left. She was so absorbed by what Robin was saying that she forgot to say goodbye either to me or to her friend Malini who was at the other end of the room. She went through the door, hoisting her brown leather shoulder bag up, the hem of the skirt fluttering for a second as she tripped down the step onto the cobbles. I went outside and stood for a moment opposite the end of Laundress Lane.

I had drunk three pints of beer by now and had taken a blue pill, but I didn't feel good. I felt angry. I began to walk up the grey pa.s.sage of Mill Lane with its high buildings. I felt trapped in a world that I couldn't mould to my own desires. Others were in sunlight; I was in darkness.

I kept walking north up Pembroke, then Downing Street, past the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, which made me wonder yet again at the nature of the anthropoid h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens, this functional ape with the curse of consciousness that useless gift that allows him, unlike other animals, to be aware of his own futility. The story of Adam and Eve put it with childish but brilliant clarity: Paradise until the moment of self-awareness and then... Cursed. For ever cursed. (Christians called it 'fallen', but it was the same thing: the Fall was the acquisition of consciousness.) As I walked past Downing Place, I remembered reading, on Dr Woodrow's recommendation, I think, Miguel de Unamuno, the Catholic philosopher from Spain, and finding the same thought there: 'Man, because he is a man, because he possesses consciousness, is already, in comparison to the jacka.s.s or the crab, a sick animal. Consciousness is a disease.'

Then in the wider light of St Andrew's Street, I saw Jennifer, arriving from the west, pus.h.i.+ng her bike up on the pavement and sticking its front wheel through the railings outside Emmanuel. I stopped and watched her go in. I decided to steal her bicycle because if she was on foot she would be less independent.

I looked down at the menu in the window of Varsity, the Greek restaurant: dolmades, kleftiko, moussaka, the usual stuff, keenly priced for students. When I was sure she would have crossed the front court and be well out of sight I went over and pulled the bike out. She hadn't locked it, the silly girl. She was trusting like that. I rode it quickly away towards the station, then doubled round and took it back to the sheds at my own college. I put it in the furthest corner, in an unnumbered rack. Where better to hide a bicycle?

This much I remembered.

Then... Then...

Malcolm Street wasn't a street you went to very often, since it was merely a cut between King Street and Jesus Lane, two other places you had no reason to go. In fact, when I heard Jen mention its name to someone after a lecture, I had to look it up in the map on the front of my Heffer's diary. Then I went to inspect. It was a street which appeared to be subject to various planning restrictions because all the houses were painted the same colour. They were of that Georgian design much admired by conservationists, though despite their value they were subdivided and let to students; you could tell by the many bells and entryphones.

Jen had mentioned a house number and the name of the people whose party it was. It was only two days after I'd taken her bike and I doubted whether she'd have got a new one already. I decided to crash the party. This was always easy enough to do, particularly if you took drink. I bought two bottles of wine from Arthur Cooper and went to the Bradford hotel to get drunk. I calculated that by eleven the little house would be so full that the door would be opened by a guest not a host and that two bottles and a confident att.i.tude would get me in.

Why did I go to the party at all? Why didn't I just wait for Jennifer to emerge? I don't know. I had no conscious plans. The party was crowded, jostling, shouting, loud, difficult to tolerate. There was dancing in one room. It was pointless unless you were an anthropologist. A jacka.s.s or a crab might have had enjoyed working out what function the gathering performed in the social behaviour of the species. I stayed as long as I could stick it, then went back to the Morris 1100 in Park Street.

I drove it round into Jesus Lane and waited, listening to the radio. When the car was fuggily hot, I turned off the engine and the heating. I watched a few students coming up Malcolm Street towards me from the party house; I saw others go the opposite way, back into town. I watched to see if I recognised them.

I feared that Jennifer would be accompanied, though I hadn't seen Robin at the party and anyway there were difficulties between them. But surely in his absence some opportunistic youth would have tried his luck... Or failing that, one of her many female friends would emerge with her.

But no. Eventually I saw that familiar walk familiar to me, at least, from so much study. She turned and waved to someone going the other way, paused, and for a moment made as if to change direction; then she continued north towards me, running for a few paces to re-establish her course. She settled to a brisk and cloudy walk. I started the engine. She looked over the street, expecting to cross to my side, but was unsure if my car was going to move off. To be safe, she stayed on her own side of Jesus Lane and started to walk quickly eastward.

I pulled up opposite and wound down the window. I called out her name and she looked suspiciously across the road to see who I was. I offered her a lift and she glanced both ways up and down the street. She didn't really want to get into the car with me, but she did so for fear of seeming rude for fear of seeming rude.

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

I was overwhelmed by her presence.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I drank more whisky and eventually I slept.

Two months pa.s.sed and the story went cold. There were no arrests and no developments.

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

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

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

'When did this guy ring?' I called over.

'It says on the paper,' said Felicity. 'Under "Date and Time of Call", oddly enough.'

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

'Aren't you going to ring your policeman?'

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

'Can't think why you bothered coming in.'

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