by Diane Janes
TWENTY-ONE
As soon as I got downstairs next morning, I switched on the breakfast news. The TV people were still talking about the body that had been found in the field and hinting that it belonged to Jennifer Reynolds. In a new development, police had gone to the home once shared by the missing woman and her currently absent husband and removed ‘various items’, presumably to help confirm or deny the identity of the body; though how anything they found in the house might do that was not explained. According to the presenter, the police were still trying to establish contact with Alan Reynolds, who was thought to be away on business somewhere in the North of England.
The words sent an involuntary shiver down my spine. For as long as I had known him, Alan had travelled all over the country in search of suitable pieces. He favoured auctions in the north because he said there were still bargains to be had there: you could pick up some very nice items at a third of the price you would pay for them in tourist haunts like London and Stratford. At the back of my mind, I had always known that one day I might literally bump into Alan, coming along a street in a Yorkshire town, browsing the antique shops, or on his way to an auction, in pursuit of something he needed to fulfil a commission.
A familiar feeling of guilt stalked me as I made my way to work. Poor Alan, who had already been left to deal with my original disappearance, was now about to be subjected to the distressing news that his erstwhile wife had been murdered and her body found buried in a field. And it was all my fault. This whole dreadful string of events was a direct result of my actions and mine alone. If I’d had the courage to simply state that I wanted a divorce – just dealt with my problems in a normal way – none of this would have happened. What could really have been so difficult about that? Now that the whole business was several years behind me, even I found my actions difficult to understand, still less justify. This whole sordid mess was entirely of my own making.
As the day progressed I experienced a growing sense of misery and confusion. I tried to carry on as normal because I didn’t know what else to do. I didn’t want Alan to suffer over the misidentified woman, but at the same time the revelation that she was not Jennifer Reynolds would put me right back to square one with Dr Millington. He said he would not have betrayed me, but even if he didn’t, someone else inevitably would. He was probably right about other people guessing but deciding to do nothing about it. Not the Trollop or the Trainspotter, but maybe someone else. It was only a matter of time before my luck ran out. The obvious answer was to cut and run.
But then there was Rob.
Before Rob became part of my life I had become accustomed to living alone. In fact, I had enjoyed it, positively revelling in the independence, but now life seemed impossibly empty and worthless without him; even his going off for a few days at the field centre had thrown me completely off beam. That first evening he was away, I deliberately took time over cooking a favourite pasta dish from scratch. I ate slowly, tidied up at a snail’s pace, finished some ironing and poked the fire so many times that I all but put it out. When I put the cork back into the bottle after a second glass of wine, I kidded myself that I felt relaxed rather than sick and panicky as the nine o’clock news approached.
It was worse than ever. The Jennifer Reynolds murder story had moved up from fourth item to second. The body had still not been positively identified, but now there were unconfirmed reports that the police might be looking for other bodies at the Reynolds’ home. The reporter who had previously been despatched to cover events from a lane alongside the field where the body had been found was now hanging about on the pavement, a mere ten yards or so away from the house I had once shared with Alan, the gate of which appeared to be manned by a uniformed policeman. I sat rooted to my chair, too astonished to move. The coverage included an interview with a too-eager neighbour – someone I didn’t recognize, who must have moved in after I had left. He was a thin-faced man with a prominent Adam’s apple, who told the reporter that from his upstairs windows he had definitely seen policemen digging in Mr Reynolds’s garden.
I emitted a guffaw of semi-hysterical laughter. ‘Much good that will do them,’ I said aloud to the screen. Clay soil too. Jolly hard work for somebody to do all for nothing.
Meantime, the police confirmed that they were still trying to establish the whereabouts of Alan Reynolds, who they wanted to talk to urgently, in connection with his wife’s disappearance. They even showed a picture of Alan. Good grief! They were treating him like a serious suspect.
A later bulletin on another channel said pretty much the same things, accompanied by more exterior shots of the house, including some obviously taken from a neighbour’s upstairs window (perhaps the man with the prominent Adam’s apple, cashing in when an opportunity presented itself). There wasn’t a lot to see. The back garden was mostly obscured by the shrubs which grew alongside the fence, but within the limited field of vision afforded by this snooping post, it was possible to discern a couple of men in coveralls, moving in and out of a gap between some conifers. Again the viewers were shown a picture of Alan and told that the police were anxious to speak to him in connection with their enquiries.
I wondered where Alan was at that precise moment. He bought a newspaper every day of his life. It was a ritual. He must have read about the discovery of the body. Perhaps the significance of it and the fact that the police would want to make contact had not dawned on him when he read about it in the morning edition. Well, even if he had managed to miss the items on the radio and television news, which seemed unlikely, he would see it all in his paper tomorrow and get in touch with the police. He wouldn’t be too pleased to hear that the local constabulary had been messing about in his garden and I could imagine his fury when he read about their ferreting in the house. With more than a ghost of a smile, I pictured the baffled Plod going through the collections of Edwardian sheet music, the piles of hand-embroidered table linen; peering hopelessly into cupboards and drawers full of postcard albums and old photographs with no hint of anything remotely useful to their enquiries. I could just imagine Alan arriving home. Sweeping angrily into the hall, almost without pause rearranging the sticks in the base of the hat stand before shirtily instructing some ham-fisted constable to come out of the sideboard, where the best china was kept.
That was it, of course. Alan would return home. He would confirm that the body in the field was not mine, and then, and then …
It did not happen like that at all.
By Thursday’s lunchtime news it was obvious that the police were actively hunting for Alan. There was talk of people phoning in with possible sightings of him as far dispersed as North Wales and Southend-on-Sea. There was also definite confirmation that the police had begun digging up the garden.
‘Police have refused to confirm precisely what they are looking for,’ said the female reporter, talking directly into the camera which was filming her on the pavement outside Alan’s house. Her serious expression belied the silliness of the comment. It was hardly as if the police went about digging up gardens on the off chance of finding a cache of Thornton’s Continental chocolates or the odd long-lost garden gnome.
Worse still, on the evening bulletin the announcer stated that the police had confirmed they had reason to believe that the body found in the field earlier in the week was that of Jennifer Reynolds, who went missing in 1983. They were refusing to rule out the possibility that there might be other bodies in the garden.
‘You’ve got it all wrong!’ I shouted at the screen. ‘Wrong, wrong, wrong.’
Fate had made a mock of my hopes that the Jennifer Reynolds case would fade back into obscurity. On the contrary, the British public were getting a good look at my old mug shots every day. No one else had mentioned my remarkable resemblance to the dead woman in my hearing, but what might they be saying when I wasn’t there? Medical Records ran on gossip the way my sitting room fire ate up logs. Once it was announced that the body in the field was not mine, it could only be a matter of time …
I lay in bed that night, trying to make sense of it all. The glow of the bedside light softened the lines of everything in the room, creating a semblance of security and calm, but the faint sound of raindrops pattering against the windowpanes intruded like a message in Morse code, borne on the wind from some persistent, far distant operator, determined to engage my attention.
Suppose the police never did discover their mistake? The jury in the health centre common room had already pronounced Alan guilty in absentia. The journalists on the national dailies were slyly infusing their copy with the suggestion that his continued absence was indicative of guilt. An innocent man would have nothing to fear in coming forward. This was the verdict of my colleagues, the press, and presumably the public at large. Personally I was not so sure. Hadn’t Rob feared the possibility of the police deliberately manufacturing evidence of his guilt in order to improve their clear-up rate? However much I reasoned that the police don’t do any such thing, I wasn’t one hundred per cent surprised that Alan might not care to stake his freedom on the theory. The idea of a police force committed to massaging crime statistics seemed to be all the rage – why should Alan’s thinking be any different?
Even if the police always played with a straight bat, they were still capable of making mistakes. The fallibility of the British justice system had been amply demonstrated over the last few years. Television pictures of men released after years of wrongful imprisonment flitted through my mind. These released innocents always looked strained and odd, even in the midst of their joy at being set free. They always looked older than their years, with prison pallid skin and badly cut hair, and their faces confirmed what we all secretly knew in our hearts: that prison is not the sanitized giggle of a Clement and La Frenais comedy, but a nightmare hell of excrement and violence; an experience calculated to break the mind and spirit of a sensitive man within days of his incarceration.
These men who had served time for crimes they never committed, surely they were all victims of mistaken, rather than malicious investigation? Criminal justice was prone to mistakes just like any other sphere of life, and the police were obviously on the verge of making a big mistake over the identity of that poor dead girl in the field. Alan’s continued absence was in itself suggestive in a highly misleading way. The complete disappearance of Jennifer Reynolds re-enforced this deceptive picture. For all I knew there might be other counterfeit evidence – something the police had found in the house, perhaps, which was open to some kind of misinterpretation. Maybe there was an old witness statement, coincidentally containing a description of a suspect which happened, by evil chance, to fit Alan. All or any of these things would increase the weight of spurious suspicion against him. If Jennifer Reynolds had never ‘gone missing’ there could not have been any confusing of the body in the field with hers. Alan would not have been implicated and therefore could not have been suspected of anything.
After leaving Alan I had tried to pretend to myself that my departure had not caused him any great distress, vaguely defended my behaviour as a pay-back for past unhappiness. This unhappiness might not have been entirely his fault, but a part of me tended to lay the blame at his door – thought that at the very least he ought to have been more perceptive, more flexible: most of all that he should have allowed me to be the person I really wanted to be. Six years later, confronted with the inescapable consequences of my actions, I could no longer pretend that I had not done Alan any harm. Whatever his failings as a husband might have been, I could not make-believe that he deserved the ordeal of being a wanted man; maybe the ignominy of being arrested and put on trial, ultimately even imprisoned for something he had not done – indeed, for something which no one had done – a crime not even committed, because this murder of Jennifer Reynolds was a crime which had somehow been manufactured from bits and pieces of other lives and other crimes: a crime that never was, with a mismatched body and its murderer wrongly identified.
I lay down and switched off the lamp, but the parade of wrongly convicted men seemed to stare reproachfully at me out of the darkness, while the rain whispered messages in dots and dashes that I couldn’t read. After thinking in circles for hours, I reached no conclusion, except that the crux of the matter lay in somehow confirming to the authorities that Jennifer Reynolds was alive and well. Everything hinged on this. If the police were satisfied that Jennifer Reynolds had not been murdered, they would be forced to accept that the body found in the ditch belonged to someone else and set about establishing who that might be. They would realize that Alan was not a person who needed investigating – after all, he would never have been under suspicion at all if his wife hadn’t disappeared. They would curtail their fruitless excavations of his garden, return his belongings and announce to the press that they had no further interest in Alan.
The most obvious means of achieving this was to simply walk into any police station and ‘give myself up’, but the consequences of this from my point of view were potentially devastating. It would almost certainly make the news headlines – little hope that a tip off wouldn’t bring reporters running from John o’ Groats to Land’s End to cover such a sensational story. My new life would be publicly blown to smithereens. The doctors would very likely fire me – a perfectly legitimate move as I had obtained my post by deception, which would in turn be a massive source of embarrassment to the practice for hiring me in the first place. There might be criminal charges involved, once the appropriation of Susan McCarthy’s National Insurance number was discovered.
Then there was a whole lot of other collateral damage to take into account. What would the feelings of the McCarthy family be on hearing of their daughter’s callously resurrected identity? What of Rob’s mother, facing the other residents in her sheltered housing complex? There would be a fearful fluttering in the dovecots when it emerged that Mrs Dugdale’s son had become involved with this duplicitous woman and her double life. (You could be sure the papers would say double life – it was an eye-catching headline, if ever there was one. Murder Victim turns up alive and well. Double life of health centre manager – turn to page 2.)
The coward in me very much wanted to run away – back to the beach hut, where the television news could not intrude its nightly reminders of this labyrinthine knot. From nowhere I remembered Rob once saying, a propos of nothing in particular, that he was prepared to fight for me if necessary. We had something worth fighting for. Above all I had to remember that.
If only I could come up with a way of clearing Alan without actually going public. On the other hand, unless I went public Alan would probably never come out of hiding. He must be suffering from the same sort of paranoia which afflicted Rob, when he had imagined himself prime suspect in the Julie Peacock case. Alan, too, must have convinced himself that the police were out to fit him up. To make matters worse, he was probably labouring under the illusion that the body in the field really was that of his former wife, because unlike me he had no evidence to the contrary.
If I went to the police claiming to be Jennifer Reynolds, they might dismiss me as a crank. What definite proof could I offer them? The best person to identify me would be Alan, but he was on the run. Round and round in circles. A few hours of sleep interspersed with periods of fretful waking brought me no nearer to a solution – and how much time did I have? It was entirely possible that the police would succeed in their efforts to track Alan down and arrest him before Rob got back. It would only take a tip off from some over-observant hotel receptionist. Not only would that be terrible for Alan, but with every day that the uncertainty continued, my own position became increasingly insecure, because so long as the press continued to pursue the line that Alan was the Nicholsfield Serial Killer, the whole wretched affair was guaranteed to stay in headlines. Terry Millington had sussed it already and surely everyone in Lasthwaite could only keep on looking at those old photographs so many times before they realized that they were looking at old pictures of Susan McCarthy?
TWENTY-TWO
/> It was while I was sitting in the staff common room, eating my lunch of fruit and yoghurt and half listening to the latest gossip about the Trollop’s numerous relatives that the mists of confusion lifted. The obvious solution was for me and Alan to go to the police together, and in a moment of sheer inspiration the realization that I above all people knew how to make contact with Alan crystallized. He might have gone into hiding, grown a beard, assumed another name, but there was one thing, one daily habit, I was sure he would not have abandoned. Alan bought a copy of The Times every day and, before he retired for the night, he would have read every word, including the business pages (which I never so much as glanced at), the puzzles (which I had never been able to complete), even the job advertisements, so that he knew – should the need ever arise to know such a thing – roughly what an up-and-coming legal executive might expect to be offered by way of a salary in the city. It was a habit which made him formidably well informed and enabled him to converse intelligently on a wide variety of topics.
Every Valentine’s Day, the personal columns in The Times erupt into annual silliness and this always provided a rich source of amusement to Alan, who would read aloud the messages which tickled him most, speculating that ‘Snugglebunnikins’ and ‘Lucky Ducky’ were probably ultra-respectable city gents. He had also been taken with another (perhaps less likely) idea that these pet names would provide a marvellous cover for spies or criminals. People could covertly contact one another, he said, by placing what appeared to be perfectly innocent romantic messages or requests to get in touch and make up after a quarrel, but which were in reality something completely different. We had laughed over the possibilities this presented, and even gone so far as to suggest silly code names for ourselves. I was to be ‘Sweetie-Pie’ and he would be ‘Toodle-Doo’, or something of the sort – I couldn’t remember exactly what.