by GJ Minett
But thoughts of that letter and its implications still produce a physical reaction in me even now, a catch in my throat, a prickling at the back of my eyes. And it comes out of nowhere. I can be doing nothing, thinking nothing, and all of a sudden I find myself, for the umpteenth time, wondering just how I failed to realise what a remarkable man I’d married until it was too late. If ever I feel the need to bring my ego down a peg or two, I go back to those two months before Julie was born, when Josef was struggling to get his head around the fact that the baby he’d always wanted couldn’t possibly be his while I, sensitivity personified, accused him of sulking. Or I remind myself that even though he knew I’d been unfaithful to him, he never once used it against me, however great the temptation must have been over the years. My reward to him for such loyalty was to poison our final few moments together with petty recriminations and, to my eternal shame, to make him weep. That’s some legacy I’ve had to carry around with me all these years.
In the days and weeks immediately after Josef’s death, I threw myself into as many practical tasks as I could think of. There were a number of jobs around the house and garden that I’d been putting off for a while. These provided me with a much-needed focus. I wrote a list and worked my way steadily through it, barely pausing to tick off each completed job before moving on to the next one. Any task, however menial or mundane, was welcomed as long as it kept me occupied.
One of these tasks was to arrange for someone to repair the heater in the car and to have the dent in the bodywork seen to. I took it to my local garage – Josef had always been impressed with them, pleased in this day and age to find people he could trust to do a good job for a fair price. The manager brought it back two days later and along with the keys he rather sheepishly handed me a sheet of paper, which I at first assumed to be the bill.
He explained that one of his men had found it, wedged down the side of the front passenger seat. I thanked him and asked how much the repairs had come to but he insisted there would be no charge. It was for Josef, he told me, and he was sorry for my loss. I thanked him and took the sheet of paper inside.
I opened it and was surprised to recognise Josef’s handwriting. It looked like a letter, obviously only a draft because it was on a scrap piece of paper with jagged edges where it had been torn from a notepad. What really took the wind from my sails was the fact that although there was no name at the top, it could only have been written for one person, and that was the Adams boy.
He was writing to the boy, or young man as he must have been by then, to express the hope that he might make something useful of his own life to atone for the one he’d taken from us. In doing so Josef seemed determined to attribute to me qualities I’m quite sure I’ve never had and I think that letter stands as a more eloquent expression of his love for me than ever I received from him in person.
Once the initial shock had passed, I sat there for some time, wondering about this. Had he at some stage completed a neat copy and sent it? And if so, where had he sent it? Around that time there was a great deal of speculation about the Adams boy and whether or not he had been released. Josef and I obviously talked about it and he tried as best he could to prepare me for the likelihood that John Michael Adams had already been granted his freedom with a new identity. But even if he had reasons for supposing this had already happened, how on earth had he come by an address?
That question was still exercising my thoughts that same evening when the phone rang. The caller, an elderly lady with a strong Scottish accent, asked if she might speak with a Mr Josef Kasprovik – the name was so often mispronounced that I rarely took the trouble to correct anyone. I asked who was calling and she went into something of a dither. She said she was probably panicking about nothing but could I just reassure her that the gentleman was alright and had arrived home safely from his trip to Scotland a few weeks ago. She and her husband ran a small B&B on the outskirts of Inverness and Josef had booked in there on the very night he had told me he was in a hotel in Manchester. He’d stayed only briefly to pay and to complete the necessary forms (which was how she knew our home phone number), then had gone out again. She and her husband had urged him not to because the conditions were so awful and they were sure he had to be tired after such a long journey. He insisted he was fine – he was meeting someone and would be back later.
They gave him a key and had no idea he hadn’t returned until her husband took the breakfast to the annexe the following morning. His car wasn’t in the drive and the bed clearly hadn’t been slept in. Her immediate fear was that something had happened to him but he had told them he was meeting someone. They assumed he’d taken one look at the road conditions and spent the night at his friend’s place instead, rather than risk driving back to the B&B.
Just recently though there was an awful story in the news about an elderly gentleman who had tripped in the snow in his own back yard and died of exposure. It had brought it all back and she felt she needed to phone just to set her mind at rest.
I assured her Josef had returned safe and sound, thanked her for her concern and put the phone down the moment it was possible to do so without seeming impolite. Now I had even more mysteries to consider. Inverness? What on earth was he doing up there? More to the point, how long must it have taken him to drive there? I calculated that the trip must have taken him something between eight and ten hours . . . one way. And he had done it twice. In twenty-four hours! What’s more he’d done it in awful driving conditions in a car that was like a freezer compartment! What on earth had possessed him? And who was this person he was supposedly meeting? Whoever it was, Josef most certainly had not spent the night anywhere other than in his car, which was absolute madness. If he’d already paid for the B&B, why hadn’t he stayed there for the night and travelled back in daylight?
I went back to the note Josef had drafted, sensing I was missing something and this time it leapt off the page. There were two phrases that sounded slightly off-kilter to me. I don’t recall the exact wording but in the first he was saying something along the lines of: I need two minutes to tell you about my wife, and then I’ll leave. Then somewhere else he was talking about me, saying that if it was me standing there and not him . . . something like that anyway. The point was, in both cases it didn’t sound like a letter. It was more like a speech, as if he was planning to deliver these lines in person. I read the whole thing again to make sure and was even more convinced I was right. If this sheet of paper was found in the car, the chances were that Josef had taken it with him to Inverness. Why would he do so unless he was hoping to confront John Michael Adams there? But for that to be possible, he would have to know exactly where to find him, and how on earth he could have known that was beyond me. It was too fantastic for words.
I almost convinced myself I was imagining things until I remembered Frank O’Halloran, and his surprise visit the evening after Josef had returned. I tried to recall that conversation in detail. I remembered the shock that registered on his face when he learnt that Josef was in hospital and in particular that strange non sequitur of a question about where Josef had been the previous day. If it hadn’t seemed suspicious at the time, it certainly did now.
I wanted nothing more than to ring him straightaway but didn’t have his number, which was ironic really. Over the past few years there must have been at least twenty occasions when he’d pressed his card into our hands or posted it through the door, and each time we’d torn it up and thrown it away. When I did eventually manage to track him down, he was at my front door within minutes, bright-eyed and out of breath. He offered belated condolences and his notebook and pen were out of his pocket before I’d even closed the door. Clearly he was anticipating another significant addition to his John Michael Adams portfolio. He seemed surprised when I told him to put it away.
While sitting around waiting for him to arrive, I’d been pondering over the best way to approach this meeting. To say I knew him well would be something of an exaggeration. Even so, I’
d had enough contact to form the strong impression that simply asking him to tell me everything he knew about the weekend in Inverness was not the way to go. He didn’t strike me as a man to be persuaded by appeals to his better nature. It seemed to me my best chance of finding out what I wanted to know would be to mislead him into thinking I already knew it.
So the moment he sat down in Josef’s armchair I first made it clear that this conversation was off the record, as they say. Once that was established, I asked him if his interview with John Michael Adams had been worth it, which at least had the effect of removing the smile from his face. I led him to believe that, just before he died, Josef had told me everything about his trip to Inverness and that I was holding him personally responsible for my husband’s death.
He reddened and was quick to protest that Josef had left and returned in his own car – no one was twisting his arm. In fact, he would have much preferred it if Josef had kept well away from Inverness, rather than barging in like that and destroying months of hard work. This threw me a little and I’m not sure what I said next but whatever it was, I must have overreached myself and given the game away because, after a brief pause, the smile returned. He relaxed visibly and complimented me on a nice try, but if I wanted to know what happened in Inverness, why didn’t I just ask him outright instead of playing games?
According to him – and I understand I would have to be a simpleton of the first order not to view this as a highly slanted account – the rumours about the Adams boy being released with a new identity were true and every reporter in the country was out there trying to hunt him down. O’Halloran wanted me to believe that he had actually managed to do it – and not only that but he’d also talked his way into a place at the table for the first meeting between the Adams boy and his father in exchange for keeping his silence as to the boy’s new identity.
He claimed Josef’s arrival was a complete surprise. He had no idea how he knew about the meeting. He couldn’t even say for sure what happened. All he knew was that one minute Josef was there, the next the boy’s father had been mown down by a hit-and-run driver and Josef was nowhere to be found. He himself had put two and two together and got out of there as quickly as possible because he wanted to get Josef’s side of the story first. Now of course it was irrelevant. He would never know for sure what got into Josef that night. Of course, much of this I recognised immediately as self-serving nonsense. For one thing, there was only one way Josef could have known about the meeting in Inverness. The idea that he’d somehow managed to find out for himself was simply ridiculous. Someone had told him and that could only have been O’Halloran. Equally preposterous was the idea that Josef had driven all that way with the intention of harming anyone. I had a sheet of paper which suggested Josef had gone to Inverness to talk with the boy, to urge him to do something with his life, not to seek revenge.
I had to admit though that I had no explanation for what did happen that evening. No matter how strong my conviction that Josef could never have done such an awful thing, there was the damage to the car to consider. Josef had certainly hit something. And then there was the fact that he hadn’t returned to the B&B for which he’d already paid, but had chosen instead to drive all the way back home in freezing conditions in a car with no heating. What’s more, having arrived, he’d stayed in the car rather than come into the house to get warm. These were not the acts of a rational man and I knew, even without O’Halloran’s testimony, that whatever happened in Inverness, the balance of Josef’s mind must have been seriously disturbed.
O’Halloran assured me he had no intention of adding to my grief by telling anyone what he knew. I had nothing to worry about. You have to know him to understand just how worrying that was in itself. I suspected he had his own reasons for not wanting to go to the police with what he suspected but I was less sanguine about the prospect of being in collusion with him. He wanted me to believe that he was doing the noble thing in protecting Josef’s memory and clearly saw me as being in his debt. I suspected this would not be the last I would see of him.
Time would prove me right, although I have to admit it could have been worse. He has become an irritant more than anything. Like the proverbial bad penny, he has a tendency to pop up out of nowhere every so often. There might be a year or so between visits and I’d reach the point where I’d more or less forgotten about him, only for him to arrive on the doorstep and invite himself in for a cup of tea and a chat. I’m not sure what he thought these visits were achieving. If, as I suspect, I was being pumped for information each time in case, as mother of one of the victims, I might have been told something by the authorities which could help him in his search for the boy, he must have been sorely disappointed over the years. I always hoped he might eventually lose interest but he’s nothing if not persistent.
In early 1982 I decided to move here to Oakham. Josef’s life-insurance policies and my reclusive existence since his death had left me in the enviable position of having more than enough money and not a great deal on which I wished to spend it. My freelance work was the catalyst which dragged me out of my cocoon and encouraged me to feel maybe the time was right to make a fresh start. Primrose Cottage was one of the first properties I looked at and I knew the search was over the moment I first saw it – this was where I could start to rebuild. I would no longer be Dorrie Kasprowicz, grieving widow, tragic mother. Step forward Eudora Nash, freelance journalist and lady of independent means. I was ready to shake off the past – including Frank O’Halloran.
I told him nothing about Primrose Cottage. I was hoping, perhaps naively, that once he discovered I was no longer living in town, he might decide it wasn’t worth the time and effort required to track me down again. His obsession with John Michael Adams must surely have its limits. I suppose I must have been in Oakham for three days at most when the envelope came through the door. Inside was a card with a picture of a Cotswold cottage which bore an uncanny resemblance to mine and a brief message, wishing me all the best on my recent move and expressing the hope that we would have the chance to speak soon. As I said, he is not easily deterred.
From the moment I moved to Oakham I went out of my way to involve myself in every aspect of village life. You’ll appreciate this was something of a departure for me but I confess my motives were not entirely selfless. I didn’t want my past to intrude in any way on the present and if being a little more sociable and outgoing helped to keep the curiosity and speculation of others at bay, it was well worth the effort. So overnight I became someone who stops in the street to exchange a few words with passers-by and pat pampered dogs on the head. I learnt to linger for a while to chat with Joyce or Rose in the village store, confident that any version of reality I chose to give them would be common knowledge in no time. I invited neighbours in for mid-morning coffee and afternoon tea and cakes and earned a bit of a reputation for being a good listener, even a source of sound advice when it was needed.
And, somewhat to my surprise, I took to it like a duck to water. In no time at all, it seemed, I’d managed to establish myself in the village. My work, which I still regarded as little more than a rewarding hobby, came to define me. I was Eudora the writer, alongside Angela the show jumper, Lois the daytime TV presenter and Maurice the ac-tor, who popped up on the TV screen every now and then in a bewildering series of minor roles, most of them indistinguishable from each other. I somehow acquired a local network – I knew to whom I should turn if the drains were blocked, if the car wouldn’t start, if a window needed replacing. There was a genuine sense of community and for once I was a part of it, not outside and seeking to be left alone. Apart from the all too brief time I was allowed with Julie, I can honestly say those were the happiest, certainly the most serene years of my life.
Then came a major health scare, which landed me in hospital for quite a while. I shan’t bore you with the details but suffice to say that, given my age, I would have been foolish in the extreme not to have intimations of mortality, as they say. That peri
od of three to four weeks, when my chances of pulling through were very much in the balance, taught me something about myself that I’d never acknowledged until then – I wasn’t ready to go just yet. I was assailed by an overwhelming sense of futility. Surely this couldn’t be it – there were things I still needed to do. I couldn’t have told you what a single one of these things might be but I knew I wasn’t about to bow out with anything like equanimity. There had to be more to life than this. Had to. And when it eventually became clear that the illness was no more than a warning shot across the bows and that I was going to be around for a while longer, it felt as if I’d been granted a second chance – one I was determined not to waste.
I’m not sure how Martin Adams came into the equation. For years he’d existed only as a vague figure somewhere in the outermost reaches of my thoughts. If ever I had occasion to refer to him, I rarely did so by name. He was ‘the boy’s father’, as if that said all that needed to be said about him. But he was more than that, of course – and if anyone was in a position to know that, surely it was the mother of Julie Kasprowicz. I had allowed myself to buy into the lazy caricature created by the media. It was too easy to forget that this was not some cardboard cut-out but a real human being. I was not alone in having endured more than my fair share of suffering. He’d lost his wife in tragic circumstances, as I’d lost Josef. At more or less the same time as I was dropping Julie off at school that morning, he was saying goodbye to his boy with absolutely no understanding that their time together was over. And as if he hadn’t suffered enough, just as it looked as if he was about to be granted his second chance, it had been ripped from his grasp by a man he personally had never wronged. Wife. Son. Self. Gone, just like that.