by Jo Smedley
Then there was Lucus. His warm body snuggled under the duvet - totally oblivious to my actions. I could imagine him dreaming contented dreams, a man wholly cocooned within his work-a-day life with his little wifey-at-home who took care of his daughter and put meals on the table. He had nothing to worry about. No cause for concerns. He trusted me. Trusted my honesty. Only his trust was misplaced. I had deceived him.
I’d always been a stickler for honesty and yet this evening I had wilfully and consciously lied to him. It wasn’t even a white lie. I had deliberately not told him what I was up to with Irene. She hadn’t sprung it on me as we’d left. It had been planned. I knew exactly what we were doing. Had Lucus known what I was really up to that evening I knew he would have stopped me going. He had a strong sense of propriety, of boundaries, and of right and wrong. He was a man of morals. What I had done was not in his list of gainful evening occupations. And so I lay awake for hours listening to his steady breathing, inching gradually away from the burn of his righteousness until I finally nodded off into an uneasy sleep on the very edge of the mattress.
Lillian woke around two. I put it down to teething, dosed her up with Calpol, gave her some warm milk to settle her back down again and then lay awake for another hour turning the house-break over in my mind.
Irene seemed sure the ex-husband hadn’t done it. Yet the police were appealing for any information about his location. He must have been their primary suspect. Even on television dramas it was usually the family they looked at first. And as for his sleeping location, it was more than a little unusual, even by Grimsby standards. Most husbands didn’t leave their wives, only to return and sleep rough in the loft of the house they’d just left. There must be some reason he had taken such an unusual step. Possibly financial. But it still begged the question: how had she not noticed him? Surely there must have been signs.
I lay there listening to the creaking of our own house and the gurgling and clicking as the central heating pipes expanded and contracted. Sometimes you could hear what sounded like a ghost walking down the hall, but I knew it was just the neighbours walking on their floor next door. The joists spanned both of our houses and the shared woodwork facilitated the movement of sound between us. I listened to the rattle of the loose fitting sash windows, the groan of wind in the chimney. Maybe I too wouldn’t notice if someone was actually living in our loft. It was so unexpected, so outside the natural order, it wouldn’t occur to me to check.
I must have fallen asleep again eventually, but the morning seemed to arrive before I’d fully shut my eyes. The “bleep bleep bleep” of the radio alarm shrilly announcing Lucus’s start to the day. He switched it off and I groaned.
“Bad night?” he enquired.
“Hmmf,” I rolled over. “Is Lillian awake?”
“Can’t hear her.”
“Then I’ll stay here five minutes.”
Lucus padded off to the shower. It wouldn’t be long before Lillian’s young ears recognised the signs of life in the house. She loved attention and hated to miss out on anything, however mundane.
I listened to Lucus thumping about in the bathroom. He didn’t care if he woke our sleeping dragon. Very shortly he wouldn’t have to be dealing with her, but rather driving off to his significant, high powered job, sorting out budgets, strategic planning, meeting parents, coaching teachers…,
Lillian coughed. I pulled the duvet over my head. Maybe that Calpol dose would keep her asleep a little longer. She coughed again and I heard a musical trill as she batted at her spinning mobile. She gave a little half cry, half giggle, and I heard her rolling and making a grab for the cot sides. There was a shudder, a giggle, another muffled thud and then a firm wooden rattle as got herself standing and yanked the cot sides backwards and forwards.
“Wah!”
I dragged the duvet down and swung out of bed. Maybe the tooth had cut in the last four hours. I could live in hope.
Barely three hours later I had reached the tipping point of the morning. Lillian had lost her patience with life in general. I’d fended off at least one screaming fit, changed three nappies, cleared Shreddies off the walls and endeavoured to pick a sodden rusk out of the carpet pile into which it had been smeared, before giving up, calling through the dog and ignoring the fact dog saliva wasn’t the most hygienic way of cleaning the house.
We’d reached the point where we hated the sight of each other. I just wasn’t entertaining enough and from my point of view neither was she. Which meant only one thing: it was time to go out.
Within minutes of entering the park Irene was at my side, her beige duffle coat pulled tight around her against the cold of the day, a red woollen scarf nestled in against her neck.
I often wondered how she did it. I was rarely in the park long before Irene made an appearance. Either I was extremely predictable, or she lurked. I hadn’t decided yet which was more likely.
I surreptitiously tried to work out how cold she was, but couldn’t decide from looking at her face how long she might have hidden behind a tree. Her appearances were too regular to be random chance… but if she had waited for me to arrive this morning I’d have expected a little more of a blue hue around her lips.
Irene had a few heels of bread with her and so I pulled the buggy up alongside the duck pond, re-enacting the first day we met, but without the ice. Her excuse of crusts made a change from just fetching milk from the Spar, or just walking back from town. Moss gave me one of his looks. Duck feeding took up valuable ball fetching time. I watched him slink away into the bushes, head down, hunched back, a vision of misery. He stole a look at me, resentment written across his face. He dropped his ball next to a hedge and ambled, rather than ran, off to his next vantage point, where he would wait impatiently for me to throw the ball.
I footed the brakes, buggy facing the water. Lillian was too young to grasp the concept of throwing any food away. Everything she held went in her mouth first. Added to that, the ducks were far too wary to come within the two inch radius she could actually hurl the bread, so I threw the bread and Lillian pointed, while Irene kept up a running commentary in baby-talk.
I listened to her. She must have had children herself. She was fluent in age appropriate chatter. The thing was… she never spoke about a family, nor a partner. Not for the first time I wondered what the story was there. We’d known each other so long it had become impolite to ask. I’d tried, early into our friendship, but Irene had brushed off my questions with questions of her own and the longer I knew her, the less I felt I could pry. It was like she’d drawn a screen around herself and her past was hidden beyond that thick heavy curtain. I wondered what lurked there. But right now she was who she allowed me to see, and that much of her I liked. Maybe that was enough. She didn’t know everything about me after all.
We all had things we kept to ourselves; behind every face was a story and there would be few in our lives to whom we bared all. Those that did were close friends, or partners, anything less would have brought with it embarrassment and mortification. Personal exposure merited a level of trust above and beyond regular friendship. I had a few close friends who knew everything about me. Irene was rapidly becoming one of them, but she still didn’t know everything yet. Perhaps I still had to earn Irene’s trust. Maybe helping her in this investigation of hers would bring me into that restricted circle, and if she trusted me, maybe I would let her in on my hidden secrets.
“All gone,” Irene sing-songed as I shook out the bag, scattering the last of the crumbs into the air.
“Bah!” said Lillian and with nothing left to occupy her, she grabbed at her socks, pulled them off and made to hurl them after the bread.
“Oh no you don’t.” I took the socks and pocketed them. I never knew why I bothered really; she seemed to spend all day pulling them off. At home I simply left her barefoot. She wasn’t yet walking outside, we hadn’t invested in shoes. But I could see those days approaching, and I wondered how many shoes we were going to lose when that day came
.
Walking away from the pond I picked up the much chewed rubber ball Moss had left by the hedge and with the plastic throwing arm known to Lucus and I as ‘the dog whacker’ (though we never whacked the dog with it) I tossed it over the grass towards the snout I could see sticking out from behind another bush ahead. Moss careened off after it, pleased to be the centre of attention again.
We’d purchased him as a pup from a working farm and although he’d never so much as sniffed a sheep, the instinct to run round a flock was still there. Once the ball was dropped, he ran a full circle, as if around an imaginary flock of sheep, to take up position further down the path in the direction we were walking in, hiding behind a convenient tree or bush as if playing a doggy version of hide and seek. My job was to locate the ball, wait until I could see him and then launch it as far as I could in his direction, at which point he’d speed out of his hiding place and grab it, mid-air if he could.
I collected the ball and returned again to the buggy. Irene was almost pregnant in her conspiracy. The air was thick around us with the unspoken conclusions of last night’s musings. I gave her the opening she was waiting for.
“So?”
She grinned at me. “I’ve found him.”
“Who?”
“The ex-husband.”
“What? Already? Have you told the police?”
“The police? Why would I do that?”
“Er… because they’re looking for him.” The Homer-like doh crept into my voice unbidden. I had a strong sarcastic streak I’d never managed to outgrow. It wasn’t my most endearing feature, as Lucus would happily testify.
Irene sighed and gave me a withering look.
I glared back. I couldn’t believe it didn’t cross her mind at least once that she might have tracked down a potential wife killer. She seemed so convinced the police were wrong and she was right. And that conviction appeared so strong it made her willing to take the risk and protect the man everyone else was looking for.
“Where is he then?”
Irene looked around her, checking for eavesdroppers. The park was mainly empty, just a few mothers with older children in the play area, the odd dog walker and one of the local drunks sitting on one of the benches near the pond with a couple of tinnies, fingerless gloves and a beanie hat that looked as though it had seen much better days. He appeared to be muttering to himself about some injustice; I could hear a running commentary that contained rather a lot of swearing.
Irene made sure we had the dewy grass and the fresh, crisp air all to ourselves and then tipped her head towards the house we had broken into the night before.
“What?” I asked. She tipped her head again.
“Seriously? He’s gone back?”
“No,” she said. “Not back as such. But the house next door is the same construction if you look. He’s in there.”
I looked at the houses. As Irene said, they were a matching pair of semi-detached properties in the Edwardian style. Each house had a mirror image adjoining it and both of them were separated by matching driveways. They were made of the same red brick used in all Grimsby homes but rather than the long thin houses common to many of the older properties, these were stubbier, with two bay windows to each frontage, indicating that each had two reception rooms facing the park. They both had a front porch but it was clear the side entrances were the ones they used as both routes to the front doors were a little more overgrown. Added to all that there was a dip in the low hedge separating the driveways exactly between the two houses back doors, which I thought was likely to be the result of the postman taking an over-the-hedge short cut between the houses to deliver mail over the years.
“Noooo.” I shook my head. It was unbelievable. “He wouldn’t have. Surely not? You think he crept into someone else’s house and repeated the same trick?” She nodded. “How can you tell?
“Same cigarette butts on the drive in line with the drain pipe.”
We were too far away to see such small evidence, but I took her word for it. If she’d seen them, then they were there. Irene wouldn’t lie about something this important. I wondered if that was where she had been this morning, proving her theory while she waited for me to catch up.
“How did he get in?”
“Don’t you have next-door’s keys?”
I rolled my eyes. Not only did I have next-door’s keys, I also had keys for the family on the other side and a friend’s set for their house several miles away. In turn, our own keys were lodged with three sets of neighbours. After all, what good were a spare set of keys, locked inside your own property? Added to the fact we wouldn’t have to break into our own house if we accidentally locked ourselves out, we knew if we were late back for some reason, we could ring round and someone would probably help us out by letting out the dog.
“Surely they’d have noticed they were missing?” I said.
“Who would have?” Irene said. “Does your mother know you’ve got next-door’s keys?”
“No”
“Does anyone?”
“You do.”
“I’m observant. But I wouldn’t necessarily be asked by the police if anything was missing from the house if you were burgled or killed. Besides the keys for the next-door neighbour would be the one thing I probably wouldn’t think to check for – after all, they aren’t yours. Of course, I will now,” she said
“Of course,” I said. “Though I’m not actually planning on being murdered any time soon.”
“I should hope not.”
“But … to move in just next door?”
“He had limited options. It was probably a split second decision.”
“And in the loft?”
“Better the devil you know. Besides, in the loft he wouldn’t be discovered if someone happened to look around the house.
“There’s no one there?”
“Not at the moment. It’s rented.”
“So… what are you going to do?” I asked her. “Tell the police?”
“Not yet. Don’t look at me like that,” she added. “They’d just arrest him.”
Without facing a mirror, I wasn’t sure exactly how I was looking at Irene, but incredulous and gobsmacked were probably close to the top of possible emotions on my face. She thought she’d tracked down the husband, in fact, she knew he was next-door, next - door, in their loft space, and she wasn’t going to tell the police!
“It’s up for let at DDMs. I checked it out this morning.” DDMs were one of the many local estate agents operating in Grimsby, though probably the largest firm if the signs I’d seen all over town were anything to go by. A new one seemed to spring up every day.
“You went round?”
“No. Just looked it up on the internet. I’d not seen any cars in the drive these last few weeks and the curtains haven’t moved. I figured it was probably empty. It is. What I want to know though, is what’s he doing for food?”
“Sorry?”
“He could raid the fridge in his own house, but to remain unseen for so long, either he’s starving or he has an accomplice at a local shop who isn’t reporting him.”
I hadn't even thought about the man’s need to eat. What he may or may not have been consuming while his wife, or rather ex-wife, was lying dead on a mortuary slab hadn’t even crossed my mind. Avoiding him: that had occurred to me. Passing on any useful intelligence to the police: that had certainly registered. But what he’d been eating? I’d not even spared it a first thought, let alone a second.
I wondered if this was what had consumed Irene’s mind the night before. Perhaps she had lain awake, as I had last night, wondering about the simple things in life. For me, the man had been in hiding; for Irene, he had been eating, drinking, sleeping, living somewhere, even smoking. She had thought about every aspect of it, every permutation. I wondered if the police followed the same thinking. If they had, surely they would have found him by now using the same methodology - or perhaps it was just Irene's unique view of life that cleared the sm
og of detection and brought things into the open. If he’d only moved next door, and hadn’t left the house, it certainly explained the lack of sightings.
“But-”
Irene halted my ‘duty of care’ speech with one of her don’t argue looks. She didn’t want to hear it.
“Look…it won't be long until the police reach the same conclusion, or at least, I hope so."
“And what then?” I asked.
“An arrest probably," Irene shrugged. “Unless we get to him first. He's rolling.”
“What?”
Irene pointed. She hadn't been talking about the murder, but rather the dog. Moss was shrugging about on the grass in clear abandon, all four legs in the air, shoulders rubbing backwards and forwards, screwing himself into the ground.
“Oh no!" I started running towards him. I could see a whole morning of dog washing was ahead of me.
"MOOSSSSS!" I yelled. He ignored me. The whiff overpowering his doggy brain. Fox spraint. Just what I needed to finish off my day. Joy!
Chapter Four
One sniff of Moss in the park had made it quite clear that he was not spending any time inside our property until Operation: Eradicate Smell had taken place. He was either going to have to live in the garden until Lucus came home at night, or I needed an accomplice. So it went without saying I’d co-opted Irene into the task.
“Are you ready?" I shouted through the bathroom door.
Irene had taken up station in the kitchen, the other side of the bathroom door, with Lillian on one hip. I had heard the pair burbling to each other while I swilled down the dog. Irene with her fluent baby chatter and Lillian with accompanying “Bah!”s and “Ah!”s and “Gah!”s.
“You just want me to open the back door and stand guard?" she asked
"Something like that. He'll come out fast!" I warned through the door.
I turned off the shower and grabbed the towel we reserved for dog cleansing from the top of the glass door. It was threadbare but extremely absorbent. I draped it over him and began to rub. I wrinkled my nose as I bent over him. He still smelled, even after specially formulated dog shampoo and copious amounts of water. It crossed my mind to wonder what state the dead woman’s husband would be in by now. Had he showered since he went into hiding, or did he smell a bad as the dog?