The Sleep of the Dead

by Tom Bradby

  ‘It’s not a matter of theory. We need to know how the little girl died and what he did with her body. It may tell us everything.’

  ‘Even so,’ Weston said, ‘the problem is the same. We did this all before. There is nothing more we can do.’

  ‘Well, you have more sophisticated metal detectors. Can’t they tell the shape of an object?’

  ‘No. They’re more sophisticated, but not in that way.’

  ‘Use thermal imaging or radar or whatever you normally do.’

  ‘Thermal imaging is done from a plane, but you have to have some heat still in the body and I don’t think …’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘Radar is ground-probing radar. It could tell us if there is a cavity down there that might be a primitive grave, but, you know …’ He looked around again in exasperation. ‘I mean, the area is vast.’

  ‘Draw a three-hundred-metre circumference from the point of the murder and search it.’

  ‘It’s still a huge—’

  ‘It’s what we need done.’

  Weston looked shifty. Julia had some sympathy. He looked as if he didn’t believe he really had the power to refuse Professor Malcolm.

  ‘We’ve said we’re not reopening the investigation,’ Weston said. Julia could see that he was gradually conceding defeat. She remembered that Pascoe had only been released this morning. Of course, Weston would have plenty on his plate. Perhaps he had given interviews to the media already.

  She wondered what had happened to the cameras in the village. What were the media saying?

  ‘Then don’t tell anyone,’ Professor Malcolm said.

  ‘They’ll find out.’

  Professor Malcolm sighed. ‘That’s really your problem, Lionel.’

  ‘This was supposed to be low-key. That’s what you said – to see if there were any grounds before the media get interested.’

  ‘They already are interested.’

  Julia realized she had got the balance of power wrong. This review, or whatever it was, had been Professor Malcolm’s idea. He had seen that he had a nervous and compliant police force.

  Weston looked exasperated. ‘Maybe it was Pascoe. He knew the common. Perhaps he came back to move the body.’

  ‘Lionel, don’t confuse me with the media. What have you done with Pascoe?’

  Weston looked tired and sheepish. ‘We took him out of the village, but he insisted we leave him in the centre of Cranbrooke this afternoon.’

  ‘You’ve got a problem. The world thinks he’s a threat, but you know he isn’t.’

  ‘You said it was not impossible that he’d committed the murders.’

  ‘Yes, but not on the basis of the original investigation and trial. He is not a threat to children, per se.’

  Weston sighed in frustration.

  Weston walked back with them and, after agreeing to a new search, said goodbye at his car, which was parked by the green. After he had gone, Professor Malcolm looked at the cross by the stile for a few moments, before wandering over to the war memorial. ‘It’s sobering, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘You go to any village or hamlet anywhere in England or France – or even Germany – and you see the names.’

  ‘At the risk of being rude, you must remember the Second World War.’

  ‘My father died in it.’

  ‘I’m sorry. Where?’

  ‘Burma.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Old enough to know that we were penniless. My mother died the following year. I was brought up by an aunt, my father’s sister. My mother’s family died in the gas chambers.’

  ‘A kind aunt?’

  ‘Yes. Very much so. She only beat me twice a day.’ He looked at her. ‘Sorry, poor joke.’

  ‘So, she didn’t beat you?’

  He moved to the other side of the memorial. ‘No, she did.’ He looked about him, glancing back at the shop. ‘You know, it’s very quiet here. There never seems to be anyone about. The post office is still run by the two sisters?’

  Julia nodded, looking at the front of what must once have been an ordinary cottage, now painted white with an old-fashioned advertisement next to the post office sign announcing that ‘Brooke Bond tea is good tea’.

  ‘Shall we go in?’ she asked.

  ‘Later.’

  She wondered if the air of tranquillity had something to do with Pascoe’s reappearance. Perhaps everyone was barricading their families inside. The crowd and the cameras seemed to be from a different world and she could only assume that the television crews had taken their pictures somewhere to be edited and broadcast and, now that Pascoe had been taken out of the village, there was nothing further to be filmed. The reporters had their story.

  Professor Malcolm crossed the road and they passed underneath the lychgate at the entrance to the churchyard. Julia wasn’t sure what he was looking for now, but assumed that he would be interested in the relevant section of the graveyard, so led him round the edge of the church and up to the top, by the wall.

  The yellow roses in front of Alice’s memorial stone were wilting.

  There were still no flowers on Sarah’s grave.

  ‘I once worked,’ he said, ‘on the case of a fifteen-year-old boy who had been found hanging in the apple tree behind his parents’ house. Not far from here – Witheram. For years afterwards and to the present day, so far as I know, the father obsessively tended the boy’s grave. The grass around it was mown three or four times a week.’

  ‘And there are no flowers on Sarah’s grave?’

  ‘It’s more than that. Look at Alice’s memorial stone. Sure, there are flowers, but they’re a couple of days old at least. The stone itself is covered in this moss-type stuff. The grass around the edges hasn’t been clipped.’

  ‘Alan does have a job, you know. He’s in charge of the whole battalion. He can’t come down here every day.’

  ‘No, well.’

  Julia could not work out if this was meant to be a substantive point, or merely an idle observation. He had not asked if there was a stone for her father and she did not wish to tell him. There was moss on his memorial stone, too.

  Professor Malcolm opened the black gate in the stone wall next to them and began to climb the ridge behind. This was scrubland, the grass damp enough to make him lose his footing once or twice, the incline steep and a hard climb for someone of his bulk and level of fitness. He stopped after forty yards or so and they both looked down. The clock on the face of the squat Norman church-tower told her it was half past four, the weather-vane on top of the spire above it creaking as it turned. You could see miles from here – out over the common to the hills beyond, where the fields were dotted with sheep.

  To the left of them was a flintstone building with an old tiled roof, covered in moss.

  ‘The village hall,’ Julia said, following the direction of his gaze.

  Beyond that was the cricket pitch and the road leading out of the village. There were twenty or thirty houses along it, in differing architectural styles, and this was where most of the villagers lived, including the Traverses, and Cynthia Walker, her husband and the little girl. The Traverses’ house was the closest with its big, neatly tended garden. It had been built from new stone on a single level with two tall chimneys and was ugly outside and in. Julia remembered the living room, which was hacienda-style and freezing in winter, even when the central-heating was on.

  Once again, Professor Malcolm led the way down, skirting the churchyard this time and climbing over a fence back on to the road. He walked slowly up to the porch of the old village hall and Julia found herself recalling the awful teenage disco her mother had thrown for her here, in the days before she was mature or gregarious enough to derive any pleasure from such an event.

  There was a noticeboard on the porch, but their eyes were drawn to a sheet of paper pinned to the door.

  It read, ‘Meeting 8.30 p.m. tonight, Tuesday, to discuss Appeal Court decision.’

  He looked at her. ‘I thin
k we should attend.’

  CHAPTER NINE

  THEY RETURNED TO the room in the Rose and Crown. While Professor Malcolm went to the toilet, Julia flicked through the green box. She looked for, then pulled out the statements given by herself, her mother and her father.

  Professor Malcolm came back in so silently she did not hear him, or perhaps was too preoccupied to notice. He sat on the bed. ‘Did your mother have a career before or after she married your father?’

  Julia looked at him. ‘She was a nurse when she met him. Her parents didn’t think it a career for a lady, but she did it anyway.’

  He nodded, as if expecting this answer, and reached for the box. His brow was furrowed in concentration. ‘I think we should begin the process of trying to understand Sarah’s life,’ he said, as he began to take out folders and pile them on the desk.

  From one, he pulled out a thick sheaf of paper, looking at it for perhaps a minute, before pushing it across to her. ‘All I have are photocopies, obviously. This is Sarah’s appointments diary for the year of her death.’

  Julia leafed through it. It was not an account for the whole year, because neither Sarah nor her daughter had lived to see April or May or any of the months beyond. This was more poignant than the photographs of Sarah’s body and, for the first time, Julia felt some sympathy for the dead woman.

  She went to the desk, sat with the papers on her lap and began to work backwards. There was a page for each week and they were notably sparse. The Saturday before the murders was blank. The Friday had the letter M written in capitals and circled, followed by ‘wts’. For Thursday, there was a doctor’s appointment listed as ‘Alice – Dr Simon’ at 9.00 a.m. Wednesday was dinner at the de la Rues’ at 8.00 p.m. On Tuesday, the letter M reappeared, circled in the same way, this time with ‘r’ next to it. There was a time, too: 7.00 p.m.

  On the previous Saturday, M appeared again, once more with ‘r’ next to it. The time was 7.00 a.m. On the same day, Sarah had written, ‘Alan – fishing, all day.’

  Julia continued to work backwards. There were ballet and riding lessons for Alice, dental appointments, more for Dr Simon. The word ‘London’ appeared on several occasions, which Julia assumed must be a reference to a day spent shopping. She could all too easily imagine Sarah going to Harrods and returning with armfuls of bags. She had never been short of money.

  Professor Malcolm had opened another envelope and was glancing through its contents.

  ‘What do you think?’ he asked.

  ‘The constant reappearance of the letter M might suggest meetings with someone.’

  ‘A code? Or a nickname?’

  She shrugged. ‘Yes. I suppose that’s possible.’

  ‘What about the letters next to the M?’

  She looked down at them again. ‘I’m not sure about that. Code or shorthand for the place they arranged to meet. I don’t know. I notice there is no reference to a meeting on the day of the murders.’

  He looked up, frowning.

  ‘If you remember,’ she went on, ‘we were discussing earlier that the clothes she was wearing – the inappropriate footwear and so on – suggested Sarah was hurrying to a rendezvous. But there is no reference to one in the diary.’

  Professor Malcolm nodded. ‘Yes, but isn’t it the point that it has the ring of a hastily arranged rendezvous, in which case it wouldn’t have appeared in the diary? I assume that Sarah only wrote down those arranged some time in advance, to be sure she did not forget.’

  Julia pursed her lips and looked down at the papers in her hand again. She turned something over in her mind for a time. ‘Actually, there is something odd about these diary entries, or our interpretation of them. If you’re having an extramarital affair in a community as small as this, it’s likely to be super-highly charged, isn’t it? You’re unlikely to forget a rendezvous, in which case, why bother to write it down at all? Surely then you just run the risk of discovery.’

  ‘On the subject of which …’ He handed her the sheets he had been reading. There were about twenty, handwritten. They were stapled together, so she folded them over and began at the top. ‘These were found in the back of an atlas in the bottom drawer of her desk.’

  Julia began to read the first page:

  I was standing with a glass in my hand close to the Christmas tree and looked over to see him staring at me. All the snakes of the village establishment were there, cloaked in the respectability they so love to wear. He wasn’t talking to anyone and I excused myself politely, saying I was called by Mother Nature and as I walked towards the stairs, he turned up them – maybe ten yards ahead – and I followed him in, locking the door behind me. It was above – right above them all!

  I had a split cream skirt on and he put his hand on my leg above the knee, then slowly ran it up, pushing me gently back against the wall. I thought he would kiss me, but he sank to his knees, ran his fingers up to the band of my tights and then in, pulling them, and my knickers, slowly down, kissing my legs, until he was at the base when he slipped them off, replacing my high heels once he’d done so.

  He worked back up.

  When he lifted me eventually, later – ten minutes, more? – he was strong and I can’t believe we were silent, though when I groaned, he put one hand over my mouth, holding me up with the other.

  Julia turned the page. She didn’t look up, not wishing to catch Professor Malcolm’s eye.

  On the common. Don’t know why he likes this. Suppose it is the potential innocence of our togetherness, though secretly I’ve decided it’s the open-air thing … I wasn’t turned on today, but when the rain came and the thunder … He’s like a bull and … there is something about the decadence of not caring that the weather is crashing down all around you.

  Felt stupid afterwards, so did he. Having your trousers down in a thunderstorm looks ridiculous when the passion’s gone and he knew it. I gave him a new nickname today, ‘Like Thunder’, because it’s how he looks all the time he’s with me. He’s not amused when I say this, as if I’ve insulted his integrity! I think he adopts a persona like a cloak to suit his environment – it’s like a pose, almost, but it shifts like quicksand. I don’t think there is a constant. Sometimes, in down moments, it makes me feel guilty about Alan. Big row today. He says it was about my emotional coldness, but I know it was about my unwillingness to let him fuck me. Does he know? Is it right that I refuse him his conjugal rights? Do I do it out of spite? Do I enjoy it? I can see the frustration – see it in the way he grips the pillow at night when I’ve refused him. I try not to take pleasure in touching the raw nerves, but it’s hard not to.

  Julia’s mouth was dry.

  Horny as hell today, couldn’t wait and got what I wanted. He’s cool about the dangers of discovery in the open, I’ll give him that. Nothing stops him. He gets himself into a frenzy and I wonder how he’d respond if I said, ‘No, thanks, not today, Squire.’ I still don’t know if anyone else can guess at what he’s like. He’s got such a reputation as a cold fish and yet there’s this intensity hidden right in there … God knows where it comes from. But that used to be intriguing and just isn’t any more. Now I know all this is hidden behind the façade and the façade is just that, it’s not intriguing. What makes me laugh is men, though he ought to be too typical to be funny. There is the aura and persona; Mr In-control, in charge, parading his integrity, but it’s just funny when it’s got bark marks on its buttocks from rubbing against a tree.

  Julia looked up. Professor Malcolm was staring at her intently. She tried to keep her face impassive, but it was hard to control. Her stomach tensed, she closed her eyes.

  ‘Come on, Julia.’

  She bit her lip so hard she could taste her own blood. She fought to control herself, but the dam burst, her body shaking, tears flooding her eyes.

  ‘It’s okay,’ he said quietly.

  ‘Of course it’s not,’ she whispered. ‘Of course it’s not.’

  She had stood. Now she sat, head in hands. ‘Oh, Christ.
She was such a bitch. Everything was okay until she came here. The way she pranced around, flaunting herself, throwing herself at him.’

  Julia’s shoulders shook uncontrollably.

  ‘Have you asked your mother about this?’

  ‘Of course not.’ Julia laughed bitterly. ‘She says Dad was helping Sarah because she seemed … lost …’ Julia wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. ‘God, it sounds crap, but that was how he was about so many things. He was just like that. He was decent, but she was so manipulative.’

  ‘He was helping Sarah, but then there was more? It went beyond that.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Julia shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

  Professor Malcolm waited. The tears dried up and her shoulders stopped shaking, but her eyes were wet. She wiped them again, head bent, thinking of the diary she had just read and the Christmas drinks party her parents held every year.

  ‘Is it possible that your fears about Sarah and your father … I assume you believe they were having an affair?’

  Julia nodded slowly.

  ‘Looking at it now with an adult mind, even if it is fractured through the prism of childhood memory, can you see anything that seems to you now to be concrete evidence rather than just febrile imagination?’

  Julia sighed. She saw that he was trying to impose his own order on events and thoughts and feelings in her mind that had none. ‘They were always together. It began around the time of the fête. That’s where my sense of unhappiness begins. Before then, on that holiday in Scotland just before they moved in, I think … everything was fine. Happy. That’s how I remember it. And then the Fords came here and at first I didn’t notice, but at the fête … that was the first time I felt it. I saw her flirting with him that day.’

  ‘She did flirt with people.’

  ‘Yes, but he seemed to laugh at her too easily and vice versa.’ Julia thought again of Sarah’s see-through skirt and the sexy underwear she had worn underneath. ‘The night of the fête, I was tired,’ Julia said, ‘and went to sleep early. When I awoke, there was the sound of a woman crying, coming from across the hall. I went into my father’s study very quietly – he hated to be disturbed in there, but I thought it might be Mum. The woman, Sarah, was standing beside the desk.’