Weycombe

by G. M. Malliet

“Oh, yes, I forgot: I took the dogs for a walk while Gideon stayed with Lulu. I shudder to think … I might have seen something. Oh my God, if I’d known, I might have stopped her being killed. But I might have been killed myself. And then who would take care of Lulu?”

  Good question; for sure not me. “You saw nothing of the—you know. Rhymes with herder?”

  “I saw nothing.”

  I sighed. “Bummer.”

  She launched into a long description of the low-visibility weather that day, and the intermittent sunlight. Then she shrugged, topic closed. Heather was like that. The focus came and went. I decided to leave before she started measuring me for an apron.

  “Here,” she said, “Take some of this jam with you. I made so much we’ll never finish it all.”

  I soon left Heather to her own early version of Woman’s Hour. She was clearly anxious for me to go: I had put her behind schedule and she still had her daily wholegrain bake to do. Later that day I deposited her two jars of jam on a shelf at home, intending to wait a suitable interval before throwing the contents down the disposal and returning the jars. She’d made the jam from the berries of Chinese lantern plants, which even I knew was a dicey proposition if you didn’t know what you were doing. I wondered vaguely where she’d got the berries from, as none grew in her garden.

  11

  Heather had given me a few things to think about. The weather had reduced visibility the morning Anna died, which had to be factored in. Heather was either a better actress than I could credit her with being, or, more likely, she had seen nothing worth mentioning during her walk Monday.

  Now I was beginning to doubt my own eyes, my own timeline. Was it Frannie I had seen? Or Heather? I only knew for certain it was a rather large woman. Age differences at that distance aren’t that apparent unless one of them is either sprinting or hobbling on a cane. If anything, Frannie was more on the spry side than Heather, even though she had a couple of decades on her. Heather tended to lumber about in her Birkenstocks like a groundhog coming out of hibernation.

  Heather had two dogs just as Frannie did—medium-size furry things, also some version of golden retriever. Heather’s dogs weren’t around when I visited. They were elderly, like Frannie’s dogs, and may have been at the vet’s for a tune-up.

  There was also that other person I’d told Milo I’d seen in the distance, making it a rather crowded field out there.

  It wasn’t yet noon, so I went home to kill some time: I’d decided to take Heather’s advice and look up Elizabeth Fortescue that afternoon. I thought about reorganizing my CV in the meanwhile, wondering why I even bothered. I’d been trying to decide if a chronological format made me look more like a loser than a functional arrangement. I’d been in a hiring position myself and I knew the functional style was often used to hide big, ugly gaps in employment history. I hadn’t had any ugly gaps until recently; I’d only had jobs I’d hated and didn’t want to keep repeating. The problem being, as every job-seeker knows, once you are pegged as one thing you stay one thing. I’d once been a reporter, but a job on a fast-disappearing city desk was exactly what I did not want. If anything, I wanted my old job back at the BBC, and there was no other job like it in the UK. The equivalent slot at ITV was filled and unlikely to open up unless the current incumbent had a heart attack or something. Not likely at the age of twenty-eight.

  I spent an hour cutting and pasting and “polishing,” but it was no use. As I say, I would have given up the charade entirely if it weren’t for the constant and not-so-subtle nudging from Will. (“So, any good leads today?” he would ask, like he was asking some punk teenager about her homework assignment.) Will had a magnificent disregard for the fact that connected though he was, and coddled by his old boys’ network, this was not getting me any nearer to employment. He needed to be out there pulling strings for me, not nagging me all the time.

  I began to wonder at his insistent harping on the subject. We were in okay shape financially and I knew he could float me a few more months. Years, if he gave up some of his expensive habits, like going to the pub to bullshit the night away. Of course, that was exactly what he did not want to do. My tentative attempts to open a conversation about how I was thinking about a new career path working from home went nowhere. Will considered the whole topic to be some elaborate ruse, a form of navel-gazing designed entirely to help me avoid working. Writing did not count as work in his eyes. To be counted as work it had to be highly paid work, in Will’s World, and even I knew only lucky writers made a living wage.

  But I’d been steadily employed since Will had known me, never once calling in sick, not even after leaving his bed so exhausted I could hardly blink. Did that count for nothing in his universe? Losing my job had been an unwelcome shock, sure, but I’d wanted—no, needed—to get off the hamster wheel for a while, anyway. Before I jumped back on, I had to figure out what I wanted to do for the next thirty-five or so years of my life. Now was the time. When, I wondered, had my dear husband become such a stranger he could not understand that?

  I couldn’t pinpoint the date, exactly. A year ago? Less. A year ago he had still been my darling William.

  And then I’d twisted my ankle and lost my job three months later. Weird Will had come along somewhere in there.

  The shrunken income worried him, sure. Being landed gentry didn’t pay the way it once had. Sometimes I wondered if he’d lost money in the stock market, some loss I didn’t know about.

  Maybe he was just embarrassed to have a wife hanging about at a loose end—a wife who had once been such a high flyer in a glamorous profession. Perhaps that should have worried me more, but what I worried about was that, approaching middle age, I was still finding myself. I felt I was becoming exhibit A in some sociologist’s report on the extended childhood of the American post-adolescent. My first layoff back in the US had come as no surprise—anything having to do with the written word was in a do-not-resuscitate spiral. But, in all honesty, I had never given my all to the cause of saving that newspaper. What I most wanted, in my heart of hearts, was to write a book, just like half my colleagues. Up until now I had no idea on what topic, in what genre.

  Now Anna, most providentially, had handed me my material. Now, I had a crime to keep tabs on. Could I not turn this material into a book? A sort of fictionalized true-crime story, like In Cold Blood. Why not? Who better?

  I closed the CV file on my laptop and sat, thinking. Marriage to Will had become like an extended cruise that started out great—all the packing, all the planning, all the looking forward, which the experts say is the whole point of vacations, anyway. I’d once taken a cruise to Greece. It had lasted three weeks, and sitting in the sun for the first week had been just what the doctor ordered. But by the final week I was ready to catch the first freighter out of there.

  What could be the problem? All the food you could eat, all the booze you could hold. Movies and a few live shows that passed for entertainment. It must be admitted the entertainment was aimed at some demographic I don’t think has been invented yet.

  The boredom level was off the charts.

  Marriage to Will was like that. You didn’t want to toss yourself overboard but you did want off this luxury cruise.

  Half an hour later there came a pounding at the door so loud it made the pen fly out of my hand. Kookie bolted from my lap, not to be seen again for hours. I walked over and looked out the vertical row of small windows beside the door. There was my brawny policeman peering in, shading his face with one hand. I pasted on a neutral but obliging expression and opened up.

  He was accompanied by the woman I’d seen him with at riverside—the fawning plainclothes cop. She stomped in on her black court shoes ahead of Milo and studied the pictures in the hallway before turning to face me. She wasn’t tall but she looked like she could hold a miscreant in a headlock if she felt like it. Fireplug short and squat, she wore her blonde hair in a blunt cut across th
e nape of her neck and curled under along the jawline. It was a sixties look that suited her but I didn’t think it was an attempt at retro irony, more a holdover from her school days. She introduced herself as Detective Attwater in what sounded like a Welsh accent, so I took it as given Attwater was a married name. I came to know her first name was Margaret but I was always careful to call her Detective. Her tight jacket highlighted a bad case of bra bulge, and under the jacket she wore an incongruous pale pink blouse with a pussy bow. She also wore way too much eye makeup and had had her mouth tattooed in permanent lip liner—big mistake.

  And she seemed to view my presence in her country as deeply suspicious in and of itself.

  But she also seemed to feel that Milo’s presence in my living room needed explaining, as he was only a patrolman and this sort of thing was normally a job for the big guys. These police protocols were wasted on me but she spent a few moments clarifying that since he was first on the crime scene and had spoken with me already she had asked him to accompany her on this visit. For all I knew Milo was being groomed for higher office, but he didn’t look the sort of man to ever be as happy at a desk as he would be behind the wheel of his little patrol car. I guided him to an easy chair and he sat on the edge of the seat like he might bolt at the first opportunity. She, on the other hand, settled in for a good long natter, accepting my offer of coffee and biscuits as she shoved her solid frame back against the sofa cushions.

  Milo refused the coffee. My sense was that he was worried he’d spill it, having to juggle it with the notebook and pen I saw he’d produced from somewhere. Again I spelled my name at his request, and confirmed that I was the neighbor who had found Anna Monroe’s body.

  “You came to be on the river path how, Mrs. White?” Attwater wanted to know.

  “I’m always there. I mean, I walk to Walton-on-Thames and back every day.”

  “Really.” She seemed to think that an extraordinary thing to do, as if I’d admitted to swallowing live goldfish or stuffing clowns into Volkswagens as a hobby. “And do you do this at the same time every day?”

  “Just about. I see my husband off to work, change into my walking gear, and go. Sometimes I do email or read the news for a while after he’s left but generally I head straight out. I like to keep the momentum going. If I don’t get the exercise in right away, I might put it off and never get back around to it.”

  She nodded. Judging by her muscular legs and her biceps straining against the polyester jacket, she was a woman who took her gym time seriously. A crumb of biscuit clung to her tattooed lips so I handed her a serviette.

  “And so you saw Mrs. Monroe taking her exercise every day?”

  I scrunched up my eyes as if to give this a lot of thought, wanting them to know I recognized the importance of the question. “Not really. I don’t know for sure what her schedule was but it must have been earlier than mine because I seldom ran into her. I had the idea her running regimen was new. In fact, I’m sure it was.” I turned to Milo. “I spotted her because of her new running shoes. As I told you. Well, you could see for yourself they were new.”

  He nodded but kept on writing, way past the point he could be quoting me verbatim. I wondered if he was editorializing a bit and if so, about what. That said, he seemed to be having a little trouble keeping up—perhaps he was a poor speller—and I wondered why the police never seemed to make audio recordings of these occasions. I could think of a dozen reasons why that would be more efficient than old-fashioned note-taking. A video would have been even better, but things had not progressed to that point and it was very doubtful the Great British Public would have stood for it, anyway. As in the US, they seemed to veer between blind veneration of their police forces and fear that the police might be jackbooted thugs underneath it all. Looking at Milo, I thought he would be one of the venerated—brave and fearless, perhaps not too bright, but not-bright in a good way, if you follow. Stolid. It’s the smart people who think they’re smarter than they are who cause all the trouble, in my experience.

  I turned my attention back to Attwater to find she was watching me closely. Maybe she was studying me for tips on the proper application of eyeliner. I should have sent her straight over to Rashima’s.

  “You were neighbors.” Milo looked up from his notebook, a mild questioning look in his eyes.

  “Yes, I’ve said.”

  “But not friends.”

  Since this seemed to imply the opposite—if we weren’t friends we must be enemies—I chose my words with care.

  “We were friendly,” I said. “It’s just that we didn’t see much of each other.”

  Milo leaned in, elbows resting on his knees, letting the notebook and pencil dangle between his legs. He sat on a chair next to his boss. He was too large for the chair and she looked like a child on the large sofa.

  Milo didn’t say anything, waiting for me to rush in and supply more detail. It was an old interview trick and I was glad to establish early on that I wasn’t falling for it. It was also clear he had studied body language at Police U—it was probably some course they taught on gaining the cooperation of an interviewee, putting people at ease before you pounce and tear them to shreds. He pivoted his body toward me as he spoke and smiled after looking me in the eye, as if to highlight the fact that he liked what he was seeing, as if I were some old friend he’d just recognized. He maintained steady eye contact. He didn’t fidget but sat firm, feet planted, rock solid. It was overall an impressive performance. Even I, who had studied these techniques, and had looked for them as I interviewed people for certain roles at the BBC, could only admire his technique.

  It probably helped that my BBC job had included casting actors to portray real-life heroes, victims, and villains in the weekly docudrama Bloody Murder: London. The villains were the most fun of all to cast. They had to look plausible and normal, but with a tiny spark of madness shimmering around their edges.

  “Do you have any idea, any at all, who may have done this? Or who would want to do this to Anna?”

  This from Milo again. Don’t you just love the open-ended questions? Police U again. Attwater looked content to let him run with it as she admired my arrangement of autumn flowers on the coffee table. I’d bought them at last week’s market to cheer myself up and the water in the clear crystal vase was looking brackish. I made a note to take care of that once they were gone, recognizing that mentally I was leaping ahead to the moment these two were out of my sight.

  I took a deliberate, slow breath to return myself to the crucial present. I knew that no matter what I said, they would go after poor Alfie first, so it might be better if they got it over with and eliminated him quickly from their list of suspects. I said, “Anna was in the business of being ingratiating. That’s how you get people to trust you with your house listing, your money. She could also be, well, a bit bossy. That’s part of the job, too, from what she told me. Getting buyers to make up their minds. Getting people to part with their precious junk so the house shows well. I gather that was the toughest part.”

  “It would be if it were my house on the market,” said Attwater. “Three kids.” Clearly, she was Good Cop and this domestic detail was supposed to endear her to me. She reached for another McVitie’s.

  “Were there any incidents you know of in her life, anything unusual, anything new? You live so near, and you share a common wall. Did you perhaps overhear something we should know about?” Milo again. Attwater continued to stuff her face.

  I figured eventually I might have to tell them that I could often hear Anna and Alfie arguing through the thin walls. That sometimes the arguments were punctuated by the sound of a body meeting unyielding plaster. And that it was Anna doing the pushing—at least, I thought it was. And without one hundred percent certainty … well. It might become necessary for me to tell this story, ugly as it was, but I hoped I wouldn’t have to. Alfie was Anna’s victim. He along with so many others. I coul
dn’t just throw him to this cookie monster and her creature Milo.

  “Honestly, I wish I could tell you more,” I said. “I just can’t.”

  I really could hear nothing specific, not even listening with a glass pressed against the wall, which I did one evening when I was wondering whether I should intervene. It was the night I heard the sound of a plate connecting with the floor.

  More ominous were the silences punctuated by slamming doors. Still, slamming doors told me everyone was alive.

  Why didn’t I do something? Because. I don’t know. Because of who I was and who we all were in that neighborhood. This was hardly some low-rent district inhabited by Stanley and Stella Kowalski, although—yes, I know this—social class has nothing to do with these situations. Wife beaters don’t all dress in wife beaters. Whatever Anna and Alfie got up to it never seemed to reach the point of anything more than yelling, and God knows Will and I did some of that, too. Once I became aware of the thinness of the walls, however, thanks to our quarrelsome neighbors, I reduced my voice to a low hissing sound, like a snake, or I stomped out of the room, keeping my thoughts to myself, and I never threw anything. (At least, not at Will.)

  Their fights, on the other hand, were so noisy they sounded staged, perhaps fueled by alcohol. Clearly acrimonious but conducted in such a stressed, screechy register I couldn’t tell exactly what was being said. I could hear the name “Jason” but I couldn’t get much of the context, although given it was Jason they were arguing about I could guess.

  All this was what I was not going to get into with Milo and his boss. Again, I had nothing against Alfie and nothing on him, and I was not going to have him dropped into it on my say-so. They could look closely at the husband without any nudging from me.

  12

  Tell us about this book club you were in.”

  Milo had had second thoughts about the coffee, at a signal I’d picked up between him and Attwater. Now he was balancing my Alnwick Gardens souvenir cup on one knee, the notebook abandoned at his side.