by Patrick Gale
He began to watch her. He counted her smiles obsessively, mentally tabulating how many she gave him, how many McBride. He watched for physical contact like a hawk. He did not need to watch long. McBride was freely tactile, with men as with women. Lawrence’s jealousy built up like a store of festering matter behind a stretching skin, until he had to speak or be utterly poisoned. A stranger to diplomacy, he blurted out his suspicions one evening. She responded with a torrent of outraged mockery. He slapped the table top to silence her and sent a plate flying. The plate was a wedding present, one of her favourites, one he had always disliked, which did not help matters greatly. He apologized, of course, made profuse, even tearful amends, but a part of her withdrew from him and would not be appeased. The next time he saw McBride, the American eyed him warily and Lawrence knew she had told him. This only made matters worse since it confirmed at least some level of collusion between the two of them.
He was powerless. He was not her jailer. He had to go out to work each day. Lucy went to nursery in the morning and was picked up by a childminder in the afternoon. Bonnie was at liberty from nine till five, to go where she chose, speak to whoever she pleased. As part of her job, she certainly spoke to, or saw McBride every day. In his quieter moments, Lawrence could understand the American’s psychological appeal for her – his confidence, his maturity, his flattering attention. The man had never seen her in awkward youth and accepted unreservedly the adult professional and capable mother she had become.
What Lawrence could not understand or abide was the thought of them in a sexual context. For all the fluctuations in his emotional investment, sex was the one area in which his marriage had rarely wavered. Conscious of the age gap between them, he kept himself in good shape. He refused to let his stamina slide even when parenthood threatened to take its toll on them both. He made her satisfaction a point of pride, determined to respond to her every whim, never to have a headache or be too tired. He would spend half an hour with his face between her legs even as she whimpered to be allowed to sleep. All this care sprang naturally from desire, but also from watchfulness against the appeal of rivals her own age. The six years between them had seemed at times such a terrible threat, and yet here she was involved with a man more than two decades her senior. Scalded by his curiosity, he became as obsessed with McBride as she and determined he must be hung like a donkey, have the stamina of an eighteen-year-old, or both. He had powerfully erotic dreams in which he stood with a small crowd to watch Bonnie and the American overpowered by desire, rutting in a public space. The extent of her duplicity astonished him. She continued to make love with him at night as though McBride had not been servicing her all afternoon, still mounting a pretty show of desire. Sometimes he played along, treating her body as the arena where he and the American could blatantly compete for her favour. He would will her to prefer him, love her into submission. At others it was more than he could bear, especially if he had been drinking. He fancied he smelled the other man’s traces on her skin.
The thought of another man desiring and possessing her cruelly reawakened the desire he had been fabricating for so long that even he had begun to be taken in. He grew hard merely at the sound of her voice on, the telephone. When she leaned over his shoulders as he sat at the kitchen table or when he sat beside her as she drove, he felt an immoderate desire to paw and kiss her. He returned to the warm shores of love but she was stranded on the ice floes of disenchanted marriage and finding his handling and touching her offensively possessive, would shrug off his touch in irritation. A part of her welcomed his renewed attentions, perhaps, but she was angered at his lousy timing, then angered further at her inability to respond to them in kind.
On the night of their last disastrous confrontation, he had brought her home an extravagant bouquet of pink roses and the ingredients for dinner. It was the anniversary not of their wedding, which he mentally discounted as inherently unromantic, but of their first, spontaneous lovemaking in the pit in her father’s garden. He had planned it all like a lovesick swain, knowing she was on a site visit at the new university and not due back until seven. He picked up Lucy from Sian, the childminder, and encouraged her to draw Mummy a waxy happy anniversary picture with crayons while he arranged the flowers in a vase and prepared dinner. He gave Lucy her supper, bathed her, put her to bed, read her a story. He bathed himself and dressed up – or as up as his basic wardrobe allowed – then waited. Seven came and went, as did eight then nine. While dinner slowly dried out, he drank the wine he had left to breathe and blew out the candles before they burned down entirely.
By the time the telephone rang, he was taut with nerves and had convinced himself her car had crashed and it was the police or casualty department calling. It was McBride, ruggedly charming as ever but perhaps less plausible than usual.
‘Oh hi, Lawrence. It’s Craig.’
‘Hello.’
‘Hi. Just to let you know Bonnie’s on her way home finally. We ended up working so late I insisted she let me buy her dinner and she clean forgot to ring you to say don’t wait. She asked me to give you a call in case you were worried. I said I was sure you’d have eaten hours ago and be watching TV with a beer by now but, well, you know how she gets. Always convinced she’s putting people out. You have eaten haven’t you?’
‘Oh yes,’ Lawrence assured him, his mouth dry from the wine. ‘Hours ago.’
He hung up and tried to eat but anger made it hard to swallow and the meat seemed to dry out and expand in his mouth as he chewed it. He pushed the food aside and brooded. It had been dark for hours. The site visit could not have gone on so very late. She had already arranged for him to collect Lucy but it was entirely out of character for her to come home past the child’s bedtime without calling, less to speak to him than to say goodnight to her. Even if they had been in a restaurant, she would have slipped away from the table after placing her order, to make the quick duty call. But she had not been in a restaurant. McBride might have lured her to the hotel with the suggestion of a meal but they had gone directly to his bed and stayed there. He pictured her efficiently combing her hair and brushing out the wrinkles in her dress as he dialled the number, then hissing to him.
‘No. You speak to him. Say I’m already on my way home,’ pictured McBride wincing as she riskily nuzzled his shoulder as he spoke the agreed lie to her husband. He splashed the last of the wine into his glass and imagined her daintily crouching over the hotel bidet, dabbing at herself with one hand, clutching a small, white towel in the other.
She was charmed by the roses, aghast at his romantic gesture, appalled by her forgetfulness.
‘Eat it anyway,’ he said, uncorking a second bottle. ‘You must be hungry.’
‘Didn’t Craig ring?’
‘Yes. But still …’
‘I’m stuffed,’ she said ruefully.
‘What did you eat?’
‘Oh … Little smoked salmon parcels with mousse inside,’ she improvised expertly. ‘Veal cordon bleu. Lots of creamy potatoes. You know. Hotel food.’ He watched her eyes flick, uncontrollably, to the roast chicken, however. He knew she was ravenous, worn out by lovemaking. He saw her swallow and imagined the guilty spittle on her tongue. ‘Oh but it smells so good! she sighed. ‘Maybe just a bit of skin. I can’t resist.’ And she tore off a large hank of skin. It left a trickle of fat on her chin, which she dabbed away with one of the napkins he had laid out in honour of the occasion.
‘Have a potato with it,’ he had said. ‘Or a drumstick.’
Padding into the downstairs loo on his way up to bed, he trod on something hard. He flicked on the light and was disgusted to see there was more dried blood in here which he had not cleaned up. It was splashed across the small washbasin. There was some on the floor and more on the rim of the lavatory pan. Whatever he had trodden on had snagged in the wool of his sock. He picked it out and held it up to the light. Assuming it to be a chip of gravel that had worked its way inside his boot, he was disturbed to see that it was a chunk o
f tooth, a canine with a slightly ragged point. He stuffed it in the pocket of his cords and fought off the urge to whimper as he scrubbed at the blood with a sponge.
CHAPTER FOUR
In the post the following morning there was still no word from Bonnie. As was her wont occasionally, his mother had sent a postcard for Lucy. It was a reproduction of a naive nineteenth-century painting of a greyhound asleep by a fire.
Dear Lucy, it said. 1 think this dog is dreaming about rabbits, don’t you? It’s your birthday soon so let Mummy know what you want and I’ll see what I can do! Lots and lots of love, darling. Granny.
He read the card through twice. His mother had taken care to write large and round, even though the child was still too young to read much. He missed Lucy unspeakably. It came over him in a great, grey wave of melancholy. The house was so quiet without her subversive laughter, her galumphing shouts of triumph, her fearless mockery.
Snatching at a possibility, he ran to the telephone and called the nursery. There was a slim chance Bonnie had called them with an explanation of her absence or even a new telephone number. The teacher said only how much the silence had worried her, however. Was Lucy ill? He told her no, but Lucy and her mother had gone away on a trip. He was sorry not to have called earlier, he said, but he forgot. He then rang the childminder in the neighbouring village, with less hope in his heart and received much the same reaction. Sian was a great talker and was just settling in for a gossip when he cut her short.
‘Sorry, Sian,’ he said ‘I’ve got visitors.’
He watched through the hall window as two police cars drove up from the lane and parked in front of the house.
Detective Inspector Faithe had returned with a small team of subordinates this time. She produced a slip of official paper as Lawrence stepped out to meet her.
‘I’ve a warrant to search your house, Mr Frost. Sorry. Were you just leaving?’
‘I’ve got to go to work. What the– ?’
Her subordinates, all in plain clothes, filed past him into the house.
‘As I say, I have a warrant.’
‘You can’t do this.’
‘Oh but we can. Have you heard from Mrs Frost at all?’
‘No. What is this?’
He followed her into the hall. A woman was crouching in the downstairs lavatory taking flash photographs. A young man, not more than nineteen, had slipped the kitchen floorcloth into a plastic evidence bag. A woman in latex gloves was picking through the contents of the cutlery drawer. A man emerged from outside clutching the chain saw from the back of the pick-up. There were heavy footsteps overhead. In seconds, it seemed, the house was being methodically and evenly ransacked. Lawrence slumped into a kitchen chair. He felt sick. It was one of those rare occasions when his mother’s presence might have been a comfort.
‘I’ll call my solicitors,’ he said weakly. ‘This is … This is …’ He realized that, although in theory it was an outrage, it actually felt as though supernatural justice were being meted out, as though a man with a loft full of stolen jewels were accused of stealing a necklace he had never seen before.
‘We’re just eliminating you from our enquiries,’ Faithe assured him. ‘It’s very bad luck, of course, but a lot of the circumstantial evidence points to you.’
‘What evidence?’
‘Apart from the fact that you called your daughter’s nursery this morning and told them she and your wife had “gone on a trip”? Well you were there, Mr Frost.’
‘Where?’
‘Wumpett Woods.’
‘I often go there.’
‘You were there for several hours on the night she was killed.’
‘Who?’
Faithe looked away at her colleagues filling boxes with their small plastic bags of household miscellany as one of them typed out an inventory on a laptop computer. She smiled minutely.
‘That’s what we’re trying to establish.’
‘Ma’am,’ a woman called. ‘Come and look at this.’
Faithe stood to confer with a detective who had come downstairs clutching the piece of tooth Lawrence had slipped into his cords pocket last night, sealed in a bag. He had left the trousers on a bedroom chair and this morning put on jeans.
‘Mr Frost, I must ask you to come with me to the station,’ she said and turned to him, her worn face still a laconic mask, her eyes seeming more wintry than ever. ‘You need to answer some questions.’
The strangest thing about Faithe was the way she could proceed in her interrogation without once implying that she thought he had done anything wrong. He had broken the law, of course, by murdering his wife, and possibly his child, but she implied not one ounce of personal opprobrium.
‘It’s a free world,’ she seemed to be saying. ‘You do your thing. I do mine. It’s just bad luck that we’ve caught you at it.’
As the gruelling day progressed, marked out in cups of coffee and extremely frightening interludes when she muttered into the tape recorder, ‘DI Faithe left the room,’ leaving her male subordinate to shout and snarl and hurl abuse, Lawrence gained the unmistakable impression that she actually liked him.
A violently dismembered female body had been found in Wumpett Woods. Even as he scrubbed Bonnie’s blood off the floor and laid her breakfast tray, a jogger’s collie was excitedly digging up layers of leaf mould and newly turned earth, only returning to its horrified owner once it had secured the charred remains of a human hand. Cause of death was hard to ascertain but, judging from tissue and bone damage, the pathologist thought the woman had died from two blows to the head; one to the front, one to the side. The teeth had been smashed in with some blunt instrument and the clothes removed and hidden elsewhere. The body had been laid in a grave in a clearing in the wood, then set on fire with paraffin until all distinguishing external features had been obliterated. Corruption had barely set in.
As well as Bonnie’s tooth the house search had revealed traces of her blood around the kitchen sink and downstairs lavatory. Her blood type – not a rare one – matched that of the body. The hank of hair was retrieved from the sink overflow. All these Lawrence could explain, through his tears, as evidence not of murder but of an accidental fall at the height of a vicious argument.
‘I didn’t kill her.’
‘Where’d you put Lucy? Is she in the wood too? We’ve got dogs out there and we’re digging and there are local families helping to search, but you could save us all a lot of time and heartache.’
‘What do you take me for?’ he wailed. ‘She’s my daughter, my little girl. I love her.’
‘Like you loved Bonnie.’
‘Love. I still love her.’
‘Funny way of showing it, breaking her teeth.’
‘She must have broken her tooth when her face hit the floor,’ he protested but Faithe continued, relentless, ‘There was a car registered in your wife’s name. A dark green Saab. Where’d you hide that, then? You were in the woods all night. You came back at seven. Your partner John says he called round repeatedly during the day and you weren’t in. Your truck was there but there was no sign of the car or you. You were off dumping her car somewhere, weren’t you? Maybe you were dumping Lucy too.’
‘You’ve got this all wrong. All wrong. I was upstairs in bed. I heard the telephone ring. I heard John come to the door and shout through the letterbox. I was there.’
‘So why didn’t you answer?’
‘I– I was too upset at her leaving me. I love her, fuck it. I love them both!’
In his frustration, Lawrence’s temper rose with dangerous speed. He smacked his fist down furiously on the table. Coffee slopped from their mugs and two butts rolled from the heavily laden ashtray. Faithe’s expression froze over. She took a fresh cigarette then promptly quit the room and her colleague proceeded to hurl abuse at Lawrence and accuse him of brutalizing and murdering Lucy. Coward, he called him, and scum and pervert.
McBride had apparently left his Barrowcester hotel the night before Bonn
ie walked out. He had then taken the train through the Chunnel to Paris, beyond where he could not be traced. Lawrence’s solicitor advised him to sit tight and not be bullied into confessing anything.
‘Remember,’ he insisted, ‘in the eyes of the law you assaulted her, but that’s no offence unless she presses charges, which she hasn’t. However guilty you feel, whatever they insinuate, you’ve no previous history.’ He pointed out that wherever she was, she had to live, she needed money. However much cash she had squirrelled away, she had to make a credit card purchase or withdraw cash from a bank machine sooner or later.
The Saab was traced to a police pound in London. It had been illegally parked on a back street parking lot in Southwark, had accumulated two tickets then a clamp then been towed away. Ever since a loss of grip had caused a near crash, Bonnie religiously used driving gloves, which she kept tucked in the door, so the only prints on the wheel, brake and gear stick were Lawrence’s and the thief’s. Two days passed and still there were no sightings and no financial trace of Bonnie’s continued existence. Lawrence was finally charged with murder and held in the cells pending a remand hearing.