I’m about to close and lock the outer door when I hear a voice say, ‘Amber Hewerdine?’ I look outside and see a short, wiry man with black hair, dark brown bloodshot eyes and sallow skin. He looks as if he’s been doing too much or too little of something. Automatically, I wonder if he sleeps well. ‘DC Gibbs,’ he says, producing a card from his pocket that he holds in front of my face.
That was quick. Aren’t mistakes meant to take a while to catch up with you? Obviously the in-denial period of imagining I might get away with it has given its appointment to the horrible retribution that was booked in for a later slot.
‘Put that thing away,’ I tell him, looking over my shoulder into the house. Thankfully, we seem to be alone; he missed Nonie by a few seconds. ‘Listen, because this is important – more important than me looking at that woman’s stupid notebook,’ I hiss at him. ‘I’ve got two girls inside who cannot find out that you’re a cop. Okay? If they see you, you’re selling something: double-glazing, feather dusters, take your pick.’
‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel,’ he says, and I have that unnerving feeling again, the same one I had outside Ginny’s house, when I was caught in the act: this is wrong. His reaction is off by a few degrees. Why isn’t he telling me that helping oneself to the contents of someone else’s car is a serious offence? Why is he quoting those strange words at me? Then it hits me, what the problem is: this is like something that would only happen in a dream – a stranger accosts you outside your house and says the very words that have been going round and round in your mind.
‘What does it mean?’ he asks. In a dream, neither of you would know what the words meant.
‘You’re asking the wrong person,’ I say.
‘Amber?’ I look over the DC’s shoulder and see Luke walking towards us fast. He must sense that something’s wrong. I feel irrationally encouraged by the idea that there are three of us now, and two of us are on my side. Luke smells of sweat, and of the dust that’s coating his skin and clothes; he’s been at the quarry all day.
‘This guy’s police,’ I tell him, mouthing the last word. ‘Go in and keep an eye on the girls, tell them I’m talking to someone from work.’
‘What’s going on?’ he asks us both, as if we’re conspiring to exclude him.
‘I need to talk to your wife,’ DC Gibbs tells him. To me, he says, ‘You can agree to come in or I can arrest you – your choice.’
‘Arrest me?’ I laugh. ‘So that you can ask me why I looked at some woman’s notebook?’
‘So that I can ask you what you know about the murder of Katharine Allen,’ he says.
What is the difference between a story and a legend? In which category does Little Orchard belong? I’d say it falls squarely into the ‘legend’ category. It has a name, for one thing: Little Orchard. Those two words suggest more than a house in Surrey. They’re enough to call to mind a complex sequence of events and an even more multi-layered collection of opinions and emotions. Wherever we have a mental shortcut phrase for a story from our past, that provides a clue that the story has become a legend.
Does it matter that, apart from one Italian nanny, the only people who know it are all members of the same extended family? I don’t think so. For all those people, it stands out. It will always stand out. It’s unique: a banned story, one they have tacitly agreed never to mention to one another and one that, as a result, they probably dwell on far more than they would if they were allowed to discuss it freely. It is certainly the most intriguing story the family owns – a mystery that seems unlikely ever to be solved. No progress has been made towards solving it in seven years, and the reasons why this is the case are almost as interesting as the mystery itself.
What sort of mind would invent something so bizarre, and why? If I’m pretending, for now, that the story – the legend – is a lie from start to finish, then that’s a question that has to be asked of every event, every utterance and every emotion within the overall sequence – asked, and if possible, answered.
First, though, we must look at the sequence. Which is a practice we’ve grown unused to, ever since Little Orchard acquired legend status. When a story becomes a legend, our mental shortcut phrase tends to evoke not what actually happened, stage by stage – that would be far too labour-intensive – but a convenient wrapping that covers the whole. For Little Orchard, several obvious wrapping concepts spring to mind: ‘We’ll probably never know’, ‘It only goes to show that you can never truly know a person, however close to them you think you are’, perhaps even the treacherous ‘We’re better off not knowing’, since many people collude with whoever is attempting to pull the wool over their eyes.
Do you see what I’m saying? How a memory loses itself within the hard shell of a story, and how a story is then further twisted out of shape and consolidated in its most easily consumable form when it becomes a legend?
I want to take the Little Orchard legend back to the level of story. Treating it exactly as I would a work of fiction, I’m going to tell it as if I don’t know any of the characters in it – I haven’t met any of them yet, and so I trust no one character more than the others. I’m also going to bring to the story the same expectation I would bring to a work of fiction: that I can and will find out exactly what it all means, that any other outcome would be an outrageous betrayal on the part of the storyteller. Like all mystery stories, this one must have a solution. Not knowing, never finding out, is unacceptable. I am stressing this before I start to describe what happened; in doing so, I am signalling to the solution that I know it’s there and I expect it to reveal itself when the time is right.
December 2003: Johannah and Neil Utting, a married couple in their mid-thirties, splash out on hiring a big house over Christmas, one that can accommodate all their relatives. It will be their Christmas present to everybody. Their own house is too small, with only three bedrooms.
After searching on the internet, Johannah, known as Jo, chooses a house called Little Orchard in Cobham, Surrey. It has five double bedrooms and four twins, which is perfect. The whole extended family is invited, and everybody accepts: Neil’s brother and sister-in-law, Luke and Amber; Jo’s mother Hilary, Jo’s sister Kirsty and her brother Ritchie; Neil’s parents, Pam and Quentin; Jo and Neil’s nanny Sabina, their five-year-old son William and their newborn baby, Barney.
On Christmas Eve, Sabina stays in with William and Barney while everyone else walks to the nearest pub, the Plough, to have dinner. Everybody seems to have a good time. Nothing out of the ordinary happens. At about ten thirty, the party returns to Little Orchard. William and Barney are fast asleep. Pam and Quentin, Neil’s parents, are the first adults to go to bed, shortly followed by Sabina, the nanny. Neil, Luke and Amber decide to call it a night half an hour later. Amber and Luke hear Neil say to Jo, ‘Are you coming to bed?’ and see him look puzzled when she says, ‘No, not yet.’ Amber and Luke are surprised too. Neil and Jo always go to bed at the same time – they are ‘one of those couples’, as Amber comments to Luke later. Neil seems put out by Jo’s negative response. He shrugs and stomps off upstairs. Everyone listens to his footsteps, which echo through the house for a long time. He and Jo are in the master suite, on the top floor.
Amber and Luke say goodnight and head upstairs to their bedroom on the first floor, leaving Jo, Hilary, Kirsty and Ritchie downstairs in the lounge.
The next morning, Christmas morning, four people who should be there are not. Jo, Neil, William and Barney have disappeared. So has their car. Sabina, the children’s nanny, is mystified. Jo would never go anywhere without her, she says, not if the children were going. ‘Even if William or Barney were ill, and needed to be taken quickly to hospital?’ Hilary asks. ‘Especially then,’ says Sabina. No note has been left anywhere in the house. All mobile phones are checked, but no explanatory messages have been left. Jo’s handbag and Neil’s wallet have gone, but all the Christmas presents are still there, wrapped and waiting beneath the tree. Most of them are for William and Barney. Sabina bu
rsts into tears. ‘Jo would never take her boys away on Christmas morning before they’d opened their presents,’ she says. ‘Something has happened to them.’ She tries to ring first Jo’s mobile phone and then Neil’s, but both are switched off.
Sabina and Hilary want to contact the police, but the others persuade them that it’s too soon, and would be, at this stage, an overreaction. By two o’clock, everybody has come round to their worst-case-scenario way of thinking, and Sabina makes the call.
A detective turns up, asks a lot of questions, says he thinks it unlikely that Jo, Neil and the boys have been removed from Little Orchard against their will. Sabina accuses him of not having listened properly. She tells him to go back to the police station and recharge his solitary brain cell. He nods and stands up to leave, as if he thinks this is a sensible suggestion, and says he will call round again the following day to see if Jo and Neil have been in touch. At the front door, he pauses to announce that Christmas – especially Christmas spent with one’s entire family – can be a very stressful time of year; he tells everybody to bear that in mind.
The rest of the day passes in a blur of tension and misery, punctuated by occasional hysterical outbursts from Pam and Hilary, William and Barney’s two grandmothers, and from Sabina, who keeps saying that she will throw herself off a tall building or swallow a bottle of pills if anything has happened to Jo, Neil and the boys – that’s how much she loves them. Luke gets angry and snaps at her to ‘give it a rest with the suicide talk’. Pam remarks, at one point, that Kirsty is lucky. ‘Ignorance is bliss,’ she says. ‘She doesn’t even know they’re missing.’ Does Amber wonder about what Kirsty does or doesn’t know? She doesn’t even know if there’s a name for what’s wrong with Kirsty; Jo has never volunteered the information.
No presents are opened and no turkey is eaten. That night, nobody sleeps well. Pam and Hilary don’t sleep at all.
The following morning, Amber comes downstairs at quarter past seven and finds Jo in the kitchen with William and Barney. The tips of the boys’ noses are red, the lenses of Jo’s glasses misted over. They look as if they have just walked in. Neil’s jacket and mobile phone are on the counter. ‘Wake everyone up,’ Jo orders, before Amber has a chance to ask her anything. ‘Get everyone together in the lounge.’ She doesn’t look at Amber as she says this.
Amber does as she’s told, and soon the whole family plus Sabina is assembled in the lounge, not daring to move, waiting for the announcement that will explain everything. Jo and Neil are heard whispering in the hall, but no one can make out what they’re saying. Luke and Amber exchange a look that says, ‘This had bloody well better be good’. Only Sabina is irrepressibly relieved and happy, clapping her hands together and saying, ‘Thank God they are back safe and sound.’ Pam and Hilary have bypassed the relief stage altogether, and are waiting in petrified silence for some piece of catastrophic news to be delivered; both are certain it’s on its way.
After keeping everybody waiting for nearly fifteen minutes, Jo finally appears. ‘Neil’s taken the boys upstairs for a bath,’ she says. ‘They were filthy.’ She sighs and stares out of the window at the split-level garden that looks like an enormous grass staircase, with a perfectly square lawn on each step. ‘Look, I know you’ve all been waiting and wondering, but if it’s all right with you, I’m going to keep this brief.’ Jo sounds like a politician at a press conference. Almost as if she has listened to herself and not liked the way she sounded, she changes her tone – makes it warmer, more personal. Now there is plenty of eye contact. ‘I’m really sorry about yesterday. Neil’s sorry too. We’re . . . sorrier than we can say. Truly. We know how worried you must have been . . .’ She pauses. Her eyes fill with tears. Then she sniffs, pulls herself together. ‘Anyway, the important thing is that there’s nothing wrong and nothing for any of you to worry about. Everything’s fine – and that’s the truth. And I promise we will never mysteriously vanish again. Now, please tell me we can forget all about yesterday and have our Christmas Day today instead.’
‘Of course, Jo,’ says Sabina. ‘We are just happy you are all okay.’
‘We’re more than okay.’ Jo looks at each of us in turn, trying to drive the point home. ‘We’re fine. There’s no problem, there’s nothing we’re not telling you. Honestly.’ Her voice is full of warmth, confidence and authority – the sort of voice you want to trust.
‘Fair enough,’ says Ritchie. Hasn’t he noticed that Jo has told a very obvious untruth, in her bid to be believed? There’s nothing we’re not telling you. Of course there is; everyone listening knows there is. No one points this out, however. Everyone assumes Jo meant to say that there was nothing significant she and Neil were withholding.
‘Well . . . thank goodness,’ says Pam. Quentin nods. Hilary is busy wiping Kirsty’s mouth and doesn’t say anything.
Amber and Luke exchange another look. Luke opens his mouth to speak – to demand a proper explanation, he tells Amber later – but Jo cuts him off, saying, ‘Please, Luke, don’t make this worse for me than it already is. Can’t we put it behind us? I’ve been so looking forward to being here with everyone. I can’t bear to think that I’ve ruined Christmas.’ She attempts a joke: ‘If you knew how much Neil and I paid for this place, I promise you you’d understand.’
Luke wouldn’t have let Neil get away with it, but this is Jo – a woman trying not to cry, trying very obviously to put a brave face on something. Luke doesn’t want to make her break down in front of everyone by pushing her to reveal details she doesn’t want to share. He also gets the impression that most people in the room would rather not know; if they are not party to the problem, they can’t be expected to contribute to its resolution, and doing nothing is always easier than doing something. And, given Jo’s reluctance to talk about it, it could well be deeply private – even more reason to steer clear. Luke can feel everyone around him deciding to take Jo at her word and believe that everything is ‘more than okay’ and ‘fine’.
Amber is thinking along the same lines: if it were not something private, Jo would tell them. She’s not generally a secretive person. If it hadn’t been an unavoidable emergency, Jo wouldn’t have taken her branch of the family and disappeared without a word of explanation to anybody. Jo is neither thoughtless nor unreliable. It is inconceivable that she would do such a thing.
Officially, the incident is never mentioned again. In fact, it gets several more mentions over the years, most of which Jo and Neil know nothing about. Amber keeps track of the references, like a sort of unofficial verbal cuttings agency, which is both appropriate and easy because Amber is often the person who brings it up. Two years after the event, she finds herself alone with Sabina and dares to ask her if she knows any more than the rest of them do. ‘No,’ says Sabina. ‘In Italy, I would know. English families don’t talk about anything.’ Amber believes her.
About a year later, Amber confides in Pam, her mother-in-law, that she still often wonders what really happened, still wants to know. ‘Well,’ says Pam, wrinkling her nose as if Amber has raised a distasteful subject. ‘You do and you don’t, really.’ Amber thinks this is a ridiculous thing to say. What on earth is it supposed to mean?
Luke is the only person with whom Amber can talk freely about Little Orchard, though it annoys her that he often appears to be humouring her. He is no longer interested. As he puts it, ‘The moment’s passed. It was a blip, that’s all. Neil and Jo have been fine ever since. What does it matter any more?’
It matters to Amber. So much that she has even considered asking William, now twelve, if he can remember anything of that night. Why?
Amber is reluctant to claim sole ownership of her curiosity. She suspects everyone is secretly desperate to know; certainly all the women who were there. Hilary and Sabina have both wondered ever since that night – they must have; how could they not? – whether the happy-seeming surface of Neil and Jo’s relationship is nothing more than an optical illusion. Pam, before she died in January from liver ca
ncer, must have wondered too. And is Amber really the only member of the Little Orchard party who still listens carefully whenever William and Barney open their mouths, in case they let a clue slip out? If something strange is going on between their parents, or in their home, there’s no way that, bright as they are, they’re unaware of it.
Why doesn’t Amber simply ask Jo straight out, if she’s so curious? Maybe, after all these years, Jo would simply laugh and tell her. And even if not, surely the worst that would happen is that Jo would say, ‘I’m sorry, that’s private.’
When Amber thinks about it, she realises that she knows the answer to this question, and, as answers go, it’s a baffling one. It isn’t that she is worried Jo won’t want to tell her. On the contrary, and odd though it sounds, it is Amber who doesn’t want to tell Jo. She feels as if that would be a terribly impolite, almost a violent thing to do. Jo appears to have erased the incident from her memory entirely. She walked out of the lounge at Little Orchard on Boxing Day 2003, having made her announcement, and immediately – instantaneously – created an alternative version of the universe, one in which it did not happen. That is the world in which she now lives happily, and for Amber to ask her about Little Orchard would be to drag her out of it. ‘Like going up to someone you see having fun at a party and telling them that you happen to know they were a victim of genocide in a previous life,’ says Amber to Luke, who thinks she is being melodramatic. His take on it is different: ‘I still don’t see why they didn’t just make up a plausible lie, if they didn’t want to tell us the truth,’ he says. ‘That’s what I’d have done.’
Which rather goes to prove my point: that there’s nothing most of us love more than a plausible lie. A good story, in other words.
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