Masters of the House

by Robert Barnard

  “If only we still had the door,” said Matthew. “But it wouldn’t have gone into the car.”

  “I don’t think it would have gone through the trees anyway,” said Annie. “Come on—get it up on the wall.”

  They each took two corners of the towel and then, straining, lifted her up and edged her onto the wall.

  “I hate that,” said Annie, “her being so close.”

  They jumped up again onto the wall and took up their burden. The little wood seemed more impenetrable than ever, loaded with this. Matthew had to walk backwards and kept tripping over roots and bumping into tree trunks. Once he started to sob with tiredness and discouragement, but Annie said “Come on—we’re nearly there,” and he continued on until at last they came out onto the field a few yards from where they had dug the grave.

  “Can we rest?” asked Annie.

  “No—just a bit longer. Come on—if we put it down we’ll only have to lift it up again. just a bit further . . . further still . . . and into the grave!”

  They had reached the hole, and without ceremony they held the towel over it, then let go two of the ends. The body fell into its resting place with a thud.

  “Are you sure it’s deep enough?” asked Matthew.

  “Yes. Let’s have a minute or two rest, then we’ll fill it in. . . . Do you think we should say something?”

  Matthew thought.

  “What is there to say?”

  “Like ‘Rest in peace’ or something?”

  He realised that she was looking on him, being male, as the nearest thing to a priest. He composed himself somewhat selfconsciously in an attitude of prayer.

  “Oh Lord, grant this woman peace,” he said. “Come on, let’s fill it in.”

  The filling in was wonderfully easy, and the sense of relief was palpable as the loose earth began to cover her. They had set the grassy top clumps aside, and finally they knelt down and fitted them roughly together.

  “There’s a sort of hump,” said Matthew, “but I suppose there would be.”

  They stood surveying their handiwork, then they both got on top of the hump and tried to tread it down. After a minute or two Annie said, “Look! Light!”

  It was hardly that: the faintest of glimmers in the east, but it decided them. They took up the spade and fork and the big bath towel and blundered through the trees to the car.

  “I feel so tired,” said Matthew, putting the key in the ignition. “My arms ache so much they hurt.”

  “You’ll make it,” said Annie. “There’s nothing on the roads.”

  Matthew’s legs ached, too, from the spadework; and the first start he made was another of those kangaroo ones that were so demoralising. The second just about passed muster, though; and they went in first gear to the entrance to the car park, then straight out into the road.

  Concentrating hard, conscious now of something more like pain than exhaustion that had invaded his whole body, Matthew changed up into second, cruised around the roundabout and along the Ring Road towards home. As they approached the second roundabout they became aware of a car speeding up behind them, but as they turned into the Shipley Road it sped on. Only Annie registered that it had been a police car.

  When Matthew turned into Calverley Row, the car died on him. He put it down into first, started it again, then kept going steadily until he turned into the drive and nosed it gently into the garage. They sat there in the darkness, too drained to speak.

  “It’s quiet in the house,” said Annie at last. “Jamie hasn’t woken.”

  Slowly they got out of the car and shut the doors as quietly as possible. Matthew felt a sudden spurt of something like love for the car. It had served them well, come up trumps after months of neglect. They shut the garage doors and crept round to the back door and into the house. When they switched on the kitchen light they both blinked at the strangeness of being able to see properly. It was wonderfully welcome.

  “I should have a bath,” said Matthew, “but I’m too tired.”

  “You might wake the kids,” said Annie. “You’d never be able to explain having a bath in the middle of the night. Have one in the morning.”

  “One day we’ll have to tell them about . . . this. When they’re grown up.”

  “No we won’t. Why should we? Why burden them?”

  Matthew thought and then nodded. He took off his duffel coat and cap and hung them in the hall. Then they switched off the kitchen light and crept upstairs. Matthew’s limbs felt like iron bars hanging from him, and he could hardly pull his pyjamas on. When he lay down in the big double bed he felt at once more exhausted than he had ever been in his life yet quite unable to sleep. But within five minutes he was in the deepest of slumbers.

  But as the light strengthened and the sun prepared to announce its arrival, his sleep was invaded by a dream. Carmen O’Keefe was standing over him, her big, firm breasts pointing at him threateningly through the yellow blouse, her red lips stretched in a smile that was no smile. She seemed about to begin an inquisition when suddenly the picture changed, and there was nothing but breasts and yellow blouse, and now they were disfigured by a bloody gash that seemed to swell and fade, enlarge and contract, then almost to shriek at him.

  He screamed out, woke for a moment, then sank back into the sleep of exhaustion.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Irish Club

  AND AFTER THAT—NOTHING. A total blank. Nobody was talking about Carmen O’Keefe. Nobody was investigating her disappearance. That, at any rate, was how it seemed to Matthew and Annie.

  The day after the burying of the body Matthew could not be woken. Annie got the breakfast and took the younger ones to school. She told Matthew’s form master that Jamie had had a disturbed night and Matthew and his father had been up with him. The excuse was accepted without demur. All the teachers knew of the difficult situation in the Heenan family, or thought they did.

  Matthew woke at midday, sore of limb and frowsty. He had a shower and put on clean clothes, then he went off to school to have the school dinner that they all got free. Very little got into his head of the afternoon classes because he was more or less asleep, but that had been quite frequently the case since his mother’s death. On the way home he dropped into a newsagent’s and bought the Yorkshire Evening Post.

  There was nothing about Carmen O’Keefe. Nothing on the front page. Nothing—he ascertained this when he could sit down and go through it at home—anywhere in the paper. An event which had been the crisis, the watershed, of their lives didn’t rate a mention in the Leeds daily newspaper. How could so noticeable a person disappear without arousing comment?

  “Perhaps they print it too early,” Matthew said to Annie. “We’ll watch the local news on television.”

  So they watched the news from Yorkshire Television. Nothing, though they sat through the whole bulletin and magazine.

  “What are you watching this for?” Greg demanded to know. “You never do usually. It’s boring.”

  “We’ve got to do an essay for English,” lied Matthew, “on an item of local news.”

  “What’s an essay?” asked Greg, easily distracted on to a side issue. After that he accepted that they watched the local news, though he often said it was boring. Nothing about Carmen O’Keefe ever appeared.

  They kept a watch on the field, too. From the window of Annie’s bedroom they could see across the field to the little wood and the supermarket. If the police descended on the grave, or anyone else began digging there, they could see it or, if they were at school, could see the results. No one ever did. No one ever went near the grave except sheep. As the days slipped by, everything became deceptively normal. They got up, dressed Jamie, had breakfast, went to school and covered up their real situation just as they had before. Apart from the fact that they could be less obsessive about locking doors, nothing had changed.

  Many years later, when they were back in the house for a death, Matthew tried to put their feelings into words.

  “It
was as if you’d just had your first you know, and then the two of you had just got up and walked away like nothing had happened.”

  “Don’t talk like that,” said Annie, bending over her knitting. “You know I don’t like it.”

  At the time, of course, no such formulation would have been possible; and they confined themselves to talking, late at night, about why there had been no public fuss.

  “Perhaps she was going away anyway,” said Matthew. “So they just assume she’s gone where she said she was going.”

  “Where could she have been on her way to, in our back garden?” asked Annie. “And she had no luggage or anything.”

  Matthew had to concede this.

  “Perhaps her husband had been half expecting her to do a bunk with one of her boyfriends,” he tried again. “And when she disappeared he just assumed that was what she had done. Or perhaps he told the police and they just decided she was the sort of woman who does just take herself off.”

  “That’s more likely,” admitted Annie. “But even more likely is that he did it, and now he’s telling everybody that’s what she’s done.”

  That, agreed Matthew, was more likely still. But the fact was they didn’t know. Soon it became eerie. Matthew thought about it often, lying awake in bed at night. They had found a body, a murdered body, in their back garden, and they had buried it. Yet the woman’s disappearance was apparently a matter of not the least concern to anyone. There was no newspaper publicity, no police investigation. It was as if the body had never been there at all. If it had not been for the dirt on his duffel coat and shirt, a clump of earth clinging to the spade, the old door still against the garage wall, Matthew might have been tempted to regard it all as a dream. When, two weeks after the burial, they found a new but broken torch in a flower bed at the back, they were at first excited. It was a clue, Annie said. But after thinking about it, Matthew pointed out it could have been thrown over by a neighbour, or from the field which abutted the house. It was really nothing very much.

  In the end, the vacuum became intolerable.

  “We’ve got to find out!” Matthew said to Annie, on their way to school. “We’ve got to find out what people are saying about Mrs O’Keefe.”

  “What should we do? Go to church again?”

  “It could begin to look suspicious if we start pumping people about Mrs O’Keefe every time we go there. We must try to think of something else.”

  So they took thought and nattered, and they had almost decided that Annie should try to have some dressmaking lessons from an elderly, loose-tongued member of the St Joseph’s congregation. (“It would be a good idea anyway,” said Annie, a born homemaker. “It would be so useful.”) Then an alternative possibility dropped onto the doormat as part of their meagre mail. It was Matthew who opened it.

  “An invitation to a children’s summer party at the Irish Club,” he said, his eyes speculative. “A lot of adults are always around at those. Parents and grandparents and that.”

  “Who do you think should go?” asked Annie.

  “You. You’re good at getting the gossip.”

  “Why don’t we all go? We could say that we’re giving Dad a rest.”

  “I want to go!” shouted Greg, and Jamie joined in without knowing at all what he was demanding to go to.

  “All right, we’ll all go,” said Matthew. “I’ll keep my eye on the kids while you . . .”

  “But you’re the elder,” objected Annie. “They’ll talk more openly to you.”

  “No they won’t. I keep letting slip that I know something was going on involving Dad. That’s what made Harry Curtin wary. You can go along and just look sweet and listen.”

  The party was in ten days’ time, on a Saturday in the early evening. It turned out to be a fine June day, and Greg and Jamie were high on excited anticipation all day long. Getting to the club didn’t present any problems. They all took the bus into town and then the bus to Temple Newsam that went along the York Road. There were no problems about leaving their father, of course. He was left alone every weekday when they were at school. It was like leaving an old dog in the house that they knew would not get up to anything.

  When they got off the bus, they had to cross the York Road by one of the iron bridges that spanned the busy road. This was an adventure for Greg, but Jamie was frightened by the roar of the traffic going in both directions under them. Once they were safely on the right side they quietened him with the prospect of the cakes and sweets and pop he could expect at the party. Irish Club children’s parties were lavish in their provision of tuck. When they got to the club and went into the big room beside the bar, they were greeted heartily by all the adults officiating.

  “Annie, Matthew! And who are these? Gregory and Jamie, is it? It’s good to see you. Where’s your dad? Did he bring you?”

  “No, we came by bus,” they said, telling the truth in case they had been seen getting off it. “To give Dad more time to himself.”

  “I’ll bet he can do with it. Is he coping all right? Sure and you four children must be a full-time job.”

  “Oh, we are. He doesn’t get many free moments. That’s why we wanted to come today.”

  Everyone nodded and accepted that, and they began mingling in. Matthew found that once the party started, he was treated as a kind of honorary adult. It wasn’t thought that he was in need of sandwiches or sticky buns, but he was pressed into service to see that the others were well supplied. When the party games and races began outside, he was made an umpire. It wasn’t as though he was the oldest there. Somehow, without knowing of their father’s condition, the adults seemed to sense that he was head of his family. It was an odd feeling, at once pleasing and frightening. Matthew felt, as he had felt before, that he had been ejected prematurely out of childhood.

  Annie did not find her task as easy as Matthew had forecast. A girl of twelve wandering round among the adults and listening to their conversation quite soon gets herself noticed. The bar and the other rooms around the club had plenty of groups of adults chatting happily, though there was little serious drinking going on as yet. Annie got herself a plate laden with children’s party fodder and walked through the rooms apparently purposefully, really looking for likely gossip sessions. The trouble was that when any hard-core gossip was going ahead, the talkers tended to bend forwards and talk low, and it was impossible to sit near enough to overhear. It was only after wandering around with her plate for ten minutes or so that Annie managed to hear something that made her prick up her ears.

  “Oh yes—gone. Just walked out of the house without so much as a good-bye.”

  It was Gladys Harcourt, the woman whom Annie had hoped might give her dressmaking lessons. She was tucking into cakes and pastries with Miss Porter from St Joseph’s, and they were blessedly oblivious to their surroundings and had not switched to hushed tones. Annie surveyed the lie of the land and picked on a chair near them but slightly behind them. Then she tucked into her food as though that were her only interest.

  “Mind you, you couldn’t say it was unexpected,” said Miss Porter with relish. “Even by that dim husband of hers, from what I hear.”

  “Maybe not. Though by all accounts he was pretty shocked that she just took off like that.”

  “Left all her clothes and everything behind, so they say. That’s not like Carmen O’Keefe.”

  “I should think she’s found someone who’ll provide. Off with the old and on with the new—clothes as well as men.”

  “Has anyone any idea who it is?”

  “There’s been names mentioned,” said Mrs Harcourt wistfully. “But then they turn up at church and everything seems normal. Mind you, I never thought it could be anyone we’d be likely to know. I’d guess it’s someone in a different league financially to any of the men at St Joseph’s. Always in the past she’s had pretty—well, pretty basic men, if you get my meaning. You knew what she wanted them for. When she got someone with plenty of the ready, she seized the opportunity with bot
h hands.”

  “Rob was home, wasn’t he?”

  “Oh yes. And his mother was visiting.”

  “Couldn’t that be why she took off without her things—to avoid a big row?”

  “I suppose so,” said Mrs Harcourt, pursing her lips in a sceptical moue. “Mind you, they don’t know that she took none of her things, because neither of them knows what she had. . . . I wouldn’t have thought Carmen was one to avoid a good dust-up, though. Rather enjoyed them as a rule.”

  “Still, if she was sure she was wiping the dust of Leeds off her feet, she might not have thought it worthwhile having a fuss. So it could be one of her usual type of men.”

  “Meaning beefy, not too bright, wanting a good time, or just wanting plain good old you know what.”

  “There have been enough of those in the past—some of them from our congregation, I’m afraid. And a number from this club, too!”

  “I suppose we all know some of the names . . . .”

  Annie’s heart thumped as they went through them.

  “I should think we do! Brian Curtis, Rory O’Rourke, Vincent Maddigan, Dermot Heenan, Paul Mackenzie—”

  “Right!” said Mrs Harcourt. “Most of them didn’t make much secret of it. Dermot Heenan was cannier about it, but then he’s a good family man.”

  “Poor soul, with all those bairns to look after. He’s doing penance if any man is. But some of the others—”

  “Blatant! But what I’m not sure about is who she’d been going with recently.”

  “Apart from Heenan, you mean?”

  “Yes, apart from him.”

  Miss Porter put up two fingers.

  “Jim Leary and Andy Patterson.” Then she put up a third. “And there was a bit of talk about Kevin Holmes, but I don’t know if there was anything in it.”

  Annie memorised the names. Jim Leary and Kevin Holmes were vaguely known to her.

  “Pretty much her usual types,” said Mrs Harcourt. “Any of them been seen at St Joseph’s recently?”