The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

  “No, it didn’t,” I said. “The fire service could never offer a satisfactory explanation, so I’ve always just assumed that it was electrical or something.”

  “And Roger never said anything more about it?” His tone seemed to acknowledge that he was touching on a sensitive area.

  “No, sir,” I said, and just for a moment I saw again the image which had haunted me, of Roger crouching in the darkness of the insect farm while the flames from the burning house lit up the night sky outside. “Roger has never said anything more about it, because Roger doesn’t know anything more about it. Never did, never will.”

  Wallace shrugged and glanced at Pascoe. The two men turned and walked slowly down the stairs.

  Roger and I had our breakfast together, and an hour later I walked with him down to the insect farm. He had a lot of maintenance, cleaning and feeding to organize in the shed, and so I agreed to come back for him in a couple of hours. Again he seemed unconcerned and asked no questions about the two men who had visited. When later on I returned to the flat, I found the numbers for Martin and Jed at their parents’ homes which I had given to the two officers. Martin was not at home when I called, and I left a message with his mother asking him to call me back. When I called the other number, Jed answered the phone. I sensed the tension in his voice as soon as he knew it was me.

  “Oh hi, Jonathan. What’s going on?”

  “I wondered if Brendan had told you that we can’t find Harriet anywhere. I went to meet her train on Thursday and she wasn’t on it. I met Brendan at the station and he thought she had been intending to travel down last Tuesday. I know he called you from there. I don’t suppose you have heard anything from her?”

  He confirmed that he had spoken to Brendan on Thursday, but had not been able to recall Harriet saying anything about when she was coming back to London. “I thought it was Thursday, as you did, but Brendan said that she told the three of us that she was coming down a few days early. I have to say that I can’t remember her telling us that, but if he says so, he’s probably right.”

  “Why?”

  “Why what?”

  “Why is he probably right? Why is what Brendan remembers more likely to be right than what you remember?”

  “Well, because…” those first two words were the start of a sentence which was clearly intended to have gone on to say that “the answer is obvious”. However, Jed checked himself just in time and his voice wavered as he searched for an alternative ending. “…because both Martin and I have only a vague recall of the conversation, but Brendan says he remembers it specifically.”

  “Any reason why he should?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just wondered if there was any reason why Brendan should have been paying so much closer attention to Harriet’s plans than you and Martin were? After all, the four of you hang out together most of the time, don’t you?”

  Again I could sense the tension and a slight hesitation as Jed struggled for an answer. My curiosity about who knew what was in danger of getting the better of me. It would be necessary for me to insist that I had no idea about anything going on between Harriet and Brendan, so to do or say anything to indicate suspicions at this stage would not be smart. By now I was sure that both Jed and Martin must have known about the affair, and I guessed that neither of them would have been comfortable about it. I thought it unlikely that either would conceal it for long if questioned by the police.

  “I think the police may be in touch with you quite soon,” I said.

  Now he sounded even more concerned. “I didn’t realize they were involved. I thought she must have just gone off for a day or so. I didn’t know she was, like, really missing.”

  “Be honest,” I said. “You know Harriet pretty well. Do you really think she is the kind of girl who would just head off on her own for a few days, not telling anyone where she was going? She’d know that we’d be worried sick. She’d never do that.”

  “No, but I just assumed. What else can have happened to her? It’s not like she can have been abducted or anything, is it?”

  “No,” I said, “I don’t think she can have been abducted. Her parents are fairly well off, I would imagine, but they’re by no means loaded. But maybe she had an accident or something? Maybe banged her head and is in a hospital somewhere and hasn’t been able to tell anyone who she is.”

  “But then she would have had some identification on her, and the hospital would have contacted you.”

  “I guess,” I said. “I’m just thinking out loud. The fact is that I don’t know what to believe. Was she acting strangely in any way in the last few weeks?”

  “In what way?” said Jed.

  “I don’t know. I guess that if she has gone away on her own to think about whatever it is that might be on her mind, I was wondering if here had been any indication of it that you’ve seen. Remember that I haven’t seen her at all for a month.”

  Once again I was sewing the seeds of a suspicion that might point to Brendan, but still I think that at the time it was partly subconscious – a by-product of my instinct for self-preservation.

  Jed had no answers or theories, or if he did have them he did not share them with me. I wondered how long he and Martin had known about Harriet and Brendan. I wondered too about the nature of friendship among men, and of the strange loyalty that allows us to overlook or permit others to be subjected to outrages which we would hate to be the victim of ourselves.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  It was four days later when I was awoken by the persistent ringing of the telephone. The handset was in the living room, and I was always anxious when it rang at an unsocial hour, because the sound seemed to reverberate through the entire building. I glanced at the clock beside my bed and saw that it was 5.45, and so I tried to collect myself as swiftly as possible in order to be able to get to it before it woke up everyone in all the flats below. I wore only a T-shirt and underpants to bed in those days, and I slipped out from under the covers and padded through the flat.

  “Hello. Hello.”

  A remote crackle on the line told me that the call was long-distance, and my mind worked out the answer at exactly the moment that it also arrived through my ears.

  “Jonathan? It’s Mrs Chalfont. Harriet’s mother,” she added, as if I didn’t know who Mrs Chalfont was. I guess it may seem odd that I referred to my mother-in-law so formally. I had met her only twice, once shortly before and once during the wedding, and then only for as brief a period as they could respectably manage. My father had always referred to his own mother-in-law as “Mum”. I was about as likely to do that with Mrs Chalfont as I was to refer to the Pope as “Dad”.

  “Oh yes, Mrs Chalfont. What can I do for you?”

  “I just wondered if you had any more information about this arrest that has taken place?”

  I was stunned. “Arrest? What arrest?”

  There was a pause. “Obviously you don’t know. The police have arrested someone in connection with Harriet’s disappearance. Her father and I are flying home tonight. We’ll be there tomorrow morning. The police don’t seem to be able to give us any further information, so I assumed that you would know more.”

  “They’ve arrested someone?” I know I was being unusually slow on the uptake, but this information was such a surprise to me that I was having difficulty taking it in. “Who have they arrested?”

  “Well, that young man you mentioned. Brendan Harcourt. I still cannot understand how you haven’t been told. Haven’t you been keeping in touch with their inquiries? We don’t even know if they are charging him and, if so, with what.”

  “They’ve arrested Brendan? Why?” By now my brain was finally kicking into sense. “Have they found Harriet? Is she all right? She hasn’t been harmed, has she?”

  “No,” she said. “They haven’t found anything so far as I know, but I understand that they have been making inquiries in Newcastle and they think that Brendan Harcourt knows more than he has let on. T
hey’ve been told things by some of the other students.”

  “What things?”

  “I can’t say right now. That is, I don’t really know for sure. Perhaps best just to say for the moment that he seems to have known her a lot better than he said he did.”

  “What? What does that mean? Does he know where she is? If so, why wouldn’t he say?”

  “I don’t want to say any more right now, Jonathan. I haven’t got the full picture myself. That’s why I was calling you. Anyway, as I say, Geoffrey and I are flying back tonight. We arrive in the morning and we’ll be checking into the Connaught. Meanwhile, maybe you could contact the police so that you can find out whatever they know and bring us up to speed when we get there?”

  My thoughts were racing. I said that I would find out what I could, and that they should call me when they had arrived and checked into their hotel. “Whatever time it is,” I added, though I wasn’t sure why.

  They had arrested Brendan. What could it mean? Now my mind was going at a hundred miles an hour as the few available facts were extended by speculation into a theory. I guessed that the police must have been making inquiries in Newcastle and would have learnt very quickly that Brendan and Harriet had been having an adulterous affair. By now he was probably admitting that he had slept with her on Monday night and had put her on the train on Tuesday. Since she apparently hadn’t arrived in London, he would be assumed to have been the last person to have seen her. Add the fact that he had no doubt continued to lie about his relationship with her, and hence, presumably, the reason why Brendan would have fallen under suspicion. It seemed a bit flimsy, but at short notice it was the best I could do.

  I went to the table to find the business cards the two detectives had left and called the main number. It went straight through to the CID room at Wandsworth, where a bored and very young-sounding officer told me that neither Detectives Wallace or Pascoe were in the office. It was still only 6.30 a.m.

  “Can I take a message for them?” he asked.

  “Yes, please ask them to call Jonathan Maguire. Please tell them it’s urgent.”

  “Shall I tell them what it’s about?”

  I hated this at the best of times, and at my current level of stress it was all I could do not to yell down the phone that it was about my fucking missing fucking wife and that the two fucking detectives who promised me they would let me know of any fucking developments hadn’t fucking done so. But I did not.

  “My wife is missing and these are the two detectives looking after the case,” I said instead.

  “Thank you, Mr Maguire. I’ll be sure to let them know.”

  So preoccupied was I now with this latest development that I could barely get through my usual routine of waking Roger, exchanging our morning jokes about breakfast, and getting him off to the bus. But Roger didn’t seem to notice. He just spent the morning wittering on about the batch of cockroaches he had been promised by a new teacher at the centre, and how he might have to rearrange the tanks to accommodate the new arrivals.

  “It was bad enough with the last ones,” he said. “This time I need to find somewhere for them where they won’t be eating all the other creatures in their tank.” As I watched and listened to him, cramming soggy toast into his mouth and talking as he chewed, I could not help but wonder for the millionth time what went on in that strange mind of his.

  On one hand, Roger was capable enough to be able to take on board and remember a vast amount of detailed information about the feeding and care of a wide range of creatures, many of them natives of foreign countries and requiring at least a simulation of their natural habitat for their survival. On the other hand, his brother’s wife had gone missing, one of his favourite people in the world, and he hadn’t even mentioned her name for a week. I found myself looking at his face as he spoke, paying no attention to the meaning of his words, but wondering if this person was any more or any less likely to alert the authorities to what had happened just a few feet away from where we now sat than would be the walls or the furniture, or indeed Olly the cat.

  After dropping Roger at the bus, I hurried back to the flat and waited. I paced and worried and speculated and paced some more, until 10 a.m., when I felt certain that my impatience would blow a hole in my head if I didn’t do something quickly. I put on my coat and set off to the police station at King’s Cross.

  I was asked to wait among the pattern of cages which formed the outer area of the police station, and wondered if someone wanted to keep me outside so that I would not see or meet Brendan. After ten minutes or so Sergeant Norris came out to see me and escorted me into the same interview room where he and I had first spoken.

  “The two detectives looking after the case are on their way here from Wandsworth,” said Norris. “I believe there has been a development in the inquiry.”

  “And what is that?” I said. I was trying to get the balance right between anxiety to know what had happened and whatever would be the appropriate levels of irritation at not having been kept informed. “Detectives Wallace and Pascoe promised me that they would let me know anything that happened.”

  Norris was about to speak when the door opened and in walked Detective Sergeant Wallace. Before he could say anything, I stood up.

  “Detective Wallace. I came because I heard that there had been a development in the search for my wife?”

  “Yes, Mr Maguire, there has been.”

  “I thought you said you were going to keep me informed. What has happened? Has she turned up? Is she OK?”

  “No, Mr Maguire, I am afraid she hasn’t. There is no good news, but also there is no bad news.” He let that thought sink in. “However, there has been a development in the last few hours. It doesn’t help us to know where Harriet is, but it may be relevant.” He stopped speaking.

  “And it is?”

  He paused again, and I saw that he was looking squarely at me, but that the precise direction of his eyes bounced from one of mine to the other, as though trying to weigh up how I would react to what he was about to say.

  “There is no easy way to say this to you, Mr Maguire,” he said at last, “but I’m afraid that we think your wife was seeing another man.”

  I stared straight back at him and counted five in my head before I spoke.

  “What?”

  “Like I say, I am sorry that you have to hear it like this. Sorry that you have to hear it at all actually, but we think your wife was romantically involved with another man.”

  “And are you saying she has run off with him?”

  “No, we’re not saying that. It’s someone you know well, but he swears that he doesn’t know where she is.”

  I was thinking hard and fast, and knew that it was dangerous for me to appear to have no clue about Brendan. It might at some point come out that Harriet’s mother had told me of his arrest. I looked at Norris, whose eyes reflected the same sympathy for me as I could see in the face of the detective.

  “And is this Brendan?”

  “Why do you ask that?”

  “Because five hours ago I got a phone call from Harriet’s mother in Singapore to tell me that Brendan Harcourt had been arrested. I didn’t believe it, partly because you assured me that I would be the first to hear of any developments.”

  Wallace’s expression told me that he could guess what had happened and was dismayed.

  “I apologize to you, Mr Maguire. I certainly did not tell her before we informed you. Because of what I might best call the wider interest in this case, we are under strict instructions to keep our boss in touch with any developments. He must have told Mr and Mrs Chalfont without letting me know he was going to do so. I’m not happy about it, and can only say how sorry I am.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and assumed that the “wider interest” was Wallace’s way of describing the influence Harriet’s parents were exerting. “But that doesn’t matter now. Are you saying that my wife Harriet and Brendan are lovers?” I laughed, with disbelief rather than with any hum
our. “Because if so, you are wrong, Sergeant. I can assure you that there is absolutely no chance whatsoever that this could be true.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “Because there isn’t. For one thing, Harriet and I have only been married for a short while. For another thing, she loves me. And for a third thing, Brendan bloody Harcourt has fancied my wife for years, but I know her well enough to know that she finds him repulsive.”

  Wallace and the sergeant looked at each other for a moment, and then Wallace glanced down at the table, apparently with some sadness.

  “I am so sorry, Mr Maguire. In my experience, very few men in your situation ever believe that their wives could be unfaithful to them, but many are, and you won’t be the first husband to have been led up the garden path.” It was an old-fashioned expression even then. “But I regret to have to tell you” – he interrupted himself – “may I call you Jonathan?” I confirmed that he could. “I am sorry to have to tell you, Jonathan, that there can be no doubt about it. Harriet’s flatmates have confirmed it. The other musicians – Martin and Jed – have also both confirmed it, and finally, Brendan himself has admitted it.”

  I put my head in my hands and sat quite still. By now my focus on acting a part was once again becoming overwhelmed by the shock and grief at the whole run of recent events, and I felt the balance of my mind going out of control. Images of Harriet crowded in, one moment laughing, one moment sad, and at another moment slipping off her dressing gown so that I glimpsed the incredible beauty of her body before she climbed into the bed beside me. I shook my head violently, trying to push out the unwanted pictures, and in an instant I once again found my body wracked with convulsive sobs, the tears falling liberally from my eyes, trickling down my cheeks and landing in a series of splashes on the table in front of me. This was no act. I am not sure if I was grieving for the unfaithfulness of my wife or for the loss of her, or for her murder. Or for the torment of what most probably was lying ahead of me. My mind was still spinning when the policeman spoke again. I felt a hand on my shoulder and saw that Wallace was standing beside me.