The Insect Farm

by Stuart Prebble

In normal circumstances, hearing someone like Mrs Chalfont referring to Roger as a “dear chap” in her patronizing manner might have provoked me to tell her to fuck off. However, having achieved more today than I had expected, I was keen to keep Harriet’s parents on my side. The more they witnessed my anxiety and distress the less likely they would ever be to suspect that I knew more than I was saying about what had happened to their daughter.

  “Oh, Roger is fine. He is taking the bar exam next month.” No, that’s not what I said. I said he was fine, but was missing Harriet, as we all were. That seemed to be all that Mrs Chalfont needed to know about Roger, and we moved on.

  “No doubt Mr Chalfont’s intervention will bring the police back to my door,” I said, “which will be very welcome. If we don’t do something about it, before we know it Harriet will just become another statistic in the ‘missing person’ file, and that’s the last we will ever hear of it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  The general feeling of dislocation which framed all of my thoughts was exacerbated by the all-pervasive preparations for Christmas which were going on in the shops and offices on all sides as I returned home. Every few steps along the high street were accompanied by the unrelenting noise of some terrible Christmas song merging into the next jangle of carols sung through a synthesizer by characters from a cartoon.

  On the corner next to the pub car park was a man selling Christmas trees from the back of a white van. All around him there were couples and families with small children, holding up this one or that one as they tried to envisage a particular tree in the corner of their hallway or living room. The sight of them made me fall into a profound sadness about what might have been and what was now never going to be. I visualized Harriet’s face superimposed on the smiling faces of the young mothers, and the imagined faces of our putative offspring on the excited grins of the young children. But there was no Harriet and there never would be any children, and all of it was my fault and my doing. Her life had ended, theirs had never begun, and mine was all but over.

  Maybe I would get away with her death in the sense of escaping society’s idea of justice, or maybe I was hours, days or weeks away from being arrested and thrown into jail for many years. In either case, the worst that could happen to me had already happened. I had lost the love of my life and would never get her back.

  I turned off the main road into our street and was about fifty yards from the house when suddenly I became aware that someone had fallen in to pace alongside me. Before I looked, I knew who it was.

  “Brendan.”

  “Jonathan.”

  I stopped in my stride and turned to face him. “What the hell?”

  Obviously he had been waiting in the cold wind, and the skin on his face was pallid and taut. Traces of his brilliant red hair crept out from beneath a brown beanie hat. Immediately I could see that his expression was tense with anger.

  “We need to talk.”

  Instinctively I turned again to continue my journey, and he began to walk alongside me.

  “You’ve got a fucking nerve to turn up here.” I barked at him. “Why aren’t you under arrest?”

  “I was under arrest. You know I have been under arrest, but you also know that I don’t have any idea what has happened to Harriet.”

  I stopped again and turned to face him.

  “And how would I know that? I have just been told by the police that you were having an affair with my wife, and that you have been putting her under pressure to leave me. She wouldn’t, and so you’ve probably done something to her, you fucking nutcase.”

  The look on Brendan’s face said that he wanted to admit the relationship, but even now some instinct was preventing him from doing so. Evidently he was caught between a reluctance to face the husband of the woman he had been sleeping with, and the need to find out anything which might cast light on her disappearance.

  “Look, I don’t know what to say about any of that. You know I have loved Harriet for as long as you have, and obviously I know that has pissed you off. I don’t blame you but, for what it’s worth to you, I haven’t had any choice in the matter. I never have had a choice. I’ve always been head over bloody heels in love with her. Just as you have.”

  “Except that she married me!” Instantly I was shouting, distraught and losing control. “We both loved her, but she chose me, you bloody madman. It’s just that you could never accept it.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see that some passers-by had heard me, a man and his two young children, and were scuttling away as quickly as they could. “You couldn’t accept that, could you? You just kept on grinding her down and grinding her down until eventually, when I was three hundred miles away, looking after my brother who has only me in the world, she finally gave in.”

  “Yes, I did,” he said. His voice was also raised, but to a level many decibels below mine. “You’re right, and I think you would have done the same if the thing had been the other way around. I didn’t have any choice. Surely you of all people can understand that?”

  By now I could see that some other people, two women walking together, had noticed us and were slowing down to see what was happening. I realized that Brendan and I must have looked as though we were about to come to blows, and I began to collect myself enough to start thinking about what I needed to achieve from this situation.

  “So what have you done with her?”

  “What?”

  “What have you done with her? The police know that you were trying to persuade her to leave me and that she wouldn’t. Obviously you have done something to her. Where the hell is she?”

  “I don’t know. If I did, what would I be standing in the street talking to you for?”

  “So why are you standing in the street talking to me? I don’t bloody well know anything. You know I don’t. I was expecting her off the train on Thursday. That’s all I know.”

  “But that’s what I can’t work out,” he said. “You know now that I saw her off at the station in Newcastle. I left her outside of the Central Station. The truth is that she was looking forward to spending some time with you. She was happy.”

  I looked back at Brendan’s face as he spoke to me and, hard though it is for me to say it, for a moment I felt a hint of sadness for him. I guess he really was as much in love with Harriet as I was, and here he stood, distraught and confused by her sudden and unexplained disappearance. A few seconds later however, my sympathy evaporated and I felt the need to reassert myself. I spoke more quietly.

  “And she had no plans to leave me?”

  “None whatsoever. You can believe that or not, but it’s true. You know Harriet, she took everything as it came along. She had finally said yes to me, and she seemed perfectly happy. I believe that she saw no reason why the present situation could not continue. I think that in the end she might even have planned to tell you about it – but despite my best efforts, she had no intention of leaving you, not now and not in the future either.”

  I stood silently while the import of Brendan’s words circulated around my brain, and I thought about Harriet and about what she had said to me on that evening. Jazz and blues. Blues and opera. No reason why they could not coexist. No reason to have to make a choice. No reason why one needed to impede on the other or why enjoyment of one should invalidate enjoyment of the other. They were just different things. Instantly I felt the tears well up in my eyes as I wondered whether all this had been necessary. Whether I could ever have seen things as Harriet had seen them. Whether I could have found some acceptance and have lived the rest of my life with her, enjoying having the warm glow of her sunny and smiling face around me every day. I felt a renewed sense of loss and sadness at what now could never be.

  Brendan was still looking at me as the tears rolled down my face. I could not speak, and after several moments he began to take small shuffling steps backwards.

  “I’m sorry, Jonathan. I truly am. It was never about you. It was always about Harriet and how wonderful she is. But you kn
ow that.”

  “Yes,” I said, and even in the profundity of my sadness I still heard a little voice at the back of my mind reminding me of the need to get the tense right. “She is. Harriet truly is a wonderful woman.”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  For the next two weeks leading up to Christmas, Detectives Wallace and Pascoe appeared to work full-time on trying to solve the mystery of what had happened to Harriet. They called Brendan back in for further questioning, and they interviewed Martin and Jed at their parents’ homes. They also travelled up to Newcastle to look around the room in the house where she stayed, and they visited the homes of the girls with whom Harriet had been living.

  At no time in those weeks did it seem to occur to anyone that Harriet had indeed travelled south on that Tuesday and had come to the flat. I was never told whether the police assumed that Brendan was lying about having seen her off at the station, or that she had taken the train but got off at some station en route. I was never asked any specific question, thank Heavens, which involved that particular evasion. I had gone to the station on Thursday to meet the train I expected her to arrive on and that, it was assumed, was the beginning and end of what I knew. If anything, I was treated as the poor idiot whose wife was cheating on him and who never suspected.

  In the middle of all this, on a Friday just about a week before Christmas, I received a call from Mrs Chalfont asking me to join her and her husband for dinner. I had no wish to go, and it was perhaps one of the few advantages of my situation with Roger that I had a ready excuse.

  “I could bring him along, if you like, but that might make it less easy to talk.”

  Mrs Chalfont did not consider the offer for long, and we agreed instead that I would drop Roger off at his bus in the morning and go over to their hotel. I arrived on time at 10.30 and discovered that a buffet breakfast for three had been delivered to their suite.

  For most of the next hour my parents-in-law went through a comprehensive account of the measures they had been taking since their arrival in London to ascertain what had become of their daughter. These seemed to consist almost exclusively of lobbying senior civil-service mandarins of their acquaintance who, for the most part, had only tangential if any relationship to any relevant government department. Indeed, I think that at one moment Mr Chalfont even referred explicitly to “the old-boy network”.

  We compared notes on what we each knew of the investigation being carried out by the police, and I told them of my frustration that there seemed so few other options. As far as anyone knew, Harriet appeared to have simply vanished into thin air.

  “I have asked the police if there is anything further I can usefully do,” I continued, “and they say not. However, I did think it might be a good idea to have some leaflets printed with Harriet’s picture on them, and to hand them out around the stations in Newcastle and London.”

  Mr Chalfont said he thought that was a good idea, and suggested that it might be useful to offer a reward for information which helped us to find her. “We can put up £500 if you think that would be helpful?” I said that I did, and that I would add the offer to the information on the poster.

  When our time together seemed to be nearing an end, Mr Chalfont suddenly stood and began to pace, as if hesitating to broach an awkward subject. He went on to explain that what he persistently described as “our family crisis” could not have come at a worse time. The Foreign Secretary was due to visit Singapore over the New Year holiday, apparently, and so they had little choice but to return there at the end of the week to make the necessary preparations. He said that they would of course return to London at a moment’s notice should there be news, but that in the meantime perhaps I would be kind enough to keep them closely in touch with any developments by telephone?

  Possibly I was lacking in sensitivity, or more probably it was the way their sort of people chose to cope, but for the life of me I could not detect anything resembling the kind of distress which one might ordinarily expect in such a situation. Harriet was their only daughter and was missing, perhaps dead. While tears and hysterics might not seem appropriate at a Saturday-morning brunch, I might have expected some sign of emotion.

  “What, in your heart of hearts, do you think has happened to Harriet? Do you think she may have left you and gone off with someone else, or do you think she is dead?” It was the most direct question of the morning and, in the whole time I had known him, it was the closest that Mr Chalfont got to anything personal in asking it. I paused and searched the ceiling with my eyes.

  “Do you know what?” I said finally. “I just do not have a clue.”

  Eventually I said goodbye to them for what I imagined might be the last time and found myself outside on the busy streets of central London. I reflected that there were two possible explanations for their apparent detachment. One was that it was a façade for what was really going on in their emotions – an exhibition of the stiff upper lip which had helped Britain to build the Empire. The other was that they thought they knew exactly what had happened to their daughter, and that she had left me to go off with another man. I was not able then to decide which of these thoughts was uppermost in their suspicions, and do not know to this day.

  After a stay in London of a little more than two weeks, on Christmas Eve, Mr and Mrs Chalfont flew back to Singapore. I did not go to see them off at the airport, and they did not feel it necessary to say anything in a brief telephone call very much more than goodbye. I think they realized that even if they did ever see their daughter again, the chances were that they would never again be seeing me.

  Days followed upon days, and weeks spread into weeks, and we heard nothing from the police beyond a phone call from Sergeant Norris which came on more or less every Tuesday or Wednesday, asking if we had heard anything from Harriet. I would usually find something new to say about how I was busy trying to track down one of her old friends from school, or how someone in the newsagent had told me he thought he had seen her when he was spending a weekend away in Devon but had been mistaken.

  “Anything new at your end?” I would ask.

  “We’ve circulated the photo to every police station in the UK, and we’re following up a few possible sightings, but to be honest we’ve not heard anything which I would regard as promising.”

  We would each agree to alert the other if anything of interest transpired, but gradually I felt any residual hope and energy dissipating from his voice. I guessed that we were moving into a phase which the police would probably call “managing expectations”. I had my expectations well under control, and had to remind myself from time to time of the need to show impatience.

  “Have you people given up? Are you assuming that she’s dead?” It was coming up to three months since I had reported Harriet missing, and something told me that I ought not to be acquiescing so quietly to the idea that the mystery would remain unsolved.

  “I understand your frustration, Jonathan,” said Norris. “Perhaps I should pop round to see you and I can put you in the picture about the way these things usually develop.”

  I was never keen to have the police visit the flat, so I made up a reason to be passing Norris’s office at King’s Cross later that day and offered to drop in. When I arrived there at 2 p.m. that afternoon, yet again Norris was wearing the same clothes and the same downtrodden expression as he had worn when I first met him. We sat in the same corner of the waiting area where we had spoken all those weeks before.

  “You’re an intelligent man, Jonathan, so I won’t try to deceive you.” I found myself wondering how I would feel about being patronized in this way if I really was the distraught husband of a missing wife that I was acting.

  “I have always appreciated your frankness,” I said.

  “I think I’ve said before that in a case like this, in the absence of a body, and without any compelling reason to think that any crime has actually taken place, there is a limit to the resources we can expend on looking for your wife.” He went on to say that the
intervention of her influential father had already forced them to dedicate more time and manpower to the inquiry than would be usual, but that influence could only have so much effect, and in this case it had more or less run its course. “You have to understand that at any given time there are literally hundreds of people who have just walked out of their houses and are never seen again. People just decide one day to start a new life for all sorts of reasons. I know you will probably never believe it, but the chances are that something like that has happened here.”

  I dropped my head into my hands and ran my fingers through my hair, clawing at the scalp.

  “Sergeant Norris, I understand what you are saying to me, but you’ve got to understand that I will never be able to rest until I know what has happened to her.”

  Norris reached across and put his hand on my shoulder. “I understand that, Jonathan,” he said, and I believe he meant it. “I really do. I will continue to do what I can, but I’d be lying to you if I said I had much hope of finding an answer to the mystery.”

  That evening I sat in the tiny flat I shared with Roger, contemplating our lives in the months and years ahead. The imperative, I knew, would be to find a way to come to terms with what had happened, and move on to whatever would befall us next. My priority was to ensure that Roger felt safe and content, and also of course to stay out of prison myself in order to be able to take care of him. I was unable to focus on making any plans, hoping only that the passage of time would offer a route forward and an answer to the nagging question of how and whether I would ever again be able to achieve some kind of peace of mind.

  * * *

  It was a Sunday afternoon, just about six weeks after my meeting with Norris, and my brother and I were down at the insect farm. Roger had been urging me for some months to help him to implement a number of improvements, and I had found it a useful distraction from my mental anguish to get stuck in to some manual labour. In particular he seemed to have been sending for lots of new species recently, and so we had constructed a number of new and differently shaped containers in which to keep and display them. This day was cold and blustery, and Roger was anxious to check that the rudimentary heating system we had organized was working. It was, and the shed provided a warm and even quite cosy refuge from the biting wind. Roger was sorting out a tank for a batch of some new kind of beetle that he was expecting to arrive any day. I honestly cannot remember what I was doing, but when I looked up and glanced through the cobwebs which obscured the already grubby window, I saw the two detectives, Wallace and Pascoe, coming through the wire gate. They were asking one of our neighbours, old Mr Bolton, for directions. As I looked I saw him wave and point his finger in the direction of our hut. My chest went into paralysis, and for an instant I could scarcely breathe. Roger did not appear to notice anything, and so I had a few moments to try to calm myself as they approached. Just before they knocked at the door, I spoke to Roger.