What Xan said was true, but wrong and cruel and I knew it to be wrong and I said nothing and I did nothing. Psychological violence is not worse than physical violence, I found that out later. Nothing, nothing compares with real pain, but the effect of psychological cruelty lasts longer. You forget physical pain; it is impossible to recall the excruciating suffering of the body, but mental cruelty you never forget. I suffered with Lai and I was joined in guilt with Xan.
Nikolai did not resist; he seemed to accept that what Xan was doing was necessary. He let him finish speaking, then he dived into the water and swam away. He left his clothes and did not come back. I gathered them up and took them home with me. And next time we met nobody spoke of what had happened. Each of us thought the others had forgotten. But none of us ever forgot.
Part Five
ZITA
13
Who was Eddie Cresacre? The image of the dome of a skull lying under its blanket of clay, gazing through its blank eye sockets at the roots of the roses had imprinted itself on Zita’s imagination. Now that she had been told of a real child she pictured the digging of the grave, the spade slicing into the soil like a knife into meat, the placing of the boy’s body in the grave, tenderly, his limbs geometrically aligned, the heaping of stones and earth on his chest. She was sufficiently self-aware to observe that her interest was not entirely rational, in the same way that Stevens’ interest seemed more intense than the circumstances warranted. She could no more account for it in herself than in him, and made less effort to do so.
When she went to see Yevgenia that evening to warn her to expect a visit from the police, she found her sitting in her customary wing chair, one of her Black Russian cigarettes in her bent fingers. Zita noticed the tiny tape recorder that Lucia had bought for her lying on the table beside her with her cigarette packet, spectacles, books and note pad, seemingly now one of the items necessary to her daily existence. She looked old and ill, more haggard than usual.
“Is your hip very bad today?” she asked sympathetically.
“My hip? No. No worse than usual. I rattle with all the pills Dr Flowers gives me. One doesn’t die any more, as people used to do, of violence or disease; one just rusts away. All the moving and non-moving parts slowly seize up. Terrible process. No, no, I am very well, my dear, and you?”
Zita sat down without bothering to define her state of health.
“I’ve made a start on recording the past,” Yevgenia said. “I still can’t decide whether it is a good thing to do or not. All I know is that now I can’t help it. It is very painful, at times, remembering what I had forgotten. I marvel at what it is possible to forget, moments of amazing happiness and of the most dreadful pain which I have not thought of for years, not allowed myself to think of. So when they come back, you relive them twice, all the emotion, the horror and the joy of the first time, but with an added element that can only be a sort of intensifier, that comes from having survived, a sadness that the love could not last and a relief that the pain finally ended. So I escaped the first time, but now I can’t escape.”
“It was about the past that I wanted to talk to you.” They were still speaking in Russian. “I wanted to ask you about a child; there was a child who disappeared…”
Yevgenia, shaking her head, interrupted. “No, no,” she said. “No.”
“I wondered if you could remember about him. It was a little boy…”
“No,” Yevgenia repeated, loudly, persistently. She was scrabbling around on her side table, knocking a paperback book and some pencils to the floor. Zita bent down to collect the fallen items. “I haven’t got there yet. It’ll come back eventually. I’ve spent all this time not thinking about it.”
Zita rearranged the table. “What’ll come back?” she asked. “What happened?”
Yevgenia had resumed control. “Remembering a past as long and horrible as mine is what I imagine undergoing analysis must be like. Such terrible things come out. I wake in the night with sudden new memories of how things were, why things happened.”
Zita tried again. This time she did not use Russian. “The child who disappeared in 1960, Eddie Cresacre was his name. Do you remember anything about him?”
Yevgenia looked at her rather oddly. Finally, she said, in English, “In 1960, 1960. What happened in 1960?”
“Well, I was born,” Zita said frivolously.
“As long ago as that? Yes, that’s right. Ivo was a baby. Marcus was married to poor Susie. I have to mark the years in England with events like the grandchildren’s age or where we went on holiday, because for Kenward and me, life was so… not monotonous, so even, that’s it, even. In 1960, a child disappeared? Who is this child, Zita, I don’t follow what you’re talking about.”
Zita started again, by explaining that she had been to see the police about the skeleton in the garden of Asshe House. “The man I spoke to, a Superintendent Stevens, seemed to think there might be some connexion with a child who disappeared in 1960. He was called Eddie Cresacre, apparently, seven years old, and lived in a cottage on Ormond Street. He wants to come to see you about it.”
Yevgenia considered for a while. “I do remember. I knew Eddie Cresacre. It was so upsetting for everyone, a child vanishing into thin air in a little town like Broad Woodham. There was a terrible outcry. The local paper was very excited about it, naturally. I’d forgotten that his body was never found.” Her tone of detached reminiscence suddenly sharpened. “How could the child’s body have got into our garden? What nonsense.” She was now making a strong effort of recall. “The man who did it, I forget his name now, how could he have got in? The idea’s absurd.”
“The man who did it? You mean they found the abductor, but not the child?”
“Yes, didn’t he tell you? It comes back to me now. There was tremendous pressure on the police to find the child and the murderer (we all assumed it was murder), and eventually they arrested someone, who then confessed. There was lots of circumstantial evidence, I suppose, and finally the confession. But the body was never found. It was one of the things that aroused great hostility towards the accused man, that he wouldn’t reveal what he had done with the body.”
As Zita listened, she reassessed her interview with Stevens which became even more incomprehensible. Why had he not mentioned the murderer? Why had he implied that the mystery of the child’s disappearance was unsolved? She recognized now that his air had been vaguely menacing, as if suggesting that she and her clients knew something which they would wish to hide and that he had the means of knowing what it was, if they did not reveal it themselves.
“What happened to the murderer?” she asked.
“Petre,” Yevgenia replied. “That was his name, Petre. He was tried, of course. I seem to remember Kenward saying that the evidence against him was rather weak, but that he never stood a chance after the way he behaved. About three times he said that the child’s body was hidden in a certain place and great searches were made and nothing was found. You can imagine what that must have been like for the parents. I remember them now. I remember the little boy, too. They were Kenward’s patients, though I don’t think he knew them well; they were obviously a healthy family. And then afterwards they moved away from the town. Who could blame them for wanting to escape such memories? The death of a child is the most awful loss there can be, one that can never be filled. And it’s not just the loss. There is the constant wish that you could have been taken instead. If only you had not failed in your care, if only you could have exchanged your life for his. You live with it for ever and ever.”
Zita was thinking of Tom’s fragile babyhood, the innumerable infections, the ambulance screaming its way to the hospital. She had fought for him and fought against herself, for the thought had often intruded, what if he died?
“And what happened?” she asked.
“He was tried. I said that, didn’t I? I think his defence must have been insanity, for he was put into Broadmoor.”
“He could still be there.”
Yevgenia looked surprised at this, as though she did not welcome the past still having a living presence. “I suppose he could. What age would he have been? Not old, not young, and it’s more than thirty years ago. Well, I am still here, so he could be too.”
“Do you remember anything about the police enquiry? I don’t mean local talk or newspaper articles. I mean, did the police interview you?”
“Well, you know, they did. I imagine they interviewed everyone. I remember it was very unpleasant. I had ideas in those days, like a foreigner, about British justice and the British bobby and these people had a way of making you feel guilty from the start. It was a horrible shock. It reminded me of the war, the terror of the police, the plain clothes ones, the Gestapo or the NKVD, the knock on the door in the night.” She returned abruptly to the present. “So how does he think this Petre got into our garden and dug up the lawn and buried the child there without our knowing?” Her voice was high, almost petulant, with indignation.
“I agree,” said Zita. “It does all seem a bit odd. And when were the roses put in? You said, ‘dig up the lawn’.”
“Kenward developed a passion for old roses. But that was quite late on, after he retired, so it would have been in 1970 or after. Charles de Mills, Tuscany Superb, Reine des Violettes. He loved all those very dark red and purplish roses. But when you plant a rose bed you don’t dig four feet down. You dig to a spade’s depth and you mix in lots of well-rotted horse manure. It’s nonsense,” she said with more force. “It can’t be that child.”
Zita walked back to her own house. On the face of it, Yevgenia must be right; but she was regretful that she had demolished Stevens’ strange hypothesis. She had seen the story of Eddie Cresacre as a threat; however, if Eddie Cresacre’s murderer had been found and convicted, the identification of his body as the one in the garden, however inexplicably it got there, would tidy up the problem of the skeleton, a problem that Stevens had seemed very eager to make as annoying as possible. If it were Eddie Cresacre, tests of his DNA or comparison of photographs of the child and the skull would show this. The conversation with Yevgenia had made her less concerned; the question that remained was why Stevens was so determined to make a link between Eddie Cresacre and Asshe House. He was playing a game, she was now sure of that, and only revealed as much of what he knew as he wanted, to achieve the effects that he desired.
Part Six
ZITA
14
Zita awoke to thoughts of Oliver, a second before she remembered there was no Oliver. This trick played by her mind, the minuscule but definable splinter of time which it took for the present to catch up with the past, the delay in recalling what she did not want to believe, still happened occasionally. The past ran its continuing existence, somewhere else, beyond her control.
She rolled onto her back and, with her eyes still closed, she rehearsed his faults. He was not a generous man. Although he was good at finding little treats for himself – a second-hand book, a new silk tie with spots on it, a good bottle of wine – he rarely gave presents. He was impatient and easily bored and had neither the politeness nor the self-discipline to appear interested when he was not, so he often went to sleep at other people’s dinner parties, leaving his wives to excuse and explain. He had the unpleasing habit of cleaning his ears with his finger tip as he read the paper at breakfast. But it was no good. No connexion flew between the disagreeable facts she could list about him and her feelings for him.
She could hear sounds from next door that showed that Tom was awake; uneven rattling suggested that he was lying in frustration, waiting for her to get him up. He took after his father in his impatience, she thought. She sat up in bed and called, “I’m coming, Tom.” Her bedside clock read 6.15.
She had to spend the day in London, a chore which she always mitigated with a visit to a shoe shop. The thought of returning on the crowded evening train with the cords of a shoe bag in her hand made the programme of meetings and visits not just more bearable, but something to desire. There was the pleasure of planning to which shop she would order her taxi after her last meeting, for, unfortunately, interesting shoe shops are not found around the Old Bailey or the Inns of Court. Whether it would be Wigmore Street or Old Church Street or Amwell Street, she sometimes did not decide until the moment that she slammed the taxi door and leaned forward to instruct the driver. However, on this day, as she sat in her aisle seat on the 8.32 from Broad Woodham to Victoria and took her day’s programme out of her briefcase, she thought of Reskimer. It was an ideal opportunity to see him, if he were free in the afternoon. She was determined to shadow Stevens’ enquiry, to understand what he was doing. If Reskimer could show without doubt that the skeleton was more than fifty years old, he would free Yevgenia from all concern and Stevens, too, presumably. The police could not be in the business of solving ancient crimes; they had enough unsolved in the present.
During the morning, between her first and second appointments, she telephoned the archaeology department and asked for Professor Reskimer. She waited for the inevitable disappointment of his not being there and so was surprised when a voice, younger than she expected for a professor’s with a faint Scottish burr, answered. She explained who she was and her interest in the Broad Woodham skeleton.
“There’s a terrible lot of impatience about this burial,” he said. “I never thought the law was renowned for its haste; it seems that archaeology moves even more slowly. I haven’t much to say, but come by all means, if you’re here and you want to. I’m teaching until three thirty; then I’ve got someone else. So shall we say five? That’s not too late for you?” Zita thanked him and accepted the suggested time. She had hoped to see him in mid-afternoon. She would have to ring Lynne and warn her she would be late. But she might now fit in a shoe shop after all. She thought, later, that her interviews that afternoon were affected by the fact that her lunch meeting finished promptly and, faced with a two-and-a-half-hour interval, she had set off to Wigmore Street with a pair of suede court shoes, discreet and elegant, in mind. When she left the shop an hour later, she was carrying a pair of sandals which consisted of not much more than a thin sole, a high heel and a couple of fine strands of brilliant gold patent leather. They had cost a lot for so little; not much, though, for so much daring and beauty and quite enough to leave her feeling reckless.
She was outside Reskimer’s door thirty minutes early. There was nowhere to sit; no sign of a secretary’s office and no voices from within to indicate the continuation of his previous appointment. She knocked and a voice called, “Come.” She opened the door to find herself in a poky modern office, of which one side was made of glass and the other of books.
“Ah,” he said as she entered, “it’s you.”
“Yes, I’m a bit early. Would you like me to wait?”
“No, no, on the contrary, I’m very glad you’re here. I didn’t know, when you knocked, whether you were the last appointment late or the next early. He’s had his chance, now you’re here.”
Zita threaded her way between the columns of books and papers to the chair opposite the desk and sat down facing the professor. He was older than his voice, by a good ten years or so. He had thick grey hair and a determined, muscular face, that gave no impression of flabbiness.
“And what can I do for you?” he asked. Zita noted the odd stress, as if he were contrasting her with someone else. She began to reiterate who she was, when he interrupted her.
“Yes, it’s about the skeleton in the Broad Woodham garden.” He lifted a folder which lay in front of him already open. “I don’t have so many cases of modern bodies from the police that I confuse them.”
“Is it a modern body?” Zita asked.
“Modern in my terms. My current interest is Caucasian burials of the fifth century BC, so this looks like yesterday to me.”
“The dating is for me the crucial thing. Dr Pigot was extremely vague about how old the remains were. That they were less than a hundred years old was as much as
he would say. He suggested that you might be able to be more accurate.”
“He’s passing the buck. We haven’t run many tests yet. As I understand it, the police are approaching it from the other end, which is probably easier to deal with, that is, they are going to give us some data and ask if it fits. It’s much harder to begin with the bones and work out from there.”
“According to Pigot, it is impossible to tell the age of the child, or its sex or how long it has been dead with any certainty, all completely fundamental questions. Can archaeology help?”
“He’s exaggerating a bit. A very cautious man, Dr Pigot. There’s DNA testing; we can do that and so can the Metropolitan Police laboratory. If we have a relative, we can compare his DNA with that of the skeleton and say whether the bones belong to a member of the family and, even if the result is negative, we can discover whether the Y chromosome is present. If so, we have a girl, and from that other things will follow. Not with certainty, but with some statistical probability.”
“And what about the time elapsed since death?” Zita persisted. “Can carbon dating help?”
“You lawyers want everything so cut and dried,” Reskimer grumbled. “You probably want me to give you the day of the week and the phase of the moon when the child died and I can’t do it. We can’t establish dates, not unless we have an inscription or something like that to anchor us. We can only produce time sequences, runs of years, cycles of seasons, which we have to tether somewhere to fix them to human time. The sorts of inscriptions we are looking for in this case are not carvings in stone; we are hoping for a wrapping paper or a tin can, a shoe print, a zipper stud which by the date of manufacture of the artefact would give us a fix, to which we could tie things like the rate of growth of the rose trees.”
The Accomplice Page 13