Authors: J.M. Gregson
Then
he slumped dead upon the stone floor of the small room. His assailant breathed heavily for a moment, checked that there was no movement in the pulse in the neck. Then the hand which had lately dropped the cord upon the unsuspecting throat reached up unhurriedly to the mains switch it had switched off less than two minutes earlier.
Christmas night in the Cotswolds. Behind the closed doors of family celebrations, there is merrymaking of different sorts.
Detective
Sergeant Bert Hook has put away his Open University books for the day. The boys have got bicycles for Christmas, but it is dark now, and Eleanor can rest, for the bikes are back in the garage and their riders safely back at the family hearth. The boys are watching an ancient Morecambe and Wise show replayed on television as their last treat of the day. Once they are gone, Bert will open the port he so thoughtfully purchased for his wife.
*
Ten miles away in his unusually boisterous bungalow, Superintendent John Lambert, who set out several hours ago to play the jolly grandfather, has long since forgotten that this is all an act. He is reading the same chapter of
Winnie
the
Pooh
for the third time to a six-year-old boy, who falls asleep before it is over. Lambert’s daughter Jacky watches her father with affection whilst she chats with her mother, diverting her concern for a whole hour from the second breast-cancer scan which has shadowed Christine Lambert’s Christmas.
*
By nine o’clock, small children throughout the country are either asleep or getting fractious. But in the childless house of Dermot Yates, it has been a strange day. Various relatives have visited, but most have stayed only for short periods, as if they were visiting someone in hospital. And that is not an inappropriate comparison, for Moira Yates has for most of the day had an abstracted air, carrying on surface conversations perfectly sensibly, yet giving the impression that her mind is elsewhere, in some secret world which only she can visit. It is behaviour common to many people with her ailment, says the doctor. By the middle of the afternoon, she is looking very tired, and retires to her room to rest for an hour.
*
They ate at six, as planned. Dermot cooked the turkey and set the table for Christmas dinner for three; for Gerald Sangster sat down to the meal with them, as Moira had requested he should. Wine was drunk and crackers pulled; the chef was complimented; the three made routine, harmless jokes; in short, they pretended hard that this was a normal Christmas.
Dermot
found himself wishing that someone would drink too much, become noisy, even rude. Anything to break the mould of good behaviour. It was all so decorous that it was false. He felt that all of them knew that, but none of them knew how to fracture the spell. Or rather, the one person who could have changed things chose not to. Moira, the one of whom they were both so careful, from whom they took their cues, was the only one of the trio who might have changed this strange atmosphere. If she realized that she had that power, she must have chosen not to use it.
*
Chris Hampson, at home with his wife and grown-up children, hugged the troubles of Gloucester Electronics to himself and tried hard to be seasonably jolly. At ten o’clock, the children drove away to their own homes, and he found himself suddenly very tired. He plodded steadily through the day’s mountain of washing up, the steady physical labour an escape from the things he did not want to discuss with his wife. She was tired but happy after the labours of the day; she did not seem to notice his preoccupation. Returning carefully correct replies to her talk about the small triumphs of her table, the small problems of their children, he felt like an expert, defensive, table-tennis player.
*
Only Joe Walsh had spent the day alone. Or almost alone. The retriever, who had crept in from the boisterous house next door to the quiet he knew he would find here, put a sleepy head obstinately on his knee as the hands of the clock crept towards the end of what for Joe was the longest day of all. The brown eyes looked up into the gaunt face, the tail wagged brief appreciation as the hand moved almost reluctantly to caress the soft fur of the tawny head. Joe stared unseeingly at the television set which had droned for hours at the other side of the room. ‘Good lad, Chester!’ he said softly to the dog.
It
was a relief to him to find he could still give affection when it was asked for. But dogs made no demand for words or effort. Presently he opened the door and said reluctantly, ‘Better go home now, Chester.’ He watched from his back door as the animal loped away over the white frost of his neglected rear garden and slipped through the hole it had fashioned in his hedge.
*
Raymond Keane’s mother enjoyed the evening, once her boisterous grandchildren were out of the way. It was half past eleven before she said to her daughter, ‘That Raymond has forgotten to ring us, you know. And he promised!’
‘
Give him a ring yourself, Mum, if you like. And wish him a Happy Christmas from us.’ Kate grinned secretly at her husband as the old lady went to the phone. If Kate knew her brother, he would be in bed with the delectable Zoe by now. But not asleep. Well, serve him right for not ringing his mum on Christmas Day if he was interrupted in flagrante delicto.
Old
Mrs Keane let the phone ring in the cottage a dozen times before she gave up, her face filled with disappointment. ‘I expect they’re out with friends,’ she said. ‘He might not have been able to ring.’
*
By two a.m. on Boxing Day, the vast majority of Christmas revellers were sleeping heavily in their beds. The temperature outside their houses was now well below freezing, and still dropping steadily. The Cotswold ground was frozen hard, the frost thick as a dusting of snow at the sides of the deserted lanes.
The
vehicle carrying the corpse of Raymond Keane moved cautiously through the deep woods around his cottage, its lights the only movement in that silent, frozen landscape. The body was covered with a blanket and an old coat. It was unlikely that there would be police on the route of this final journey, but there was no need for unnecessary risks. Besides, the driver preferred to have those wide, unblinking brown eyes covered on this final journey.
It
seemed to take a long time to reach the place, though the distance could not have been more than four miles. The car hesitated for a moment at the side of the road, then turned carefully through the ragged gap in the hedge, where years ago there had been a gate. On the uneven track between the young birch trees, it was more than forty yards to the chosen place.
Once
there, the driver switched off the car’s lights. There was enough light from the low crescent moon and the stars for the task that was left.
No
great strength was needed now. The pool was below the back of the vehicle, not more than four yards away. The driver dragged the corpse out, hearing but scarcely registering the thud as it landed heavily on the iron-hard ground. The material at the bottom of the trousers gave the easiest hold: the mortal remains of Keane were dragged unceremoniously feet first down the steep slope of frozen mud and flung vigorously on to the surface of the pond.
For
the person conducting this awful dispatch, there was then a moment of black farce that might have come straight from Hitchcock. The surface of the pond was already frozen hard. The body slid spread-eagled on to it, the white face staring unseeingly at the night sky. And lay there, its eyes glinting white in the light of the moon. For a long fifteen seconds, it seemed to the watcher as though the ice was already too thick for the evidence to disappear from sight. Then, with a noise which sounded in the living ears beside the pond like that of an alpine glacier cracking into movement, the ice broke, and the body of Raymond Keane disappeared into the black depths of the hidden pool.
The
pieces of broken ice disappeared for a moment with their sinister burden, then returned to the surface and settled again into stillness. The watcher wasted no more time. Within thirty minutes, the driver was back in bed like other, more innocent survivors of the Christmas festivities.
Nature
was the unwitting ally of evil. By morning, the ice on the surface of the hidden pool was already over an inch thick. When the body rose towards the surface two days later, the ice was a three-inch ceiling above the water, imprisoning the murdered body against discovery for as long as the arctic conditions should persist.
‘The news is out. Such as it is. I knew we couldn’t keep it quiet indefinitely.’
The
Chief Constable stared dolefully at the newspapers on his desk. Like most of his colleagues, he found journalists more annoying at times than criminals. At least criminals kept you in a job, whereas it often seemed that if you made the wrong move journalists would be delighted to put you out of one. And you knew where you were with felons, whereas the fourth estate could switch sides overnight, without notice, and often with no good reason. ‘It’s only because he disappeared over Christmas that we were able to keep it quiet as long as we did.’
George
Harding was quite new in his post still. Despite voicing the ritual police suspicions of the press, he was much more at home with the media than his grizzled predecessor had been. They could be helpful at times; and even when they became a nuisance, he accepted that they were a necessary evil. He pushed the papers at Lambert.
The
story had made the front page of
The
Times
, but only in the bottom-left corner: there were no glaring headlines as yet. ‘Mystery of missing Tory MP’ was the heading, and the text beneath began soberly, ‘There is still no news of missing Tory MP Raymond Keane. The promising backbencher was expected to spend Christmas and New Year in his Gloucestershire constituency, but last night had still failed to appear. His sister said yesterday that the family was “a little upset” by his failure to contact them, but saw no real cause for alarm. “MPs are busy people, despite what some of the public think,” she said. It appears that Mr Keane has not been seen since he visited his mother’s house on Christmas Eve.’
For
most of the tabloids, the Keane story wasn’t yet worthy of the front page. The
Sun
headlined its piece ‘Rottweiler Ray goes missing’, pinning a scarcely earned reputation for parliamentary dogfighting on Keane in the interests of alliteration. The article began, ‘Eligible bachelor and aggressive parliamentary debater Ray Keane has gone missing from his Gloucestershire constituency. The MP, known as Rottweiler Ray since he savaged Labour ministers in Commons exchanges, has not been seen since Christmas Eve. His mother and his business partner both refused to comment on his absence last night.
‘
Keane’s parliamentary research assistant, vivacious twenty-three-year-old Despina Mottershead, agreed that her employer was an attractive man, and thought that he might well have disappeared to the Continent, though she was not sure what country he might have chosen. She said she had no doubt that he would be back for the beginning of the new parliamentary session. “Mr Keane is one of the most responsible and dedicated of our younger politicians. I certainly expect to see him or hear from him within the next week,” she said last night ...’
Superintendent
Lambert knew why he was in the Chief Constable’s office. The hunt, which had so far scarcely been worthy of such a dramatic name, was to be stepped up. When the press chose to stir things up, they got attention, however much the police and other public services might deny the connection. That was real life.
‘
They haven’t raked up the unsavoury history of other disappearing politicians yet,’ he said. It was the only consolation he could think of to offer the smartly uniformed man on the other side of the big desk.
George
Harding smiled, ruefully rather than grimly, Lambert hoped. ‘It’s just the beginning, John. You know the pattern. Tomorrow, if there’s still no news, we’ll get some of the tales of gay MPs and scandals which have led to resignations. Anyway, we shan’t be responsible for that. Keane will have brought it upon himself. If he chooses to disappear without telling anyone where he’s off to, he knows what the press will do with the story. I take it we haven’t any further news?’
‘
No, sir. But I wouldn’t expect any, unless the man turned up of his own accord. We’ve put him on the missing persons register, but otherwise kept it low key, as we agreed. The family didn’t want us to stir up a hornet’s nest. His sister was more annoyed with Keane for not contacting his aged mum than worried about him. She seems to think he’ll turn up when he’s ready.’
‘
Has he done this sort of thing before, then?’
‘
No. Not as far as we can tell, without more detailed enquiries into his past activities.’
Harding
pursed his lips. He was a handsome man, his hair now a becoming silver but still plentiful, his body comfortably covered with flesh rather than plump beneath the well-tailored uniform. The chances were that nothing was seriously amiss, that he would only irritate Keane when he turned up if they were too persistent now with their enquiries into his absence. But once the press was on to these things, you had to be seen to be doing something. If anything proved to be seriously amiss with the police reaction to the disappearance, they would use the blissful benefits of hindsight to hold an inquest on it. An unfortunate word. Harding said, ‘Give it another day: if there’s still nothing then, step up the activity. Let them see we’re taking the matter seriously.’