‘Yes. He told me that if two officers call, they will want information, but if one calls it is to collect you to view Edith’s body, or a body which might be Edith. He said it was the first indication you’ll get . . . two call, the police have questions, but if one calls it’s because they have found her body.’
‘Or
a
body,’ Webster replied. ‘But yes, your neighbour is essentially correct.’
‘I’ll get my coat . . . just a minute, please.’ Hemmings turned and went back inside his house.
In the car, driving to York District Hospital, Webster broke the uncomfortable silence by saying, ‘It won’t be like you might have seen in the films . . .’
‘No?’ Hemmings turned to Webster.
‘No, they won’t pull a sheet back and reveal her head and face, it will be done quite cleverly, you’ll see her through a glass window, a pane of glass, heavy velvet curtains will be pulled back and you’ll see her. She will be lying on a trolley with her head and face tightly bandaged with the sheets tucked in tightly round her body. You will see nothing else. It will look like she is floating in space, in complete blackness. If it is your lady wife, it will be the final image you will have of her. It’s a better image to keep in your mind than one of her being in a metal drawer.’
‘Yes, thank you. Thank you for telling me that. I appreciate it and you are right, it will be a much better last memory, because it will be her. I know it. In my bones I know it will be her.’
Later in an interview suite at Micklegate Bar Police Station and comforted with a hot mug of sweetened tea, Stanley Hemmings said, ‘She was a Canadian, you know.’
‘Canadian?’
‘Yes,’ Hemmings nodded. Webster again saw him as small, like his late wife, but now also noticed that he was barrel-chested with strong-looking arms and legs.
‘Yes . . . specifically Canadienne.’ Hemmings saw the puzzled look cross Reginald Webster’s eyes and so he spelled the word for him. ‘It means, among other things, a French Canadian female, or so she explained to me. “
Je suis Canadienne
,” she said when we first met. I remembered from school what “
Je suis
” meant, it’s the sum of my French, and so she had to explain the rest. She apparently spoke French as they speak it in Quebec province, that is to say with a very distinct accent, in fact I found out that in Quebec they speak French like they speak English in Glasgow, not just a distinct accent but unique in terms of phrase and strange use of words. Just as the Scots will use “how” to mean “why”, so the French Canadians have their own variation of the French language. But she and I always talked in English anyway. We had to, for heaven’s sake.’
Hennessey sat silently next to Webster and opposite Hemmings in the softly decorated and carpeted orange-hued interview suite. He felt that Mr and Mrs Hemmings probably would have made an odd couple in life, more because of their personalities than anything else. Hennessey, for some reason, thought that Edith Hemmings must have been a spirited person in life, the clothes she wore, her courageous presence of mind in hiding the electricity bill in her shoe, that, he felt, showed initiative. And she had been adventurous enough to relocate from Canada. Yet here was her husband who dressed in a dull manner, and had a monotonous tone of voice . . . almost whiny, Hennessey thought. Her hairstyle contrasted with his centre-parted style, attached to his skull with cream as if he was the very caricature of a Victorian railway booking clerk. The image of them as a couple didn’t gel in his mind. He also found the job that Hemmings gave, ‘an under manager in the biscuit factory’, not the sort of job that would attract a woman of Edith Hemmings’s taste in clothes, and he was a man who whined about having to take time off work while ‘our Edith was missing’ . . . again, not the sort of husband he would have thought to Edith Hemmings’s taste.
‘Were you long married?’ Hennessey asked.
‘No, sir . . . just a few months.’
‘Months!’
‘Yes, sir, about eighteen, that’s all. Just a year and a half, if that. I was a bachelor getting close to retirement and I thought, well that’s me, lived alone, set to die alone, then along comes our Edith. We met in a pub in town. It was she who started to talk to me. I was just in there for a pint to get out of the house for an hour or two . . . I get fed up with my own company now and again . . . and it changed my life. I’ve never been very successful with women and I wondered what she wanted at first but she seemed properly interested in me and then one thing led to another and another and another and eventually we got married quietly at the registry office and she came and settled with me in my little house in Dringhouses. She was keen to know that I owned the house and that I wasn’t renting it, she just wanted that bit of security, I assumed, and that’s fair enough. So, anyway, I showed her the papers about the house, the little bit of mortgage I am still paying off . . . after that she was OK about it. Quite happy. She was Mrs Hemmings. Mine . . . our Edith for me to come home to.’
‘I see.’ Hennessey rested his elbows on his knees and clasped his meaty hands together. ‘What do you know about your late wife’s background?’
‘Very little, tell you the truth. It might seem strange but it really was a very rapid thing we did. One day I was alone in the world . . . not unhappy . . . lifelong bachelor, the next married and the next a widower.’
‘Was she employed, or did she have any outside interest?’
Hemmings shrugged. ‘Well, she was not employed when she was my wife but before that . . . well, she was working as a sort of housemaid but not a maid . . . a helper . . . like a companion, she and the elderly gentleman who owned the house, somewhere in the country outside York, somewhere like that . . . out in the sticks. She didn’t talk about it very much; frankly, to be honest, she didn’t talk about her life very much at all.’
‘Do you have the old boy’s address?’ Hennessey asked warmly.
‘Yes, I have it. I can let you have it. It’s at home though. But yes, I can let you have her previous address.’
‘We’d like to chat to him. He might help us get to know more about your wife, nothing more than that.’
‘It’s more his family that is likely to help you. I think that he was a bit gone in the head and difficult to live with. I think our Edith was glad to get away from there. That was the impression I got anyway.’
‘I see . . . so . . . can I ask you, when did you last see your wife?’
‘See? Two days ago. Wednesday today, so last saw her on Sunday, so then that’s three days ago. She left the house to go to the shops on Sunday evening about five p.m. We had run out of milk and so she put on her white coat and said, “I’ll be back soon” . . . or “I’ll be ten minutes”, something like that. There’s a little shop just five minutes’ walk away, you understand; it opens seven days a week and stays open late. It has to do that to compete with the supermarkets . . . bad position for a man to be in, I always thought. I don’t earn much at the biscuit factory but at least the hours are civilized.’
‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ Hennessey allowed impatience to edge into his voice.
‘So when she didn’t come back after about an hour I went out looking for her. Who wouldn’t? I went to the shop but the fella said Edith hadn’t come in that evening. I said that she must have done but he said she never did. He knows our Edith, you see. So I began to get worried because she had not taken anything with her, just about enough money in her purse to buy the pint of milk she went out for. I checked when I got back, all of her clothes were there, all of her shoes, all of her documents, even her passport and her birth certificate, her Canadian driving licence, her jewellery, it was all still there. All of it. She hadn’t left me. She left the house to go to the corner shop to buy some milk for herself and her husband so that we could have a nice cup of tea on a quiet Sunday evening before we went to bed for the night and that was it.’
‘I see,’ Hennessey sat slowly back in his chair. ‘Do you know of anyone who’d want to harm her?’
‘No, sir, no one, she only knew me in York. That’s all, just me. She had no friends . . . no enemies but . . .’ Hemmings voice faltered.
‘But?’ Hennessey pressed.
‘But what?’ Webster assisted Hennessey.
‘But . . . well, I didn’t know her very long, she might have been my wife but she seemed to come from nowhere . . . like she was suddenly there . . . out of the blue . . . but she did always seem to have a history. She gave the impression that she had left some sort of life behind her. But what that was I cannot say . . . I do not know. Even in marriage she was a private person.’
‘She must have told you something about herself?’
‘She told me that she had grown up in Quebec and moved to Ontario when she was very young. She told me that. She never mentioned any brothers or sisters . . . she said that her parents were both deceased. She did tell me that sort of little orphan Annie number but apart from that she really hardly told me anything.’
‘What was your marriage like?’
‘What’s any marriage like?’ Hemmings reacted defensively, Hennessey thought. ‘We were middle-aged, we settled down . . . quietly. We had an understanding, she didn’t like too many demands made on her . . . if you see what I mean.’
‘All right, I understand, we won’t go there . . . unless it becomes relevant.’
‘Thank you, sir, I appreciate that.’ Hemmings paused and took a deep breath. He clearly had powerful lungs. ‘She cooked the meals and kept the house tidy and did the laundry and I worked at the biscuit factory and earned our money. And that was our little house. Hardly glamorous, hardly the good life, but we ate, we were dry when it rained and we didn’t fight. Never had fights . . . that I appreciated. No fights. It was just nice to have someone to come home to after years of being alone. She even warmed my slippers by the fire for me to come home to. That was a nice touch, especially this winter just gone. I must admit things could have been more passionate but it was convenient for both of us and at our age that means a lot. It wasn’t marital bliss but it was better than being alone and she, like me, was beyond the first flush of youth.’
‘Understood. Did she seem worried?’
‘No more than usual.’
‘What does that mean?’ Webster asked suddenly and perhaps a little too aggressively for Hennessey’s liking.
‘Well . . . how can I describe this?’ Hemmings sat back and glanced round the interview suite. ‘It was her manner, she didn’t like the summer. She was strange like that, was Edith. In the summer she had her hair cut short, really short . . . didn’t suit her. I think the style is called “boy cut”. You know, as short as a schoolboy’s hair and then when it was short she wore a long blonde wig and large spectacles but the plastic in the frames was just that – plastic, tinted plastic, not proper lenses. She had good eyesight did Edith . . . big glasses, they were more like a man’s frames rather than a woman’s choice of frame. She would also walk round York with a small British Airways rucksack, as though she was a tourist, not a resident. That’s when she did go out. Most of the time she stayed at home but I like to go out now and again. I mean it’s fair enough. I’m in the factory all day so at weekends I like to roam. Why not? Go into York, drive to the coast for a few lungfuls of good sea air . . . maybe find an old quiet pub for a beer or two, and our Edith, she’d drag her feet but eventually she’d agree to join me but only with the wig and dark glasses and her small British Airways knapsack that made her at least look like a tourist. When I asked her about it she just cut me short and said, “It’s my image”, really snappy, bite-my-head-off sort of reply, so I stopped asking but she was always clearly relieved to get back home and tear the wig off.’
‘As if she was frightened of being seen?’
‘Yes, but only in hindsight. Only after I’d thought about it for a while. At the time I thought it was no more than her just wanting to stay at home and not liking summer because she was a Canadian and more used to the cold, but now I understand Canada can be blisteringly hot during the summer so perhaps that was not it, perhaps that was not the reason. I just put it down to the words of my Uncle Maurice when I was a teenager. “You’ll never fathom a woman, Stanley,” he once said to me, God rest him, “you’ll never fathom a woman”, so I put it down to her being a woman and thereby a damn strange creature. I mean there seemed to be no point in going to war over the issue . . . and I did appreciate a peaceful house. She was just much happier in winter. I knew her for two winters and one summer. She seemed to be more relaxed in the winter, always as though the dark nights were hiding her, and the short, grey days also. Well . . . got a funeral to arrange now. I’ll ask for a simple graveside service, there will only be me there, me and the priest and the pall-bearers, can’t fill a church with friends and relatives I don’t have so I won’t try. So we’ll lay her down and follow the coffin with a sod or two of soil and that’ll be our Edith.’
‘We’d like to take a look at your late wife’s possessions,’ Hennessey asked. ‘I hope you won’t object?’
‘Of course,’ Hemmings glanced up at the ceiling. ‘All there is of them is just clothing and a few documents.’ He paused and looked at Hennessey. ‘Why? Do you think there’s something there?’ There was a slight note of alarm in his voice.
‘We think nothing yet,’ Hennessey replied quietly, attempting to calm Hemmings, ‘nothing at all, but she was evidently kept against her will for two days, then she was left by the canal, as if her body was posed . . . that speaks of motive and premeditation and now you indicate that she seemed to be hiding from some person or persons as yet unknown. You seem to be saying that she was a woman in fear.’
‘You think so?’ Hemmings looked at Hennessey with wide, appealing eyes, ‘Not just abducted by some sicko?’
‘We think nothing yet, as I said, Mr Hemmings. All avenues are open, all are being explored.’
The man walked purposefully up to the fountain and casually tossed a coin into the pool of water surrounding it. He then stood up and glanced around him, the solid buildings, the red double-decker buses, the black taxi cabs, the crowded street, too crowded for his taste. He was used to wide open spaces and few people. He turned back to the water. ‘Well, I did it,’ he said, ‘I didn’t do what I intended to do . . . but I did something else. It seemed just as good. Just as satisfying.’