Soul Seeker (3 page)

She said nothing, but then she didn't need to; Rebecca Lancefield was already rushing to show her abilities. ‘Where's Owen Gardner?'

‘In the farmhouse.'

‘And the dog?'

‘Muzzled and chained around the back of the cowshed.'

Beverley asked, ‘What about the dog?'

Lancefield said, before Fisher could even begin compiling his thoughts into his version of human speech, ‘It was the dog that found it, sir. I'm afraid it got chewed up pretty badly before Gardner was able to get it off her.'

Beverley raised her eyebrows. ‘And where did the dog find it?'

Fisher said brightly, ‘The slurry pit.'

She had somehow guessed that this would prove to be the case. ‘Where is it now?'

‘We bagged it,' was Fisher's bright response, one that produced a correspondingly depressing feeling inside Beverley.
We bagged it
. It was what the police now did; they no longer looked for clues and then deduced from them, they now
bagged
them. If they had made evidence bags big enough, they would be bagging the fucking bodies so they wouldn't have to do any thinking about them. Fisher continued, ‘I ordered it to be put in the boot of one of the cars.'

She could hear by the way that he said ‘ordered', that he liked reliving the event. She waited for him to suggest that it would be good idea to go and get it so that she might gain some purpose from her visit, but nothing was forthcoming.

It was Lancefield who suggested, ‘Perhaps you could go and get it so that we could examine it, sergeant.'

Fisher nodded, oblivious to the undercurrent, and trotted off. Had Beverley and Lancefield been better acquainted, they might have exchanged knowing glances – the secret messages of the initiated – but neither wanted to lower their defences just yet. Instead, Beverley said to Lancefield, ‘I think it's about time that lot started to earn their wages, don't you?' She meant the crowd around the slurry pit. ‘First I want three of them inside searching the farmhouse – make sure there isn't a cellar – and remind them to go into the lofts. The rest can go over the farmyard; not fingertip, but I want every nook and cranny investigated; if I discover that one of them has missed something, they'll be sent to the dog-training school as live bait.'

‘What about further afield? This is a three-hundred acre farm.'

‘First things first, inspector.'

And Lancefield merely nodded, accepting the mild rebuke. She strode off to the assembled police officers, leaving Beverley looking at her back, her expression neutral, her thoughts anything but.

Fisher came trotting back, a human retriever not with a ball in his mouth but a human head in a clear plastic bag in his hand. He proffered it and she could see from the way that he did so that it was heavy; when she indicated that he should put it down on the bonnet of a nearby, apparently derelict tractor, it landed with a dull thud. The weather, until then gusty and only threatening rain, finally made up its mind and began to let forth a fine drizzle upon the just – and, she had a shrewd idea, upon the unjust, equally.

The head was difficult to see, even though the plastic was perfectly transparent, because it was covered in green and brown cow faeces that had smeared the inside of the bag. She could make little out other than it had been seriously chewed, and she was loathe to unseal it. Let the pathologist have that little treat.

Speaking of which . . .

‘Who's the duty pathologist?' she asked Fisher. God, she hoped it wasn't Sydenham. Sydenham, who seemed to go on forever, rather like an inferior Wagnerian opera, or a scabetic itch.

But Fisher, for once not because of his incompetence, managed to surprise her.

‘Dr Eisenmenger, I think.'

THREE

A
ntonia watched Andrew trudging up the hill, pale-blue shirt open at the collar, showing sweat stains under the arms and, she knew, between his shoulder blades, a damp towel over his left shoulder. Ahead of him ran Josh and Harriet, their liveliness providing stark contrast with his lassitude; their shouts only emphasizing his breathlessness. Not that Andrew was
old
, she thought automatically, but at the back of her head was the realization that she had been saying that to herself for quite a few decades now. He was definitely showing tiredness, though; how could he not be? Thrust into a second bout of parenthood at the age of sixty, destined to miss out on the comparative ease of grandparenthood, all the while grieving for his son and daughter-in-law, bearing the curse of outliving his own offspring. The children burst into the kitchen giggling. They knew better than to let the door slam, but even so it was opened with a degree of energy that neither she nor Andrew would ever be able to match. Josh was eight years old, two months from being nine; he had dark, slightly curled hair and a rather asymmetrical face that somehow worked, that evoked a smile and a feeling of warmth in those who saw it. Harriet was halfway between seven and eight and, similarly, halfway between fates; Antonia could see that in a few years time her granddaughter would either be startling attractive, or plain. It was at the moment impossible to say which way the genes would fall, onto which path Harriet be lead.

‘Have you had a good swim?' she asked them, a smile breaking her mood of unconscious melancholy. Of course they had; how could they not? The weather was good and the Parkers had a wonderful pool. Their hair glistened and there was a faint yet potent scent of chlorine. Whilst the children sat at the kitchen table and drank the orange juice that Antonia poured for them, Andrew came in. He smiled because he always smiled, but those decades came back to remind her that it was not as happy a smile as it once had been. She asked him, ‘Nice swim?'

‘Oh, yes.' He meant it, but she could hear that his head was full of darker thoughts. He sat down and she went to the fridge and, forsaking the orange juice, she poured him some white wine. There was a large dark sweat patch on his back.

Harriet asked, ‘Can we have the television on?' Eighteen months ago, when Antonia and Andrew had just been grandparents, the idea of a television in the kitchen was as peculiar as the idea of one in the bathroom. How things had since changed. She rose and went to the wall-mounted set without argument. It was a cartoon, of course, but she said nothing; she and Andrew had learned to blot things out and children's TV was the least of them. After all, they had all but blotted out the events around the car crash that had killed their only son and his wife.

She picked up her own glass of wine and joined the family at the table; the children had become immediately and deeply entranced in the television. ‘How is Jane?' she asked her husband.

‘Not there. No one was.' Wallace Parker was often away, his wife, Jane, less so; even if none of the three children, now grown up, was there, it was understood that they were allowed use of the swimming pool.

‘Really? Jane didn't say she'd be away.'

There was nothing Andrew could say to that and he didn't try. Antonia liked to think that the Parkers considered them more than just neighbours, that they were friends, and friends, moreover, who were approximate social equals. He was of a different opinion: Wallace Parker had been the CEO of a major high street bank, of one of the better-regarded estate agency chains, and, most recently, of an international gas and electricity supplier. Andrew Barclay had recently retired as a general practitioner; not exactly a failure, but he was aware that he had been run of only a slightly esteemed mill. Antonia Barclay ate lunch; Jane Parker ‘lunched', a wholly different thing. ‘Lunching' was a verb that implied so much more than ingestion of food, it implied a way of life so socially elevated, so distant from the lives of most people that it might have been the group ritual of a different species.

It was not that they were treated in quite the same way as the inhabitants of the council cottages just down the road – the Redferns, Mrs Williams, the Carters and the Coles – who were regarded, he had observed, much as barbarians at the gates, it was just that they were not treated as members of the inner circle. They were merely ‘neighbours' and, as the saying has it, one cannot choose one's neighbours or one's relatives. They were
endured
, he suspected, although that was better than the fate reserved for Tom Sheldon and Ellie Taylor, who just didn't register on the social radar; Sheldon, because he was an ex-traveller who had no interest in observing the social conventions that the Parkers considered so essential; and Ellie Taylor because she had three children by three different fathers and never once a husband.

Josh finished his drink and, the television not to his liking, he began to torment his sister by trying to grab and squeeze her knee. She squealed and spilled her juice, causing Antonia to scold first her then, when Harriet protested, Josh.

‘Go up to your rooms and I'll start running your baths in a moment. Give me fifteen minutes to relax with Gramps.'

They complied with her command, doing so in an energetic manner that she still found exhausting and thus demoralizing. Once more, she could not help realizing the difference there was between the two generations in the house, one that was twice as wide as was normal, perhaps twice as wide as was healthy. They waited until the door had closed – slammed, actually – before Antonia turned to Andrew. ‘How are you?'

He said at once, ‘Fine.'

He might have been convincing had she not known he was lying. ‘No pain?'

‘Not today.'

She eyed him. Being a doctor he was, she knew, a good liar. Eventually she decided that she could not tell whether this was the truth and so gave him the benefit of the doubt. ‘Good,' she said with the best smile she could muster. She knew better than to press the point and the conversation continued in the easy triviality of a long marriage for ten or so minutes.

Upstairs, Josh and Harriet shouted cheerful insults at each other from their rooms, feeling a degree of exultation in life that they did not know was a precious, diminishing part of their lives. As she ascended the stairs and heard them, Antonia was once again struck by both joy and sadness, a mix that produced a kind of melancholic euphoria, as she exulted in their youthfulness whilst being reminded of what she had lost forever. She went to the bathroom and began running the bath, pouring in some bath bubbles; it was Josh's turn to go first tonight.

She checked the temperature, swirled the water, dried her hand and then called for Josh.

She tidied his room as he splashed in the bath, listening with half an ear to make sure that everything was alright. Her back ached and had done so for a long time, although she wondered occasionally if it had got significantly worse, or maybe even changed, and if she should mention it to Andrew. There were so many things now that she never seemed to get around to discussing with him.

Josh was not an overly untidy child she now realized, although it had taken a good few hours of conversation with other parents at the local school to convince her of this. She was certain that she had not been so careless of orderliness when she was so young. She had tried to impress upon him the concept – so simple to her – of putting dirty clothes in the laundry basket, of folding and putting away clothes that he was hoping to wear again, yet neither he nor his sister, as bright as they were, seemed able to cope with this concept. She found herself constantly sighing as she performed this nightly ritual of tidying up after them.

And toys . . .

She and Andrew had looked in vain for Meccano, and the Airfix kits that they had found had left her husband deeply saddened, muttering that he had not realized that things had become so bad. Even Action Man – and she had moral qualms about the concept – did not seem to be quite as she recalled him; Lego, too, appeared to have changed, mutated, degraded. Still, Josh was showing a healthy interest in board games such as Junior Scrabble, Monopoly and Mousetrap, although he still seemed blind to the concept of clearing up after himself.

After fifteen minutes she had almost managed to clear the floor of pieces of toy, having succeeded in more or less reuniting the bits correctly. She got tiredly down on her knees – her left hip became bad tempered at this time of day – and reached under the bed. She brought out a box of small treasures. More Scrabble tiles, more small abstruse and highly coloured plastic parts from Kinder toys, Lego bricks and a small, tatty teddy bear that had once been Andrew's. Then her fingers found his camera and, tutting at the careless way he treated precious things, she pulled it out. It had been his present not six weeks before; it was a ten mega pixel digital camera and he had been thrilled beyond words to receive it. Already, though, the casing was scratched. Telling herself she was not being unduly inquisitive, she switched it on as she sat on the bed, then scrolled though the pictures. Most were of her and Andrew, many were of his sister and an equal number had in them Darren from over the road.

She stopped and stared at one in particular, then sighed again, this time more angrily. She went into the bathroom where Josh was playing submarines and presented the camera to him. ‘This was under your bed.'

It was not obvious to Josh's young mind that he had done anything wrong in leaving it under the bed, but his granny's tone told him that it was. He looked guilty and the silence that was suddenly about them was huge. She waited; Josh was well aware, young as he was, that Granny Antonia was good at waiting. He said eventually, ‘Sorry.'

‘You've been in the grounds of the Grange again, haven't you.' This was a statement without the inflection of a question mark.

There was a hesitation but it was only minimal. ‘No, I haven't.'