‘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.’
It was Wednesday, 14.07 hours.
TWO
Wednesday, March twenty-fifth, 15.43 hours — 22.30 hours in which more is learned of the deceased and Mr and Mrs Yellich are at home to the gracious reader.
The immediate, and what was also to prove the lasting impression for Webster and Yellich was that the house and its owner had both seen better days; both were elderly in their own way and probably because of that both seemed to the officers to be ideally suited to each other. Both, as Webster had just that afternoon heard Mr Hemmings say to describe his late wife, were ‘beyond the first flush of youth’. Well beyond it.
The house was called ‘Lakeview’, oddly, thought Yellich, because any observation of the surrounding area or a glance at the map of the district did not show the presence of any body of water in the vicinity. It was situated on the B1363 near to Sutton-on-the-Forest, could be easily seen from the road and was probably, Yellich estimated, a quarter of a mile across open fields from the tarmac. It seemed to occupy a natural hollow in the landscape which Webster thought unusual because that part of the Vale of York he understood to be particularly prone to flooding. The grounds of the house seemed to be generous with the front gate of the property being much closer to the road than the house. The frost-covered grounds, whilst vast, were also overgrown and it seemed to both officers that they needed ‘rescuing’ rather than ‘tidying’. The traces of a landscaped garden could be clearly seen but the garden had, by the time Yellich and Webster called, largely been allowed to revert to nature. The building had been blackened by nineteenth century industrial pollution which had evidently been carried from the manufacturing areas of Leeds and Sheffield by the south-westerly winds. The house had an aged and worn look with the roofline at each side of the tall central chimney seeming to sag before being lifted up again at the gable ends. The house was of two storeys and, thought Webster, unlikely to have a cellar given the height of the water table in the area. The front door was set significantly to the right hand side of the building and enclosed in a wooden porch which, like the house itself, was decayed, with peeling paintwork and one or two broken panes of glass. The building was, he observed, potentially very interesting but had sadly been allowed to deteriorate to the point that it was, unlike the garden, clearly beyond rescue. It had been, by all appearances, crumbling for some considerable time and would continue to crumble until it was bulldozed into extinction, to be remembered only in the dim recesses of individual memories and old sepia prints which captured it in its heyday.
Yellich halted the car on crunching gravel in front of the misshapen metal gate and, without waiting to be bidden, Webster, the junior officer, left the car and walked to the gate. It was, he found, fastened to the drystone wall with only a loop of blue nylon rope which was noosed over a protruding stone in the top of the wall. He unhooked the rope which allowed the gate to swing on its hinges with a loud squeaking sound that seemed to penetrate the still silence and to do so deeply. He looked about him. The frost was obviously not giving up without a struggle and the sun had that day been unable to penetrate the grey cloud cover. The black of the house and the black of the leafless canopy of a stand of trees were the only other colours he could detect. Webster stood by the gate as Yellich drove the car slowly through the gateway. He then closed the gate and secured the loop of rope over the stone in the wall. Then there was only stillness and silence.