“How do you know?”
“Teddy Grimshaw saw her. He was talking about it in the pensions queue.” Reg had not himself been in the line-up. The Brockleys’ joint pensions went straight into his bank account. But the post office also doubled as a newsagents and he was in there paying the monthly paper bill. The Daily and Sunday Express, Radio Times and, for Iris, the Lady. Green Fingers, the gardening journal taken for many years, had recently been cancelled after some female jobbing columnist had taken it upon herself to suggest that excessive neatness in a plot was not only bad for the plants but denoted a seriously neurotic personality in the plantsman.
“What on earth was Mr. Grimshaw doing in the police station?”
“Making a formal complaint about that abandoned traffic cone.”
“The one leaning against the wall behind the phone box?”
“I hope you’re not suggesting another has sprung up, Iris.”
“No wonder house prices are plummeting.”
The Brockleys were taking tea on the patio. Now Reg got up from his green plastic chair and walked down the steps. As he contemplated his lawn, close-shaven in lines straight as prison bars, his prim lips tuckered into a smirk of satisfaction.
He walked down the path, his eyes swivelling, alert for alien seedlings or overconfident species that had ceased to know their place. Spotting a lacewing clinging to a violent orange floribunda, he broke off the leaf, squeezed it round the offending insect and dropped the shrouded corpse into the dustbin.
The Brockleys had no compost heap and could not understand those who did. To them the whole point of having a garden was to keep it contained, not encourage it to go burgeoning about all over the place.
Iris called out, “Another finger dainty, dear?”
Receiving no reply, she picked up a sunray of bloater paste fingers and made her way towards her husband, her stout little feet carefully avoiding the cracks in the crazy paving. No point in deliberately courting bad luck.
Reg had eased his way behind a ceanothus and was now peering into the Hollingsworths’ unruly herbaceous border. In the early evening silence frogs plopped in and out of a tiny pond. What he saw disturbed him greatly. As he wriggled back into his original position, Iris clicked her tongue.
“You’ve snagged your cardie.”
“Iris—”
“Your best Fair Isle.”
This garment was Reg’s only concession to retirement. Beneath it he wore a crisp collared and cuffed shirt, a plain closely-knotted tie and a park of dark trousers with creases so sharp they could have opened an oyster.
“He’s digging, Iris.”
“Digging?”
“A hole.”
“But he never touches the garden. He hates gardening.”
“Nevertheless ...”
“And the ground’s like a rock.”
“He’s turned the hose on it.”
After Iris had also craned round the ceanothus for a sight of the excavation they returned soberly to the house only just in time for the six o’clock news to which Reg, for the first time that either of them could remember, could hardly give his full attention.
Iris was distracted to such a degree that Shona was allowed to emerge from her basket and stand quietly in the centre of the room without being reprimanded. In gratitude she started to wag her tail.
“He must be burying something,” suggested Reg.
His wife, rinsing the crockery for the second time in clear running water, drew in her breath. One long, excited sibilation. “You don’t think ... ?”
“What?”
“Nelson?” The cat had still not reappeared and Alan was no longer to be heard calling him. Iris added, with a trembly wince in her voice, “How big’s the hole?”
“Impossible to guess from that angle. I’d need to look out of Brenda’s bedroom window.”
“Chance’d be a fine thing.” Iris laid the cloth and sat down to face her husband over the kitchen table. The discovery of the hole could well presage imminent upheaval and the Brockleys were torn between pleasure at the prospect of an exciting scandal and alarm at the thought that chaos could possibly ensue, chaos that might tip the precisely weighted balance of their world and introduce more than a touch of Iris’s “hurly burly.”
“I can’t help thinking of that terrible business in Gloucester last year.”
“Ohhh!” cried Iris. Her hands, two little pink lumps of dough, flew together and became one large pink lump. Her features shimmered under a racing flood of emotion. Alarm, pleasure, titillation, dread. “But it’s been four days since she disappeared. Surely he would have ...” Iris hesitated, unable to bring herself to utter the word “buried.” Disposed of seemed demeaning, as if Simone was something less than human. Concealed suggested inefficiency on Alan’s part. Hidden was rather lightweight and might be said to reduce the whole terrible business to no more than a macabre parlour game. Iris decided to pass, concluding tamely, “by now.”
That was when Brenda arrived from work. After she had completed her ablutions and was sitting down letting a nice cup of tea get cold and picking the onion out of the pasty, Reg slipped away.
His daughter’s door was ajar. He pushed it just as wide as he needed to get inside—fortunately it did not squeak. He tiptoed to the larger of the two windows which looked over the back garden. From here he could see the hole quite clearly. As far as he could judge it seemed to be about four feet round and two feet deep. Nowhere near big enough to accommodate a body even if tightly curled. On the other hand Hollingsworth had plainly not finished digging, for the spade was left jammed into the ground.
Reg, who always cleaned his tools with newspaper before hanging them on their clearly labelled hooks, gave a “tsk” of censure. Though he would have been outraged if such a suggestion had been put to him, in truth Reg disapproved more of this example of slovenliness than if he had come across Alan actually interring his spouse.
And then the man himself appeared. Suddenly he was there, on the terrace. Reg jumped back out of sight. After a moment he heard the sound of the spade scraping and chopping at something and then repeated hard bangs as if the earth was being beaten level. He risked a peep round the curtain and saw that the hole was being filled in.
Reg hurried away, adjusting the door, as precisely as he could remember, to show exactly the same gap.
As he sat down again, Iris raised her finely pencilled brows, indicating the food still lying on the table.
“She’s hardly eaten a thing.” She scraped the remains of Brenda’s supper into a bowl marked DOG.
“Now, Iris. I’ve surveyed the—”
“I mentioned he’d been digging and how he never had before. She said, in that cold sort of way she’s taken on lately, ‘A person can change, I hope, Mother.’ I thought, he’s not the only one.”
“Are you listening to me?”
“Of course I am. Just because I’m talking doesn’t mean I’m not listening.”
“I would say that hole was of a size to comfortably accommodate a medium-sized box file.”
“That’s nice.”
“However, the situation has now changed somewhat ...”
Brenda was sitting on the sofa in the lounge. Ostensibly transfixed by Watchdog, she was in fact preoccupied entirely with her own private misery. She could hear her parents droning on but only remotely, like waves on a distant beach. Queasily swamped by thoughts of Alan Hollingsworth, she stared at the screen, not registering the everyday saga of crooked folk and their imaginative swindles.
Since that dreadful moment when their eyes had met through the glass of her bedroom window, he had not been out of her thoughts for an instant. Her work had suffered. Asked that morning to take one of the tills, a rare and unwished for honour, she had been so locked within a remorseful maze of argument and counter-argument that she had not even registered the sympathetic—or repelled—glances her appearance always provoked.