Steph is a clever girl. While we were grappling with the question of the car she went rather quiet, and then she suddenly came out with something her art teacher had told her. She had once done a watercolour of some trees and painted the trunks brown. Her teacher said, if I sent you out and said come back when you’ve found a brown tree trunk, I would never see you again. Why have you given me brown tree trunks? Well, Steph said, wood is brown, see? The whole room was full of tables and chairs, she said, all wooden, and brown, as you’d expect. But why look at tables and chairs if you’re trying to paint a tree, he asked her. Go and look at trees. And don’t think, he said, that I am teaching you to draw and paint, I am teaching you to look. People don’t see what is actually there unless they look. Artists must learn to look, most people never do. They see only what they expect to see.
Up until then I hadn’t really been getting her point, but she explained it. The point was, the vicar’s car might have been seen this morning, in the village, outside Sally’s, perhaps even turning off up our drive, and so while we had to get rid of it, we had better not try and say he had never been here. We had to get ready to say that he had been here, but had left after spending a bit of time with Charlie. Then she said that Mr Brookes had better drive back through the village again, this afternoon, so that somebody might see him again, and confirm what we would say about him leaving here. Well, this sounded mad to Michael and me.
‘You’re as tall as him,’ Steph told Michael, ‘and there’s that hat he was wearing so the hair won’t matter. You just have to drive through the village in his car, wearing his clothes. Somebody’s bound to notice the car, aren’t they, with all those stickers on the windows. You couldn’t miss it.’
They were sitting with mugs of tea at the kitchen table. The sandwiches that Jean had made just in case anyone felt like lunch sat untouched. Only Charlie’s appetite was unchecked; today Steph was trying him on banana. Michael pushed his empty mug away.
‘But I’m not him! I can act like somebody else, I can’t be somebody else.’
‘But I’ve explained. The thing about most people,’ Steph told him with weary patience, ‘is they see what they expect to see. Like me and the tree trunks. Nobody’s going to say oh yes, I saw somebody wearing Mr Brookes’s clothes and hat, driving Mr Brookes’s car, in the village on Wednesday afternoon. They’re going to say they saw him. He’s not the vicar of the church here, is he, so it’s not like anybody actually knows him, it’s just the impression they’ll remember.’
‘But what’s the point? Why take the risk? Why don’t I just drive the car off and dump it?’
Jean said quietly, ‘Because if you do that, and if somebody in the village saw Steph and Charlie in the car this morning, the police will know he was here. If we deny he was here, they’ll be suspicious. And if we admit he was here but just say he left, the police will have this place down as the last place he was seen. They’ll be very interested in us, they might be suspicious enough to turn the whole place over. Dig up the garden.’
‘So? We’ll have got rid of the car by then, and we can dump him too. He won’t even be here.’
‘No. But Miranda is. What if they find her? And anyway,’ she said, ‘how long before they find out more about us? Find out everything?’
Steph said, ‘And haven’t you ever watched those detective things on telly? They can find traces of people, you know, even a hair or a bit of spit or something. If they really look hard, they’ll find something. We’ve got to do something that shows he left here. Even though he didn’t. If somebody thinks they saw him later on, it makes it really look like he left here, doesn’t it? And then we’ll be left alone.’
So Michael put on Gordon Brookes’s dried and pressed clothes and his hat, removed the broken lenses from his glasses and put those on too. Jean managed to stop him, just in time, from touching the car without gloves. She found some thin plastic ones in the box with the silver polish. A backpack with Michael’s own clothes went into the car, and Gordon Brookes’s backpack, boots, anorak and Charlie’s car seat came out. Four hours after Gordon Brookes had driven his grandson up to the house, Michael drove his car back down the drive and along the road into the village. He was alarmed but pleased to see a knot of people, mainly elderly ladies and youths in baggy clothes, at a bus stop, and a man sitting outside the village shop next to a banked table of fruit and vegetables. He pressed the hat further down and drove by without turning his head.
The tank was more than half full. With the map open on the passenger seat he drove, according to what had been decided with Jean and Steph, first to the M4. He joined the M5 northeast of Bristol and left it at junction 19. By half past two that day he had parked Gordon Brookes’s car at the far end of the Avon Gorge Nature Reserve, in an almost empty car park displaying a warning about theft from vehicles. Here and there little heaps of ice-blue fragments of windscreen glass glittered on the ground.
A picnic was in progress nearby on a patch of grass dotted with tables, rubbish bins and notices about litter, dog walking and wild flowers. Keeping as far away as possible but remaining within sight of the picnickers, Michael took his backpack from the boot and set off down the path, marked with fat yellow arrows, towards Nightingale Valley at the heart of the wood. The path rose and fell along the steep, thickly planted banks of Leigh Woods. From the map Michael had hoped for a more remote, less public sort of place; there were arrows and maps everywhere, even little metal badges on some of the trees. But it was simple enough to keep his head down and ignore the grunted ‘g’afternoons’ of the few people he met, most of whom sped past him on mountain bikes. He doubted if any one of them saw anything more of him than his feet, or would remember seeing even those. Where the path branched Michael took always the smaller and less-frequented one, and after an hour or so of walking, and checking that the path was deserted in front and behind him, he scrambled up a bank thick with brambles and bracken. He found a place where a stand of rhododendrons under some conifers made almost a secret room, several feet wide but only about five feet high, and he crouched inside, panting, waiting until he was sure that the only sounds he could hear were his own breathing, and birdsong. He looked round to make sure that he was quite out of sight. Very carefully and quietly, he pulled his own clothes from the backpack, slipped out of Gordon Brookes’s things and put on his own, as quickly as he could under the low concealing arches of the rhododendron. He placed Gordon Brookes’s clothes- jacket, shirt, trousers, shoes, hat and glasses- in the backpack, and fastened it up. He settled back onto the ground and waited. Strange, how birds calling in woods sounded somehow hollow and far away. He lay listening to the stillness, broken by the wind sighing through the trees above him and from time to time by murmuring voices, a crying child, from the path below. Once, a dog came crashing by quite close to him before being whistled away back to its owners. The afternoon passed. It seemed to Michael, overwhelmed now by fatigue, that he was waiting here only until he could be granted some sort of permission to admit how tired he was. His eyes drooped and he leaned back on his backpack.
Steph set off at the usual time to take Charlie back to Sally’s, tucking a cotton blanket around him in case he might feel a slight chill from the evening air. She called out to Jean that she was off now, and crunched away across the gravel. She had adjusted the pushchair seat so that Charlie was now facing outwards, to see the direction in which he was going, rather than facing her. He was old enough now to want to take an interest in the things around him and no longer needed to keep Steph constantly in his sight. But that was not the reason, or not the only one, why she had done it. Although she did not understand how it was possible, she knew that outwardly she was behaving quite normally. She knew too that Charlie had seen nothing ‘unpleasant’ and that, as Sally had remarked, he did not know his grandfather from the Archbishop of Canterbury; yet there was something in his long, considering stare that she did not feel quite equal to tonight.