Michelle and I had stayed there four years ago. It was spring, and we’d wanted a break involving long fresh days on high empty ground, and slow quiet evenings eating twice as much as necessary. An internet search produced the Yard of Ale, and for all my dismissive comments, it fitted the bill. Post-breakfast, we hiked for miles on the Long Mynd; counted off the Stiperstones and scaled the Devil’s Chair. In hidden valleys we found the remnants of abandoned mines, and sheep turned up everywhere, constantly surprised. And in the evenings we ate three-course meals, and drank supermarket wine at restaurant prices. The bed was the right degree of firm, and the shower’s water-pressure splendid. Everyone was polite. As we checked out Michelle picked up one of the hotel’s self-promoting postcards, and when we got home she clipped it to the fridge door, where it had remained ever since.
I set off about thirty minutes after Dennis had left.
The rain began before I’d been on the road an hour. It had been raining for days in the south-west; there’d been weather warnings on the news, and a number of rivers had broken banks. I had not paid attention: weather was a background babble. But when I was stopped by a policeman on a minor road on the Shropshire border, and advised to take a detour which would cost a couple of hours — and offered no guarantee of a passable road at the end of it — it became clear that my plan, if you could call it that, wanted rethinking.
“You’re sure I can’t get through this way?”
“If your vehicle’s maybe amphibious. I wouldn’t try it myself. Sir.”
Sir was an afterthought. He’d drawn back as I’d wound down the window to answer him, as if rain were preferable to the fug of unwashed body in my car.
I said, “I need somewhere to stay.”
He gave me directions to a couple of places, a few miles down the road.
The first, a B&B, had a room. There’d been cancellations, the man who checked me in said. Rain was sheeting down, and the phone had been ringing all morning. He’d gone from fully booked to empty without lifting a finger. But there’d be more in my situation; folk who couldn’t get where they were headed, and needed a bed for the night. It was still early, but he seemed confident there’d be little travelling on the local roads today.
“I was headed for Church Stretton,” I said.
“You’ll maybe have better luck tomorrow.”
He seemed less worried than the policeman by my unwashed state. On the other hand, the smell of dog possibly masked my odour. The room was clean though. I could look down from its window on to a rain-washed street, and on light puddling the pavements outside the off-licence opposite. When I turned on the TV, I found footage of people sitting on rooftops while water swirled round their houses. I switched it off again. I had my own troubles.
I lay on the bed, fully clothed. If it weren’t for the rain, where would I be now? Arriving at the Yard of Ale, armed with enquiries. I had a photograph — that was about it, as far as packing had gone — and I’d be waving it at somebody. It wasn’t the best picture of Michelle ever taken (she’d be the first to point out that it made her nose look big) but it was accurate. In some lights, her nose does look big. If Michelle had been there, the photo would be recognized. Unless she’d gone out of her way to change her appearance — but what sense would that make? She’d left me a clue. If she hadn’t wanted me to follow, why would she have done that?
Always supposing it really was a clue.
Perhaps the rain was a blessing. It held off the moment of truth; the last ounce of meaning I could dredge from the note she’d left. The note there was no room for doubt that she’d written.
But had signed Shell. An abbreviation she’d detested. And what was that if not a coded message? It was a cry for help.
And no one was listening but me.
At length, I turned the TV on again. I got lucky with a showing of Bringing Up Baby, and when that was finished I swam across the road to the shiny off-licence, and collected a bottle of Scotch. Back indoors, before broaching it, I belatedly took Dennis Farlowe’s advice and stood under the shower for twenty minutes, using up both small bottles of complimentary gel. There were no razors. But the mirror suggested I’d crossed the line between being unshaven and having a beard.
And then I lay back on the bed, and drank the scotch.
Alcohol never helps. Well, alcohol always helps, but when there are things you need to keep at bay, alcohol never helps. Dennis Farlowe’s appearance had disturbed me. Dennis’s appearances inevitably did, though on most occasions I could mask the visible symptoms: could smile, give a cheery hello; ask him how things were going while I manoeuvred my way into my own kitchen; stood behind my own wife; put my hand on her shoulder, still smiling. All that newer history I mentioned. The history in which Michelle and Dennis had re-established the relationship we’d once all enjoyed, before the older history had smashed it all to pieces.
That history didn’t end with Dennis’s wife’s murder. Ten days after Jane Farlowe’s body was found a second victim came to light, in a town some distance from ours. I was at a conference at the time — that phase of business life was already in full swing — so didn’t see the local press reports until they were old news. Wounds on the body indicated that the same man was responsible for both murders. You could sense our local tabloid’s frustration at the vagueness of this detail, as if it had hot gossip up its sleeve it was bound not to share. Gossip relating to the nature of those wounds.
“Have you spoken to Dennis?” were my first words to Michelle on reading this.
“I tried calling him.”
“But he wouldn’t talk?”
“He wouldn’t answer.”
He would have been in shock, of course. Just a week and a half since his own wife’s body had been found: did this make it worse for him? To understand that his wife’s end was sealed by random encounter, not precise obsession? Because there was surely — can I say this? — something of a compliment buried in the murder of one’s wife, if it was intended. If it didn’t turn out that the murder was just one of those things; a passing accident that might have happened to anyone’s wife, had they been in the wrong place at the right time.
The random nature of the murders was confirmed with the discovery of a third body: a little later, a little further away.
I poured more scotch. Switched the TV on. Switched it off. It was suppertime, but I didn’t want to eat. Nothing was happening outside. The rain had eased off, and I could see the puddles dancing under the streetlights’ glare.
In the gap between the discovery of the first two bodies — Jane and the second woman, whose name I’ve forgotten — Dennis Farlowe had suggested that I was the man responsible. That I was a rapist and murderer. We had been friends for years, but in his grief he found it possible to say this: You wanted her. You always wanted her. The police would have interviewed me anyway — as they did all Jane’s male friends — but Dennis’s words no doubt interested them. Though they subsequently had to spread their net wider, with the second death; and wider still with the third... A local murder became a two-county hunt, but the man responsible was never caught, though he stopped after the third death. Not long after that, Dennis moved abroad.