The Insect Farm (27 page)

I had not been in touch with Brendan to see if he was going to the police station with me today, and wondered what to
do. I decided that I would go alone, but be sure to let them know that I had asked him to come along. If I had been told it, I had not remembered the name of the policeman I had seen yesterday, but when I briefly described him to the officer behind the porthole he immediately knew whom I meant.

“That’ll be Sergeant Norris,” said the officer. “I’ll just see if he is in. Who shall I say wants him?”

I told him my name and said it was about my wife who seemed to be missing. The young officer picked up the phone, and I saw him mouthing the words which asked Sergeant Norris to come out to see me.

The sergeant looked as though he had not left the station since the last time I had seen him there twenty-four hours earlier. Come to think of it, there was never anything about him to suggest that he ever left the station. Maybe they put him in a cupboard and plugged him in to recharge overnight.

“Still not turned up then?” he said. He was using a plastic spoon to stir the cup of brown liquid which he had obtained for himself when I had asked for water. He placed it on the table. We were in what I learnt was called an interview room, which is where they put you whether or not you are suspected of a crime. What that means is that there is toughened glass with wires running through it, and there are plenty of metal hoops and brackets to which to handcuff you should it become necessary.

“She hasn’t, and now I’m worried sick.” I spoke hurriedly, blurting it all out. “No one who shares her house in
Newcastle knows where she is. A bloke she’s friendly with in Newcastle says he is sure she left there on Tuesday. I wasn’t expecting her until yesterday, but either way there is no sight nor sound of her.”

Sergeant Norris had brought a standard form with him, and methodically we went through the essential details of Harriet’s life. Name, address, age, place of birth, names of parents, occupation, where last seen. It felt strange talking about Harriet in this context. The flesh and blood of the woman I loved was now being expressed as a set of stark data.

“Did you bring a photograph?”

“Pardon?”

“A photograph. Did you bring a photograph of your wife?” he asked. “The next stage would be for us to circulate a photograph of her to other police stations and eventually, if she doesn’t turn up, maybe on some posters. We’ll need as clear a photograph as you have.”

I shook my head and apologized. It should have been obvious to me that they would need one. I had plenty at home. I would bring one in.

“One thing I am sorry to have to ask you, but I hope you’ll understand why I need to.”

I nodded. “Go ahead.”

“Do you think it’s possible that your wife has met someone else – another man, I mean – and maybe gone off somewhere with him? I’m not saying she has left you or anything. It’s
just that it wouldn’t be the first time that a young woman has got carried away with a romantic fling.”

I had anticipated the question and mentally rehearsed my performance.

“You know, in the last twenty-four hours I’ve obviously thought of that, and I know everyone must say this, but really, you don’t know Harriet. She just wouldn’t do anything like that. She’s not that kind of girl.”

“No one is that kind of girl,” said Norris, “and yet somehow or other lots of wives leave their husbands, and lots of husbands leave their wives.”

“And anyway” – this was the part I had to pitch carefully – “she seems to have been very close to a few blokes in Newcastle, one in particular called Brendan, and he was absolutely vehement that she hadn’t been seeing anyone else. He was close enough to her to be certain, he said. He absolutely assured me.”

I saw Norris writing on the back of the form he had just completed. “And what is this chap’s name? And where might we be able to find him if we need to?”

I gave them Brendan’s name and telephone number. No, I did not know the precise address. “But we always drop him off at the end of a place called Essex Road in Croydon.” I said. “I wonder—”

“You wonder what?”

“Nothing, just a stupid idea. But as I think about it, Brendan was just a bit evasive about why he thought that
Harriet had travelled down on Tuesday. I just wondered for a moment whether she might be at his place, but honestly, that’s ridiculous. She couldn’t be.”

Sergeant Norris told me that in the absence of any evidence that a crime had been committed, there was little they could do for the moment, other than to circulate details of a missing person. If I brought in a photograph, they would add that to the details. He was still quite sure there was nothing to worry about, he said. He had seen dozens of cases like this, and most often the missing person had just wanted to take a few days alone to think about life.

“Nine times out of ten they turn up safe and sound and usually embarrassed that everyone has been worried about them,” he said. “I’m sure that will happen here.”

I told him that I hoped this would turn out to be so, repeated that I was worried half to death, and stood up to go. “There is just one thing I’d like your advice on.” He raised his eyebrows in enquiry. “Do you think I should alert her parents? They live in Singapore, and obviously there is nothing they can do right now to help. I don’t want to worry them unnecessarily if there turns out to be no reason to be concerned.”

The sergeant did not hesitate. “I think you should,” he said. “Firstly, they may have heard from her – who knows, she could even have taken it into her head to pay them a flying visit and she might answer the phone. More likely they have no idea, but I think they need to know that their daughter is missing anyway.”

I said that I could see the sense in that and undertook to let him know straight away if they had any information, or if anything else turned up.

“You really still don’t think I need to worry?” I said, as he showed me the way back into the maze of cages in the entrance lobby.

“I shouldn’t think so. To be perfectly honest, we won’t start to worry unless there is no sign of her for another week or so. Even then, if there is no evidence that anything bad has happened to her, she’ll just go down on the list as a missing person. You’d be amazed how many people just go walkabout for their own reasons, but almost all of them turn up in the end. There is a lot of this sort of thing about, Mr Maguire.”

I thanked him and walked away. Once outside and in the street I breathed deeply and found I had to lean against the wall for support. I could feel my pulse beating in my head and chest, and hoped I had managed to disguise the reason for the stress I was so plainly feeling. Nothing in Sergeant Norris’s manner suggested that he suspected anything untoward, but I guessed that he was much more practised at concealing his thoughts than was I.

Chapter Twenty-One

At this distance in time and space, I am not able to say for certain exactly when the focus of my efforts shifted from trying to keep myself out of trouble towards pushing any suspicion in the direction of Brendan. The seed was planted at that instant at the railway station when I realized that he was having to lie to me about what he knew of Harriet’s intentions, and about how he knew about them. There was no telling how long, and to whom, Brendan would keep up his attempts to conceal his affair with my wife. If he started down that road with the police, who knew where it could end?

I think that, in those first few days, the idea of gently nudging doubts and concerns towards Brendan merely felt like an aspect of diverting attention from myself. In the days that followed, it became more of a mission. After all, there was a very plausible interpretation of events that in fact Brendan
was
responsible for Harriet’s death. Obviously I know that immediately this sounds like special pleading on the part of a killer, but if anyone wanted to see it from my point of view for a moment, it has the ring of credibility about it.

I loved my wife. I had never been unfaithful to her – neither before nor since our wedding. I had never told a lie to her. For reasons which were not altogether selfish, I had made the
sacrifice of not being with my wife all the time – with a view to being able to be with her permanently after a relatively short hiatus. I am not at this late stage going to try to suggest that there was any special virtue in my decision to give up studying to take care of Roger. I never have said that and I never will. He was and is my brother, I love him, and it is my pleasure to do what I can to take care of him.

Nor, if honest, could I claim that I was making any particular sacrifice in forgoing romance or sex with other women. Neither my work nor my daily life away from work threw me much in the way of other women my age, and even if they had, I had never taken any interest in them. Not any of them, not ever since I met her. That part of my life was all about Harriet. Again, it always had been and always would have been.

So perhaps the least that could be said on my behalf is that my reasons for not being with Harriet were not unworthy ones. I was a dutiful husband, waiting for her, patiently, and was entirely ready to love and to cherish her, in sickness and in health, forsaking all others, for as long as we both should live.

That was the plan.

Then along came Brendan. Brendan fucking Harcourt. Harriet’s jazz to my blues.

I had cast my mind over the events of that evening, now four days ago, hundreds and hundreds of times. No, not hundreds and hundreds of times; that implies that there were gaps in between. I cast my mind over them constantly, still
never really understanding what had happened. But the one thing I was sure of was that it was that comparison – that analogy of my love for Harriet, and hers for me, with some favourite type of music – which had tipped me over the edge. Sure enough, music was important to me, but I knew that her appreciation of it was far more profound than anything I could ever have experienced. I had seen her enchanted during
Jazz on a Summer’s Day
, I had seen her entranced during the Clapton solos of ‘Have You Ever Loved a Woman’ and I had seen her quite literally enraptured as Rodolfo and Mimi fell in love over a lost key. None of this was within the realms of my personal experience.

Maybe in her mind, therefore, a comparison of our love with her most loved music was not as demeaning as it so certainly felt to me. Maybe comparing the soaring ecstasy of lovemaking with the soaring joy of listening to a favourite aria was not as crazy as immediately it had seemed. But it was too late to worry about any of that now.

* * *

I waited until much later that night before telephoning Harriet’s parents. There was an eight-hour time difference between London and Singapore, and so I decided to delay until it was early morning there before calling. I had only ever seen photographs of the house they occupied, and I imagined the background to their lives more as part of a film set than as something real; something convivial and colonial, involving
white panama hats and lots of deferential servants. I knew that even to find that it was me calling instead of Harriet would immediately cause them concern, so I tried to put the information in context as quickly as possible. After the briefest of greetings with Harriet’s mother, I launched straight into it.

“I am sure there is nothing at all to be worried about, but I thought I had better let you know. Harriet seems to have taken herself off somewhere, and none of us knows where she is. I was just calling to see if by any chance she had been in contact with either of you?”

“What do you mean, ‘taken herself off somewhere’?” she said. “Where is she?”

“We don’t know, Mrs Chalfont.” If we knew that, I was thinking, we wouldn’t be calling you. I was surprised to find myself reacting already like a man trying to solve a genuine mystery. It would stand me in good stead for what I knew must be ahead of me. “She was due to come down from Newcastle on Thursday, and I met the train, but she wasn’t on it. I’ve called her flatmates and spoken to a couple of her friends from college, but no one knows where she is.”

Silence on the other end of the phone. I imagined that Harriet’s mother’s instant reaction was that her daughter had left me. No doubt she was trying to work out what to say which wouldn’t make that instantly obvious.

“How long has she been missing?”

“As far as I know, it’s two days. I had expected her to come to London on the train on Thursday. What’s a bit more worrying is that one of her friends from the quartet was on the same train, and told me he thought she had left Newcastle on Tuesday. If that was true then she has been missing for five days.”

“Which friend is that?”

Of all the questions Mrs Chalfont could have been expected to ask, I had not expected this one.

“Pardon?”

“I said which friend from the quartet told you that?”

“A bloke called Brendan Harcourt. Why, do you know him?”

“I know of him,” she said. It was plain that this was the name she had been expecting. It was a turn of events I had not anticipated, and I realized that I had very little idea of how much or how little Harriet had been in touch with her parents. I always assumed that it was very little; she had only seen them twice in four years, to my knowledge, and I guessed that they were not constantly on the telephone. I also had no reason to know whether they had been in postal contact, or how frank or intimate Harriet might have been in any letters.

“May I ask how?”

“No, you may not,” she said, then appeared to remember her manners. “I mean to say that of course you may, but that isn’t my immediate priority. Have you informed the police?”

I told her that I had gone directly to the police station after Harriet failed to show up on the train as expected, but that they had been unconcerned and asked me to come back the following day if there was still no sign of her. Which I did, but even now they didn’t seem to be taking the thing seriously, since there seemed to be no reason to think that any crime had been committed. “I think they think that maybe she has got fed up with me and gone off with someone else.”

“And what do you think?” she asked.