The Insect Farm (31 page)

I forced myself as best I could to put those thoughts to one side, and to organize in my mind the practicalities of the situation. I had no way of knowing how much they may have heard about Harriet and Brendan before all this happened. Certainly Harriet’s mother had seemed to be more familiar with Brendan’s name than I would have expected had he been only a run-of-the-mill friend of Harriet’s. Yet somehow I doubted that she could name many of her other friends. The switchboard operator called the room, and then I heard Harriet’s father say, “Please send him up to room 324.” Perhaps the lack of enthusiasm I detected in his tone was more in the way I heard it than the way he said it.

I took the stairs, up and round and up and round again the huge atrium, and made no sound along the thick carpeted corridors. Eventually I knocked and wondered if they would make use of the spyhole before admitting me. The door was opened by Harriet’s mother, who might have embraced her daughter’s husband, but who instead retreated into the suite. I went in to be met by both of my in-laws, standing as though they had rehearsed our meeting.

“Hello, Jonathan,” said Harriet’s father, as I shook hands with both of them. “Bloody awful business this.” It was not a question.

I was shocked at the sight of both of them. No doubt the long journey with little sleep, and also the worry about their daughter, had made their contributions, but both seemed to have aged a decade since I had last seen them less than three years ago. It occurred to me only now that I could see nothing of Harriet’s features in either of them, and for a second I found myself considering if in fact Harriet had been their biological daughter. The thought had never occurred to me before, but I wondered if it explained what I had always felt was their unusual level of detachment from her.

“Never mind about that, Geoffrey,” said Harriet’s mother. “Let Jonathan tell us whether there has been any developments since we last spoke. Jonathan? Has anything further happened?”

“Nothing helpful,” I said. “I went down to the police station after you called me and spoke to Detective Sergeant Wallace, who is handling the case.” All three of us were still standing, as though the urgency to hear the latest news outweighed normal courtesies. “Harriet still hasn’t turned up anywhere so far as they know, but he did tell me something which, to be honest with you, knocked me sideways.” It seemed that I had already imparted the only thing they regarded as urgent, and that they knew that the next part was uncomfortable territory. Mrs Chalfont gestured towards two chairs and a hideous Regency sofa which were crammed uncomfortably in the bay window. We all sat.

“Mrs Chalfont, may I ask you,” I said, “did you know about Harriet and Brendan?”

She was pouring tea from a bone-china pot which seemed far too small for the purpose into cups which were also inexplicably miniature. Plainly they had ordered room service in anticipation of my arrival. She added tiny splashes of milk before responding to my question.

“Harriet told me some time ago that there was a young man who had shown an interest in her for a very long time, and that her marriage to you had had no effect of reducing the enthusiasm of his advances.”

“He’s has fancied her for a very long time, that’s for sure,” I said, and I watched them both wince slightly at the expression, “but she always gave me the impression that his feelings were not returned.”

“I think that would be right,” she said. By now Mr Chalfont was half turned and looking out of the window, as though disengaged from the conversation. “But if I am not mistaken, in the last few weeks the pressure from him has been growing, and I wouldn’t rule out the possibility that, partly in respect of the long periods apart from you, she might have let her guard down just a little.”

The quaintness of her expression seemed to be straight out of a romantic novel, and I realized immediately that Harriet must have told her everything. That she had finally conceded to Brendan’s long-term advances. I doubted, however, if she had told her mother that sleeping with Brendan
was her “jazz” in comparison to my “blues”. I felt sick at the thought.

“So now the police are saying that they think it’s possible that Brendan might have been pushing her to leave me, and that they quarrelled. He obviously lied to them about what he knew, and so they arrested him and kept him overnight. However, in the absence of any evidence that any harm has come to Harriet, this morning they have had to let him go.”

“What?” It was the first time that Geoffrey Chalfont had spoken since greeting me, and he seemed genuinely surprised by this news. “But he is the last person to have seen her. What the devil do they think they are playing at?” He seemed to be asking his wife as much as he was asking me, and neither of us had any clear idea of the answer.

“Presumably if there is no direct evidence that a crime has been committed,” I said finally, “they have no choice but to let him go. They seem to think the most likely thing is that Harriet got off the train on the route, checked into a local hotel, and is walking along the beach somewhere contemplating her options.”

“After a week?” said Mr Chalfont. “They must have taken leave of their senses. Obviously I know less about what is going on in my daughter’s mind than my wife does.” He turned to me, his eyes meeting mine for the first time since I entered the suite. “I knew nothing of all this with Brendan, by the way. Clearly I have been treated to information only on a ‘need-to-know’ basis. Bloody awful for you, and I am sorry for it.
Don’t know what the girl is thinking of.” Now he resumed his original point. “But I do know her well enough to know that she would realize that by this time we would all be worried sick, and she would have let us know she was all right. Something has happened to her. There can be no doubt of it.”

“I agree,” I said quickly. “It’s enough of a shock for me to find out about Harriet and Brendan. Obviously I thought I knew her better than I do, but I am sure that I know her well enough to know that she wouldn’t just take off without telling anyone. Apart from anything else, she would know that you two would be worried half to death.”

My little speech seemed to thaw some of the frost between the three of us, and it was almost as though we were accepting for the first time that we were all on the same side, all worrying about the same thing. Harriet’s mother turned to me.

“I am so sorry for this, Jonathan. It must be terrible for you. Whatever else has happened, I know that you love Harriet, and I also know that she loves you. This is just an awful business, but I am sure it will turn out all right and that she will be back with you soon.”

I put down my cup and pressed my face into the upturned palms of my hands. It was not a contrived gesture or an act. As before, I was finding the reality of what had happened, combined with the sympathy of those I was seeking to deceive, very difficult to cope with. And again, not for the first time, I found myself responding more like an aggrieved and worried husband than as a killer.

Plainly uncomfortable at any show of emotion, Mr Chalfont stood up and began to pace the room. For a moment I thought that Harriet’s mother was going to touch me, a gesture of sympathy or support, but she did not.

Mr Chalfont said that he was going to make some phone calls and see if he could “get someone cracking a whip”. I thought about Wallace and Pascoe back at King’s Cross police station and about how welcome that would be. Harriet’s mother said that they planned to take a nap to get over the journey, and wondered if I would like to come back later to have some dinner with them.

“It’s very kind of you Mrs Chalfont,” I said, “but I want to stay around the flat as much as possible just in case Harriet rings me there, or in fact turns up. Besides, I have to be there for most of the time to take care of Roger.”

Her face was a picture, the perfect transition from recollection to distaste.

“Ah yes, Roger. How is the dear chap? So brave of you to take care of him.”

In normal circumstances, hearing someone like Mrs Chalfont referring to Roger as a “dear chap” in her patronizing manner might have provoked me to tell her to fuck off. However, having achieved more today than I had expected, I was keen to keep Harriet’s parents on my side. The more they witnessed my anxiety and distress the less likely they would ever be to suspect that I knew more than I was saying about what had happened to their daughter.

“Oh, Roger is fine. He is taking the bar exam next month.” No, that’s not what I said. I said he was fine, but was missing Harriet, as we all were. That seemed to be all that Mrs Chalfont needed to know about Roger, and we moved on.

“No doubt Mr Chalfont’s intervention will bring the police back to my door,” I said, “which will be very welcome. If we don’t do something about it, before we know it Harriet will just become another statistic in the ‘missing person’ file, and that’s the last we will ever hear of it.”

Chapter Twenty-Five

The general feeling of dislocation which framed all of my thoughts was exacerbated by the all-pervasive preparations for Christmas which were going on in the shops and offices on all sides as I returned home. Every few steps along the high street were accompanied by the unrelenting noise of some terrible Christmas song merging into the next jangle of carols sung through a synthesizer by characters from a cartoon.

On the corner next to the pub car park was a man selling Christmas trees from the back of a white van. All around him there were couples and families with small children, holding up this one or that one as they tried to envisage a particular tree in the corner of their hallway or living room. The sight of them made me fall into a profound sadness about what might have been and what was now never going to be. I visualized Harriet’s face superimposed on the smiling faces of the young mothers, and the imagined faces of our putative offspring on the excited grins of the young children. But there was no Harriet and there never would be any children, and all of it was my fault and my doing. Her life had ended, theirs had never begun, and mine was all but over.

Maybe I would get away with her death in the sense of escaping society’s idea of justice, or maybe I was hours, days
or weeks away from being arrested and thrown into jail for many years. In either case, the worst that could happen to me had already happened. I had lost the love of my life and would never get her back.

I turned off the main road into our street and was about fifty yards from the house when suddenly I became aware that someone had fallen in to pace alongside me. Before I looked, I knew who it was.

“Brendan.”

“Jonathan.”

I stopped in my stride and turned to face him. “What the hell?”

Obviously he had been waiting in the cold wind, and the skin on his face was pallid and taut. Traces of his brilliant red hair crept out from beneath a brown beanie hat. Immediately I could see that his expression was tense with anger.

“We need to talk.”

Instinctively I turned again to continue my journey, and he began to walk alongside me.

“You’ve got a fucking nerve to turn up here.” I barked at him. “Why aren’t you under arrest?”

“I was under arrest. You know I have been under arrest, but you also know that I don’t have any idea what has happened to Harriet.”

I stopped again and turned to face him.

“And how would I know that? I have just been told by the police that you were having an affair with my wife, and that
you have been putting her under pressure to leave me. She wouldn’t, and so you’ve probably done something to her, you fucking nutcase.”

The look on Brendan’s face said that he wanted to admit the relationship, but even now some instinct was preventing him from doing so. Evidently he was caught between a reluctance to face the husband of the woman he had been sleeping with, and the need to find out anything which might cast light on her disappearance.

“Look, I don’t know what to say about any of that. You know I have loved Harriet for as long as you have, and obviously I know that has pissed you off. I don’t blame you but, for what it’s worth to you, I haven’t had any choice in the matter. I never have had a choice. I’ve always been head over bloody heels in love with her. Just as you have.”

“Except that she married me!” Instantly I was shouting, distraught and losing control. “We both loved her, but she chose me, you bloody madman. It’s just that you could never accept it.” Out of the corner of my eye I could see that some passers-by had heard me, a man and his two young children, and were scuttling away as quickly as they could. “You couldn’t accept that, could you? You just kept on grinding her down and grinding her down until eventually, when I was three hundred miles away, looking after my brother who has only me in the world, she finally gave in.”

“Yes, I did,” he said. His voice was also raised, but to a level many decibels below mine. “You’re right, and I think
you would have done the same if the thing had been the other way around. I didn’t have any choice. Surely you of all people can understand that?”

By now I could see that some other people, two women walking together, had noticed us and were slowing down to see what was happening. I realized that Brendan and I must have looked as though we were about to come to blows, and I began to collect myself enough to start thinking about what I needed to achieve from this situation.

“So what have you done with her?”

“What?”

“What have you done with her? The police know that you were trying to persuade her to leave me and that she wouldn’t. Obviously you have done something to her. Where the hell is she?”

“I don’t know. If I did, what would I be standing in the street talking to you for?”

“So why are you standing in the street talking to me? I don’t bloody well know anything. You know I don’t. I was expecting her off the train on Thursday. That’s all I know.”

“But that’s what I can’t work out,” he said. “You know now that I saw her off at the station in Newcastle. I left her outside of the Central Station. The truth is that she was looking forward to spending some time with you. She was happy.”

I looked back at Brendan’s face as he spoke to me and, hard though it is for me to say it, for a moment I felt a hint of sadness for him. I guess he really was as much in love with
Harriet as I was, and here he stood, distraught and confused by her sudden and unexplained disappearance. A few seconds later however, my sympathy evaporated and I felt the need to reassert myself. I spoke more quietly.