The Insect Farm (34 page)

“Calm down, Jonathan,” he said, “and come inside.”

“I want to see him,” I said. “Immediately. The poor bugger must have no idea what is going on. He’ll be terrified.”

By now we were in the corridor, outside of the row of interview rooms. I knew that Roger was likely to be in one of them.

“Actually, he’s very calm,” said Pascoe. “He hasn’t minded helping us a bit.”

“I’ll bet he hasn’t. Roger will say anything he thinks you want him to say just to keep you happy. You should know that. Anything he has confessed to won’t be worth a damn if it comes to court. You should know that too. Anyway, now I want to see him.”

Pascoe said nothing more but turned and walked along the corridor, past three or four of the interview rooms, until he reached the last one in the row. He turned the security bolt on the outside, opened the door, and stood back to allow me into the room. I was aware of him following me inside. Roger was sitting at the desk, facing me, and apparently in a daze. For a moment I was unable to get his attention until I spoke his name.

“Roger, are you OK? It’s Jonathan. You will be all right now. I’ve come to clear everything up.”

Roger looked up at me, his eyes moving only slowly, as though he was coming out of a trance. Instantly he smiled and his face lit up.

“Jonathan. Hello. How are you?”

“I’m fine, Roger, but it doesn’t matter how I am. How are you?”

“I’m OK, thanks,” he said straight away. “The two policemen have been very nice to me.”

“I’ll bet they have,” I said, and I glanced around at Pascoe. “You haven’t told them anything silly have you? You haven’t told them you have done anything just to keep them happy?”

“I just told them that I was hiding in the insect farm. I don’t know anything about it. I was hiding in the insect farm.”

I was confused.

“What do you mean ‘hiding in the insect farm’? When were you hiding in the insect farm?”

I swear that my next sentence was going to be something like “you were in bed when Harriet was killed”, but I was interrupted by Pascoe from behind me.

“During the fire,” he said. “Roger has just been confirming to us what we had already believed. That he was hiding in the insect farm during the fire.”

“What bloody fire?” I said.

Pascoe looked back at me. Now it was his turn to be confused.

“The fire that killed your parents,” he said.

“What? What’s that got to do with Harriet?”

“Harriet?” said Pascoe. “Mrs Maguire? Nothing. Why do you ask that?”

“Why? Because as far as I know, that’s what you and Wallace are investigating. My wife’s disappearance. You’ve arrested Brendan bloody Harcourt and had to let him go, and now you have arrested Roger. Are you saying that that’s nothing to do with Harriet?”

“Sit down, please,” said Pascoe. “Let me explain.”

I didn’t want to sit down, but I reckoned we would get to the point sooner if I obeyed, and so I did. And all the while Roger was sitting alongside me, saying nothing.

“We are investigating the disappearance of your wife. But as you know we have also kept open the file on the fire at your
parents’ house. The fire was never explained, and your dad did have quite a big insurance policy, so it has remained an open inquiry. We don’t have any choice in the matter. You also know that at one time we had an idea that Roger might know more about it than he let on. We asked you about it at the time, but you were adamant that it couldn’t be the case, and so we let the matter go.”

“Yes, I remember all that,” I said. “So why are you raising it again now?”

“Because of something Roger said to someone else at the day centre which caused them to think he knew about something criminal. They were sufficiently concerned about it to inform us, which they did earlier this morning, and so we reopened the file to take a look.”

“What?” I said. “What did he say? Who did he say it to?”

“I am not at liberty to tell you that,” said Pascoe, “but I can tell you that we felt we had no choice but to ask Roger about it. And when I tell you what it was, I hope you will understand why.”

“And why didn’t you wait for me?”

“Because, Jonathan,” he said slowly, “if you don’t mind me saying so, it seems to us that you will do anything to protect your brother, and if you were here you wouldn’t be able to stop yourself from interrupting every question we asked. As it is,” and now he looked pleased with himself, “your brother Roger has cleared up the mystery, and we can all go back to the way we were before.”

“Cleared up the mystery of the fire?”

“No,” said Pascoe, “cleared up the mystery about what he said at the day centre.”

“And what was that?”

“He told one of the other pupils there – is that what you call them? Pupils? Anyway one of the other men – that he had been involved in a killing.”

“What? He can’t have.”

“I know, but you can see why we had to take it seriously. Anyway in all the circumstances, we had to ask Roger about it, and we now have done so. It took him a while to tell us, but it turned out that he was talking about something or other living in the insect farm. Something that had been doing a lot of damage to some of his other creatures in the insect farm. Did he have to kill some cockroaches or something? I think he must have felt very badly about it, and so when he talked about it at the day centre, obviously it came out as something like a confession.”

“And was it Terry, the Down-syndrome kid?”

“I shouldn’t really tell you this, but as no harm has been done – he told Terry and Terry told his dad, so by the time it went through all the Chinese whispers, it came out as a killing. Anyway,” he said, “I hope you understand why we had to check it out. And I hope you understand why we had to check it out without you being present. But Roger has cleared it up on his own now, and so, if you want to, you can take him home.”

I felt a constriction in my chest and realized that I’d been taking short breaths since first seeing Roger in the interrogation room. I filled my lungs to capacity to get the air flowing through me. It tasted like freedom.

Chapter Twenty-Eight

More passing days turned into weeks, and the weeks turned into months, and on every waking hour I expected to receive the phone call or the knock on the door which would bring the news that someone had seen Harriet on the train on that Tuesday, or that one of the neighbours had seen her coming to the flat, or that I had been spotted in the early hours of Wednesday morning labouring under a heavy load, and that therefore I was now a suspect.

“Can you tell me what was in the bundle you were seen carrying at four in the morning, Mr Maguire?” Neither of my imagined interrogators were Wallace or Pascoe. The question was asked by the clichéd concave face of a man with wire-rimmed specs and a sweaty brow, and I could give no answer. I knew that any hope I might have of staying out of prison rested entirely on luck, and that it must be extraordinarily unlikely that anyone could have the amount of good fortune that would be needed for none of these things to come to light. I was also acutely aware that I was adding to the risk I was facing when I had a lot of leaflets printed showing Harriet’s photograph with the message “Have you seen this woman?” with the reward of £500 proposed by her father. The last thing I needed was for someone who had travelled
on the train on that Tuesday to remember her as a fellow passenger. Did I deliberately choose a photograph of Harriet where the light came from the side and slightly distorted the features of her face? I guess I did, but the police had no reference point from reality, and none of our other friends ever mentioned it.

Probably as much from their sense of guilt as from their concern, Martin and Jed helped me to distribute the leaflets outside King’s Cross station. Both apologized for not telling me what was happening between Harriet and Brendan, and I used their embarrassment to squeeze out more detail.

“In the end I just think she was worn down by his persistence,” Martin told me. We were in a burger bar opposite King’s Cross station, taking a break from a session of stopping people in the street outside to show them Harriet’s picture.

“You shouldn’t really blame her,” said Jed. “I know that sounds like a stupid thing to say, but you’ve got to try to understand. It was a very tough ask for her to be away from you for weeks and weeks on end. All the rest of us were going out and doing the normal pairing-off. She was being asked to live the life of a nun.”

The pain these thoughts caused to me were not part of any act. I had no need to pretend to be a distraught husband – I was distraught. Hearing any detail of Harriet’s infidelity cut me to the core every bit as much as it would have done had she been with me still.

We neither saw nor heard anything further of Brendan during this period, and I did not seek him out. Martin and Jed told me that he had taken the trip up and down on the train to Newcastle, apparently looking out of the window as if to do so might yield some clue as to what had happened to her. If he had ever had his suspicions, he was too shamefaced, I assumed, to come and ask me about them. Eventually Jed, Martin and Brendan returned to Newcastle and I went back to work at the library, where, for several months I had to endure the pitying glances of colleagues, before eventually my little tragedy became just another part of my pathetic life’s story.

Ideally I would like to be able to record that Brendan was charged with Harriet’s murder, found guilty and went on to spend the next twenty years in prison. In my mind, this would be a suitable punishment for having slept with my wife. The law, however, failed to see it that way. The absence of a body made it more or less impossible, the police kept on telling me, to prove that a crime had even taken place, let alone that Harriet had been murdered.

And so that was it. That was the story of Harriet Maguire, née Chalfont, born 1952, who went missing in 1973 and was never heard from again. I had no insurance to cash in, no funeral plans to make. As far as the wider world was concerned, it was almost as though she had never existed. I was back at my job, Roger went back to regular attendance at the day centre, and we all got on with our lives. I never
managed to get anything resembling an answer from him about what happened to the body I had buried in a box full of soil and worms in the insect farm in a shed in the allotment site just two hundred yards or so from our flat. Every attempt at securing an explanation was met with a change of subject or a blank stare, and after a while I just gave up trying.

Chapter Twenty-Nine

In the few years after Harriet’s death, I left the library service and opened a small bookshop in Clapham High Street. We specialized in travel books and have done reasonably well. I never married again – after all, I was already married, and never sought a divorce or an annulment. Harriet had been the single love of my life, and I never felt that I wanted to try to replace her.

Roger and I carried on in our own way. After another five years had passed, we moved to a small house just around the corner from the flat. It was a proper semi-detached; I thought our mother would have approved. We did not need to move the insect farm again, and the oversized shed on the allotment has continued to accommodate Roger’s ambitions.

I lost touch with Martin and Jed, although one day, perhaps seven or eight years after what happened, I ran into Martin in the street and he told me that he thought Brendan had emigrated to Canada and was married with children. The news left me cold, and I felt no curiosity to know any more.

As expected, I never saw Harriet’s parents again after that last Christmas and, in 1983, ten years after the disappearance of their daughter, I heard that Mr Chalfont had died in
Singapore, and that his wife was returning to England. She did not contact me and I made no attempt to contact her.

Last month, just a few weeks before my birthday, Roger and I were having breakfast in our small kitchen when, quite out of nowhere, he asked me what date it was.

“April 17th, I think. Why do you ask?”

“Two weeks from your birthday?”

“Yes, that’s right, Roger. Another bloody birthday. Two weeks away.”

“And how old will you be?”

“I will be fifty-seven. Why, what do you have in mind?”

“The same age that Dad was when he died.”

“Yes, I believe so,” and something rang a bell from a long long time ago. Something he had asked me about decades earlier.

Two weeks later, on my fifty-seventh birthday, my older brother Roger gave me a very unusual present. He woke up and changed whatever remains of the rest of my life. His was the gift of revelation.

The day began as usual – an early start for me, waking and listening to the radio. It was Saturday and I had been awake for half an hour before I remembered that it was my birthday. The years have brought me many acquaintances but very few friends and, as I come to consider it, there is no other person in the world, other than Roger and myself, who could spontaneously recite the date of my birthday. I considered waking Roger a little earlier than usual, just so
we could do some silly birthday stuff, but then I remember thinking: fifty-seven? What the hell. It’s not fifty, it’s not sixty, it’s not even fifty-five. No big deal. Let him sleep.

After an hour or so I swung my legs out of bed, put on my dressing gown, and ambled through to my older brother’s room. For some reason I have got into the habit of looking at Roger for just a few moments before I rouse him from his sleep, and yesterday, not for the first time, I felt a little frisson of envy of the life that Roger leads. His appearance was of a man with no worries, no responsibilities, nothing to plan for or even much to remember. Yesterday seems very much like today, which will be very much like tomorrow.

I reckon that he looks younger than his sixty-three years. He has few lines for a man of his age, and his hair is thick and dark. Meanwhile I have no doubt that the cares and responsibilities which have thus fallen upon me have made me look older than my now fifty-seven years, and so I guess that Roger and I look more like twins than anything else. Now, as always since we were small boys, he is probably rather better-looking than I am.