The Insect Farm (36 page)

“So the police were wrong about you all along,” I said at last. Roger turned to look at me and raised his eyebrows. It was a facial expression suggesting a level of comprehension and enquiry which I do not think I had seen before, and it was this which made me continue. “For a long time, you know, I think they thought that maybe you had started the fire at Mum and Dad’s house.” The corners of his mouth drooped down slightly, and I kept on talking. “Someone had suggested
to them that perhaps they had threatened to close down the insect farm, and that you had become angry and started the fire.” I don’t really know why I was saying it after all these years, but it seemed to me that if I did not do so now, I never would. I stopped speaking and allowed the words to percolate around the mystery that was Roger’s brain. Who could ever know if they were doing so in a way anyone else would recognize? It seemed entirely possible that at this moment he was considering what I had just said; equally it seemed just as likely that he was in a far off land of ants and beetles and spiders, or his mind could be in some third place that I might never know anything about.

“Yes,” he said finally, “wouldn’t it have been funny if I had got into trouble for the wrong one?”

Now it was my turn to raise my eyebrows.

“‘The wrong one’? What do you mean ‘the wrong one’?”

“Just saying, wouldn’t it be funny if I had got into trouble and had to go to prison for the wrong murder?”

My mind turned a somersault, but very quickly I recalled the confession he had made at the day centre all those years ago about killing the cockroaches which had come so close to getting him into huge trouble at the time. I was about to warn him that careless talk of that sort could be dangerous.

“Oh, I don’t think you’d go to jail for killing insects, Roger,” I said.

“Not for killing insects,” he said slowly, and looked directly at me. “For killing Harriet.”

Once, when I was a small child and my mother was hoovering the carpet on the stairs, I played a game which involved plugging and unplugging the vacuum cleaner from the electric socket. Evidently I must have found it amusing to confuse her about the reason why the machine kept stopping and starting. My game was interrupted by a huge bright blue-and-red flash of electricity which burned my hands and knocked me across the hallway, leaving every part of my body numb as it decided whether to live or whether to die. Eventually, gradually, it decided to live – but only just. I lost count of the number of adults who took the opportunity to share their view that I had had a miraculous escape. That, as near as I can describe it, was the effect on my mind and body of the three words just spoken by my brother.

Slowly, as the breath began to refill my lungs and the oxygen began to filter back into my bloodstream, I gently took Roger by the cuff of his jacket and led him outside. I picked up the two seats, clattering clumsily against the frame of the door as I unfolded and set them out. My foot caught the step and momentarily I stumbled, nearly falling headlong. My initial shock was even further exacerbated by the momentary jolt of tripping over. I put one chair to one side of the patio and one on the other, half-facing each other. I sat down and gestured for him to sit opposite me.

“Would you like some tea from the flask, Roger?” My throat was tight, and the words were uttered through a strangulated larynx. I rubbed my neck as though to loosen the sinews
which had made it feel constricted. We sat down together while I poured the tea carefully into two enamel mugs, and for a few moments we remained silent, two old men, our lives inextricably intertwined by circumstances, and yet in so many ways there was such distance between us.

Over the next two hours, inch by inch, minute by minute, thought by thought, I slowly extracted from Roger the individual elements which, once rearranged, made up an account of the events of that night well over three decades earlier. It did not come out in the form of a story, nor any kind of narrative with one thing following another. It would not have been possible for Roger to relate it in such a way. Instead, he was able to give me a series of memories and impressions and images which made little sense in themselves but, when taken in the context of what I knew already and could remember myself, allowed me eventually to understand and piece together what had happened. His recall was not linear, and not logical, but what is so strange is that, when all put together, Roger remembered everything so much more clearly than did I.

Roger had understood, it turned out, that Harriet was due back from Newcastle on that Tuesday. Even that was a revelation to me. He had been excited at the prospect of seeing her and secretly had been disappointed when I arranged for him to spend the evening with Terry and his father. He had not known, or certainly had not understood, anything about the turmoil filling my mind regarding Brendan. Even now, as
Roger’s vignettes of recollection were emerging, I was careful not to allow him to realize the impact on events of what he had told me about having seen Harriet and Brendan kissing, and having heard his words: “I love you, Harriet.”

Roger had worked out that I arranged for him to stay at Terry’s house because I wanted to be alone with Harriet, which is the reason he had not complained. But he had also been missing her himself, which was why he had started to become restless at Terry’s house, and had pestered Mr Harries to bring him home.

In fits and starts and with arbitrary and maddening diversions, Roger conveyed how he had told Mr Harries that it would be quite all right to drop him at the front door of the house. We seldom locked the door at the top of the stairs and Roger was quite capable of letting himself into the flat. He had not heard or thought anything untoward until he reached the top landing, at which point he had heard raised voices. Very gently and slowly, he had pushed open the door. Then he paused for a moment, stopping in his tracks, because he could hear a sound he had not heard for many many years. He had remained still and listened for a few minutes, unable to work out what the sound was. Only then had he realized that it was the sound of his younger brother crying.

The glimpses into his mind and thoughts that Roger allowed were enough for me to work out what had followed. The sound had set off in him an instinctive reaction, just as it had in the local streets many years earlier when I was being
bullied by a bigger boy. Now, just as then, Roger had lost control. He had entered the room determined to intervene, only to be confronted by the sight of Harriet and me – her alongside me, apparently calm and in possession – but me sitting and sobbing and in a level of distress that he was not able to describe, and presumably therefore he was still less able to cope with. When he came to speak about this moment, his jaw seemed to seize up, and he struggled to form the words. His instinct to protect me from harm was overwhelming. He had picked up the first thing that came to hand, a wine bottle, and had done what he needed to do in order to take away the thing that seemed to be hurting me. When he turned back to me, it seems, I had passed out, and, seeing that I was no longer apparently suffering, he had left the room, washed, changed into his pyjamas and put himself to bed; which is how and why he was sleeping peacefully when I came to a little later and went into his room.

I will not attempt to convey the whirlwind of thoughts and impulses scrabbling over one another for priority and attention. “But when I woke up, Roger, I had a broken bottle in my hand.” Roger shook his head. He had no explanation.

“I could tell that she was hurting you. I just had to stop her from hurting you.”

Of course it is not possible for me to work out, let alone to express, what I felt and am still feeling. Is it anger? No. How could I feel angry that I had an older brother whose sole instinct was to save me from distress? Relief? Hardly that:
Harriet was still taken from me, still I never got her back and never came close to replacing the part she had played in my life. Bemusement? Probably that. I felt a sensation of profound emptiness, maybe better described as numbness, as I tried to unpick in my brain all of the ramifications and baggage which had resulted from the fact that for all these years, all these decades, I had thought myself to be responsible for the murder of Harriet Maguire.

If someone is a thief – steals something from his friend – but later returns it, is he still a thief? Or if he takes a single object without permission and then takes nothing else for forty years, is it still fair to describe him as a robber? Perhaps not. But once a murderer always a murderer. It is a label which, once attached, can never be detached. Though this dreadful secret has remained within the torment of my own memories, it has been the constant reality accompanying every aspect of my life. A fact of my life. Every moment of every day of every year, I have thought of myself as a killer; someone who has taken another person’s life. Perhaps we might compare it to having a missing limb: something you might eventually learn to live without, but still there will never be a moment of your life in which you do not have a missing part.

Though I could not place hand on heart and claim that Harriet’s murder has been present in every single thought, it would be fair to say that she, and what happened on that night, have been present somewhere in every conscious hour. Her physical beauty has not withered with the passing years,
the tenderness of her touch has gently caressed me through sleep and dreams. But the other side of that same coin is the memory of throwing shovelfuls of soil onto her flawless skin, and of watching her disappear under the earth. All these images are every bit as vivid as I write as they were on the day it all happened. Now, as it turns out, the label which has adhered to me like a tattoo branded into my soul turns out to have been based on a falsehood. It was not I who ended the mortal life of my wife, but a man who – as Harriet herself was the first to acknowledge – would go to any lengths to protect me. He would, and he did.

“You do realize, do you, Roger, that for all these years I thought that it had been me who had killed Harriet?” The expression on his face suggested no proper comprehension of the real import of my question; as though I had asked him to describe the taste of a strawberry.

“I thought you knew I had done it, and have been looking after me.”

“I have been looking after you, Roger,” I said. For a long time I looked at my older brother, my lovely older brother Roger, the friend and companion I have spent my life with, the warmest, most gentle, most loyal and loving person I have ever known. The creator of my universe, and the person who had killed my wife. “I have been looking after you, Roger, but equally, my friend, it seems that you have been looking after me.”

Once again we both sat quietly, each with our own thoughts. I considered the secret lives that we all lead inside our minds,
the thoughts we have which remain unknown to those around us as we go about our business. How I could have managed to live my life, apparently an average and normal sort of guy, and all the while with the concealed belief that I was a killer. And I was at a loss to know how my brother, so close to me and so open in so many ways, could have retained so huge a secret in that space just behind his eyes.

“You must have wondered,” he said at last.

“Wondered? Wondered what?”

“I thought you must have wondered what became of her.”

Of course I had wondered. I had wondered about it many times, and indeed had asked him many times, but had never managed to get an answer. Always he had responded with a total blank, or instantly had changed the subject to something completely unrelated. Now though, my older brother Roger stood up and went inside the shed, emerging only a few seconds later carrying a brown heavy-duty cardboard container, about the size of a large matchbox, which he handed to me. It was damp and discoloured, and had signs of having been delivered by Air Mail. I slid my spectacles into place from their usual resting place on my forehead and screwed up my eyes to read the label, turning it into the light. My mouth shaped the words as I deciphered them. “Fragile. With care. Live specimens. Genus
Osedax
.”

“They are found in the area of Monterey Bay near San Francisco,” said Roger. For a moment I thought we were experiencing another example of Roger changing the subject
completely when confronted with a question he preferred not to deal with. No doubt the expression on my face indicated clearly that I had no idea what he was talking about, or what could be the relevance of his words. Then he spoke again, slowly, distinctly and, not for the first time, in a tone which suggested that he was speaking to an idiot. “I sent off for them just a few days after the last time we saw Harriet. They are the only species of beetle on the planet which eats bones.”

In the space of a few seconds, the intervening years of ignorance and confusion were swept away like the seed heads of a dandelion blown into the wind. I remembered one Sunday in the flat when the two detectives had called unexpectedly, and I had been worried about Roger’s reaction to news that Harriet was missing. All he had seemed to care about on that morning was whether a particular parcel had arrived. I recalled the day when Wallace and Pascoe had turned up at the insect farm, and the alacrity with which Roger had shown them the crate in which Harriet’s body had been buried in soil. All the time he had known that this was her burial ground, but that by that moment there would be no evidence of her. “Amazing creatures,” he was saying, “Seventeen different species, all with no eyes or digestive system, but they land on a skeleton and insert little appendages like roots down into the bone, and then suck out the organic material. After a few days, the whole thing disintegrates and there is literally not a trace left.” He paused again. “They can be handy things, these insect farms.”

Roger remained still for a while, and once again he seemed to be thinking, as I was thinking. I looked at the face I knew so well and, for the ten thousandth time, I tried to imagine what it must be like inside his head. How he might be processing the life-changing words and meanings we had just shared. For a moment I thought he was about to say something more, a further revelation about the death of Harriet. Then he stopped himself and seemed to consider for a few more seconds before he spoke.