by Steve Cook
Mary was gone a long time.
They had finished supper at seven and Peter got up, uttered his cheery and habitual post-nosh mantra, “Nice bit o’ fish/lamb/curry/bolognese that, sweetheart. Put the kettle on?” and went to check his emails and phone messages. It was his customary way of avoiding the washing up.
He remembered the time because the antique grandfather clock at the foot of the stairs was in dolorous mid-chime as he crossed the hall from the dining room and he had instinctively checked it against his watch, frowned at it because there was a two-minute discrepancy. The old clock was slow –or his wristwatch was fast –and he was still trying to decide which when he reached the office and sat down at the computer. The tiny detail bothered him: he had a thing about clocks but as “things” went, it was relatively harmless.
Mary had said, “Tea or coffee?” as she gathered up the supper plates, then when he had plumped for tea: “
“Raspberry and lemon or nettle and ginger?” asked his wife, like a walking multi-choice questionnaire. Mary did opinion surveys for a national marketing company – the ideal job, considering her ”thing,” which Peter had never quite been able to put a name to but after twelve years of marriage it irritated the hell out of him.
“You decide.” He told her, overwhelmed by the pressure of decision-making and beginning to wonder why he had said “herbal” in the first place. He didn’t normally; a moment of madness he supposed, a sudden desire for adventure. It gave him a sense of life being out of kilter. Life had been simple once, back in his parents’ day when all you had to do was pick Typhoo or Liptons. They lived in bewildering times.
“You want it in the office or by the TV?”
Bloody hell. Peter got the hell out of there.
He checked his emails and answered the three out of eighty two that were not spam offering him penis enlargement, Viagra or a Filipino wife; took the call he was expecting from one of his drivers who had taken a rig laden with the Murdoch family’s household possessions up to
It was seven twenty by the time he finally knocked off for the day and moved on to Facebook, scrolling down the home page in a futile attempt to find a posting by one of his three hundred and eighty two “friends” that did not involve a report that they had just successfully been to the toilet, acquired a duck for Farmville or just become a gang chieftain in Mafia Wars.
It was a bit early in the evening for there to be all that much activity on Facebook anyhow: he would check it later before he went to bed and people were back from the pub or had given up on the TV.
As it happened, there was just one posting that evening, which caught his attention: he almost missed it among the banalities as he scrolled down the page but his attention was caught by his mother-in-law’s familiar profile picture.
“Has anyone seen Bill?” said the post.
It was timed at
The message had been posted ten minutes earlier.
“Has anyone seen Bill?” was a strange message, particularly as his mother-in-law hardly ever went on Facebook and when she did it was to post recipes.
Annie Bryant’s “thing” was recipes and her hobby was thinking up her own and then endeavouring, usually in vain, to get people to try them. She spent an inordinate amount of time cooking and Peter had the feeling that if her cooker ever broke down, she would expire very shortly thereafter, her life having lost all purpose.
“Has anyone seen Bill?”
Peter blinked at it. Bill was his father-in-law, the gruff and predictably overweight owner of Bryant Farm (turkeys and small industrial units), a man somewhat weighed down by the insurmountable challenges and defeats life had thrown at him, such as marriage, bank managers and income tax, but not so defeated he could not fight back by taking it out on his long-suffering wife.
Peter wondered what that strange post was all about, what could be up in the Bryant household that lay three miles away on the outskirts of Westerbrook?
He checked and found that Annie was still apparently online, so he clicked the appropriate icon, got the “chat” box, typed her a message: “Hi Abbie, wgat’s up?”
He waited for a reply, frowned at his customary typos and cursed keyboard manufacturers everywhere for maliciously manufacturing keyboards that were too small for large haulage contractors’ fingers.
No reply came back. He guessed Annie must have moved away from her computer, probably to baste something or take something out of the oven or argue with her husband, the latter being the “thing” that filled the spare minutes that were not taken up with her primary “thing,” cooking.
The posted message still glared at him, enigmatically. Has anyone seen Bill? It sounded like the old girl had mislaid her husband. How do you mislay a sixteen stone sixty-two-year-old farmer?
He thought of ringing Bryant Farm to check all was well but then thought better of it.
The danger was that it would be Annie rather than Bill who answered the phone. He liked both his in-laws well enough, an affinity that had been ten years in the making and had finally, reluctantly, emerged after a decade of difficult labour and myriad reasons why it should have been strangled with its own umbilical.
Bill was cantankerous and not very big on the social graces but these were superficialities that overlay an inherent decency, the way a charred pie-crust conceals a savoury filling. His manner was somewhat monosyllabic – except when berating his wife – which was an advantage when he answered the phone because calls tended to be brief. Annie was a different kettle of fish entirely. She liked to talk and would tend not to let you go until the oven mercifully pinged, signaling that something required rescue – by which time usually you were thinking either of suicide or taking out a second mortgage to pay the phone bill.
Better get the missus to call her mum, Peter Wells decided, the way one elects to call the cops rather than tackle the mugger personally. Thinking of Mary, he realised she had been gone quite a while. His tea had not appeared, the TV was still not on and the house was quiet. It was now
Something was wrong.
Peter got up and limped through to the kitchen, his left foot having gone to sleep was he was sitting.
Mary was standing at the sink, staring fixedly out of the kitchen window, beyond which dusk was falling upon the yard, parked trucks and outbuildings of what had in a previous incarnation been a farm and was now the “Wells Haulage: A Lovely Mover,” a house-hold removal depot.
Beyond the dark shapes of the sheds and removal trucks lay field and copse, a small lake and the church spire of Westerbrook village, all merging now into the gloaming under a glowering, darkening sky.
Winter was almost on them now, Peter reflected, night was falling early like an impatient curtain upon some jaundiced matinee, the twilight sprinkled already with the scattered lights of desultory candles. The evening’s chill winds and overcast were the first overtures of her grey, dispirited symphony.
“Mary?” Mary did not respond. She might as well have been watching TV for all that she registered his communication. He crossed the tiled floor of the kitchen and, with faint apprehension, touched her on the shoulder.
Mary jumped. Peter jumped because Mary had jumped.
Startlement flashed across her face, gave way to relief as if she was glad to discover him standing there and not a zombie. She touched him on the arm, seeking anchor.
“You frightened the life out of me.” She frowned.
“I came to find out what happened to my cuppa.” He told her lightly, which was not entirely true.
Mary looked down. The tea was made and standing on the work surface, getting cold. “I’ll make you another.” She went to the kettle and switched it on.
“You realise you’re missing What’s my Gerbil?” he said, which was his generic epithet for the inane TV so favoured by his dear wife.
“Oh…” She looked distracted, as if half of her was still focused elsewhere, preoccupied with something. It was faintly creepy.
“What’s up with you? You sick or something?”
“Hmmm?”
“You were staring into space.”
“Was I – ?“ she seemed to take a moment to gather her wits, to get re-orientated in her surroundings. “No…. I was…I thought I heard - saw someone…..” She made a slight motion with her head towards the window and the world beyond.
Peter gazed uneasily out at the yard where the removal trucks and sheds crouched like slumbering mastodons in the gloom; beyond them, the fence that skirted their property and then open meadow rolling up to the tree-line that stirred restlessly in the stiffening wind. Rain was pattering against the pane; it was going to be a stormy night.
“I don’t see anything.” He said, relieved that he didn’t. The drivers and crews had long since parked up and gone home along with the yard staff; the sheds and main gates padlocked. The slightly deaf old Rottweiller they used as a watchdog was sitting by his kennel, vigorously licking his testicles. It was quiet out there, normal. Even so, something stirred the hairs on the nape of his neck.
“Trick of the light I guess….” She poured his still-born tea down the sink and rinsed the cup. “I thought…well I thought I heard someone tap on the window but when I looked there was no-one…..”
“Probably the wind.” He said. The leaves were already falling from the trees and one could easily have brushed against the pain. “Or the rain.”
“Yes, thank you.” Mary replied, somewhat curtly, finding the banality of his “rational explanation” a little irritating, and then added sarcastically, “raindrops with knuckles would explain it.”
She dried the cup and waited for the kettle to re-boil, said: “Anyway I looked because I thought one of the lads must still be in the yard. Got locked in or something. There was no-one there, except something tripped the motion sensors and the yard lights came on.”
“Probably Frankenstein.” Peter suggested, referring to the Rottweiller.
Mary just sighed.
“They’re not on now.”
“Yes I can see that.” she replied, tetchily and her mood bothered him slightly. She was normally an affable if somewhat prosaic woman and tetchiness was not normally one of her “things.”
She put a tea bag in his cup and went to the fridge for the milk, having forgotten he had ticked the “herbal” box. He decided that now was not the time to mention it.
“Anyway…” she continued. “When the yard lights went out again, I saw someone walking in the meadow….”
On a reflex, Peter glanced out of the window again. The meadow lay beyond their boundary fence. It had once been part of the land that had been Wells Farm but when he inherited the farm Peter had sold it off along with the rest of the fields and woods his father had owned so as to raise money for his removal business. It belonged to a neighbouring farmer now, who grazed sheep on it. The meadow sloped upwards to the tree-line and one could see it clearly from the window. It was empty.
“At least, I thought I saw someone. It’s getting dark so I couldn’t be sure. It’s just that…there was something about them, about the way they were walking. They looked…” she searched for the right words, “…agitated. And when I looked hard to try and to make out who it was, they weren’t there anymore. Then while I was pouring your tea, I thought I saw them again going in the other direction, like they were walking back and forth. But I kind of lost them in the shadows.”
“There are always people trespassing in Huntley’s meadow.” He told her, referring to Tom Huntley of Shallowbrook farm who had now owned the land for nearly fifteen years. He turned his head away from the window but then jumped and did a double-take. From the corner of his eye he saw a figure, a tiny dark question mark walking along by the tree-line.
“What?” Mary asked, seeing his reaction.
“You know, there is someone there!” he said. Mary came and stood by him.
“Where?”
Her husband pointed, “Th -. “ But now there was no-one: just a ragged curtain of trees bending in the wind and the undulating grass of the meadow turning rapidly to shadow-on-shadow.
“Bloody hell!” He said, a little too strongly. “Now you’ve got me seeing things!”
They both stood for a moment and looked and looked, but there really was no-one out there in the windy dark, under the rain.
Mary shivered. The kettle boiled and switched itself off, the click of the switch fell into the silence like the rap of a knuckle on glass.
“We really got to stop freaking each other out.” He told her and drew the curtains, a thing which neither of them usually bothered to do. “Let’s go and watch TV.”
Mary shrugged, the tiny, inconsequential incident soon to wink out from memory like a ghost-blip on a radar screen.
That evening however, Peter went and bolted the doors before settling down in front of the television, locking up much earlier than he usually did. A big, strong man though he was, or at least so he presented himself to others, he was more easily unsettled than he would ever admit.
In front of the television, having endured ten minutes of Celebrity Hair, with one hand on his wife’s pleasantly warm thigh and a cup of tea in the other, he suddenly remembered the message that Mary’s Mother had left on Facebook. During the adverts he decided he had better mention it: Mary and Annie were close, the Axis of Evil as he called them, not without affection.
Mary was faintly exasperated. “You didn’t think to mention this minor detail earlier?”
“I got distracted,” he said, “When you started giving me the heebie jeebies in the kitchen.”
“I might have guessed it would be my fault.” She muttered under her breath, removing his hand from her thigh and extricating herself from the sofa’s needy embrace.
Peter sensed an argument coming on and decided discretion was the better part of valour. “I’ll show you the message,” he said, putting his cup on the coffee table and following her through to the office.
There were times, not often, when she reminded him of her father. Bill was a cantankerous man whose few words usually came sharply barbed, especially where his spouse was concerned. In marriage some people were troopers, some heroes, some platoon sergeants, some went AWOL, some just kept their heads down and others were snipers. Bill was of the sniper variety: he didn’t want to be, he just could not help it.
Mary, mercifully, was normally like her mother: a trooper, but on occasion the sniper gene would threaten to break through to the surface and when that happened, Peter would instinctively switch from platoon sergeant to keep-your-head-down mode. Cowardice under fire, he guessed and was inwardly ashamed of it.
In the office, Facebook was still on-screen and he showed her Annie’s message. Mary stared at it with a puzzled frown. According to the “Friends Online” thingy in the left side bar, her mother was still online and in his absence she had replied to Peter’s, “Hi Abbie! Wgat’s up?”
“I’m looking for Bill.” said the message.
Mary did not like the look of that one bit. Apart from anything else, it was an uncharacteristically terse message. And for another thing Annie hardly ever went online. If she wanted to communicate, she picked up the phone – and then normally had great difficulty putting it down again.
Mary glared at her husband, whose tendency to forget to relay important details, remember anniversaries and otherwise drop balls could be exasperating particularly as he reserved all the dropped balls for the home, never work, as if the home did not merit his concentration the way his business did.
She reached over and picked up the phone, dialed her parents’ number. Nobody answered. Thinking she might have misdialed, she tried again. Still nothing. By then she was worried.
“Maybe they’ve gone out.” Peter suggested, helpfully. “Or just not picking up.”
He typed a reply to Annie’s last message, which by the time notation had been left while they were watching TV. “Is eberythingh okay, Annie?”
He waited in vain for a reply, and meanwhile Mary tried her mother’s mobile, left a message to call her back on her voicemail when Annie did not answer. Then she tried Bill’s mobile, thinking he might still be out and about on the farm, attending to some last minute something or other before the dark closed in.
Bill’s mobile was switched off. Mary fretted. It was very unusual for her not to be able to get hold of either of her parents. Sometimes Annie did not pick up when she was cooking but Bill, like Peter and indeed all business men, always had his mobile on. Combine that with the ominous messages Annie had posted and Peter shared his wife’s anxiety.
“You’ll have to drive over there.” Mary told him. “Make sure they’re okay.”
Peter did not particularly want to. The Bryant farm was only three miles way but it meant putting on his boots, unlocking the gates and driving through a night that was by then cold, wet and distempered. After all, his parents-in-law had to be somewhere in the vicinity: the village pub, friends and so forth and it would be a lot easier to let their fingers do the walking (or in this case driving) and ring around. However, he kept his reluctance to himself: it would have been unkind to display anything but an alacrity he did not feel.
So it was that Peter put on his coat and boots and backed the Nissan out of the garage, unlocked the yard gates and drove off with a feeling that his precious down-time was being wasted on a wild goose chase, towards Bryant Farm, through the rain that was by then bucketing down, vindictively.
With the driven rain came twigs and small branches and swirling leaves, shaken loose from the trees that overhung the narrow, twisting country lanes and gusts that occasionally nudged the little Nissan like an invisible hand. Peter wished he had taken the four-wheel-drive instead.
Twenty minutes later he arrived at the Bryants’ farm, negotiating the rutted half-mile long track that served as their driveway with great care. The main house, when he pulled up in the yard, was in darkness, as were the converted barns and outbuildings that Bill rented out as small business units, the turkey sheds and the newish prefabricated buildings that housed the slaughterhouse and processing and packing areas. Everything seemed to crouch in the dark, like slumbering beasts enduring the storm and longing for daylight and for nature’s foul mood to pass.
Motion sensors tripped the yard lights, which temporarily threw back the besieging night and plunged the house, outbuildings and parked trucks and solitary tractor into eerie, preternatural shadows.
In the nearby sheds he could hear the turkeys stirring, disturbed by the sound of his car, or perhaps the wind and gobble-gobbling like some sort of dim-witted avian lynch-mob. Peter hated turkeys: they were ugly, gormless birds with ugly, gormless voices. He was not overly keen on them cooked either, and being as his in-laws made a living from selling their flesh, they ate a hell of a lot of the ruddy things.
By the time he reached the house Peter was wet, fed up and quietly cursing Bill and Annie Bryant. He banged his head on the stupid wind-chimes that hung in the cobwebbed front porch like some sort of booby trap and cursed that too, then cursed the stupid weathered little card that had been pinned to the door frame, evidently since the Reformation, that said “Bell not Working. Please knock loudly.”
Peter knocked loudly, venting his irritation on the door knocker.
Predictably, there was no reply. There was obviously nobody at home and he had known that from the moment he had driven up. There was not a light on anywhere in the house, except the porch light, which was on the same circuit as the yard lights. He could have spared himself getting out of the car and getting wet but he was going through the motions now, for Mary’s sake, so that he could return to base and truthfully report that he had carried out his mission. Being soaked through to the skin would provide the evidence that he had faithfully done his duty.
For good measure he banged on the door again, reluctant to leave the shelter of the porch. When that achieved the same result as the first banging – nothing – he turned his back on the door’s implacable face and cast his eye about the yard. Everything was normal but as deserted as the ancient ruins he and Mary had once visited, perched for reasons known only to the ancient Minoan planning department, high up on some Cretan mountainside.
As he stood there, unmoving, the yard lights went out and there was just a split second as they did so, just before the dark dropped like a leaden curtain, that he thought he saw someone standing by the old tractor, watching him. It was too quick, too subliminal to make out who it was, or even if it was someone at all and not just some trick of the shadow but, startled, he moved quickly so that the motion sensors would trigger the lights again.
There was no-one there. No-one in the yard at all, just the sheds and trucks dead as graveyard sepulchers. But his heart was hammering somewhat and the hairs on his nape were stirring.
Bloody creeping myself out now….He decided, trying in vain to laugh at himself for the sudden, childish urge to get back in his car and drive off.
He called out: “Is anyone there?” and his own voice detonated flatly in the yard, despite the wind, the swish of the rain and the rustle of encroaching trees, like a hand grenade in a monastery.
Nobody called back and he was faintly relieved that they did not.
Peter fought down the impulse to get back in the car and leave and forced himself to go around the house, braving the puddles and sodden overhanging bushes, peering in the windows and trying the doors. Nothing.
At the back of the house there was a light on in the downstairs loo but it had clearly merely been left on by accident. Trying the back door that accessed Annie’s vegetable garden from the kitchen, he found it unlocked so he opened the door and stepped inside.
“Hello! Anyone home? Annie? Bill?” he called out, crossed the kitchen that was warm from the still-glowing coals of Annie’s Aga, stepped into the ramshackle hallway, which smelled of musty carpet and – predictably - turkeys. He called out again and the dark house answered him once more with sullen silence. But there was an atmosphere hanging over the familiar old house that disturbed him: it was if its personality had changed in some intangible way but then again, he was not used to it being empty or silent or plunged in darkness or to being in it without an invitation.
Well they’ve obviously bloody gone out, he muttered to himself under his breath. They had not even locked the back door so they were probably not far. Just popped into the village for something.
For good measure, because he knew he would be asked when he was debriefed, he left the house, crossed the yard again and checked the garage. Sure enough, Bill’s Land Rover was not there.
Well, that confirmed it then, so far as Peter was concerned. Bill and Annie had popped out some time after Annie had left her last message on Facebook, probably while he was driving over here in the Nissan. And probably he had only missed them by minutes.
Disgruntled, he got back in the Nissan and drove off.
As he turned out of the yard onto the long, unmade driveway that had over the years claimed the exhaust system of many a small car, he gave the house one last glance in his rear-view mirror.
Peter slammed on his brakes. The yard lights were still on and by them, in the car’s rain-smeared side mirror, he saw a figure crossing the far end of the yard between two of the outbuildings.
At least he thought he did. He could not be sure so he reversed the car into the yard, put her in first and, with the wheel lock hard on, did a couple of slow circuits, letting his headlamps pass over the buildings and parked vehicles like searchlights.
Had there been someone there or not? He could not make up his mind so he did a third circuit just in case, thinking if Bill or Annie or one of the staff were there, they would show themselves: if there was an intruder, he would scare them off.
He did not, however, get out of the car. Instead he took a moment to call Mary on his mobile.
“They’re not here.” He told her. “Obviously they’ve gone out in the Land Rover.” He decided not to mention that he twice thought he saw someone lurking around, mainly because he was unsure that he actually had.
“You checked the garage?”
“Yes I checked the garage. The Land Rover isn’t there. Anything your end?”
“I rang a few people. Nobody has seen them since six. George said everything was normal when he went home.” George was Bill’s manager, the last to check out at the end of the day. “Bill was locking up and Annie was putting their dinner on the table.”
“Well there you are then. They must have gone out after supper. I’ll swing by the pub on my way back if you like.”
Mary sighed. “Would you mind? I guess I’m getting worked up over nothing.” Peter wondered at what stage in life one’s parents became one’s kids, yet here they were fussing over two mature adults who happened to have left the house. Stupid.
“It’s just that strange message mum posted on Facebook. Otherwise I wouldn’t be worrying.”
“Well maybe she got distracted and only put up half a message or something. Maybe it was some kind of a joke.” Peter innocent-explanation-for-everything Wells told his wife. “You try her mobile again?”
“It goes to voice like before and dad’s is still switched off.” It occurred to Peter then, in a moment of madness, that maybe his in-laws were doing what presumably still came natural even to people of their age and had retired to bed early, overcome by passion, for a spot of hanky panky. He shuddered to think that they might have been upstairs in the bedroom doing the pelvic rumba the whole time and then shuddered some more because now he could not get the picture out of his head.
The pub it is then, he decided. I could do with a pint.
Bill and Annie were not in the pub but some of Peter’s friends were and he got involved in conversation and a game of darts and tarried therein a tad longer than he had intended to.
It was
He was able to report, however, that Bill and Annie were nowhere near the Blacksmiths Arms that evening.
“Mum called my mobile while you were there.” She told him.
“Oh? What did she say?”
“I don’t know. The line was crap. All I got was a lot of crackling and her voice sounded like she was calling from Saturn. Couldn’t make it out. It was her mobile though.”
“Bad signal.” He said. The area was not great for some networks and he guessed the foul weather was not helping. “Well at least we know she’s alive and well and hasn’t fallen down a well or something.”
“Suppose so.”
“My guess is they’ve driven over to
She gave him a frosty look. “My dad? Take my mother out? The last time dad took mum anywhere was driving her to the maternity hospital when she had me!”
“I thought maybe it was her birthday or something…”
“Her birthday.” Annie told him, pointedly. “Is in July.”
“Oh, yeah……”
But she added: “Anyway, I’m glad mum at least tried to call. No doubt she will tell us all about it in the morning.” She glanced at the clock on the mantle shelf: it was nine-forty five. Peter thought she looked tired and was not surprised when she told him she was going to get an early night; she was an early riser in any case and was normally in bed by ten-thirty and asleep by eleven after half an hour with Mills and Boon. “All this excitement has worn me out. Make you a cuppa before I go?”
Peter wondered what state is wife would be in should, God forbid, anything really happen in their lives, declined the cuppa and said “’Night sweetheart.” then kissed her proffered cheek, before settling down to watch some mid-week football on the telly.
Mary went up, leaving her mobile on the glass-topped coffee table and at eleven-thirty it started vibrating, gliding across the glass like a giant bug. Peter, who had been dozing buy then, came to with a start and grabbed the itinerant device before it threw itself lemming-like from the table onto the carpet.
“Hello?”
The line was all crackle and fuzz and somewhere beneath the interference he could hear snatches of what was probably a voice sounding, as Mary had said earlier, like it was coming from Saturn.
“Hello?” Peter said again, speaking very slowly and clearly for the line was terrible. “Is that Annie?” He looked quickly at the display screen and saw that the caller’s number was indeed Annie’s mobile. “Can’t hear you Annie. You’re breaking up. Annie?” But the line had gone abruptly dead.
He put the phone down again. Outside, the night was still foul, with no sign that it was going to lighten up and he thought that wherever Annie was calling from, she had better find a land line because they were not going to get any joy our of her mobile that night. He decided to wait up a bit, in case the house phone did indeed ring, thought about going upstairs and letting his wife know that her mother had tried to call again but knew she would be asleep by now.
He went to the kitchen and made himself some hot chocolate, found some chocolate biscuits, returned to the lounge and put a DVD in the player and settled down to watch a movie. It was not something he normally did in the middle of the week as he had to be up early, the removal business being no game for sluggards, but that night he could not shake off a feeling of unease and knew that he would not be able to sleep. If only for Mary’s sake he wanted to be able to take the call if Annie tried again to get through.
Where could she and Bill be at this time of night? He wondered. They were farmers after all and habitually up at the crack of dawn. Just on the off-chance that they were back home he put the movie on pause and tried their house phone, got not reply and then gave up, was soon absorbed in the reassuring movie-world of cops and mayhem.
For a man who was sure he would not be able to sleep, he dozed off surprisingly quickly and missed all but the first twenty minutes of the movie. At
Someone was banging urgently on the front door.
At this time of the night? He thought. Nothing good comes to a man’s house at two in the morning. He immediately thought of the police, bringing news that his in-laws had been in an accident with the Land Rover – Bill had been known to drive somewhat under the influence at times – or of the truck that was doing the Glasgow run driving back south through the night.
It did not occur to him until much later to wonder how whoever-it-was had got past the locked gates and not bothered to use the intercom.
He rushed into the hall for fear the banging would wake his wife, unbolted the front door and, with the chain still on, opened it a cautious crack and peered out.
Annie Bryant was standing there in the rain, without a coat, looking deathly pale and very distraught. Behind her, dead leaves were swirling in the yard and one of the refuse bins had been blown over and was rolling in the puddles. Of their faithful old watch dog there was no sign. He had not even bothered to bark.
“Have you seen Bill?” Annie asked him without preamble, clutching at the neck of her sodden cardigan, here eyes dark craters in whose shadows there glinted a febrile gleam of despair and incipient madness.
Alarmed, Peter undid the chain and opened the door. “My God Annie, what are you doing out in this? What’s happened? Come in for Christ’s sake!”
He held open the door for her but she made no attempt to enter the house, just stood there, shaking her head, a trembling knot of desperation.
“I’ve got to find Bill.” she told him.
“Where is he?” Peter asked, which he immediately realised was a stupid question. If Annie knew where her husband was, she would not be roaming the night looking for him. “What’s happened to him?”
“He went off.” was all she said. “It wasn’t his fault. Now he’s done something stupid!”
“What wasn’t his fault?” Peter asked, bewildered and alarmed at the same time, then he looked beyond her to the yard and saw no car. “Did you walk all the way here? Look, come in for God’s sake and get warm….” Then he stepped out of the doorway and made a move to take her shoulders and steer her into the house but Annie stepped away from him, with a nimbleness that surprised him.
“No time!” she wailed. “No time! Please! I need you to help me find him!”
“Yes, yes, alright. Calm down.” Peter told her, trying to sound calm and reassuring but he was rattled. He had never seen Annie in such distress, never seen anyone in such distress, and there was something almost preternatural about her mood. He wondered if she was on some kind of medication. He knew plenty who were and almost one-for-one it made them strange.
“Of course I’ll help you Annie. Just let me get my boots and coat.”
“Please hurry, Peter.”
He turned away from the door, took his still-damp coat off the peg, checked the pockets for his car keys with fingers that trembled slightly, thinking he would take the four-by-four this time.
“Have you any idea where –“ he began, but stopped in mid sentence, for turning back to the front door he saw that Annie was no longer there.
He went to the threshold and peered out into the yard. Annie was nowhere in sight. “What the hell?”
“Peter? What’s going on?”
Mary made her husband jump. She was standing on the stairs in her dressing gown, looking bleary and anxious. The commotion had obviously woken her up.
“Your mum’s here.” he told her, struggling into his boots.
“What? Where?”
He peered out into the night again, flapped a futile hand. “She was right here a moment ago. Where the bloody hell did she go?”
Mary was understandably alarmed, rushed down the stairs and brushed past him, went out into the rain and looked around the yard, then was driven back indoors by the elements.
“What’s going on?”
Peter only wished he knew and told his wife so, then told her what Annie had said, finishing: “She looked totally freaked out.”
“Dad’s gone missing?”
“That seemed to be the gist of it. She wasn’t making much sense. I told her I’d help her find him. Can’t have her roaming the countryside….I only turned my back for a second and she’d buggered off.”
“Doesn’t sound like mum…..”
“I don’t care who it sounds like, that’s what she did!” He found his boots and pulled them on, then asked, “Has your dad ever run off before?” conscious that he was speaking about her father as if the old man was a puppy.
“He’s been known to drive off in a huff.” Mary said. “They’re always bickering. You know what they’re like. But where’s he gonna go? Usually he’s down the pub and back home by eleven, having forgotten why he got the hump.”
“Well, whatever.” Peter said, tying up his laces. “You’re mum’s having kittens so I’m going to help her track down the old ferret.”
“I’m coming with you.” Mary said, running up the stairs. “Round my mum up and put her in the car while I get dressed.”
Rounding Annie up was easier said than done because he could not find her, not in the yard or the outbuildings nor, once he had unlocked the gates and run out into the lane, in the road either. By the time Mary appeared dressed for the night, he still had not found her.
“Where is she?”
“Christ knows.” Peter retorted, turning the ignition in the car. “Hop in. It looks like we’re looking for the two of them now….” He backed the car out of the yard.
“What’s the plan?” Mary asked him as he put the car in first and roared off towards Westerbrook.
“I don’t have one. I’ve no idea where either of them would have gone. Any suggestions?” Fifty yards up the road he turned right into
Mary did not have any. It looked like the plan, such as it was, was going to be to drive around all night and hope they spotted them.
“Who are you calling?” Peter asked after a couple of minutes of bouncing along the lane and hoping that Annie at least would appear in his headlights.
“I just tried mum again.” Mary replied, fiddling with her mobile. “No answer.”
“I don’t recall she was carrying her mobile. Try your dad.” Peter decided not to mention the call he had received from Annie’s mobile because that was just too much weirdness for one night.
Mary tried: “Still switched off.” she reported, exasperated.
“Who are you calling now?”
“The police.”
“It hasn’t come to that yet. If they’ve just had a tiff…..”
“Yes it bloody has. There’s a sixty two year old man missing and a sixty one year old woman roaming the dark in her cardigan in a state of distress. God alone knows what lies in back of that!”
Peter had to agree his wife was right. The police could at least be on the alert for stray old people. Did they even have patrols out in this neck of the woods at this time of night? Westerbrook wasn’t exactly crime capital of
It turned out there was just one car patrolling the entire area but they would keep a lookout for the old couple and swing by the house in an hour or two to see if they had returned there. There was not much else the police could do at that stage; it was not as if they were dealing with a missing child. In fact they were not even dealing with missing adults yet because Peter had seen Annie less than five minutes ago. One could not instigate a manhunt every time some neurotic housewife mislaid her husband for a few hours. No doubt the police would think Mary was being somewhat premature with the panic button and Peter could see it from their point of view.
There was nothing for it, they realised, but to drive around and hope they spotted one or both of them. But Annie at least was on foot and if she wandered across the fields or through the woods, there was little chance they would spot her.
They went to the house first. Mary had a key and went in through the front door while Peter checked the outbuildings. The house and everywhere else was still dark and Mary switched on the hall light. Peter heard her calling for her parents as he did a quick scout of the outbuildings, sheds, trucks and refuse skips, trying not to trip or otherwise injure himself on the trailing hoses and cables, water-filled potholes and various bric-a-brac that lay like booby traps in the shadows.
Mary was inside the house a few minutes, during which time upstairs lights went on and off and then she ran out, returning to the car first, a little out of breath. Peter joined her soon after, dripping all over his upholstery.
“Like you said,” she told him. ”Nobody home. I checked upstairs in case dad was asleep.”
“The Land Rover is still out.” Peter reported.
“Mum’s on foot, so even if she headed home, she couldn’t have arrived yet.”
“Well, why don’t you wait in the house, while I drive around and see if I can spot the Land Rover? Meet you back here in a couple of hours.”
Mary thought about that. “I’d rather be out looking than sitting here waiting.”
“If Annie comes back she’ll be cold and wet and in a state. She’ll need you here.” Peter said. “Besides, we don’t gain anything particularly by having two of us driving around instead of one.”
“I should have brought the Nissan.” Mary said. “We could drive home and get it….” Then she changed her mind. “No, no, all right. I’ll wait here. Mum’s got to make her way home, there’s nowhere else for her to go.” She examined her mobile briefly. “Bloody battery’s nearly dead. I’ll use the house phone to call people…..”
With that, she got out of the car. “You’ve got your mobile on you?” she asked him, just before she shut the car door.
He nodded. “I’ll call as soon as I find either of them. Don’t worry sweetheart, we’ll –“
But she had slammed the door and was running to the house.
For the next three hours, Peter drove around Westerbrook, then Finleigh and Copsham the two neighbouring villages, then along the main road almost into
There was no sign of Bill’s Land Rover, no sign of Bill, no sign of Annie. He knew that in any case the odds against him happening upon any of them in a search that random and that limited to the roads, in all that rain and the pitch dark, were considerable. Bill could be parked up somewhere just off the road, Annie could be lying face down in a field dying of exposure and he would pass right by them without seeing them. He might as well have just parked up in one spot and hoped that one of them passed by; the odds were no worse and, for all he knew, might have been better than driving around like a headless chicken.
Around three thirty he did stop once, parking up in a gateway where a five-bar lay across a tractor entrance to some fields and got out of the car. By then, the wind had died somewhat and the rain had eased off. Overhead, the clouds were breaking up, admitting here and there some rivulets of starlight. The storm was passing.
He stood then in the middle of nowhere in the pitch dark under overhanging trees that crouched over the road like sequestering pterodactyls and yelled the names of his in-laws into the night. His tiny voice seemed to be snatched away by the cosmos and he waited in vain for an answering shout but none came, not even his own echo.
He tried a few more times and then gave it up, conscious of how foolish and futile it was. He decided to call Mary at the Bryant house and see if anyone had shown up there, although he was sure she would have rung him if they had.
It was then he discovered his own battery was low. He used his mobile a lot during the day and always, religiously, put it on charge in the evening, right after checking his messages but that evening of all evenings, what with the distractions, he had forgotten. He decided to save what juice he had left. If she hadn’t rung, there had been no development at her end and there had certainly been none at his.
The ruddy thing was about to die. He should switch it off for now to save the battery for when a call was really needed. That meant Mary would not be able to tell him if her parents had returned home but he decided to take the chance: it was three-thirty and if they were not home now, it was not all that likely they would appear in the next hour or so.
So he switched off his phone, got back in the car and continued his headless chicken routine.
By five, the storm had died and the rain had stopped. Grey pre-dawn light was beginning to seep into the sky and the landscape began to coalesce out of the darkness.
He was tired by then, not having had any sleep, and the car was low on petrol. None of the local garages would be open yet so he decided to drive back to base and pick up the spare can of fuel he kept in the garage. Then, he supposed, he would continue his search, although he was mighty fed up with it by then. Still, the approaching daylight gave him a better chance of spotting his quarry and while he was there, he could call Mary on the house phone.
So Peter Bryant headed home. He knew the country lanes like the back of his hand, having grown up in that very house and was there in under ten minutes.
He turned off the road into his driveway, the gates still being open as he and Mary had left them in their haste.
It was then that Annie appeared out of nowhere, seeming to jump out of the hedgerow opposite the gateway and he had to brake hard in mid-turn so as not to hit her.
Annie stood in the road, in the glare of his headlights and shouted something he did not hear so he stuck his head out.
“Where have you been!” Annie shouted at him, her face a mask of frustration and distress, reminding him of that hideous painting everyone admired: “The Scream.”
“Scouring the entire ruddy countryside for you.” He told her. “Where the hell did you run off to? Mary’s having kittens!”
“I’ve been looking for Bill.” Annie replied, looking wet and bedraggled as a half-drowned cat. He saw then that she was shaking and her eyes were not focused upon him at all, as if she was looking down into another universe from which she was unable to extricate her gaze. Peter started to suspect the woman had gone batty, imagined she had chopped Bill up with an axe and then roamed the night like a demented wraith looking for his spirit.
Having witnessed some of the rows she and Bill had, how distempered and cruel could be the old man’s mood, Peter could imagine that Annie might well have snapped.
Bloody hell, Pete old chap. Get a grip! He told himself, wondering if going bonkers was contagious and then remembering it had been a weird and stressful night and he had not slept.
“Well, did you find him?” He asked his mother-in-law, not expecting for a moment she had had more luck than he had.
“Yes.” came the reply. “Almost an hour ago. That’s why I’ve been waiting for you. I need you to help me! Oh Peter, why did you go out? Why did you switch your phone off?”
The last was an odd question, although the oddness did not register right away, for Annie was clearly not carrying a mobile, unless she had tucked it in her knickers. But he let that go, making room for the more pressing question:
“Where is he?”
She turned and pointed up the road to the signposted intersection where the road met
“Where?” Peter could not see anything in the grey half-light but the wooden signpost standing akilter as if the night’s wind had all but blown it over and wooded hills marching down to where the roads joined. Beyond that, the road turned a sharp bend and was lost from view. There was no sign of the Land Rover. He assumed she meant he was further up the lane somewhere.
“Got to hurry, Peter. Please. He’s dying!”
That galvanized Peter somewhat. The old bugger must have run the vehicle off the road somewhere, or had a heart attack and Annie, bless her, had actually found him! Well that explained why she looked half out of her mind.
“Get in!” he told her, then ducked his head back inside the vehicle and reached across the passenger seat to fling open the passenger door. Annie must have moved with the speed of a Ninja, for she was already right there at the door when he opened it. She had barely got into her seat or shut the door before Peter sped off, the forward leap of the car shutting the door for her.
“All right.” he said, accelerating like a maniac. “Show me where he is –“
“Right there!” Annie shouted, pointing. Peter slammed on the brakes. They were at the intersection barely fifty yards from his house.
Annie was pointing to her left, to Stickleback Pond that lay opposite the intersection beyond a hedge. Peter stared, trying to spot the Land Rover. The dawn light was stronger now, enabling him to see details etched eerily on the morning’s grey canvas. He began to notice little details that quickly assembled in his mind, a picture of what had happened.
The signpost stood awry because something clearly had hit it, splitting the main post. There was a gap smashed in the hedge right opposite Wheeler’s Lane that had not been there yesterday, a gap big enough to suggest a vehicle had crashed through it. Wheeler’s Lane approached the intersection where it joined their own lane, which was called
Oh dear God! Had the poor old bugger been lying in his crashed vehicle, sinking into the mud of the pond less than fifty yards from the house the whole time? Had Peter driven right by him in the dark several times?
“Hurry!” Annie urged him.
Peter flung open the door and jumped out of the car, shouted to Annie, “Stay there!” for fear of what sight might be waiting, splashed though puddles, fought through sodden, smashed hedgerow and slithered through mud to the edge of the pond.
The Land Rover was there, half on its side, its front end in the pond. Bill must have been going at quite a lick when he hit that hedge, momentum carrying him deep into the mud and water. The cold, brackish water was right up around the driver’s cab and Peter feared that Bill might have drowned or, having been stuck there for several hours, died of exposure. But Annie seemed to think he was still alive, so he braved the freezing water and the mud that took him up to his calves and waded out to the vehicle, fought his way around to the driver’s side.
The windows were misted up, which told him that at the very least Bill must have been alive and breathing for quite some time, although whether he was still breathing remained to be seen. He wiped the window with a muddy sleeve, cupped his hand against the glass and peered in. He could just make out Bill’s silhouette: the old boy was slumped in his seat, not moving.
Oh Jesus Christ! Peter banged on the window trying to get Bill’s attention, yelled his name, hoping he might stir. Then he thought he saw his head move slightly, thought he might have heard a faint groan. That both encouraged and galvanized Peter, who then tried to yank the door open.
The door budged a few inches, felt like it weighed a ton with the weight of water pressing on it, and then jammed and would budge no further. Peter heaved at it with all his might but could not move it another inch. It was buckled all out of shape by the crash and there were branches against it and Peter realised his strength was not going to shift it. Besides, the exertions were surprisingly tiring and he was already running out of steam
Then he had a brainwave, shouted through the window for Bill to “hang on in there” and that he would be “back in a jiffy.”
He fought his way back to the road and his car, arrived there gasping for breath and hoping he was not going to round off the evening by having a heart attack. He retrieved the car jack from the boot, headed back towards the Land Rover, then changed his mind and went back to the car and retrieved his mobile.
“Hurry!” Annie called. She was still sitting in the front seat, a skinny knot of bedraggled apprehension “Hurry!”
“I’m hurrying!” Peter replied. Praying that the phone still had enough life in it, he stabbed the little keyboard with fingers trembling from cold and exertion, called for the emergency services, all three of them, left terse, breathless details of the accident and a description of where he was and then switched the phone off quickly before it died completely.
Then he went back to the Land Rover, jammed the car jack into the gap between the part-opened door and its frame and tried to use it to force open the door. It was more difficult than he first thought. He had to try and position the jack so that he had space to turn the handle and avoid dropping it in the deep water, whence he might have difficulty finding it again in all the mud that lay beneath.
He had to try not to panic too because all the while he was fumbling around, Bill was dying. Easier said than done. Gradually though, the door creaked open and the more it opened the more purchase and room he had and he began to think he was winning.
But then the jack was extended to its fullest extent and it had not opened the door far enough for him to be able to get in the vehicle or drag Bill out. So he tried heaving on it again, putting all his weight and strength behind it. All he needed was another foot or so.
He was still fighting the door with the last of his ebbing strength when he heard distant sirens, saw the lurid splash of blue lights on the trees. An ambulance screeched up, followed twenty seconds later by a police car. He was amazed they had gotten here so quickly: it could only have been five minutes at most since he called them, although it seemed longer. He guessed that he – or rather Bill - must have gotten lucky and they were in the locality already. Nevertheless, he had never been so glad to see anyone in his life.
The ambulance crew and two police officers waded into the water, shouldered the exhausted Peter aside and, as a team, began to fight the door.
Shattered, Peter sat in the mud at the water’s edge and watched as the joint strength of three men and one woman got the door open. One of the ambulance crew climbed in the vehicle and checked Bill for a pulse and, when he found one, for broken bones.
Peter saw Bill’s head move, heard him mumble something. The ambulance man ducked his head out of the vehicle:
“A bang on the head – cracked skull maybe - and hyperthermia”” he shouted. “No broken bones so far as I can tell. And his legs aren’t trapped.”
“Can we risk moving him?” asked one of the police officers.
“The lesser of two evils right now. If we don’t get him out pronto, the cold will kill him. How long as he been here?”
The question was directed at Peter, who wasn’t quite sure, except that it must have been since yesterday evening or thereabouts.
“Nine or ten hours?” Peter guessed.
“Miracle he’s still alive then. We better move quickly.”
“He’s a tough old bugger.” said one of the police officers, who came to stand by Peter, while his colleague and the ambulance crew got Bill out of the vehicle as quickly as they could, moving him as gently as they could in case there was a broken spine or other injuries that the ambulance man had not been able to discern. There was not enough room for all four of them.
“How about you sir? Are you alright?”
“I’m fine. Just knackered.” Peter said, shivering.
“We’ll get you a blanket in a mo.”
They had Bill out of the vehicle and on to a stretcher. The old man was moaning and mumbling something, but did not appear to be in pain so Peter thought there were probably not any broken bones: just cracked his head and endured a night in freezing water. In fact Peter thought it sounded like Bill was complaining, nagging at the ambulance crew, so he knew the old boy was going to be okay. As the officer had said: a tough old bugger.
They struggled with the stretcher through the mud, the officer who had joined Peter helping his colleagues manhandle it up the slippery slope and through the tangle of broken hedge and shrub to the ambulance. By then the first rays of the sun were beginning to limn the horizon with wintry fire. Overhead, the clouds were dissipating. It was going to be a fine autumnal day.
While they were loading Bill into the ambulance and doing whatever paramedics did with sodden old men who had nearly died of the cold, one of the police officers produced a blanket and wrapped it around Peter’s shoulders.
“You’re Peter Wells?” The officer was a few years older than Peter himself, half a foot taller. His uniform looked pretty ruined and he was breathing heavily from the exertion, his breath steaming in the morning air.
“Yes. I live just down the lane there.”
“And this man is your father-in-law?”
“Yes. William Bryant of Bryant Farm.”
“Your wife reported him missing several hours ago. We were told that you had been out looking for him.”
“And there he was, less than fifty yards from my house the whole time.”
“Have you any idea how all this happened?”
Peter shrugged. “I guess he must have been on the way to see us yesterday evening, overshot the junction at the bottom of
“Well, it’s lucky you found him. Easy to miss in the dark – even in daylight.”
“I didn’t find him.” Peter said. “His wife did.”
“His wife? That’s er,,,,” he flipped open his notebook and consulted it. “…Annie Bryant?”
“Yes.”
The officer gave him a strange look.
“When was that sir?”
“Just before I called it in.
Again the strange look and then, outright suspicion.
“You’re saying that Mrs Bryant was here and took you to the spot?”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying.” Peter retorted, somewhat irritated by the sudden interrogation.
“You can ask her yourself, she’s sitting in my c–“
He turned towards his car. Annie Bryant was no longer there.
“Oh bloody hell, she’s gone again!” he told the officer. “She keeps doing that. Still, she can’t have gone far. Maybe you can look for her? My wife will be frantic and I’m a bit worried about Annie’s mental state….”
“No need.” The officer replied, his manner suddenly cold. It was an odd thing to say but Peter was too tired to think about it. “Sir, are you alright?”
“Just tired. A bit shaken up. It’s been a hell of a night.”
“I’m going to need a statement from you.”
“Can’t it wait? I was hoping to go with Bill in the ambulance. Maybe one of you chaps could take my car back to the house for me? The keys are still in it.”
The officer was peering at him closely. “You should go and get checked out too…Any bangs on the head?”
“No. Why do you ask?”
“Just a precaution. Go in the ambulance with Mr. Bryant and let the doctors have a look at you. My colleague will go with Mr. Bryant and yourself. I’ll take your car home and catch up with you there.”
Peter shrugged. “If you insist. But apart from being covered in crap and short of a night’s sleep, I’m fine.”
“I do insist sir. If you please.” The officer gestured towards the ambulance.
Peter obeyed, said: “Can you call my wife and let her know her dad has been found? My phone -.”
“Already done sir. We were with her at the Bryant farm when the call came through.”
“Ah, that’s explains how you got here so qui-.”
But the officer had walked off to have a quiet, urgent word with one of the ambulance crew and the other police officer just as they were preparing to shut the ambulance doors. All three glanced in Peter’s direction with odd expressions that Peter could not interpret.
The first police officer was on his lapel radio, presumably reporting back to the station that Bill had been found alive, if somewhat worse for wear. The second officer and the female paramedic came over and told him to climb aboard. “We’ll get you checked out too.” the paramedic told him, peering at him closely. “How are you feeling?”
“Knackered.”
“Well, get in quickly, we need to get your dad….”
“Father-in-law.” the police officer corrected.
“…..your father-in-law ….to the hospital pronto. He’s not out of the woods yet.”
Peter hurried to get in the back of the ambulance. The officer climbed in the back with him. The woman slammed the doors shut and raced around to the front of the vehicle, climbed in and drove off as fast as she could without bouncing the cargo around.
In the back, Peter sat on a cot next to the police officer, while the male paramedic tended to his father-in-law, strapping him to his cot, giving him a shot of something and putting an oxygen mask on his face, some kind of thermal blanket over his body to keep him warm, then checking his pulse, carefully examining his head wound, which looked pretty ugly. The whole right side of Bill’s face was one giant purple bruise and the paramedic put Bill in some kind of padded brace thing to stop him moving his head. He was too preoccupied with the injured man to spare much attention for Peter.
“Let me know if you feel woozy at all. Any double vision, headaches” he told Peter over his shoulder and then focused all his attention to administering to his primary patient.
“How’s he looking?” Peter asked.
“He’ll make it. Another half hour though in that water and it would have been a different story. Looks like he cracked his skull too but if that was going to kill him it would have done so by now. He’s a very lucky bloke.”
Bill was half conscious, somewhat delirious, intermittently stirring, getting restless and the paramedic had to get very insistent to get him to lie still.
“Peter?” Bill said suddenly after having seemed to have fallen asleep for a few minutes. The old man opened his eyes and for a moment they seemed more or less lucid.
“I’m right here, Bill.”
“What happened?”
“You came off the road into Stickleback Pond. You were trapped there for a while before we found you. Do you remember any of it? Do you recall how it happened?”
Bill shut his eyes. “No, not much, I was coming to your place I think.” But then his voice trailed off; whether he was searching his memory or had fallen asleep, Peter was not sure.
A few minutes later, as the ambulance was approaching
“Still here Bill.”
“Where am I?”
“In an ambulance. You crashed the Land Rover…”
“I did? That was stupid of me. Yeah, I think I remember. I was in a hurry. I can’t move……” He drifted off again for half a minute and then his eyes opened again, a look of horror crossed his face, as if dreadful memories had just surfaced. Then he burst into tears.
“Oh Peter, I’m so sorry! Tell Mary I’m so sorry! Annie! Oh, Annie!” He became so agitated then that the paramedic gave him another shot to calm him down.
“You’ve nothing to apologise about. It was just an accident.” Peter told him.
“It was all my fault.” Bill said, calmer, but the tears were flowing. “I shouldn’t have said it! I didn’t mean it! God knows I didn’t mean it!”
Peter guessed that the old man’s wits were addled by the blow on his head. He opened his mouth to say more but the paramedic shot him a look and shook his head, an unspoken message that told Peter to keep from saying anything else because it was not helping.
Peter wondered what could have happened between Bill and Annie, wondered what Bill should not have said, what he did not mean, and what was all his fault. He could not quite make sense of it, but guessed perhaps there was no sense to be made of it and Bill was just confused and rambling. Peter hoped the head injury had not permanently addled the old boy’s wits.
He turned to the officer, “Your chaps will let me know the minute you find Mrs. Bryant?” he asked, thinking once more of Annie, gone walkabout again. She should be easier to find now that it was daylight. “My mobile’s just about dead but I can give you my wife’s number…..”
“Sir?”
“Mrs Bryant…” and Peter repeated what he had just said. In the back of his mind he began to wonder why it was necessary for an officer to ride with them. Did they do that with accident victims? But then he remembered Bill’s past convictions for driving under the influence and figured they were probably wanting to test him for alcohol as soon as the medics would allow it.
“We are already in contact with Mrs. Wells sir. She already knows her father has been found…” then the man shifted uncomfortably in his seat, as if he was not sure how to proceeded. “Sir……are you aware of events at the Bryant house?”
“Events? No….I guessed there had been a row or something. Why? Is there something I should know?”
The officer side-stepped the question entirely. “Someone will meet up with you at the hospital and brief you…and take your statement.”
“I’ve already told your colleague……”
“Yes, I know what you told my colleague.” And then more emphatically, in a tone that brooked no argument: “Someone will talk to you at the hospital.”
Peter had a bad feeling. Something was wrong, something was going on that he did not know about. He could not imagine what it could be. Nobody had been murdered; Annie had shown no signs that Bill had been knocking her about; the house had not burned down. Maybe Bill had run someone over on his way to his final rendezvous with the hedge and pond at the bottom of Wheeler’s Lane.
He decided to argue, was beginning to feel a faint stirring of belligerence. “Look, if there is something I should know –“
But the officer put a firm hand on his arm. “We’re just about there.”
The ambulance arrived at the hospital shortly thereafter and backed into the A and E bay. The doors were flung open, Peter and the officer got out and watched while the paramedics adroitly slid the semi-conscious and thoroughly battered Bill out of the ambulance and onto a trolley, then whisked him into the building. A nurse and a doctor appeared from nowhere and homed in on the speeding trolley like seagulls around a freighter, began administering treatment while it and its payload were in full flight. It was impressive stuff, reminding Peter as he and the officer followed at a pace brisk enough to make his overworked muscles protest, that even in poor old semi-conscious and thoroughly battered
The trolley and its gaggle of attendants zoomed into a waiting treatment room and a nurse pointedly closed the doors, barring Peter and the policeman from entry. Peter glanced at his watch. It was
Peter was just wondering what to do next, when a nurse appeared, had a quick look at him, seemed satisfied that he was not about to drop dead and with a strong eastern European accent, instructed him to take a seat in the waiting area. He did as he was told, sat down on a plastic bench among half or dozen or so walking wounded, variously bandaged, bleeding, battered or bonkers. It was amazing how many people managed to get themselves damaged on a Tuesday night in semi-rural
The officer spoke briefly to someone on his lapel radio, listened to instructions, acknowledged and then sat down next to him. They made a damp, bedraggled-looking pair and none too aromatic too, courtesy of the somewhat fetid shallows of Stickleback pond. All Peter wanted at that moment was to go home, get out of his clothes, bathe and sleep but he guessed his duty was to stick around at least until Mary got here.
The policeman got up. “Coffee?” he asked.
“Christ yes. Milk no sugar. I’d get it myself but…” And he held up a hand to show that it was shaking. Then he fished in his pockets for coins but the officer put a hand on his arm.
“My treat.”
When the officer brought back the coffee, Peter asked:
“You say my wife has been notified?”
“She’s on her way, sir. How are you feeling?”
Again, the concern with how he was feeling and a strange, searching look as if he was made of glass and would shatter any second. He felt slightly insulted. All he did was miss some sleep and jump in a pond. Didn’t they know he used to play
Then he glanced up the corridor and saw Mary approaching in the company of a WPC and a man he immediately identified as a plain clothes police officer. Mary looked very distraught, dark rings under her eyes, which were red-rimmed from recent tears.
She rushed into his arms, buried her face on his shoulder and started blubbing. He guessed the stress of the evening had been too much for her but it gave him a chance to wrap his arms around, her pat her shoulder manfully and generally do the stalwart husband bit.
“Peter, I couldn’t get hold of you.” Mary said between sobs, her voice muffled by his big manly shoulder. “Why did you switch your mobile off?”
“I’m sorry sweetheart. I had to save the battery.”
“I was going out of my mind…..”
“Well it’s all right now.” He said and at that she cried some more.
“How can you say that?”
“Well, your dad’s okay. They’re treating him now. I’m sure Annie will turn up soon.”
He felt her stiffen in his arms. She pulled away from him and stared into his face with a look that combined grief with astonishment. Her mouth worked but seemed for a moment to have disengaged from her brain. She glanced at the accompanying officers, who glanced at her and then at Peter. To the officers she said:
“Has no-one told him?”
The officers for a moment seemed nonplussed, glanced at one another, then at the officer who had bought Peter the coffee, then at Peter. Peter was aware that he was living through an “awkward moment” but was not sure why. He sensed though, from their mood that something bad was coming.
“Has no-one told me what?”
Mary’s face crumpled and she sagged back into his arms.
“Oh Peter….My mum died!”
“What?” Peter suddenly felt like he was falling into a deep dark hole. He was attached to Mary’s parents, despite everything – there were not many people he would jump into a stinking, freezing pond for he reckoned - but the shock he felt was because of the suddenness. Annie had been alive and well little more than half an hour earlier. What the hell had happened after she left his car?
“But I…I only saw her…..”
The uniformed P.C. cleared his throat pointedly and there were more exchanged glances and that galvanised the plain-clothes man, who stepped forward and introduced himself.
“I’m D.S. Penhalligan, Mr. Wells.” He put out his hand to shake Peter’s and Peter responded robotically, felt like a small boat that was coming adrift from its moorings. “I’m sure Mrs. Wells would like to see her father, if the medics will allow it…..”
The PC took his cue, “He’s over here. Perhaps we could have a word with the doctors Mrs. Wells….” And he and the WPC gently ushered Mary away, towards the room where Bill was having tubes stuck into him, as if they were coaxing a hostage away from her captor.
“Perhaps you’d like to sit and have a chat, sir.” Penhalligan suggested, in a way that made “have a chat” sound ominous, and ushered him to a quiet corner of the waiting area. He sat Peter down and perched on the plastic seat next to him, in a way that both enabled him to read Peter’s face as they talked and bar his escape if he made a run for it.
“Now sir, suppose you tell me what happened tonight, to the best of your recollection.”
Peter obliged, although his throat was strangely constricted and his mouth barely cooperating, as if he was about to burst into tears.
Penhalligan peered at him closely. “Let me make sure I have understood you Mr. Wells. You are saying that Mrs. Bryant called your house on her mobile some time around ten thirty?”
“Yes. At least it was her mobile. The line was bad so I couldn’t hear.”
“I see. And you say you saw Mrs Bryant at your house around two this morning.”
“Yes.”
“And spoke to her?”
“Yes. She was very distressed, with her husband gone missing.”
“Did anyone else see her?”
“Er…no… My wife came down but Annie had run off by then….”
“I see. That corroborates what your wife told us. She also mentioned that at the time you had this…conversation with Mrs. Bryant, the gates to your yard were padlocked. Is that true?”
“As I recall….yes. We had to unlock them to……” It was beginning to dawn on Peter that something was terribly wrong and the sense of falling into a hole intensified, as did the sense of coming loose from his moorings.
“Any idea then how Mrs. Bryant could have gotten into the yard? Is there some other access?”
“There’s a back gate but my yard foreman locks it when he leaves. We have to be security conscious what with the trucks and items in storage…..”
“An officer returned your car to your house sir and did a quick check. He confirmed that the back gate was locked. In your opinion could Mrs. Bryant have climbed over the fence?”
“Er…..I…normally I’d have to say ‘no.’ But who knows what people are capable of under extreme stress?”
“Indeed.” Penhalligan said, writing in his notebook. “And you saw Mrs. Bryant later? Around five?”
“Yes. She showed me where Bill had crashed the Land Rover. If it had not been for her, I’d not have found him in time. As far as I’m concerned, she saved her husband’s life.”
Penhalligan seemed perplexed, as if he did not know what to make of Peter’s story but it was clear he was having trouble believing a word of what he had been told.
“And you insist that this is what happened?”
“Of course! Look, I’m not sure why I’m getting the third degree here. Am I under suspicion or something?”
“We’re still trying to piece together what happened to Mr. and Mrs. Bryant.” Penhalligan replied non-committaly, then added “We will be questioning Mr. Bryant as soon as he’s in a fit state and may be charging him with murder or manslaughter, depending on the results of the autopsy. It’s not clear yet how Mrs. Bryant died but I have to tell you that what you have just told me isn’t helping…..”
Peter shook his head with helpless bewilderment, thinking Penhalligan must have lost his marbles. “How could Bill have killed Annie? He was in the ruddy ambulance when she died!”
Penhalligan cleared his throat, shifted uneasily in his seat. “That’s just it, sir. He wasn’t. According to our preliminary findings Mrs. Bryant died around seven yesterday evening. At home. Your wife found her in the lounge around three-thirty this morning, after you dropped her off.
It was then, as what Penhalligan told him penetrated the fog that had descended on his thoughts, that Peter did the only thing he could: he went cold, then numb, then passed out.
It took several days to piece together what had happened that Tuesday night- Wednesday morning and none of it made any sense whatever to Peter, who remained convinced that he had seen Annie Bryant large as life twice after everybody else insisted she was already dead.
In the end everybody else was so adamant and in agreement with their version of events that Peter concluded that he must have gone mad. Indeed he quickly began to feel as if he had lost touch with reality. In the end his own memories, so contradicted by everybody else’s, began to seem unreal and dreamlike and his self-confidence took an almighty jolt, so much so that his business suffered because he lost much of the decisiveness and self-belief upon which success in any business so much depends.
In the end it was Mary who came to his rescue. So far as she was concerned if Peter said something happened, it happened and it kind of helped her through her mother’s death, and helped her help her father through his prolonged grief and self recrimination, to believe that somehow her mother’s spirit had managed to save her husband’s life from beyond the grave.
Maybe she was believing Peter because she wanted to believe him but Peter did not care. That she believed him and did not treat him as if he was weak in the head was all that mattered.
Mary had a dimension that surprised Peter. She had always seemed a prosaic and unimaginative woman but when it came right down to it she took on board with some alacrity the notion that “there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your philosophy.” Indeed she eagerly embraced it. If it helped get his wife through a difficult time, then Peter guessed that his so-called “delusion,” the police questioning, the psych evaluations, the funny looks, and endless discussions about what had happened that night had been worth it.
From Mary’s perspective what had happened that night after Peter left her at Bryant Farm to go scouring the countryside was simple and tragic.
When she ran through the house calling for her parents she had not checked all the rooms, merely rushed upstairs to the bedroom to see if they were in bed when only silence greeted her calls. She had switched the lights on in the hall and landing and kitchen but not done so in the lounge, dining room or utility room, having been pretty much convinced that they were not at home. It never entered her head that either of them might actually be dead or dying.
After Peter left she went to the kitchen and made herself a cup of tea, then settled down to wait, wanting to be by the house phone which was perched on a sill by the back door.
Around three thirty, by now tired and bored she went through to the lounge to search out something to read and it was then, when she switched on the lights, that she found her mother’s body sprawled on the floor between the settee and the T.V.
It just so happened that Annie had fallen in a place that meant her body could not be seen unless you actually entered the room. Mary knew the moment she saw her mother that Annie was dead. She was quite blue and when Mary touched her, stone cold. Her mobile phone was tucked into her apron and Mary, by then utterly hysterical, used it to call for the ambulance
It gave her nightmares for years to think that all the while she was sitting in the kitchen sipping tea, her mother’s cooling body was lying less than twenty feet away. It was a memory she never did manage to quite get out of her head, even when medical reports confirmed that Annie was dead long before she arrived at the house.
And she had been dead for hours when Peter had come looking for her earlier, entering the house via the unlocked back door and going into the hall and calling out. There was nothing Peter could have done to save her even then, had he found her, although he gave himself a hard time for not having looked more thoroughly. If nothing else it might have saved him the madness of later “impossible” events – although, perhaps then he never would have found Bill in time and Mary would have lost both her parents that evening.
Poor Bill’s experience that evening was perhaps even more harrowing, although it was several days before he was well enough to give his account.
After the staff went home, he and Annie had settled down for dinner. Bill was in one of the black, foul moods that descended upon him frequently, which he inwardly hated but which he could not control.
As always, his poor wife received the brunt of his venom. He never understood why he felt the compulsion to be so mean to Annie, for he loved her dearly, but it was like there was a demon inside him that took control and he found himself carping and criticizing and then blowing up at the most innocuous things his wife said. Annie for her part never had the sense not to argue back and indeed had a little demon inside her too, one that compelled her to push his buttons: quietly, innocently stoking the fires of his distemper. She did not know why she did it, for she loved Bill as much as he loved her.
Bill did not know how the argument started that night or even what it was about, something about the TV programs perhaps, for their squabble had moved to the lounge by then, but etched on his memory forever was the moment he turned to his wife and yelled at her:
“For God’s sake, woman I wish you would ruddy well drop dead!”
And Annie did.
Annie Bryant simply keeled over right in front of him and crashed lifeless to the living-room rug.
Bill tried for several minutes to revive his wife, tried to give her CPR the way he had seen it done on the telly, tried talking to her, pleading with her, even yelling at her, then cradling her lifeless body in his arms as if trying to suffused the life of his own flesh into hers.
In his grief, overcome by guilt, Bill was convinced he had killed Annie, the balance of his mind having momentarily fled. He was certain he had somehow murdered her and he panicked.
Instead of calling for an ambulance he ran out of the house via the back door and drove away in the Land Rover, his one thought was to get to Mary and Peter’s house, to tell them what had happened, to find succour and help. Peter and Mary would know what to do.
Thus it was that, driving like a man possessed he came down
He recalled too, waking up at one point to find Annie sitting beside him, Annie young and pretty as the day he first met her, stroking his hair, saying, “Chin up Bill, you silly old bugger. I’ll get you out of this….”
The coroner’s report confirmed that Annie had died of a massive stroke, pure and simple. There was nothing whatever to suggest foul play. It was just the cruelest of ironies that the stroke happened right at the moment that her husband told her to drop dead.
No charges were ever brought against Bill, not even for running off and failing to call the ambulance for it was pretty certain it would have made no difference to Annie’s fate and the local constabulary decided Bill had suffered enough.
As for Peter’s version of events, no-one knew quite what to make of them and so they did the only thing they could do: filed them away and forgot about them. Peter was advised to see a psychiatrist, which he did merely so he could prove to one and all that he did not have a screw loose.
The psychiatrist was a dead loss and in Peter’s opinion, which he often expressed loudly – but not in the presence of the psychiatrist – the man was a “charlatan pretending to be a doctor.” When given a prescription for anti depressants, he obligingly took the piece of paper and politely thanked the idiot, then later threw it in a bin. After that, he failed to turn up for his appointments and psychiatrist evidently lost interest and went looking for another victim.
As he told Mary: “If some poor bugger is depressed what’s the point of drugging him with something that lists ‘depression’ among its side-effects?”
Along with Mary, Bill actually helped Peter get through his own trauma and Peter in his turn helped Bill. Bill after all had seen Annie sitting beside him while he was trapped and dying in the crashed Land Rover and he believed utterly that Peter had seen her too. It helped him through his grief and self-blame to know that Annie did not blame him and that, far from it, had gone through so much trouble to roam the countryside looking for him, then leading Peter to him, before moving on to wherever it is that the departed go.
Peter and Bill became close after that and Bill changed. He became mellow, even genial and his habitual ill-temper seemed to have vanished, as if the experience or the realization of how much love was possible beneath the charred pie crust of the human personality had brought about a seismic shift in his psyche. Or perhaps he had remade himself into a living monument to the woman he loved, to become the kind of man that Annie Bryant deserved: he owed her that much at least.
He took to text messaging on his mobile too, something he never used to do and was frequently seen playing with the ruddy thing like a teenager. They could never get out of him who exactly he was messaging. Mary began to suspect that her dad had a girlfriend.
One evening, though, a year after Annie’s death, Bill came over to the Wells house for dinner, something which had become by then a regular occurrence because Bill had discovered a love of human company and did not much like spending the evenings at home, alone.
Some time around seven, while Mary was doing the washing up and Peter was in the office checking his emails and putting his mobile on charge – he never ever forgot the latter again- Bill sat on the sofa in the lounge busily and happily, messaging someone.
When Peter finished for the day and joined him on the settee, Bill turned to him, smiled and winked. Then whispered:
“Annie says, hi!”
END
