Gift Wrapped (28 page)

‘So what happened to the Cleg sisters?' the woman asked, as the sound of children's feet running along the upstairs landing was followed by the closing of doors and silence.

‘They were liquidizing everything the last we heard of them, totally selling up ... their husbands' business interests, their homes ... everything. They are probably moving to the beautiful south. Probably they'll buy a house together and with any luck they'll trip themselves up somehow and we could possibly nail them for something even if it's for only one of the murders – even that would be something, but at the moment there is the annoying sense that they have used the law and the police to become two wealthy women. All we can hope is for a witness to come forward or a new piece of evidence; as it is they seem to have got away with it. But they'll never sleep easily; they will live in fear of the seven a.m. knock on their door.'

‘H.D.O.W.A.O.,' the woman offered.

‘Sorry?' the man queried.

‘Husbands, disposal of, wealth acquisition of,' Louise D'Acre explained. ‘Well, it's gone quiet up there. Shall we go up?'

George Hennessey drained his glass. ‘Yes,' he said, ‘let's go up.'

Christmas Day – 01.35 hours

Antoine Chadid walked slowly home through the small village close to the Belgian border in which he had lived all his life. The sky was cloudless and myriad stars seemed to him to be pinpricking the blackness. The midnight mass had, he felt, uplifted his soul and he enjoyed a profound sense of peace and contentment. As he walked he glanced to the north and he identified the Plough and using the pointers he found the Pole Star. Antoine Chadid's thoughts then turned to Jules, his beloved older brother who was a geologist and who, at that moment, was combining the laying of foundations of his career with a young man's lust for adventure, being at that moment in the great dead heart of Australia where he was working for a company who were drilling for oil. All received geological wisdom, all fossil evidence, Jules had once told him ‘indicates that Australia must be sitting on a vast ocean of oil, and a fortune awaits the company which finds it'. His brother's contract of employment was due to expire in the coming April, whereupon he intended to spend the money he had earned on an extended holiday in Australia and New Zealand and he planned to return home to France when his money was spent, probably, he anticipated, the following October.

It was upon Jules's return that Antoine Chadid would show him the newspaper cutting and the photographs that they had taken the day when, hidden from view, they had been bird watching some three hundred meters from the incident, but had changed the wide-angle lens to the telephoto lens and had captured the image of two women lifting the body of a male into a green and white camper van, and had then also photographed the van as it had driven away, obtaining a clear image of the United Kingdom number plate. When no report of a crime had been published the two brothers had assumed that the man had consumed too much red wine and had been carried by his two female companions into the back of the camper van so that he might sleep, and so they mentioned it to no one and thought no more about it. They were then twelve and thirteen years old.

Antoine Chadid stepped off the road and walked up the pathway to his house as an owl hooted, and another owl answered. Yes, he could do that, there was no need to hurry, there was no urgency. He would allow his brother to rest for a few days upon his return, and then at some quiet moment he would show his brother the news item he had cut out of the newspaper earlier that year, in the midst of the summer, about a man whose body had been found ten years earlier in a ditch in Belgium and who had only just been identified. The British police had appealed for witnesses and had added that the man had been reported as missing to the French police by two women who were believed to be driving a green and white camper van at the time.

Antoine Chadid silently unlocked the door of his small house, so as not to wake up his wife and their infant son. Yes, he thought, yes, he would wait, because he and Jules always did everything together and he knew Jules would want to be part of reporting what they had seen. And after a delay of ten years, what did a further ten months matter?

It would be no time at all.