The Pull of the Moon (25 page)

Then again, suppose it was someone who really did want to speak to one of us – not even specifically one of us, but the occupier, the home owner. Suppose it was someone who had driven all
the way out here specially and was not easily put off. Then in a flash it came to me that it must be the builders. I gave a little cry of horror. They had come a day too early and if I didn’t
get down there in time they would see Simon’s car parked out front and guess we were in – maybe assume we couldn’t hear the door knocker and go round the back in search of us.

I bundled the towel into a turban round my head and scurried down the stairs, buttoning my shirt as I went, scrambling to reach the front door. Somehow I would have to persuade them to go
away.

When I swung the door open, the two men outside did not look at all like builders. They were wearing dark trousers, pale-coloured shirts and plain navy ties. Not quite smart enough to be the
Mormons. One of them was standing expectantly at the door, but the other had stepped back and was looking speculatively up at the house, as if assessing for repairs. Perhaps they were exceptionally
well-dressed builders.

‘Good morning,’ said the man nearest the door. He flipped open a little card holder and flashed it in my direction – exactly the way I had seen them do it on the television.
‘Sergeant Mathieson, Staffordshire Police. I was hoping for a word with Simon Willis. Is he in?’

I reeled back a step or two into the hall – my face no doubt yelling,
Guilty as charged, get the cuffs on.
Sergeant Mathieson and his colleague were evidently accustomed to
generating this reaction and took absolutely no notice.

‘Simon,’ I stammered. ‘Yes, Simon’s here. He’s in the garden – working in the garden.’ Had I already said too much? Did they
know
what he was
doing out there? Had they guessed? How the hell had they got here so quickly? I wondered if they had brought their own spades to dig Trudie up, or whether they would want to use ours.

Sergeant Mathieson and his colleague exchanged looks. They obviously thought I was a halfwit.

‘Shall we walk around the back and find him?’ The other one spoke for the first time, seeming to address both me and his companion.

‘No, no,’ I said quickly. ‘Please come inside.’ I stood back, waving an encouraging arm as if in training for traffic duty. ‘If you’d like to come in and sit
down, I’ll go out and get him. That would be quicker,’ I added, seeing them hesitate. ‘I know exactly where to find him.’

They stepped inside – probably imagining from the way I’d spoken that the house stood in a vast acreage, within which a hunt for Simon might become a time-consuming jaunt through a
maze of shrubbery. I showed them into the drawing room, which looked much the same as it had on the day of Mrs Ivanisovic’s visit, give or take a bit of dirty crockery. My heart was pounding
so hard I thought they must be able to hear it.

‘I’m sorry about not answering the door,’ I said. ‘I was in the middle of washing my hair.’ I pointed up at the towel.

Sergeant Mathieson was not interested in my hair-dressing arrangements. ‘Do you live here?’ he asked.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Well, yes – I’m staying here – for the summer – as a sort of housekeeper.’ The thought flitted through my mind as I spoke that
officially I was not here at all – I was fruit picking in France. I saw his eyebrows lift as he swept a glance around the room, his eyes meeting those of his colleague at its conclusion. They
were evidently unimpressed with the Katy Mayfield school of housekeeping.

‘It’s not – bad news, is it?’ I fished.

‘No, love, nothing like that. We need to speak to Mr Willis as part of routine enquiries. So if you could just pop out and fetch him . . .’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I’ll get him.’

I walked out of the drawing room and across the hall with all the normality I could muster, but once out of their sight I ‘popped’ through the kitchen with the velocity of a bullet
from a gun, racing across the lawn with my hands on my head in order to prevent my towel from coming adrift.

‘What the hell’s wrong?’ asked Danny, clambering out of the hole and advancing a few steps to meet me.

‘It’s the police,’ I gasped out. ‘The police are here, asking for Simon.’

Simon stared at me. His face went so white that I thought for a moment he was going to pass out.

Danny appeared marginally calmer. ‘Slow down, Katy.’ He placed a gentle hand on my arm. ‘What makes you think it’s the police?’

‘I don’t think. It
is
the police. They showed me a thingy – a warrant card. Sergeant Mathieson of the Staffordshire Police.’ The peculiarity of this suddenly
struck me. ‘We’re not in Staffordshire,’ I said.

Danny turned to Simon. ‘Do you think it’s something to do with the car? Are the tax and insurance up to date?’

‘Of course they are,’ said Simon. ‘Anyway, they wouldn’t send someone all the way from Staffordshire just for that.’

‘Do you suppose Trudie came from Staffordshire?’ I asked.

‘She didn’t,’ said Simon, abruptly. ‘Nowhere near.’

‘It’ll be something to do with uni,’ said Danny.

Simon was staring at him. ‘Rachel Hewitt,’ he said.

‘You can’t be serious,’ said Danny. ‘Why would they come all the way down here about that? You’ve already made a statement.’

‘I don’t see how it can be anything else,’ said Simon. They were talking in low, urgent voices. I was horribly aware that Simon was still standing in the excavation. They had
finished covering the bottom in a layer of sand and were working on the sides now. His feet were only a few inches from Trudie. We had put her there to avoid the attention of the Rachel Hewitt
murder enquiry, but it looked as if the enquiry had caught up with us, all the same. Somewhere above our heads a young jackdaw emitted a raucous cry like laughter. I was getting to hate those
bloody birds.

‘Whatever it is they’ve come about,’ said Danny, ‘you’d better go and talk to them.’

‘Yes,’ I urged. ‘Otherwise they might come out here, looking for you.’

‘There’s nothing for them to see,’ said Danny. ‘But she’s right – you’d better go inside. Ought I to come in as well, d’you think?’

‘I don’t know.’ Simon clambered out of the hole and stood beside me. ‘Maybe not, if they haven’t asked for you. Anyway – we need to keep working if
we’re going to have this ready for when the bloke comes tomorrow.’

When the bloke comes tomorrow. Until a few minutes before I had half forgotten that their speed was dictated by the imminent arrival of someone whose attention was going to be squarely focused
on the place where we had buried Trudie. Feeling sicker than ever, I trailed after Simon as he headed towards the house. While Simon took off his boots and washed his hands at the kitchen sink, I
returned to the drawing room to announce: ‘Simon’s coming now. He’s just washing his hands.’

I had expected the two policemen to be prowling round the room, examining everything, looking for clues; but they were sitting on the sofas, perfectly docile. ‘Would you like a cup of
tea?’ I asked.

‘That’d be nice, love, yeah,’ said Sergeant Mathieson. ‘Milk, no sugar.’

‘Two sugars for me,’ said his companion.

Simon appeared at that moment. He had regained some of his colour, found time to tidy his hair. His clothes looked scruffy – dirty even when compared to the two policemen, but then they
had not been labouring outside. He approached Sergeant Mathieson (who happened to be nearest) with his hand extended: ‘Simon Willis. How can I help you?’

That was the thing with being as well brought up as Simon, I thought. You could carry things off, whereas I was hopping about like a flea in the background, feeling as though I had to contend
with some strange form of Tourette’s – only instead of shouting out swear words, it was things like
She’s in the garden – she’s under the pond.

I remembered my promise of tea. ‘I’ll just go and make the tea,’ I said. They had dealt with the introductions and Simon was about to sit down in the chair nearest the door.
None of them took any notice of me.

I decided to use the best teacups, but as I lifted them out of the kitchen cupboard I remembered who had been the last person to handle them, and this made my hands shake so hard that I almost
dropped a pile of saucers. I had to stand still for a moment or two, gripping the edge of the worktop before I could carry on. I had got as far as putting the kettle on and setting out four cups
and saucers on a tray, before I remembered that we had no milk. I opened and closed cupboards and explored the contents of the pantry shelves in a frantic search for a tin of Marvel – but
there was nothing doing. For a desperate moment I wondered what would be the effect of whitening our tea with salad cream, but then I recalled that we hadn’t got any of that either.

Humiliated, I returned to the drawing room and waited for an appropriate pause in which to break my news.

‘So you can’t think of any reason why it would have been in her room?’ Mathieson was asking.

Simon’s skin tone was now approaching another extreme. Where he had been deathly pale, his cheeks now burned like guilty sirens. ‘No,’ he said. At least his voice was
emphatically confident, as he added: ‘Absolutely none.’

‘And you say you’d missed it sometime before? Possibly in the student common room?’

‘I can’t honestly be sure,’ said Simon. ‘That’s the last time I actually remember that I was going to use it – but – well, I don’t know.
It’s not easy to remember. It wouldn’t have seemed very important at the time. I wouldn’t have missed it unless I actually looked for it, because – you know – I wanted
to use it. I only noticed I hadn’t got it when I was packing up to come home.’

‘How about your room-mate?’

‘I didn’t have one,’ said Simon. ‘I had a room to myself

They noticed me lurking empty-handed in the doorway. ‘I’m ever so sorry, but I’m afraid we’ve got no milk. Would you like some orange squash instead?’

Sergeant Mathieson’s companion emitted a derisive snort. The sergeant himself – who hadn’t seemed all that excited by my offer of tea – now looked distinctly irritated
that it wasn’t forthcoming. ‘Not for me, thanks,’ he said. ‘What about you, Jim? Do you want some orange squash?’ He made the offer sound ridiculous, emphasizing the
words ‘orange squash’ as if he had never heard of anything so ludicrous in his life. His colleague responded with a shake of the head.

‘So . . .’ Mathieson turned back to Simon. ‘You’re staying here for the rest of the holidays, are you?’

‘Until my uncle gets back at the end of August,’ Simon corrected. ‘After that I expect I’ll go back to my parents’ until term starts.’

‘And are the other people here all friends from university?’

‘No,’ I jumped in smartly. ‘I’m at teacher training college, in Birmingham.’

‘How many of you living here?’ asked the other policeman. He said it so casually – as if it wasn’t important at all. Did he notice Simon’s hesitation?

‘Three – just myself, Katy, and our friend Danny, who’s working out in the garden.’

Digging a grave, digging a grave,
my newly diagnosed Tourette’s wanted to shout, but I wouldn’t let it.

Just then a new idea gripped me. Suppose they produced a search warrant. Trudie’s possessions were still scattered all over her bedroom – with perhaps among them evidence of who she
actually was. It wouldn’t take the slowest of Mr Plods two minutes to work it out. There was no possible way we could explain it. Something would have to be done about her things. I stood
there racking my brains for a plausible reason to go upstairs, so that I could gather all Trudie’s stuff together and hide it – but where? And if they found her things all bundled up
under a bed or stuffed into the back of a cupboard, wouldn’t that look even more suspicious? Couldn’t we just say she’d gone out somewhere? But then Simon had already told them
there were only three of us – and three into four lots of clothes won’t go. One wild idea after another. We ought never to have moved her body – in doing so, we had only made
everything appear much, much worse.

‘So . . .’ Sergeant Mathieson was consulting some notes. ‘You don’t think you could have lent it to Rachel Hewitt, then?’

I swallowed hard. At least they appeared to have lost interest in the make-up of our household.

‘No,’ said Simon. ‘I’m sure I would have remembered.’

‘Why?’

‘Because I hardly knew Rachel Hewitt,’ Simon said – a bit crossly, I thought. ‘So I wouldn’t be likely to lend her anything. She wasn’t on the same course as
me and we didn’t live in the same block. I saw her a few times, because our blocks shared a common room – but we used separate kitchens. I don’t think we ever spoke to one
another.’

Sergeant Mathieson looked as if he might be getting cross too. He had been denied his cup of tea and now he wasn’t getting very far with Simon. ‘So you’ve got no idea how your
screwdriver came to be in this girl’s room? You didn’t lend it to her – or anybody else, so far as you can remember – you weren’t on her course and you lived in a
different block. You haven’t got any suggestions at all?’

‘I can hazard a guess, if you want me to,’ said Simon. ‘As I said before, the last time I remember seeing my screwdriver was when I took it down to the common room because
someone wanted the plug on the record player fixed – but when I got down there with it, another guy – Keith, I don’t know his second name – was already mending it. I
didn’t go straight back to my room. I stayed and talked for a bit and I suppose I must have put the screwdriver down and forgotten about it. I assume I went back to my room without it and
later on someone else picked it up – maybe took it back to their room to use it for something and never returned it. It’s like that, I’m afraid. There’s a lot of petty
thieving goes on. Finders keepers and all that. Maybe Rachel took it herself – who knows?’

‘Well, Mr Willis—’ Mathieson stood up and his colleague followed suit – ‘I think that’s all you can help us with – for now. You know where you can find
us – if you think of anything else you want to say.’

Simon stood up politely – although neither he nor Mathieson attempted a smile. I scuttled ahead, opening the front door and holding it for them. Simon didn’t follow us. They walked
straight to their car without looking back, started the engine and drove away. Sergeant Mathieson’s colleague made a much better job of turning their car than Mrs Ivanisovic had.