Unforgotten (6 page)

A steady drizzle was falling as Hugh drove out of the station car park; he negotiated the traffic through a blur of streaked lights. The approach to the motorway was solid, but once clear of it and into the north-eastern suburbs the traffic ran freely and then he was only fifteen minutes from home. Lizzie had called to say her meeting was overrunning and she wouldn’t be back till eight thirty. He would use the time to have a bath. There was something about the London grime that seemed to lie heavily on his flesh, almost to chafe at it, so that he longed to scrub it away. Then he would soak for a while, a glass of Merlot in hand, and mull over the day while he listened for Lizzie’s arrival, the clunk of the front door, the faint clatter of her keys as she dropped them into the dish on the hall table, her familiar call, a long hello sung on a rising note. Having called back, he’d wait for the sound of her steps on the stairs, which, if not actually audible from the echoing bathroom, would resound strongly enough in his imagination. Then the real thing, footfalls on the bedroom carpet, soft but distinct, and the squeeze of happiness he would feel as she appeared in the open doorway. She would bend down to kiss him, then, having stolen a sip of his drink, she would sit on the chair at the end of the bath while they got the measure of each other’s day.

In the long years of their marriage such visions of homecoming had never palled for him. He loved Meadowcroft, the house where they had lived for the past fifteen years, and he loved the pattern of their evenings, the preparations for supper, the
exchange of news over the table, the discussions about the children, Lou now halfway across India on her gap year, Charlie at IT college in Birmingham, and their shifting plans for weekends and holidays. But most of all, he loved coming home to Lizzie. This was the miracle of his existence, that the woman he loved was also his wife, that he’d never been interested in any other.

They lived in what had been a small village until the mid-nineties when the first of a series of utilitarian housing developments had advanced into the surrounding fields, ultimately trebling the population. Now cars clogged the main road and buses ran into the city every hour and noisy teenagers caused trouble on Saturday nights. But they had been lucky, their side of the village was protected by the deep cut of a small river and, half a mile away, the steep rise of the Cotswold Hills. From Meadowcroft’s upper floor you could see rolling fields dotted with sheep and against the skyline the tiny dots of walkers on the ridge path.

If the house with its odd proportions and pebbledash exterior had few pretensions to beauty, its plainness was thoroughly redeemed by a rambling garden of almost an acre, framed by a ring of magnificent trees, ash and beech with a lone lightning-scorched oak. While several of the partners at Dimmock Marsh had migrated to handsome eighteenth-century honey-stone farmhouses in the country proper, complete with stables and tennis courts and four-by-fours, Lizzie and he had never had aspirations to that sort of life. They were content to stay in their solid house in its unfashionable village, perhaps because they had always been happy there.

The rain intensified as he drove through the village and made his turn. The lane that led to Meadowcroft and six other houses narrowed into a single-track road that wandered back in a half circle towards the west and was therefore little used. Hugh accelerated up a slight rise to the first bend, then steadied his speed as the road straightened out. On either side, dripping shrubs and hedgerows gleamed and sparkled in the headlights,
until a patch of darkness to the left marked the gates of a house. Another twenty yards and the porch light of his immediate neighbour twinkled briefly through a tangle of shrubs to the right. Then he was rounding the last curve and coasting towards the gates to Meadowcroft. Some ten years ago, following what the local paper had described as a spate of burglaries, they had installed a burglar alarm and a security light operated by a motion sensor. The spate of burglaries turned out to number just three, the thief was caught soon after, and it wasn’t long before they began to set the alarm erratically, leaving it off altogether in the school holidays when Charlie and Lou and their friends were in and out the whole time. But since the break-in two weeks ago they had started to set it whenever the house was empty, even for half an hour, and last Saturday morning Hugh had propped a ladder against the corner of the house and climbed up to the light to turn up the sensitivity of the sensor. Tonight, however, he was glad of the security light for a rather different reason, because it stayed on for over five minutes after it had been activated and, by looking for the telltale flicker of light through the hedge, he could tell if Lizzie had got home just ahead of him after all. But despite peering in the direction of the house several times he saw no sign of the light and resigned himself to returning to an empty house. Evening meetings were a recent development in Lizzie’s volunteer work with the Citizens Advice, a mark of added responsibility, even if she was too modest to admit it, so his immediate disappointment was balanced by a more general pride.

The curves and kinks of the lane, the rises and undulations of the surface, the glimpses of entrances and porch lights served as subliminal way marks for course and speed. If he thought actively about his progress down the lane it was only in terms of his closeness to home, or occasionally to take a fleeting pleasure in his car, which he enjoyed driving more than any he’d owned before, though it was neither particularly smart nor fast. In every other respect his actions were mechanical. Now, as he turned in through the gate, his mind was partly on the
Deacon case and partly inside the house, planning his progress across the hall to the central-heating thermostat to notch up some extra warmth, to the kitchen to open the wine and check the answering machine, then upstairs to run his bath.

At first he registered the indistinct shape that showed palely against the greater darkness of the garden as a trick of the wet, the refraction and bounce of raindrops and light beams off distant leaves. This impression seemed to be confirmed when in the next instant it vanished. As the headlights continued their sweep across the garden his mind nevertheless tried to make sense of the blurred form, which had been small and vaguely crescent-shaped and close, even attached, to the trunk of a tall ash tree. Too high above the ground to be animal, too low to be another addition to Lizzie’s collection of nesting boxes. Then, as the headlights settled on the house and reflected darkly off the windows, the shape mutated again in his mind’s eye and took on a form that made his pulse leap and his foot stamp on the brake. As the car halted in a scrunch of gravel he was already leaning across the passenger seat to peer out through the streaming side window. Jerking upright again, he looked over his shoulder through the back passenger window into the glittering red curtains thrown out by the brake lights, then, craning further round, peered out through the rear window. Nothing. In his mind’s eye he re-examined the shape. He saw the face again, half turned towards him, the cheek partly hidden by the tree trunk or something dark like a hood. He saw it pull back behind the tree. He was sure it was a face, and yet . . . The shape, whatever it was, had been some distance away and very blurred. Looking again through the side and rear windows, images were two a penny in the kaleidoscopic flashes of refracted light and shifting shadows. He must have been mistaken. Persuading himself to this idea, he straightened in his seat and prepared to drive on. As he put his foot on the accelerator he automatically glanced in the rear-view mirror.

There was no mistake this time: a shadowy figure was loping away through the gates, hood up, a pale sliver of face
visible in the rear lights as the youth cast a furtive eye back over his shoulder.

Hugh jammed the brakes on and, flinging the door open, came out running. The youth must have started sprinting the moment he heard the brakes because by the time Hugh got into the lane he was well ahead, racing away in the direction of the village, his white trainers bobbing like rabbit tails as they faded rapidly into the night. Fired by the heat of the chase, Hugh ran a full thirty yards before pulling up short. He hadn’t the shoes, he hadn’t the breath, and in the pitch dark and splattering rain he hadn’t a cat-in-hell’s chance of spotting anything, let alone a canny youth who was probably hiding in a nearby garden till the coast was clear, or, most likely, jogging away at a leisurely pace in the certain knowledge that Hugh, hampered by age and unfitness, would never be able to catch him.

Nursing a childish exasperation, Hugh tramped back. The rain had soaked his trousers, there seemed to be a leak in his right shoe, and by the time he reached the car a trickle of water had found its way inside his collar. At the house he parked quickly and, unlocking the door, took reassurance from the steady buzz of the alarm’s entry tone, signalling that no one had managed to get in, and from the fact that the security light hadn’t been activated until his own arrival. Either the youth hadn’t had time to get close to the house or he’d been hanging around on the off-chance, hoping for an unlocked door and easy pickings.

Hugh stooped to pick up an envelope from the mat and, seeing the Dimmock Marsh logo in the top corner and his name written in Annaliese’s bold handwriting, chucked it onto the hall table. Then, turning on lights, he went from room to room, checking windows and doors. When he was sure that nothing had been disturbed he drifted back to the kitchen and stood indecisively in the middle of the room, replaying the scene at the gates with a rather more glorious ending in which he caught the youth by the scruff of the neck and twisted his arm up his back until name, address, and purpose of visit had been
extracted. Intent was impossible to prove, of course. Trespass wasn’t even a crime. If he’d called the police they would have told him he was wasting their time. In the topsy-turvy world of political correctness, the only thing that would rouse them into action was a complaint by the youth, who would of course be fully familiar with his rights. A couple of years ago a farmer client of Hugh’s had tackled a lad he’d caught breaking into one of his barns and held him till the police arrived, only to find himself charged with assault, unlawful arrest and false imprisonment, and the youth let off without so much as a caution. The charges were eventually dropped, but not before the farmer had been consumed by worry.

Hugh thought of opening some wine, but instead wandered over to the bay window with its breakfast table and curved window seat, and stared again at the left-hand window. A smudge of putty was the only evidence that the glass had been replaced recently, along with a dribble of watery paint from the glazier’s cursory retouching job. Lizzie had discovered the break-in on her return from work one afternoon. When she’d called to tell Hugh, she’d made light of the whole thing, calling the thief a complete amateur because almost nothing had been taken, apart from the fifty pounds she’d left out for the cleaning lady Mrs Bishop, and some costume jewellery from the bedroom. When he got back that evening they had searched the house together just to be sure, but all the obvious things were still there, the computers and televisions, the clocks and silver christening spoons, the semi-precious objects they had accumulated over the years. The only jewellery of any value, two rings and a necklace, were safe in their hiding place in a bathroom cupboard. The loss of the costume jewellery was a nuisance of course, but also a bit of a blessing, Lizzie insisted, because it would force her to go out and buy something a bit more up to date. There was no question of claiming on the insurance. For one thing the amount of the claim would barely cover the policy excess. For another, there was the matter of the burglar alarm. When Lizzie had failed to mention it on the phone,
Hugh guessed she had forgotten to set it and decided to maintain a diplomatic silence. But when they had finished their search she asked him to sit down. She would have told him before, she said, but she’d been hoping there might be some obvious explanation. The fact was, she had set the alarm that morning but it had failed to go off. They went through the limited range of possibilities: the thief had contrived by some extraordinary gymnastic feat to evade the beams that covered the dining room and hall; the alarm had gone off on cue but somehow managed to re-set itself; Mrs Bishop had been passing and had come in to switch it off, an idea quickly dispelled by Mrs Bishop herself when she came in next morning. With a sense of postponing the inevitable they called out the maintenance firm to check the alarm, though they shared an implicit understanding that no fault would be found. Finally they faced the explanation they had been hoping to avoid from the beginning, that the break-in was somehow connected to the bad old days with Charlie, that while Charlie might be away at college starting a new drug-free life, some of his former friends still had drug habits that required regular financing, friends who might have come to the house and watched Charlie tap the code into the key pad.