Chain Reaction (40 page)

But Vernon is no longer listening. Fear and cunning have taken him over, and self-preservation is all he can see. He liked Jody. He doubts if that boy would rape anyone and yet they share one terrible secret. Life is hard and life is unfair and if opportunity drops into your lap you’d be a fool not to take it. He is shocked to discover how easy it is to betray a stranger. To save your own skin. Since the murder, what does it matter how shabby his conscience or his behaviour? He’s doomed to hell anyway, the flames are already licking his ankles and he’s loathsome in the sight of God. He is already working out in his mind how he can implicate Jody. From what he can gather, the boy is finished anyway, and probably he is guilty of rape and the mother can’t bring herself to see it. That’s perfectly natural, he would be the same. How simple it would be for the police to get hold of the wrong end of the stick. If the boy is going to be locked up for the rest of his life, then he might as well take the can for Joy’s murder, too. He can deny it as much as he likes. Nobody will believe him.

When the police return that afternoon Vernon emphasises in his statement just how peculiar Jody was. ‘Very twitchy. Of course, I understand why, now that I know he was on the run. Very interested in my wife, which was odd. Kept asking questions about her—and the strangest part of all was that the boy turned up here on my doorstep soon after Joy went missing. He gave me no other reason than that his family were about to move in here. I sensed there was something wrong with him. I was nervous, quite frankly, suspecting he might be one of those young schizophrenics let loose from hospital. That’s why I allowed him to stay. I was concerned what his reaction might be if I sent him packing.’

‘That’s interesting, sir,’ says the policeman, scribbling. ‘But you had no idea that he had escaped from remand, accused of rape?’

Vernon shakes his head. ‘Of course not, no. I would have found a way to inform you if I had suspected anything like that. I have always been a most law-abiding man.’

‘Quite so.’

‘To tell you the truth, Jody Middleton terrified me. There was something sinister about him.’

‘He is a thoroughly bad lot, according to my information from Lancashire.’

‘Capable of anything, I would have said.’

‘You are probably right. A bad apple.’

‘It’s his family I feel sorry for.’

‘I wouldn’t waste your sympathy,’ said the tall lanky policeman, bending almost double on the sofa to prop his pad on his long bony lap. ‘It’s normally the parents’ fault. Too damn soft.’

‘I agree with you absolutely,’ says Vernon. ‘You see enough of it round here.’

‘You see it everywhere these days, I’m afraid, sir.’

Vernon hesitates slightly. He looks up sadly at the lean man in blue. ‘At what point would you advise me to report the disappearance of my wife?’

‘How long has she been missing now, sir?’

‘Five days. I dropped her off at the shops after a slight argument and haven’t seen her since.’

‘Might I ask what the argument was about?’

‘Yes, it was about which property we ought to buy. She favoured an old ruin out on the moor, I tried to persuade her that the flat would be more sensible. Funnily enough it’s the self-same flat in Swallowbridge which is featuring so highly in the public eye at the moment. The siege.’

‘Oh? Of course, I think you mentioned that earlier. That’s what brought the photographer round.’

Vernon nods. ‘Exactly. But Joy had her heart set on a cottage called
Hacienda.
I did wonder, actually, if she might have called there… She’s been behaving so strangely lately.’

The policeman nods knowingly. ‘We can certainly check that out, Mr Marsh, if you would give me the directions.’

‘I can do better than that.’ Vernon gets up and retrieves the estate agent’s particulars from the drawer. ‘It looks quite nice in that picture but really it would have cost a fortune to make it habitable, and my wife—’

‘I know what they’re like, women—romantics, most of them. I see it’s even got its own well.’

‘A hole in the ground, no more than that, probably. Character, they call it.’

To Vernon’s relief the policeman finally gets up to go. ‘Well, you leave this all with me and as I said, someone will check it out just in case Mrs Marsh decided to pay the cottage a visit, although how she would reach it in the middle of nowhere is quite another matter.’

‘A lift?’ queries Vernon. ‘Not difficult at this time of year when you’ve got all the holidaymakers crisscrossing all over the place.’

‘That’s always possible,’ says the constable, straightening his helmet in the mirror by the door. ‘Or there’s probably even an odd bus once or twice a week. The driver would probably remember.’

The driver will not remember. Nobody will remember giving Joy a lift to
Hacienda
five days hence but that won’t matter; given the other evidence, that won’t be of vital importance. But sure as eggs are eggs, fugitive or not, Jody Middleton will have left clues back at that cottage—discarded Coke cans, packaging, footprints and fingerprints, advertising the fact that he was there. Whereas Vernon himself left no sign at all. Any tyre-marks the car might have left can be passed off as those they made the first time they visited
Hacienda
together. The offending iron has been sold on in the shop, cleaned and done up as new, and an excellent second-hand one now sits on the shelf in Joy’s cleaning cupboard.

She came upon him while he was hiding there, didn’t she? He acted out of sheer panic.

No, Vernon rubs his hands. Not such a failure after all. Joy would have been proud of him. Soon they will not only be after the unfortunate Jody Middleton for rape,
but for murder as well.

N
EVER MIND ABOUT JODY,
Babs Middleton feels like she’s on the run from something herself. Speaking on the telephone to Vernon Marsh who has seen Jody so recently, even had him staying in his house, has lit the feverish flame of protective motherhood once again at the thought of her child reduced to begging for food and sanctuary at the door of total strangers. They should never have turned him away from home when he needed them most. Although she was in agreement at the time, Babs blames Len for that, and the attitude of Dawn and Cindy. If they were more sympathetic towards their persecuted brother she herself would not have felt the need to defend him against them.

Babs is angry. She is angry towards the police who are out to get him, the judicial system which is out to stitch him up, Janice Plunket and her unimaginative family who are determined to exact an unjust revenge, but most of all she is angry at Len and the girls who seem relieved to be shot of him.

The only real sympathy she has been given of late has been from an unexpected source, Vernon Marsh at Joyvern. He seemed to understand a degree of the sort of despair she is going through. He might have more news of Jody than he was willing to give on the telephone. He has seen her beloved son, spoken with him, spent time with him—perhaps there is something more he can tell her? She knows these cravings are quite illogical but she feels compelled to go down to Milton in Devon, just in case something might happen. Jody might get in touch with Vernon again, and Babs wants to be there in case. She fights the great hope within her, knowing how unlikely it is.

She shivers and suffers not knowing his whereabouts.

‘Don’t be silly, pet.’ Len sees right through her arguments into the neurosis within. ‘There’s no need for you to be down there. There’ll be plenty of time to measure and match once we move; we’re in no hurry for that sort of thing.’ And then he looks at her sadly, in the patronising way she is getting used to. ‘You won’t find him, you know. And what would be the use if you did?’

‘I’m not discussing the matter with you any more, Lenny. You don’t understand a mother’s feelings and that’s all there is to it. I am going down there for a couple of days to stay at the Old Mill and I’ve already booked so don’t try to dissuade me.’

‘Dawn and Cindy might quite like to come. It’d give them something different to do, choosing some colour schemes for their new bedrooms. Why don’t you ask them? You could have fun with some company, go round the shops, eat out, a day on the beach, take some time off for yourself.’

Babs looks at him sharply, her brain almost too disorganised to find the appropriate words. ‘I do not want Dawn and Cindy with me just in case Jody should get in contact. You know that, Len, so what are you really trying to do? Keep Jody from me, that’s the truth, isn’t it?’

His is a heavier sigh than hers had been. He pities her; but he finds it increasingly difficult to resist the longing to shake her. In a score of ways Lenny has tried to protect Babs from these debilitating hopes of hers, tried to help her accept the reality that Jody is probably lost to her for a long, long time, soothing her in her nervousness, ministering to her physical needs but he knows he has lost the battle. She seems intent on self-torture. None of them are enough for her. The sunshine has gone out of her life. Dawn and Cindy have tried in their own ways, too, helping round the house, bringing back videos they thought might distract her, using the recipe book to make interesting meals, all to no avail. Babs is possessed with the image of her son as an innocent, much-maligned little boy who still needs her in the way that he used to. And although this is true, she will not see that it must be left to the process of law and that by interfering she can only damage his chances further. Jody might be temporarily free but Babs is imprisoned and driven. There seems to be some sickness in her that only Jody’s need can cure. Take it away and it starts afresh, the buried conflicts, draining all energy. It is awful.
Awful.
There is now a wide gulf between him and his daughters and the restless Babs, so often overwrought with worry, dominated by an all-pervasive urge to find and protect the missing Jody, hungry, lonely, unloved and unsatisfied.

Their life of persecution goes on in the Close, more intermittent now, but bad enough all the same. The odd anonymous letter comes with horrible regularity through the door, as well as the occasional abusive phone call; the standoffishness of the neighbours and the nasty whispering in the street goes on. Dawn and Cindy dare not return to school and a teacher comes in twice a week to give them work. But at least the police have relaxed their vigilance now they know that Jody has left the area, and the Middletons don’t feel quite so much like fish in a bowl. The sooner they move house the better, and thank God everything seems to be working to plan. The Smedleys, although hard to contact according to their solicitor, are still pressing ahead with the purchase of Penmore House. Len will be sad to leave it, although since Jody’s arrest there has been a shadow cast over it. No matter how hard Babs and he try to make a happy home again, nothing they do can override the unjust fate of their first-born child.

If there was anything to be done to help Jody, anything in this world, Len would be doing it. How many more times can he try to convince Babs of this simple fact?

Babs flees to Devon, in pursuit of wholeness and fulfilment.

She has never really thought about her new home before. She hardly took it in when she came to view with Lenny, Dawn and Cindy. Now she must take notes of the details and concentrate, make out she is interested when she is not. It’s a small house, and lacking in character, with an empty feel about it although it is full of matching furniture, mix and match, and the neighbours are very close. There’s not much protection or natural cover in the form of fully grown trees or hedges; it seems that some people prefer the open-plan idea. How on earth will she manage to fit everything into this minute but squeaky clean kitchen?

‘It is good of you to let me come. It must be a nuisance, especially when you are so concerned about your wife.’

‘No problem,’ says the courteous and helpful Vernon Marsh, with a bright unconcern. Such a nice, gentle man, rather red-faced and overweight, but quite prepared to hold the other end of the tape when she needs him to. ‘These things have to be done.’

She smiles at him disarmingly. ‘Did Jody say anything else?’

He must be getting fed up with her unending questions by now.

Vernon thinks harder. ‘No, as I told you already, he really didn’t say much. He asked lots of questions about my wife, looked at all the photographs with very great interest—that surprised me, I must say. But I am absolutely positive he made no mention of where he was going. I didn’t even know he was leaving, you see. He left some time in the night after the photograph had been taken.’

‘And you don’t know where he was staying before he decided to come here?’

‘No, well, he’d only just arrived down here. He can only have spent one night in the open, camping, I suppose. His legs and arms were burnt. That would be the effect of the cycling.’

They are sitting discussing Jody’s visit, nibbling biscuits and drinking coffee, when a serious knock which is obviously not just a chatty neighbour popping in, sounds at the door. Vernon jumps up to answer it.

He shows the two official-looking men, who are wearing jackets and ties on this warm day, into the kitchen where Babs is sitting. She knows at once they are police. She’s had enough dealings with them recently to know a policeman, plain-clothed or not, when she sees one.

Neither visitor enquires as to her identity; clearly they have more important matters on their minds. ‘We have some very sad and rather shocking news, I’m afraid, Mr Marsh,’ says the front one grimly. ‘Perhaps you might like to sit down.’

Vernon sits down heavily at the kitchen table. With his cuff he clumsily knocks the teaspoon from his saucer on to the cloth and even at this crucial moment he is trained well enough to pick it up and wipe it.

‘I think we have found the body of your wife.’

An unnatural hush. And that short statement wraps the room in a freezing blanket.

Vernon jerks, props himself up on one arm. The other hand is clenched beside him. ‘The body of my wife?’