The Living and the Dead in Winsford (17 page)

I suspected that Castor and I would be spending several hours with Margaret Allen – she didn’t leave out many details: but as luck would have it there was a hundred-year gap in the story. After Selwyn Byrnescotte’s tragic end, the house stood empty until about 1920 when it was bought by a Londoner who needed somewhere for himself and his household to spend the night while he was out hunting red deer on Exmoor. It was eventually taken over by his son for the same purpose, but after this unfortunate young man – his name was Ralph deBries and he seemed to be of Belgian extraction as far as one could make out – had also committed suicide there, this time with the aid of tablets, the house was sold at auction in 1958 and bought by the father of the current owner, Jeremy Tawking.

Anyway, nobody had died in the house since 1958 – Margaret Allen was careful to stress that fact – and no doubt over two hundred people had been living there as Mr Tawking had been renting it out for at least twenty years. Usually by the week during the summer months, of course, but Margaret recalled that somebody had been living there last winter as well. In any case, it seemed to be well built and insulated, and was able to withstand the winter storms.

I was able to confirm that this was the case. Even if the really hard winter storms hadn’t actually occurred yet – an assertion that Margaret agreed with. The worst usually came in January and February.

I thanked her for the tea and the information, and reaffirmed that Castor and I would be turning up again very shortly. Margaret said she suspected she had been too negative about Darne Lodge in some respects, and apologized for going on so long.

We said our goodbyes and left. The walk back up to Winsford Hill turned out to be quite difficult, with various gates, herds of bleating sheep and glaring cattle, and when we eventually came up onto the moor itself we had the wind directly against us all the way to the edge of the Punchbowl, which I could now see, looking at it from this direction, really did look like a crater. Or like the after-effects of a gigantic meteor that had crashed down several thousands of years ago and left behind a hole a hundred metres deep and roughly twice that wide.

Nevertheless, we eventually got home – both Castor and I were equally muddy and exhausted – and even as I opened the garden gate I could see that there was a dead pheasant lying outside the front door.

A magnificent male bird, lying peacefully on its side with its wings and its tail feathers in excellent shape and apparently uninjured.

Apart from the fact that it was dead.

Then Castor did something totally unexpected. He walked slowly up to the bird, sniffed at it from various angles, then carefully grasped it by the head with his teeth. Dragged it gently to one side, just a metre or so, then left it lying there next to the wall.

Then he looked at me, as if to say that it was okay to go in now.

19

In the last-but-one chat show I ever hosted, something happened that I believe was unique in the history of Swedish television.

The theme was quite serious: people who had vanished.

And how family and friends cope with a situation in which somebody has disappeared, and nobody knows what happened. Not even if the missing person is alive or dead.

We had several guests. A psychologist, a woman from the public registration office, a senior police officer who explained how the police deal with missing persons, and three people who had been affected. The latter trio comprised a couple from Västerås whose teenage daughter had been missing without trace for two years, and an elderly woman from Norrland who had reported her husband missing twenty-five years ago.

And there were two of us presenting the programme, to make sure everything went without a hitch. In other words, a normal and carefully planned set-up for twenty-eight minutes of off-peak broadcasting.

The woman from Norrland arrived quite late, just as we had planned. All the others had had their say, and the female half of the pair from Västerås had cried a little. I now turned to Alice, as the new woman was called, and asked her to tell her story. Who was the person who had disappeared from her life?

‘Ragnar, my husband,’ she said curtly.

‘And that was quite a long time ago, I believe?’ I said.

‘Twenty-five years ago,’ said Alice.

‘And what were the circumstances when he went missing?’

‘Nothing out of the ordinary. It was in the autumn, shortly before the elk-hunting began.’

‘And he disappeared from your home, is that right?’

‘Yes.’

At this point my male colleague stepped in. He had interviewed Alice on the telephone the previous day, and received a fair amount of information from her.

‘When we spoke yesterday you said that he’d gone off on his bike to fetch your newspaper from the post box: is that right?’

‘No,’ said Alice. ‘We’d already collected the paper. He was going to see if there were any letters. It was round about lunch time.’

‘And this was twenty-five years ago?’ asked my colleague.

‘Twenty-five years and one month,’ said Alice.

‘And you haven’t seen him since then?’

‘Not since that day, no.’

I intervened: ‘So he didn’t come back after going to fetch the mail.’

‘Oh yes, he came back all right,’ said Alice.

I recall that she was wearing a very elegant dress. And high-heeled shoes. Her hair was newly trimmed and dyed in a slightly unusual hue verging on gold. I think I realized that something was about to go wrong, but I couldn’t think of anything else to do other than to keep going. I saw a floor-manager holding up two fingers – so there were two minutes’ broadcasting time left.

‘Are you saying that he did, in fact, come back?’ I asked, wondering if I had misunderstood what my colleague had said briefly before the programme.

Alice sat up straight on the sofa and suddenly stared directly at the nearest camera – instead of looking at the person she was talking to, as we had instructed her beforehand, like we did with all our guests.

‘Oh yes, he came back all right,’ she said again. ‘And he’s been lying out there in the woodshed ever since.’

For some reason it never occurred to anybody to stop the broadcast.

‘Why is he lying in the woodshed?’ asked my colleague.

‘I killed him with the sledge hammer,’ said Alice with something reminiscent of triumph in her voice. ‘Then I dragged him into the woodshed and covered him in firewood. I haven’t seen him since then. I always fill up with more firewood before he appears.’

Now I realized the seriousness of the situation. Time to cut. I signalled that we would go over to Camera 3 and begin to round off the programme.

‘He was an evil person,’ our guest from Norrland managed to get in. ‘But it’s statute-barred now, I can’t be prosecuted!’

*

There was quite a hullabaloo after we managed to stop broadcasting – but before that, the very first few seconds, a deathly silence. Everybody was staring at Alice, and it wasn’t hard to imagine what was buzzing round in everybody’s head.

What exactly had she said?

She had killed her husband.

She had put him in the woodshed and left him there for twenty-five years. And reported him missing.

She had confessed to murder on a live television programme.

Or else she was a madwoman who had succeeded in creating a sensation. How come the programme research hadn’t discovered something odd was going on, incidentally?

But then everybody started talking at once. Various studio officials came running up, and the police officer made a call on his mobile. The only person who remained calm in her place on the sofa was Alice. Sitting up straight, with her hands clasped on her knee, she contemplated the chaos on all sides with a slight smile on her lips. Order was restored when the programme’s producer came in and announced that we would all assemble in his office for a brief discussion.

The woodshed in question – located on the edge of the village of Sorsele in southern Lappland – was examined by the police the following day. When they dragged out the skeleton of Ragnar Myrman, they tried to keep all the journalists and photographers and nosy parkers at a distance, but there was no chance of that. There were too many of them – a hundred or so – and in the coming weeks Alice Myrman received as much attention in the media as she had evidently aspired to. After interrogating her, the police released her without charges or conditions because, as she had rightly said during her momentous television appearance, the crime was so far in the past that under Swedish law it was now statute-barred.

I met her once again, purely by chance. She was standing in Sergels Torg, Stockholm, handing out leaflets for a Christian organization – The Pure Life. I couldn’t resist asking her how things were going for her nowadays: it was three or four years since that memorable evening in the Monkeyhouse.

‘I’ve moved on,’ Alice explained. ‘I think you should do so as well. Take this – we have a meeting this evening in the City Church.’

She handed me a leaflet, and said that she’d been living in Stockholm for about a year now. She had become too much of a celebrity to stay on in Sorsele, she maintained, and since she had met Jesus – and the pastor in charge of the organization, to whom she was now married – her life had taken on a deeper meaning.

She thanked me from the bottom of her heart for allowing her to take part in that television programme. If she hadn’t had the opportunity to tell all and sundry the truth about what had happened to Ragnar, this miracle would never have taken place.

‘Never give up,’ was the last thing she said to me. ‘When things are at their worst and you are walking through the valley of the shadow of death, He is with you, and He will comfort you.’

Her eyes were blazing. I have often thought about her. Especially lately, this last month, since we were walking into the wind on that Baltic beach in Poland and my life branched off in a new direction.

About what it must feel like behind blazing eyes like those.

How she must have felt as she sat there on the television sofa, waiting for her turn to speak.

20

The ninth of November. Ten degrees at half past eight. Grey and misty when we went for our morning walk, but an hour later the sun had broken through. Nevertheless I’ve decided to stay here working until noon, and then we’ll go for a walk by the sea if the weather holds.

When I write ‘working’, what I mean is reading the material from Samos and Morocco. I have the feeling that we really must make progress with that: I don’t know where that feeling comes from, but perhaps it’s just a little splinter under a fingernail that one has to get rid of. I’ve been reading so much Dickens these last couple of days that he can wait his turn now. I’ve put the packs of playing cards back in the drawer where I found them.

So I made another cup of coffee and sat down by the window with the diary from that first summer on Samos. Bit the head off every feeling of doubt and uncertainty, and started reading. Make decisions and stick to them . . . When Eugen Bergman gets in touch it will be as well if Martin has at least some idea of what he’s been doing.

Three hours later I’d got as far as 1 August 1977. There is a week left before he is due to return to Sweden, and it’s possible that all kinds of things will happen then. Martin is still writing in his restrained, neutral style – as if he thinks that one day somebody else will read the text, probably a young woman with intellectual ambitions. I can’t help having that impression, nor can I help it that here and there some things that he writes are impossible to understand. But it is only occasional words, nothing of significance for the meaning overall.

The most important thing that happened towards the end of July – and there is no need to read between the lines in order to understand this – is that he pays a visit to the Herold/Hyatt house. It is not just Martin, but the whole of the so-called writers’ collective, and it evidently turns out to be quite an impressive occasion. There are about twenty people present, and they eat a succession of fancy Greek dishes prepared by the staff at the nearby taverna, who also act as waiters and waitresses, at least at the beginning of the festivities. The guests sit at a long table on the terrace with views over the pine-clad hillside and the sea. There is guitar- and bouzouki-playing, singing, poems are read in every language you can think of, animated discussions take place, a manifesto written and masses of wine drunk. ‘Retsina,’ Martin goes out of his way to stress, ‘that’s the only drinkable wine you can get down here.’ He writes that it is absolutely blooming magical, and he’s not referring to the wine. Marijuana is also smoked, but not by Martin.

The reason – if there needed to be a reason – for Herold and Hyatt inviting all the guests to their house is that the first reactions to Bessie’s debut novel have started flowing in. There is still a week or so to go before the book is due to be published in the USA, but her publisher has informal contacts and can already inform Bessie that the reviews are going to be brilliant. Not to say sensational. Tom Herold gives a speech in praise of his young wife, and declares facetiously that a year from now he will be forgotten, but Bessie Hyatt will be as resplendent as a modern-day Pheme on the uppermost pinnacle of Parnassus.

Those are the exact words that Martin wrote, and then he comments that the choice of that particular goddess is rather odd. Pheme is above all the goddess of scurrilous gossip in Greek mythology: he points out that he seems to be the only person present who reflects on that fact, and that he will take the matter up with Herold in due course. In any case, he adds, Bessie doesn’t seem to have taken the reference amiss. On the other hand, she may well not be familiar with all the details of the ancient Greek gods and goddesses. But Martin is.

The party continues until dawn. Martin writes that he eventually joins a little group discussing Cavafy, and Durrell’s
Alexandria Quartet
. These learned discussions seem to go on for ever – with the Russian Gusov sitting in a corner and annoying everybody with his ignorance; also present are the two lesbian artists and the French poets Legel and Fabrianny. Plus the cheerful Nietzsche specialist Bons. Martin devotes over two pages to the comments and points of view expressed in these discussions, and concludes his account of this long day and night by describing how a group of eight or ten persons trudge down to the beach and bathe naked as dawn breaks. He notes once again that it is absolutely blooming magical, but then crosses the phrase out when he realizes that it is a repetition.