The Anderson Question Read online

  ‘You mean another woman?’

  ‘I’m sorry – yes.’

  Eleanor remembered her thoughts of the night before and the sudden anger, but gave nothing away. ‘Honestly, it’s an utterly ridiculous idea. Ask anyone.’ She smiled faintly, raising her eyebrows, which irritated WPC Dix.

  ‘Well, not everyone would know, Mrs Anderson, but I shall have to ask them anyway. Look, let’s leave that for the moment. Did your husband have any enemies? Anyone with a grudge who wished him harm?’

  ‘None at all. Everybody in the village was fond of him, as you’ll discover. His surgery was always full and over-ran its time because nobody’s personal problem was too small for David. He always used to say that he had to treat the mind as well as the body. Oh, they all told him their troubles. Sometimes it went a bit far.’ There was a sudden note of criticism in her voice, and the policewoman asked what she meant. ‘Oh, it’s just that sometimes I feel he gets a little too involved. I tell him he has his own life to lead.’

  ‘Can you give me an example?’

  Eleanor thought. When they first moved to Winterstoke he had wanted the surgery to be in their house, thinking it proper, a doctor’s duty to be knocked up at night. But Eleanor’s father had left them some money, enabling them to buy the cottage in the High Street. She had insisted: ‘A GP has to have a life of his own,’ she had said, ‘and it’s impossible if you live over the shop.’ So the rows of morning and evening petitioners had been distanced from her, and still more when Sheila took over as receptionist. Yet she knew them all of course; Eleanor knew everyone in the village.

  ‘Well, there are dozens. It’s the kind of man he was. But …’ (here she lowered her voice, indicating the closed dining room door with her eyes) ‘one example was our cleaning lady. Her husband’s a jobbing gardener, Jack Ainslie, one of the old village families. Well, three – or was it four? – years ago they had their first baby. They were much too old. It was a mongol. David delivered it. It’s very upsetting for doctors too, you know. The child lived, but last year they had to operate and it died. During all that time David spent hours with that family. Most people wouldn’t.’

  Closing the front door at last behind the police, Eleanor felt vacant, as if in answering the silly questions she had stretched her own resources, draining herself. There were no answers. ‘No, my husband hasn’t been ill lately. No, he hasn’t shown any signs of stress. No, there have been no strange phone calls, no debts, no threatening letters, no illness. Of course he was a safe driver …’

  And so on: safe, safe, safe. Her answers closed in circles, leading round and round to the secret at the centre: that David was exactly as he seemed. Eleanor felt almost satisfied that the over-confident policewoman had looked nonplussed. ‘But they have to come back this afternoon.’ It was an intrusion. Again she felt the tiny, shocking flicker of resentment, that somehow David had caused those two police constables to enter their house, and both so impertinently young as well.

  ‘What do you think, then?’ PC Jennings drove casually, his fingertips resting lightly on the steering wheel, but kept his eyes straight ahead. He felt WPC Dix turn to look at him, which was what he wanted. ‘Funny woman,’ she said. ‘Did you notice her hands? Never moved them – just like a statue. Anyone would think it didn’t matter to her. Cold type, I’d say.’

  ‘Well, what do you think?’ he repeated.

  ‘Oh, you know what Sergeant Elkins always says.’ She imitated the broadest West Country accent, exaggerating her own, ‘“Shurshay lah famme, that’s what oi do say”. And he’d probably be right this time.’ She pulled a photograph of David Anderson from her notebook: pleasant face, high cheekbones, greying hair, straight nose, a good-looking man when he was young, the policewoman imagined. ‘Look at him, Steve, any woman would fancy him.’

  ‘Your type, is he?’ He glanced sideways, flushing.

  ‘Oh, a bit old for me. Mind you, I like them experienced.’

  She grinned at him, knowing the words would have the desired effect, and he frowned. ‘You can’t tell by looking,’ he said, doing his best to sound cool, ‘I mean, take Mrs Anderson, back there. She’s that calm, posh type, takes everything in her stride. She could have poisoned her old man and stuffed him down the drain for the insurance, for all we know. She could be having it off with that young vicar. Some of’em like younger men.’

  ‘Do they now?’ she said archly, and clicked the notebook shut again. ‘Well, we’ll be searching the premises.’

  ‘Have you decided, Eleanor, about who should draw the raffle? Mr Wright did it last year, but this year he’s decided to play us a few blasts on his trumpet.’ Daphne made a face, ‘I hope it’s all right on the night, mind you. A bit loud for my taste. Of course, the rector could draw it but is he, you know, showy enough?’

  Daphne fell silent. She spilt a little coffee in her saucer. Eleanor said nothing. Nervously Daphne babbled, ‘Oh, I’m sorry to be going on, dear. I know you’ve got more important things on your mind. Is there any news yet? Oh I’m sure, I’m simply sure there’s a reasonable explanation, aren’t you?’ Still Eleanor did not speak, shaking her head slowly and staring into space. The uncharacteristic silence terrified Daphne Ryan, who felt as if a crutch had been snatched, with sudden brutality, from beneath her own shoulder.

  ‘I know … I mean, I just have this very strong conviction, Eleanor, that David’s going to be all right. I thought that if we talked a little about the concert it would take your mind off everything. Chin up, old girl, that’s what my father always said to Enid when…’

  ‘I’ve already asked the Reverend Dunn to be Master of Ceremonies,’ said Eleanor suddenly, a hard edge to her voice, ‘and he has agreed.’

  ‘Ah,’ Daphne said.

  There was another silence. Daphne sipped the coffee, cold now, and noticed that some of it had seeped into the light blue jaquard of her skirt. The sun filtered across the carpet through leaded windowpanes. In the garden the birds were singing riotously.

  ‘Feels like the first real day of early summer, doesn’t it? After yesterday.’ Daphne looked hopeful. Eleanor nodded …

  Yesterday he was in that kitchen having breakfast with me, and came in here to glance at The Times before leaving for surgery. He said how cold it was and switched on the electric fire. Then he went, and he has not come back. David …

  Eleanor tried to remember how he had looked, and if his hands were shaking at breakfast, but always conjured up the same picture: David sitting quietly, thanking her for his toast, making fresh coffee, mentioning that Sheila Simmonds had been unusually bad tempered with patients recently and that he would have to speak to her about it. ‘But I know she has problems at home,’ he had added mildly, and Eleanor had been irritated as always by the thought of the woman, with her clothes of scarlet and electric blue, her boorish husband and dreadful yobbish sons, and her tendency to gaze at David with doglike devotion. ‘I shouldn’t get too involved,’ she had warned.

  At last she spoke aloud, looking at Daphne directly for the first time. ‘He took his case as usual, and kissed me on the cheek just as he always did. Then he drove off, but he wouldn’t take his raincoat, even though I told him he might need it.’

  Daphne Ryan spread out her hand on her slightly splayed knee and smiled broadly. Mixed with her embarrassment at hearing her friend sound, for the first time ever, bewildered, was joy – that Eleanor wanted to talk, to confide in her.

  ‘Well, there you are. He would have taken it if he’d been going somewhere, wouldn’t he, dear? David wouldn’t take a risk.’ Her voice rang with certainty, as though something had been proved, but she shifted uneasily in her chair, feeling her suspenders dig into her flesh and her thighs stick together with perspiration.

  ‘Eleanor, have you told Paul?’

  ‘I telephoned him after the police left.’

  ‘Is he coming down?’

  ‘I told him not to come. There’s nothing he can do, and it’s silly for him to take time off wo
rk, even though it isn’t much of a job. I’ll keep in touch, tell him if there’s any news.’

  It was incredible, thought Daphne sadly, that Eleanor should not cry into the telephone and beg her own son to comfort her. She, Daphne, certainly would – only there was no one to call, no son and no husband, not even a missing one. She opened her mouth to reproach Eleanor, then changed her mind as the first word came out, and mumbled, ‘I suppose it’s all for the best.’ Eleanor sensed the dishonesty, got up, and walked to the window.

  ‘You know as well as I do what Paul’s like, Daphne,’ she said sharply, leaning with her back to the light. ‘He’s hardly the most helpful and responsible person to have around. David never got over the disappointment, and it really hasn’t been the same since then. He could so easily have got into medical school; he simply didn’t bother.’

  ‘A lot of pressure on him, Eleanor.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Eleanor sounded more normal now. ‘We just encouraged him, that’s all. But David did give in, in the end, though Paul didn’t know. He told me perhaps art school might have been better, and with those science A levels! And there he is now, in the ticket office at The National Theatre. He says he’ll graduate to poster design, but he’s been there four years and not much sign of it.’

  Paul Anderson had let his parents down, Winterstoke people agreed. Mrs Anderson had been a doctor’s daughter, and married a doctor who was also the son of a doctor … what else could she assume but that her son would follow the line? The old men had shaken their heads at his baggy trousers and jackets, and his slicked-back hairstyle, pursing their lips still more when he appeared in skin-tight black jeans, although his style was a parody of ‘fifties smartness and echoed their own. Adrian Wright, the landlord of The King’s Head, told friends privately that the doctor’s son was ‘like that’. His wrist flicked downwards. Brian Simmonds had often agreed with him over a pint that you could tell them a mile off, and no wonder the boy never came home from London. They smiled knowingly together, neither of them daring, not even in the privacy of the noisy bar, to voice the mean thought they shared: that if Paul Anderson was ‘bent’ it would be a come-uppance for his mother.

  Sunlight cast a pattern of twigs and leaves, like lace, on the path. The light sky trembled between the ragged edges of bushes and herbaceous plants; the forsythia had finished. Daffodil leaves, tied in thick clumps by Jack, had almost withered to the ground. Eleanor pressed her forehead against the window, feeling her flesh flatten, and holding it there as if she might draw warmth from the garden and the normal late spring day.

  A policeman was prodding a long stick into the rhododendron. Another was opening the garden shed, disappearing inside, calling something over his shoulder to the man who was writing everything in a notebook. Their notebooks! Everything was dutifully recorded; Eleanor felt that if she coughed or wept it would immediately be entered, rack by rack. She would not give in she promised herself, gripping her own body as she folded her arms across her chest.

  ‘But why must you search my garden?’

  The sergeant, a burly man in his late forties, had been matter-of-fact. ‘Sorry, Mrs Anderson, but it’s normal procedure.’

  ‘But what can it achieve?’

  His tone was brutal, the words enunciated as if they had been learnt by rote, ‘To ascertain whether or not there is a body on the premises, madam.’

  ‘You surely don’t mean to imply …?’

  ‘I’m implying nothing, Mrs Anderson. When a person’s reported missing we put out a call to all cars, interview associates and make a search. You know.’ He changed his tone, trying to comfort, to tell her a story: ‘Once, an old lady, somebody’s auntie … I was on the case. Missing for five days and not a sign of her. Searched for miles we did. I thought it was murder, myself; she wasn’t hard up, if you know what I mean. We found her at last only six yards from her own front door. Hanged herself down the manhole.’

  Eleanor had shuddered. WPC Dix who was examining the diary by the telephone, had noticed. ‘First time the woman’s shown any sign. They all crack up in the end. Shouldn’t think he’d have done himself in though; not the type. Not a neurotic,’ she thought. The policewoman had read some paper-back books on psychology, and looked with scorn on some of the efforts of her male colleagues, especially when they were dealing with children or women.

  PC Jennings wandered round the doctor’s study, and opened a drawer nervously. Letters, cryptic messages on the blotter, strange details that did not fit … he had been carefully instructed to look for the unusual, but his imagination, nurtured by notions of guns in drawers and threatening letters, was baffled by the books in rows, and the slightly shabby elegance of the small room. Green leather desk set, a silver paper knife engraved, To D with love from E’, a pen and pencil set still in the box, and a couple of magazines with dense print: the surface of the small desk offered no mystery.

  Even the picture postcard bore a non-committal message in careless scrawl: ‘Just a line to say am sorry haven’t written. Working hard and keeping well. See you soon, Paul’. The young policeman sighed and shook his head. He could hear her moving around downstairs, and felt sorry for her. When she opened the door to them that second time she had stepped back involuntarily into the hall, letting them invade her, like someone beaten. When she questioned the sergeant in the end it was almost as if she was going through the motions, he thought, but the life had gone out of her. PC Jennings felt uncomfortable in this house, seeing beyond its predictable accoutrements to the air of calm and well-worn contentment at its core; he identified it so clearly as what he would like, one day, that the doctor’s absence was all the more shocking, as though his own dream had turned to nothingness. Steve Jennings had not done well at school and his ears were very pink, but his widowed mother had taken him to church each Sunday and her simple clichés of pity and understanding remained with him. ‘Do as you would be done by’ had not, so far, taxed him, although he was thankful that he did not work in Bristol where criminals attacked policemen and policemen were none too gentle, and the code might lose all meaning. But the woman downstairs was someone he could cope with; he stored up descriptions to tell his mother when he was having his meal.

  WPC Dix poked her head round the door. ‘Found anything?’ He shook his head. ‘I don’t think we will, either. Not in this house.’

  The King’s Head was almost empty, but Adrian Wright still called ‘Time!’ in the powerful bass that cut through the Saturday night hubbub, unable to modify his ways. Sunlight streamed through the open door; he drew himself a half of lager and lit a cigarette, putting it down immediately to wipe his head.

  There had been only one topic of conversation that lunch time. Even old Alex Cater from ‘Lavenders’, next door to Jack and Margaret Ainslie, had stopped his habitual monologue of RAF memories, and directed his attention to Dr Anderson. ‘Was he an army man? – I can’t remember,’ he had mumbled, for the third time.

  ‘Something must have happened, he must have been mugged or something,’ said Jack Ainslie dolefully into his glass of stout, adding with a dark look over his shoulder, ‘It’s happening everywhere these days.’

  ‘But he was in his car, Jack,’ said Adrian Wright, wiping the surface of the bar.

  A travelling salesman had settled himself in the corner for a lunch of toasted sandwiches, and within a few minutes picked up the subject that interested all those around him. He wore a knowing look; night after night, in cheap hotels and pubs he chatted to strangers, sometimes picking up solitary women with coppery hair and buying them brandy, and so he prided himself on a knowledge of the vagaries of human nature. Now he leaned back against the horse brasses with a faintly complacent smile. ‘What’s he like then, this doctor? Drinking man? Women?’ He winked.

  Jack Ainslie gave him a blank look, then frowned at the ceiling. The publican shook his head, ‘No, not that type at all. Mind you, we’ve all heard of dark horses. I read in The Sunday Express a couple of weeks ago about this woman w
ho’d died. Spinster she was, lived alone with a couple of cats. When they read her will she’d left thousands to the man down the road who did her garden. He admitted in the end they’d been having if off for years. But there she was, nothing to look at, church on Sunday – you’d never have guessed.’

  Alex Cater nudged Jack. ‘There y’are, Jack. Even gardeners get their lucky breaks. There was a chappie in our squadron, could grow anything, real green fingers – used to say that if a man’s good at gardening he’s good at … you know,’ (he winked and made a movement with his elbow) ‘because he roots and he digs and he knows when to sow and when to pull it out!’ The salesman’s loud guffaw started, then choked as Alex went on with a jolting change of mood, ‘Didn’t do him much good in the end though. Killed in the Battle of Britain. All the best ones went. Have you ever heard of Peter Sandleson – DFC?’

  The remark was general, but only the salesman shook his head and mumbled helplessly, ‘No – sorry.’

  ‘My squadron. Typhoons, you know. He was one of the best – fearless, abso-bloody-lutely fearless, and Jerry found that out, sure enough. Nothing like Typhoons. Best fighting planes they ever made. Ever flown in one?’ Nobody replied; no reply needed.

  ‘Oh you’ve missed something there! We’ve got a club now, y’know – once a year get-togethers and that sort of thing. We have some times, even though we are all getting on a bit now. Anyway, old Sanders – Peter Sandleson, D – F – C – came through it all, good career after the war, accountant I think he was, and President of the Typhoons Society, one of the best pilots I ever met, and what happens? Cancer. Went right through him in six weeks. He bought it a year ago, and at the last AGM we gave him a two-minute silence.’

  The salesman was experienced in contortions of facial muscle, nods of assumed interest while the mind was elsewhere, and swift, athletic changes of subject – all skills cultivated of necessity by people alone in public places who choose not to stay that way. He had been brought up to be polite and sometimes thought it a grave disadvantage. ‘Oh really? Sad,’ he said to the florid, white-haired old man, noticing at the same time that the publican was suppressing a grin. He glanced defiantly round, ‘Well, what about this bloke then, this doctor? Are there any theories? He can’t have disappeared off the face of the earth.’