So He Takes the Dog. Jonathan Buckley
cut out and cruised to a standstill. There was heavy fog, and Martha was turning the ignition key over and over again, praying that the thing would miraculously spark into life, when she looked up and saw this wild-looking man looming out of the fog. It was Henry – or rather, it was the homeless man from the beach, as she knew him. Purposefully Henry strode towards the immobilised car, as if he’d been summoned to rescue her, and as he came nearer he was making a gesture that she took to be threatening, before she realised he was miming the action of pulling the bonnet release. Indicating that she should stay in the car, he hoisted the bonnet, then came round to the passenger’s side and rapped on the window. Martha wound down the window. ‘I need to listen inside,’ he told her. This was something of a quandary, being stuck in the fog with this fairly frightening old man demanding admittance to your vehicle, but he waited patiently beside the door and after a few seconds, seeing her hesitation, he suggested that, if she was scared, she could step out of the car as he got in and get back in when he stepped out, so she stayed in the car and opened the door for him. ‘Thank you,’ he said, but he didn’t actually get in, not completely. Instead, he knelt on the road and bent his head into the footwell, placing an ear close to the floor. He seemed to be wearing about a dozen T-shirts, and his clothes gave off a reek of old seaweed. ‘Turn the key,’ he ordered. Martha turned the key. ‘Once more,’ he said. Martha turned the key again, and he nodded like a diagnosing doctor at whatever it was he’d been hearing. Then he got out of the car, saying nothing. ‘Again,’ he instructed her from behind the bonnet. She turned the key and a moment later Henry came round to her window. ‘We need a bit of wire,’ he told her. ‘You don’t have a bit of wire, do you? No. Of course you don’t have a bit of wire. Why would you have a bit of wire? Right. Wait here.’ These words were addressed not to Martha directly but to a point somewhere over her shoulder, as if to a back-seat passenger whose incompetence was to blame for the situation. He loped down the hill, vanishing into the mist. Martha waited and half an hour later, just as she’d decided that Henry wasn’t coming back, he reappeared, looking angry. He didn’t speak, but went straight back under the bonnet. She could hear him muttering loudly while he worked, perhaps to himself, but perhaps to her as well. ‘Turn the switch and the light bulb comes on but what’s happened to make it come on? What’s the science? Do you know? No, you don’t have a clue,’ she heard. He was going on about televisions and computers and telephones, and how we don’t understand anything. The implication seemed to be that only trained mechanics should be allowed to drive cars. Martha did not take issue. In mid-mutter he interrupted himself with a shout of ‘Again!’. The car started and Henry slammed the bonnet with more force than required. He crouched at the roadside, wiping his hands on the wet grass. ‘That’ll do for a mile or two,’ he said. ‘Tell your garage it’s the fuel pump relay. What’s your name?’ he asked, quite aggressively, with no pause between the statement and the question.
‘Martha Swinton,’ she replied and immediately, before she could thank him for the repair, he’d turned his back and was walking away as if there were another car awaiting his attention somewhere in the murk.
Like Henry and Malak playing snipers on the beach, the episode of Martha’s car adds a bit of colour to the victim profile, but neither story gets us very far, and as we listen to the report, imagining the scene, we’re all thinking the same thing: this case is a runner; Henry will be with us for ever. At a stretch you could argue that Henry’s trick with the bit of wire gives some credibility to the tale told to Peggy Thurlow, but you don’t have to be an engineer to know what to do when a fuel pump relay is on the blink. And the one fact of obvious significance – that Henry was definitely alive in the first week of December – is superseded within minutes, because one of the lads has spoken to a Mrs Turley, who was visiting her sister on the morning of 9 December – the day of her wedding anniversary, so she remembers the date clearly – and saw Henry sitting on the sea wall. It’s the latest reliable sighting we’ve had so far and we’re never to get a later one.
‘OK,’ says George Whittam, summing up. ‘Still among the living on the ninth. Understands motors. Handy with a rifle. Another alias. Is that it?’ His eyes have the look of a man facing hours of futile paperwork, but George likes to end with a flourish, and now he lifts a manila folder from the desk and produces the picture, a dozen copies of it. Wearing the SeaShed T-shirt and the swimming trunks that Ian bought for him, Henry sits on a boulder, peering at the sea, with one hand on his whiskers in a venerable hermit kind of pose. It’s a good photo: a bit arty, but clear. Last night a young woman had phoned, extremely upset, having just heard that Henry was dead. An hour later she walked into Ilfracombe station and delivered the photo, taken by herself last October.
‘Fair-haired, plump, average height, twenties?’ someone asks.
‘Redhead,’ says George, as he hands the name and address to Ian. ‘For you two,’ he says. ‘Cherchez la femme.’
The door opens and we’re looking at a young woman in grey tracksuit leggings and a baggy grey T-shirt, late twenties, not slim, five-six or five-seven. Her hair, gathered in a twist and secured with a pair of chopsticks, is a colour that some people might classify as red but most would describe as fair or strawberry blonde. We both know at once that we’re looking at Henry’s walking companion, and at least one of us is thinking it’s odd that her face didn’t make much of an impression on Tom Gaskin, because it’s not the kind of face you see every day of the week. There’s something Slavic about the breadth and slope of her cheekbones, and about her eyes, which are narrow and deep-set, and set slightly at an upward angle. The nose, small and somewhat flattened at the bridge, is interesting too, and rather delicate, whereas her mouth is wide and full-lipped, with a distinct ridge above the upper lip, and her jaw is deep and heavy, almost masculine, some would say. Her brow juts out a little, which tends to give her a brooding appearance, and her skin isn’t terrific. You couldn’t imagine anyone describing Hannah Rowe as pretty, but nobody with functioning visual apparatus could deny that her face has strength, an unusual strength.
She shakes hands with both of us: her grip is strong and her skin surprisingly rough. She precedes us up the stairs to her flat, into a room that has no curtains or blinds. The floorboards are unvarnished and there’s just one rug in the middle of the room, a big square of thick chalk-coloured wool with a small square of turquoise inset at one end. There’s hardly any furniture: a futon against the wall near the edge of the rug, a couple of leather beanbags, one wicker armchair, that’s the lot. A few books are lying on the floor, and there are some shelves of books and cassettes in the corner opposite the futon, above the TV and hifi and a tree branch that’s propped against the wall, stripped of its bark and as white as veal. The walls are a colour that seems off-white at first, but as the hour passes and the light changes in the room it acquires a tinge that’s greenish-grey, and in the centre of one wall there’s a row of photographs, each the size of a magazine page. All these pictures show the same thing – a field and a drystone wall – and all were taken from exactly the same place, so the wall runs diagonally across the top right-hand corner, but the images are different, because the light is not the same in any two, so in some the wall is grey and in others black or fawn or even pink, while the field itself is not the same hue of green from one shot to the next. And by the door there are some of pieces of cloth, pressed under glass. They’re not patterned or embroidered, like the samples in the Heidi house. These are just scraps of material, each dyed a single colour: a blue, a red, a yellow. One of them is black. That’s all it is: a bit of black rag. Ian notices it on his way in and you can see that he’s instantly decided that we’ve an arty poser on our hands.
Hannah waves us towards the futon and the armchair. Crossing her ankles, she sits down on the floor, swiftly, easily, and her back is absolutely straight when she’s sitting, like someone who does a lot of yoga. For a few seconds she stares into the floor and a profound frown appears, as if she’s seeing on the floorboards a picture of Henry. ‘So,’ she whispers, and she glances up, but at the sky, not at either of us. ‘You found him on the second?’
‘He was found on the second of January, yes,’ replies Ian, employing the tone