Rreginald Hill: A Killing kindness

That was the last contact for some time. Mary clearly decided, probably for a combination of religious and personal reasons, that disappearance was a better bet than any remedy of the law. Perhaps to keep their heads down, perhaps because the mid-seventies was a very bad time for expatriate teachers to try to filter back into the home system, they decided to abandon education for cultivation and went into the Garden Centre business. Certainly if they maintained any contact with the RAF world at all, reports of Greenall's condition would not have encouraged them to let him know their whereabouts. Drink and a growing oddness of behaviour patterns had resulted in first the loss of his flying status, then, after a period of breakdown, discharge on medical grounds.

All this over a period of nearly three years.

'So,' said Greenall, 'I woke up one morning and found I was back in civvy street. No wife, no daughter, no commission, no career. And no flying. I had to get that back to start with. Do you understand? Down here even when I was on the crest of the wave, I always felt there was something, I don't know, sort of pulling me back to where I started. Up there, it was different. Still is. Up there I was… am…'

'King of infinite space?' offered Pascoe.

'Yes. Right. That's it. King of infinite space. So I did an instructor's course. Just basic stuff. Work on trainers, that kind of thing. I knew I would never get back in the big boys again, but this way at least I got my feet off the ground. And there was work in it. I got a job down at a flying club in Surrey. Twice the size of this. I really enjoyed it, all of it, even the ground staff side.'

His speech, mirroring his mental recovery, had begun to flow freely again. Pottle would explain this, thought Pascoe. And probably advise me to listen carefully for the return of disjunction.

'And did you see your wife again in this time?'

'Neither saw nor heard from her,' said Greenall. 'When I got myself together, I started looking. I played your game, detective that is. Not an easy business, is it? I went to the address on that one letter, but it was a boarding-house, no forwarding address. I tried local schools, then the Department of Education. They couldn't or wouldn't help. No, it wasn't easy.'

'Police?' suggested Pascoe. 'Did you try them?'

'Why?' said Greenall, surprised. 'It had nothing to do with the police. In the end, I stopped trying. I didn't give up, you understand. Just settled to play a waiting game. I knew that somehow, one day, something… well, I was right. There in the paper, just a paragraph. Tragic accident. Man chewed to death by machine at Agricultural Show. Mr Peter Dinwoodie. Leaving wife, Mary; daughter, Alison. Pure chance. But more than chance. The paper I saw it in was months out of date. I'd rented a small cottage. There was a coal fire. I used newspaper to light it and during the summer the papers just piled up. I'd missed the item when it first appeared, last summer. But one cold January morning this year I was making spills of paper to use as kindling, and there it was. Pure chance? I didn't think so.

'I was better at detective work this time. I thought about it for a week or two. All I had was one paragraph. Agricultural Show. So I came up to Yorkshire and started a search via the press. It was very easy. There were more details in the Yorkshire Post. I got the town and the name of the Garden Centre. Linden. That made me almost certain. But I had a look through back numbers of the local evening paper when I got here, and there was a photograph. Dinwoodie. I should have felt triumphant but I didn't. Sick almost. I nearly headed back south there and then. But I'd come this far… this far…

'That night I went out to the Garden Centre.

'Mary was alone. She was surprised to see me, but not too surprised. We sat and talked. I told her about myself, put her at her ease, told her I bore no grudges. It got late. Alison wasn't home. Mary said perhaps I should come back the next day, but I was getting a bit concerned. She was barely seventeen, a child still. I didn't like the idea that she was being kept out till all hours. Then we heard a car. I looked out of the window. I could see her in the passenger seat. She and the driver were in a pretty tight clinch you know, hands everywhere. I wanted to go out, but Mary wouldn't let me. A bit later Alison came in. God, what a change! I mean, all right, it was six years since I'd seen her, but she was still my girl, still just a child. But the clothes she had on, the hair-do, the make-up! And on her hand, on her left hand, a ring. She didn't notice me at first, she was so excited, waving this ring at her mother, saying she was engaged.

'I had to say something. I didn't want to spoil our reunion, but I had to say something. She was quiet at first, much more surprised than Mary. Pleased to see me, I thought, but also accusing. As if it had all been my fault. And wilful. Like her mother. She said she wanted to get married soon. Married? What did she know of life? A child. She said this boy was down here doing some kind of agricultural course. They'd met at the show where Dinwoodie had been killed. Irony. Even dying, he did me a bad turn. Soon he'd be finished, going back up to the Borders somewhere, and he wanted Alison to go with him. I said it was absurd. Legally she was still my daughter. I had my rights still. They let them choose for themselves when they're eighteen now. Stupid, isn't it? But there was still a year to go. And there was no way she was going to get my permission!'

But she didn't need it, thought Pascoe. One parent's agreement was enough now. Christ, why didn't people check what the latest state of the law was?

'Well, there was a row, of course,' resumed Greenall. 'Alison flew out of the room. Mary, however, seemed to be much more sensible about the situation. We talked and in the end I went away, satisfied that an understanding had been reached. It was far too early to talk about a reconciliation, but at least I felt we understood each other. How wrong can you be?'

Pascoe's pen was flying over the sheets of his notebook, yet he was making a great effort to keep it legible. This was an iron to strike while hot. This was not going to be a statement which would easily bear the delays of careful typing. Greenall's signature at the bottom of each handwritten page was going to be the first consideration.

‘I couldn't get back for nearly a fortnight, and then just an overnight stay. Alison wasn't there. Staying with friends, said Mary. A long-standing commitment. I accepted it. Why not? We all had our own lives, we weren't a family again. Not yet. But I had hopes. I'd seen an advert in one of the journals. They wanted a secretary/instructor at the local Aero Club. It wasn't – isn't – a patch on the place I was at in Surrey and the job was much more of a general dogsbody from the sound of it, but I thought it might be worth a look. I said nothing to Mary, but I sent off for details.

'Then next time I came, there was no one at the house. There'd been heavy snow, you recall. It was a foot deep or more. The Garden Centre was closed, of course. And the house was empty. I went back to Surrey, not knowing what to do. I was worried sick. I'd not told a soul anything about this, so I couldn't even talk things over with anyone. I was in a dream for a couple of days. Then the phone rang. I'd given Mary my number and it was her. I knew it was her before I picked it up, and I knew it was bad news. Well, she was almost matter of fact about it. Against my will, against my rights, she'd encouraged Alison to run off with this boy.

They'd been married in Scotland. And now they were dead.

'I don't know what I said. I don't know how long she listened. She was to blame, I knew that. Yet I could understand how utterly her life must have been destroyed. And Alison's death was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. Yet in a way it might be a sort of blessing, it seemed, for when I thought of all the agony and disillusion being married so young must have piled up for her, or being married at all for that matter, in a way this quick, sudden death…'