Reginald Hill: Death of a Dormouse

She knew at once that Trent was dead.

She knew it as she sat in the police car on their way to the hospital.

She knew it as she listened to a staff nurse explaining that someone would be along shortly.

She knew it when a soft-spoken man in a blue suit showed her Trent’s tempered steel identification bracelet.

At last, as if worn down by her silent certainty, they too admitted it.

‘I’m sorry Mrs Adamson. I’m afraid that your husband is dead.’

A week in Sheffield had been long enough for Trudi to take a strong dislike to the place.

She found it cold, drab and ugly, and the people were not much better. The north of England was almost more foreign to her than anywhere else in Europe. She disliked in particular the way everyone addressed her as ‘love’ or rather ‘luv.’ It felt like an invasion of privacy.

It was only now that she began to realize just how little in truth her privacy was likely to be invaded.

She knew no one. No one knew her. She went home and sat and waited for tears to come. When they didn’t she tried to induce them by going back over her life with Trent, like a video run in reverse. But nothing happened till she went beyond their wedding day and found herself suddenly three months earlier at her father’s funeral.

Now the tears came close. How regressive a thing was grief, she thought. Then the moment was past and her cheeks were still dry.

She took a strong sleeping pill and went to bed.

She awoke to instant remembrance but when she cautiously explored her feelings she discovered a barrier, thin as cellophane round a packet of biscuits, but irremovable without the risk of damage.

So she turned away from feelings and concentrated her thoughts on the bureaucracy of death.

Another policeman came, a sergeant, older, more solemn.

‘Just a formality, luv,’ he said. ‘Just a few details.’

He noted Trent’s full name, his age, his business.

‘This firm he works for. Silver Rider …’

‘Schiller-Reise of Vienna.’ Trudi spelt it out. ‘It’s a travel company. Reise means “journey”. And Schiller is the name of the man who runs it.’

‘Oh aye? German, is it?’

‘Austrian.’

‘And they’ve got an office here.’

‘Well no, I don’t think so,’ said Trudi hesitantly. She felt the officer regarding her dubiously and she pressed on. ‘They’re in most big European cities, of course. But I’m not sure about the UK. Probably that’s what my husband was doing, setting something up. He travelled a lot in his work, looking at hotels, locations, amenities. He used to be an airline pilot himself.’

She produced this last statement as if somehow it justified the preceding vagueness about Trent’s work. The sergeant looked unimpressed.

‘Is that right?’ he said. ‘Well, I reckon Sheffield’d be as good a centre as anywhere.’

He did not say for what.

There would, he told her, be a post-mortem; routine after any sudden death.

The facts of the accident were tragically simple.

It had happened a few miles south of the city in the Derbyshire Peak District. The car had been parked at the side of a narrow undulating country road. A fertilizer truck moving at speed had come over a rise some fifty yards behind it. It had been raining earlier in the day. There was muck on the road surface which was long overdue for repair after the previous bitter winter. The driver had braked, the truck had skidded, caught the parked car from behind and driven it a hundred yards before slamming it into a telegraph pole. The truck driver had been flung out of his cab.

‘Lucky for him,’ said the sergeant, perhaps in search of some consoling circumstance. ‘Old farmer working in the fields saw it all. Said the car went up like a bomb. Fractured the tank likely. And he seems to have been carrying some spare fuel in a jerry can in the boot. Probably for his scooter.’

‘Scooter?’

‘Aye. We found the remains of one of them foldaway motor-scooters in the boot. Didn’t you know he had one?’

‘No,’ said Trudi. ‘I didn’t know. Perhaps he hired it with the car.’

‘Aye. Mebbe. Well, one thing, Mrs Adamson, it must’ve been quick.’

In support of this assertion he educed the fact that identification had only been effectable through the number of the hired car and the name on the fireproof bracelet.

Realizing too late that these considerations were as likely to aggravate as to ease pain, the well-meaning sergeant hopped from the past to the future, pointing out that the police would be swift to establish the extent of the truck driver’s responsibility as soon as the man came out of hospital.

‘Shock; broke his collarbone and a few ribs falling out of his cab; and he got pretty badly scorched too. Well, he would. Like an inferno. Burnt the telegraph pole like a Yule log, brought all the wires down, you know. Sorry, luv. All I mean is, you’ll want to get your insurance company working on this. And your solicitor too, I shouldn’t wonder. You’ve got someone to help you with all this, have you? Someone to talk to? Friends?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Trudi, with dismissive certainty.

She thought of Janet in distant Spain. There was no one else to think of, but there was no way of contacting her even if she wanted to. It was bad enough working out who to contact in Vienna. Friends? She couldn’t think of anyone close enough to require a personal notification. Shyness, agoraphobia, call it what you will, but a woman who gives the impression that the end of any social occasion can’t come soon enough doesn’t attract friendship. Consciously or unconsciously, Trent had encouraged her isolation, rarely bringing people home, rarely involving her even in business entertainment. Herr Schiller, the head of the firm, was the only one of Trent’s senior colleagues she had met more than a couple of times socially. She had not much liked the old man, but he had seemed to take a benevolent interest in Trent’s career and for the sake of her husband she had put on her best social face. It seemed to have worked, for Trent had risen close to the top. But Schiller was old now, semi-retired and invalid, and it would be no kindness to contact him direct. In the end, she sent a telegram to Schiller-Reise’s head office and left it to them to pass on the news where and how they saw fit.

By the day of the funeral, there had been no response, and the vicar in the cemetery chapel was clearly disturbed to be faced by a congregation which, bearers apart, was divided evenly between the quick and the dead.

But before the service started, the door opened and a man came in. He had a narrow intelligent face which was hard to put an age on, particularly as the eye was diverted by his hair which in a woman would have been called beautiful, worn rather longer than was fashionable, and swept back in powerful waves of rich black, becomingly tinged with grey. His elegance was underlined by his clothes which were of such immaculate manufacture that the professional bearers shifted uneasily in their shabby mourning.

He came straight to Trudi, stooped over, took her hand and said in German, ‘My dear Mrs Adamson, what a tragedy! What a loss! Believe me, I am truly devastated.’

It was only at this point that Trudi recognized Franz Werner, her husband’s, though not her own, Viennese doctor. She hardly knew the man, certainly did not know his relationship with Trent went beyond the professional to the extent of flying eight hundred miles to catch his funeral.

This was explained to some extent as they followed the coffin out of the chapel. Perhaps aiming at a therapeutic distraction, he told her in a reverential whisper that he had been on the point of departing from Vienna to attend a conference in London when he had heard the news.