for him and she had kept all the papers firmly stapled together and had checked after each visit that not a single page had been removed, so she felt certain nothing could have travelled back to London with him.
No, she was fairly sure she’d thought of everything. Or had she? Evelyn looked at the evidence of his life spread out on the table. It wouldn’t hurt to create a little diversion, perhaps, and it wouldn’t take her very long.
She quickly picked up her coat, bag and car keys. It was a lovely afternoon for a drive. Somewhere quiet, somewhere that might suggest he had gone further afield, she decided as she turned southwards onto the A3. In the summer it was heaving with cars returning from weekends of summer sailing, but at this time of the year there wasn’t much traffic. Lymington perhaps, maybe somewhere not far away from the ferry terminal.
Just as she had hoped, the town was fairly deserted when she arrived and she pulled up in an almost empty car park. She could have chosen Southampton and disappeared in the crush of vehicles returning from weekends on the Continent, but Lymington was discreet, so unassuming. She strolled, just another middle-aged lady at leisure, enjoying an afternoon walk.
A little way down the road she found just what she was looking for: a bank cash machine on a side wall just off the high street. It was a quiet Sunday afternoon, very few tourists, the pubs were fairly empty, the town was dead; with gloved fingers she slipped Stephen’s debit card into the machine and hoped this would work. She tapped in four numbers, then another four, then finally four more, and she breathed a sigh of relief. The card didn’t reappear. It had been taken by the machine, and if her understanding was correct (and yes, she did read the financial and money pages of the papers, despite what she had let him think), his account would record an attempted transaction and the bank would eventually assume the card had been stolen. Anyone checking his whereabouts would wonder where he had lost it. In London or in Lymington?
She glanced around her. The street was still almost deserted. The sun had nearly finished setting over the sea and it would have been rather nice to wander down to the water and enjoy the end of the day, but she knew it would be best to head back home. Anyway, there was still some of that lovely casserole left over from lunch.
37
Evelyn, 6 February 1986
The Fox Café
After two days she made herself go down to the copse to check. It was still there, looking just the same as when she had dragged his body between the close-grown saplings and brambles. He? It? It wasn’t him any more. More leaves had blown over the corpse but his shoulders and head were clearly visible, the thin hair sticking to the scalp, dark with blood, and the skin now grey, greyer than she remembered. Wearing thick gardening gloves, she scooped handfuls of leaves and twigs over him until he was completely covered.
The day it happened had been cold, but the last two days had been mild and wet. If it continued to be mild, they would catch the scent and would soon come, just as they had come before. They are not particular – food is food, though there was a time when a badger took a long time to disappear. ‘Oh, foxes don’t like ’em,’ Neil had said, when she had pointed out that the black and cream pelt was still visible under the hedge that ran alongside his sheep’s field. ‘None of ’em like a badger’s stink.’
So what about a man’s stink, thought Evelyn. What if I’m wrong and they don’t want him? I’ve assumed they’ll go for him just as they went for the hens, the ducks, the geese and the lambs, but what if I’m wrong? What will I do then?
She walked away from the copse as if it was just one of the checkpoints in her regular casual inspection of the grounds. Wouldn’t do to linger too long; better to look as if it was merely one element of her constitutional, her perusal of the boundaries, her survey of her domain. As she walked, hands pushed into the pockets of her old Barbour jacket, still filled with ends of straw and twists of twine from her sheep-keeping days, she tried to remember how long it had taken before.
There