She focused weak-looking grey eyes on my face and indecisively fluttered her hands. ‘It’s only to the railway...’
‘I’ll take you... if you don’t mind a Fourtrak?’
She looked as if she’d never heard of a Fourtrak but would have settled for an elephant if all else failed.
I persuaded Sandy to take Dave back to Pixhill and set off with Mrs Ogden who was not exactly crying but in a definite state of shock.
‘It didn’t take long, did it?’ she said defeatedly. ‘It didn’t seem much of a thing, did it? I mean, not at the end of someone’s life.’
‘Not a great thing,’ I agreed. ‘But you’ll have a service of thanksgiving, perhaps.’
She didn’t look cheered. She said, ‘Are you Freddie Croft?’
‘That’s right.’ I glanced at her, thinking. ‘When does your train leave?’ I asked.
‘Not for ages.’
‘How about some coffee, then?’
She said wanly that it would be nice and settled apathetically into an armchair in the empty front lounge of a mock-Tudor hotel. Coffee took its time coming but was fresh in a Cafétière pot, with cream and rosebudded china on a silvery tray.
Mrs Ogden, until then huddled palely into her black shapeless overcoat, began to loosen a little by undoing the buttons. Under the coat, more black. Black shoes, black handbag, black gloves, black scarf. An overstatement.
‘A terrible shock for you,’ I said.
‘Yes.’
‘Your daughter must be a comfort.’
‘We never had a daughter. He made that up, to get lifts.’
‘Did he?’
‘He had to make things up.’ She gave me a sudden look of panic, the first crack in the ice. ‘He lost his job, you see.’
‘He was... a salesman?’ I guessed.
‘No. He was in sales. Under-manager. The firm got taken over. Most of the management were made redundant.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘He couldn’t get another job, you see. Not at fifty-four, with a bad heart.’
‘Life’s unfair.’
‘He’s been unemployed for four years. We’ve spent the redundancy money and our savings... the building society’s repossessing the house... and... and... it’s all too much.’
And he’d bounced cheques, I thought, and failed to pay hotel bills, and tried to live on scraps gleaned from a feeble transport scheme, travelling around free by lifts cadged on the basis of a sob story about a non-existent daughter’s wedding.
Lynn Melissa Ogden looked as hammered into the ground as a tent peg. She had greying straight brown hair tied back in the nape of her neck with a narrow black ribbon. No cosmetics. Pinched lines round her mouth. The cords of age in her neck.
I asked sympathetically, ‘Do you yourself have a job?’
‘I used to.’ The greyness in her skin looked like despair. ‘I worked in a greengrocer’s but Kev... well, he’s gone now, it can’t hurt to say it... Kev took some money out of their till, and they were pretty good about it, they didn’t get the police but they said I’d have to go.’
‘Yes.’
‘We were eating on that money.’ She trembled with futile anger. ‘Feeding ourselves on my wages and the things like rotting fruit and veggies that the shop couldn’t sell. How could he?’
‘He could have sold that ring, perhaps,’ I suggested. ‘I saw it on his finger... gold and onyx.’
‘That was a fake,’ she said dully. ‘He sold the real one months ago. He missed it so much... He cried, you know. So I bought him that one... it was rubbish, but he wore it.’
I refilled her coffee cup. She drank absently, the cup clattering on the saucer when she put it down.
‘Why did your husband want to go to the Chieveley service station?’ I asked.
‘He had to—’ She stopped and considered, then said, ‘I don’t suppose it matters anymore. He can’t get into any more trouble... I told him I couldn’t bear any more of it, but I did, of course. We’d been married thirty-three years... I loved him once but then... for a long time... I’ve been sorry for him, you see, and I couldn’t kick him out, could I? Because where would he go? And he hadn’t been home for weeks because the police had been round... I don’t know why I’m telling you...’
‘Because you need to tell someone.’
‘Oh, yes. And appearances, you see? I can’t tell our neighbours and we hardly have any friends left because Kev borrowed money from them...’
And never repaid. The words were as stark as if she’d actually said them.
‘So why was he going to Chieveley?’ I asked again.
‘People used to phone the house and ask him to take things for them from one place to another. I said he’d get into trouble doing that. I mean, he could have been carrying bits to make bombs, or drugs, or anything. Quite often he took dogs or cats... he quite liked that. He put an ad in Horse and Hound sometimes. People would pay his train fare to take their animals but he’d cash in the tickets and go thumbing. I mean, he hadn’t any pride left, you see. Everything had come apart.’
‘Wretched,’ I said.
‘We paid the phone bill,’ she said. ‘We always paid the phone bill. And I’d take the messages for him and he would phone me whenever he could use someone’s phone for nothing. But we couldn’t have gone on much longer...’
‘No.’
‘It’s a blessing for him, really, that he died.’
‘Mrs Ogden...’
‘Well, it is. He was ashamed, you see, my poor old boy.’
I thought of all their awful shared misery and judged that Kevin Keith had been undeservedly lucky to have had Lynn Melissa.
‘He wasn’t carrying an animal in my horsebox, though,’ I said.
‘No.’ She looked doubtful. ‘It was something to do with animals, though. It was an answer to the Horse and Hound ad. A woman phoned. She wanted Kev to meet someone at Pontefract service station and go to South Mimms service station and then go in your horsebox to Chieveley.’
‘Ah,’ I said.
She didn’t understand the depth of comprehension in my voice, but looked simply surprised by it.
‘Who was he going to meet at Chieveley?’ I asked.
‘She didn’t say. She just said someone would meet him when he got out of the horsebox. Someone would meet him and pay him and take what he was carrying, and that would be the end of it.’
‘And you agreed to that?’
‘Well, yes, of course I did. We lived on it, you see.’
‘Who was he meeting at Pontefract?’
‘She just said “someone” would meet him and give him a small carrier bag.’
‘Did she say what would be in it?’
‘Yes, she said a thermos flask but he wasn’t to open it.’
‘Mm. Would he have opened it?’
‘Oh, no.’ She was definite. ‘He’d be afraid of not being paid. And he always said what he didn’t know couldn’t hurt him.’
A recipe for disaster if ever I heard one.
She looked at her watch, thanked me for the coffee and said she’d better get along to the station, if I didn’t mind.
‘How about the train fare?’ I asked.
‘Oh... they gave me a voucher. The police or the court or someone. They gave me one to come down last Saturday, too, to identify him.’ She sighed heavily. ‘Everyone’s been kind.’
Poor Mrs Ogden. I drove her to the station and waited with her until her train came, though she said I needn’t. I would have liked to give her money to see her through some of her present troubles, but I didn’t think she would take it. I would get her address from Sandy, I thought, and send her something in remembrance of Kevin Keith, her poor old boy who seemed to have precipitated me into a maelstrom.