Crossing Over
by Philip J. Lees
“If they don’t get this bloody heater fixed,” I said, “they can find someone else to cross over with.”
Beside me, Susan sniffed, pulled her woolly hat further down over her ears and thrust her hands deeper into the pockets of her duffel coat. Her nose was pink and the lower part of her face was scrunched up, as if she’d smelled something bad and was trying not to inhale any more of it. Ken and Mary’s old Land Rover didn’t smell bad—it had an interesting, but not unpleasant blend of mint, floral air freshener and pipe tobacco—but it was cold, cold, COLD in there and the air pumped out by the rattling fan felt barely warmer than the wind outside howling across the fell. I’d let the engine run for five minutes already, giving it a chance to warm up, but so far I couldn’t detect any difference. I played with the fan speed settings, from low to full blast, but the temperature wasn’t affected. I left the fan on medium and gave up.
“Bugger this,” I said. “Let’s get going.”
I’ve never been able to stand driving in gloves, so I pulled them off, pushed the soggy gear stick into first and pulled out of the lay-by on to the road. After five minutes’ contact with the icy steering wheel I could feel my fingers starting to go numb. The tips had already turned flaccid and white, and I knew there’d be pain when they finally warmed up again. To make it worse, we were on the far side today. Ken and Mary, in our warm Nissan Patrol, only had ten minutes’ drive to reach our rendezvous at the Yew Tree, but it would take us almost three times as long. They were probably there already, in fact, sipping on a neat scotch (Ken) and a medium sherry (Mary), propped against the bar and enjoying the blaze in the fireplace.
“Bugger,” I said again.
Susan was still hunched up next to me, her nose even redder now, and with that same expression of distaste on her face. But she didn’t say anything. One thing I liked about Susan—she wasn’t a complainer. She left that to me.
Swapping car keys with friends in the middle of the moor usually made for a nice morning’s outing, where you earned the feeling you’d achieved something by walking from A to B—a distance of five miles or so—rather than heading out only to turn back and return to where you’d started. We’d been crossing over with Ken and Mary once or twice a week for more than a year now, agreeing by phone on a starting time, two end points and a trail between them, and it had worked well. Despite my initial misgivings, we’d never missed each other, and it made a pleasant break to meet up with friends in the middle of the walk and pause for a chat. We hardly ever saw anyone but ourselves out there. Being retired—or semi-retired in my case—meant we could get out on the moor on days when most people were at work. It was good exercise and for most of the year the skies and the landscape made it a joy to be outdoors.
But sometimes in the midwinter months the wind blew straight down from the Greenland glaciers, or so it seemed, and even wrapped up in several layers of warm clothes it was only our stubbornness that got us up there.
By the time we reached the Yew Tree I could hardly feel my feet and I nearly missed the brake pulling into the pub’s car park. I grabbed at the handbrake in a panic and the jeep lurched to a standstill and stalled with its front bumper only inches from the brick wall. Susan was out of the passenger door and striding towards the pub entrance before I had the key out of the ignition and I was only a few steps behind her. I didn’t bother to lock the Land Rover. Nobody was going to steal it.
The warmth inside was almost shocking and I was aware of how cold my cheeks and ears were. Susan had her hat and coat off while I was still fumbling with the buttons down the front of my own coat, fingers already starting to ache, as expected. I hung the coat on the same hook as Susan’s, popped my flat hat on top of it and headed for the lounge.
It was almost empty and I joined Susan in front of the fireplace, stretching out my hands and flexing my fingers to help the pain pass as quickly as possible. I looked around and that’s when I realised Ken and Mary weren’t there.
“What’s happened to them?”
“It’s that carburettor,” Susan said. “I told you.”
A few times recently the carburettor on the Nissan had flooded when I over revved the engine. It was only a matter of adjustment, but I just hadn’t got around to it. If the engine died, the only thing to do was to wait for five minutes before trying to start it again. If you kept trying the ignition it would only make things worse. Susan had reminded me to warn Ken about it but I’d forgotten.
I went to the side window and looked out over the car park. There was no sign of a silver blue Nissan Patrol. Somehow, as the sensation returned painfully to my fingers and toes, I didn’t feel too bad about that carburettor. It was an easy thing to forget, after all. Could happen to anyone. The sky had clouded over. It looked like it might snow .
“They’ll be along sooner or later,” I said. “Let’s have a drink.”
Susan was already ordering. A glass of red wine for her and a whisky mac for me. I didn’t usually go for fancy drinks, but Susan knew without asking that I needed that ginger wine in the scotch to stoke the inner fire on a day like today. We were both hungry after our walk so we went ahead and ordered a double basket of scampi and chips. Ken and Mary could catch up when they arrived.
But by the time we finished our meal they still weren’t there.
“We can’t go home,” I said. “We’d have to break in.”
It was true. Our house keys were on the same key ring I’d handed to Ken that morning in the middle of the moor. On the other hand, we couldn’t spend the rest of the day in the Yew Tree.
“Let’s go to their place,” Susan said. “We can wait for them there. If they’ve broken down that’s probably where they’d go.”
If they had our keys, we had theirs. My sensible wife had found the solution. We paid our bill, wrapped ourselves up and, braced against the cold by the food and drink, we drove the fifteen minutes to Ken and Mary’s house. We parked the Land Rover in the drive and let ourselves in through the front door. There was no sign of our Nissan and the house was quiet and empty.
“I’ll make a pot of tea,” Susan said, rubbing her hands together. “They won’t mind.”
I turned on the gas fire in the sitting room—Ken and Mary would doubtless be cold when they got home—and switched on the TV. I stretched myself out in one of the reclining armchairs and clicked the remote until I found a rugby match. Susan was clattering about in the kitchen. We’d spent so much time in our friends’ house—and they in ours—that we felt quite at home.
About twenty minutes later the rugby match broke for half time. I got up to take my cup in for a refill—Susan was making a second pot—and as I stepped into the hall the doorbell rang.
“Here they are,” I called out. “I’ll get it.”
But when I opened the front door it wasn’t Ken and Mary, it was a policeman wearing a flat cap with a chequered band and a heavy overcoat. There was a police car stopped in the street, with another officer sitting in it.
“Mr. Kenneth Rutherford?” the policeman asked. He was about my height, a little under six feet, and probably my age, too, or a bit younger. He was pinkly clean-shaven and had bushy grey eyebrows. He held his arms stiffly at his sides.
I looked at the empty teacup and saucer in my hand, at Ken and Mary’s Land Rover parked in the drive. From behind me Susan called out from the kitchen, “I’ll put some more water on.” I could hear the television playing an advertising jingle in the living room.
“Yes,” I said. “Is there something wrong?”
The moment I spoke I could feel a tightening in my stomach, but really, I thought, what if I’d said no? That would mean all sorts of awkward explanations, and he probably didn’t want anything important, anyway. It was just a nuisance.
I heard Susan emerging from the kitchen behind me and I turned in time to see her expression change as she walked towards me wiping her hands on a dishcloth. I turned back to the door.
“My wife,” I said. “Mary.” I could have bitten my tongue and I didn’t dare look at Susan, who was now standing beside me.
“I’m Sergeant Fuller, sir. Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. Have you been home long?”
“Oh,” I tried to look thoughtful. “About half an hour, I suppose.” Now I did turn to look at Susan. “Half an hour, would you say, darling?” I was trying to sound casual, but I wasn’t certain I was managing it.
Susan’s face wore an expression I’d never seen before, but she nodded vigorously.
“Yes,” she said. “About half an hour. Maybe a little bit less.”
“Is that your vehicle in the drive, sir?” He pronounced the aitch in the middle: vee-hickle.
In for a penny, I thought.
“Er, yes,” I said.
“Would you mind if we took a look inside it, sir?”
What? Now what was going on?
“Of course,” I said quickly. “Yes. Why not. I’ll get the keys. They’re right here on the hall table.” I knew I was talking too much, but I couldn’t seem to stop myself. What right had this annoying man to disturb us for no reason? We hadn’t done anything wrong.
“It doesn’t appear to be locked, sir.”
“Oh, really?” I peered over his shoulder. Even from here I could see that the door lock push buttons were in the popped up position on both sides.
“No, sir. Do you normally leave your vee-hickle unlocked?”
I wished he wouldn’t say it like that. For some reason it made me want to giggle and I had a premonition that giggling would be a very bad idea.
“Not normally, no,” I said. “But, er, we were planning on going out again soon.”
“I see.” He was looking pointedly downwards and it took me a couple of seconds to realise why. I had slipped my shoes off while I was watching television, so I could warm my feet better in front of the gas fire, and now I was standing there in my socks. The sock on my left foot had a hole in it, just to the left of the big toe.
“I was going out,” Susan said abruptly. “Just me. Not … Ken.”
Good for you! I thought.
“Right,” Sergeant Fuller said. He sounded decisive. “Well, if you don’t mind …”
“Yes,” I said. “I’ll get my, er, slippers.” I’d noticed a pair of Ken’s slippers in the living room. I went back in there and slipped them on. They fit me perfectly, I was pleased to find. I rejoined the policeman in the hall with renewed confidence.
Ken’s driving licence was lying on the Land Rover’s dashboard, as mine, presumably, was lying on the dashboard of the Nissan, wherever it was. Both our licences were old ones, without a photograph, and we’d decided long ago that it was simpler for each of us to pretend to be the other, should we run into a police spot check, than to go into prolonged explanations that might be complicated by other matters such as driver insurance. I opened the passenger door, reached in for the licence, and handed it to Sergeant Fuller, even though he hadn’t asked for it. He glanced at it and gave it back without comment, but he was studying my face and frowning in a way that bothered me. I shivered.
“It’s freezing out here,” I said. “Is there anything else?”
“Let’s just take a look in the back,” he said, still with the same intent expression on his face.
I shrugged.
“If you like.”
To open the back involved undoing a series of butterfly clips that had to be twisted until they were aligned with the holes they fit through. My fingers were getting cold again and I was clumsy, but I was pleased to see he was having the same trouble. Finally we were able to roll up the canvas top part with the smeared and scratched plastic panel that made the Land Rover’s rear vision dangerously poor, in my opinion. Together we reached in and slid back the bolts, then hinged down the tailgate. Inside was a spare petrol can (probably empty, knowing Ken), lying on its side next to a rusty tool box, and in the middle was a large tarpaulin that had been dumped in a pile, not even folded.
“Like to tell me about that, Mr. Rutherford?” Sergeant Fuller asked, gesturing with his finger. Then he turned to the patrol car and beckoned to his colleague.
I didn’t see what he meant at first. Then in the dim light I saw a shoe lying next to the tarpaulin. No, two shoes. Then I realised the shoes weren’t empty. Stockinged ankles led under the tarpaulin. I shivered again, but this time it wasn’t just from the cold.
“Mr. Rutherford,” Sergeant Fuller said, “you do not have to say anything. But it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence. Do you understand?”
“What?” I said.
The other policeman was walking up the drive. He was making a rapid circling gesture with one forefinger in the air that part of my mind understood to mean that an ambulance, with its rotating emergency light, was on the way.
“I have reason to believe that a crime has been committed,” Sergeant Fuller said, “and I need to ask you some questions. You do not have to say anything unless you wish to do so, but I must warn you that if you fail to mention any fact which you rely on in your defence in court, your failure to take this opportunity to mention it may be treated in court as supporting any relevant evidence against you. If you do wish to say anything, what you say may be given in evidence.”
Court, I though. What was the man talking about? Most of my brain seemed to have stopped working. Perhaps it was the cold. My fingers were aching again, although my toes were warm inside my slippers.
Ken’s slippers.
“There’s been a misunderstanding,” I said. “My name isn’t really Kenneth Rutherford.”
The second policeman had climbed into the back of the Land Rover and was carefully tugging at a corner of the tarpaulin. He was wearing rubber gloves, white as death. Sergeant Fuller stared at me.
“I see,” he said. “And I suppose that isn’t Mrs. Mary Rutherford, either?”
Susan was standing by the living room window. She smiled when I looked at her.
“No,” I said. “That’s right.”
“But you introduced her as your wife, Mary,” Sergeant Fuller pressed on. “And she called you Ken. Or didn’t I hear right?”
He was beginning to get that nasty ironic tone to his voice that I’d only heard before in police series on the television.
“This is silly,” I said, trying to keep the nervousness from my voice. It was difficult, with the cold and all.
“Can we go inside?” I said. “I’m freezing out here. I can explain everything.”
“So this is your house, then?”
“No,” I said. “That is …”
“And I suppose that this is not really your vee-hickle, even though you told me it was before. Is that right?”
“That’s right,” I said. “You see …”
“And those are not your slippers you’re wearing. It’s just a coincidence they fit you.”
“Sarge.” The other man spoke for the first time. Sergeant Fuller gave me a long look before turning away. The other policeman had pulled back part of the tarpaulin and we could see the rest of the body it had concealed. It was a man, lying on his side facing us, his knees drawn up and his arms crossed in front of his chest. He had grey hair, a deeply lined face, and a strikingly black moustache, which I always believed he dyed, though I could never understand why he bothered. His eyes were closed.
“My god!” I said. “It’s George Baxter.”
“You know this man, Mr. Rutherford?” Sergeant Fuller said. For the first time, I saw him smile.
“Yes,” I said. “We bought our house from him. That is …”
“This house?”
“No,” I said. Then I remembered that Ken and Mary had indeed bought this house from George Baxter. He was, or had been, the most successful estate agent in Newton Abbott.
“He’s an estate agent,” I said. “Look, I really can’t stand out here any longer.”
I turned and walked back to the front door, Sergeant Fuller at my elbow. Susan had seen us coming and opened the door for us. For the second time that day the warmth inside was a shock. One more shock, I thought, and I would pass out.
“Susan,” I said. “Please tell Sergeant Fuller who we are.” I gave her my best meaningful look.
Susan was at her best in a crisis. Her forehead had creased momentarily when I said her name, but she pulled herself together immediately and spoke firmly.
“I’m Mary Rutherford,” she told Sergeant Fuller. “And this is my husband, Ken.”
“No,” I said, and I could hear the despair in my own voice. “Tell him who we really are.”
I’d startled her, I could tell, but I could see her assess the situation and come to a decision.
“Oh,” she said. “Who we really are. Well then …”
“Wait a minute,” Sergeant Fuller interrupted. He took his cap off, scratched his head, then put the cap back on again.
“You do not have to say anything,” he told Susan. Then he repeated the same gobbledygook he’d said to me before about court, evidence and defence.
Susan looked at me.
“What’s he talking about?”
Now I was warming up again, it began to dawn on me what a pickle we’d got ourselves into. We weren’t very sociable people. Since we moved to this out-of-the-way part of the country Ken and Mary were the only people we’d really spent time with, and I knew the same applied to them. We’d met by chance—as a matter of fact it had been in the offices of the same George Baxter whose presumed corpse was now lying out there in the Land Rover—and we’d been drawn together by the fact that Ken and I were in the same line of business. I was a web page design consultant and still did some freelance work. By a happy coincidence Mary and Susan shared a passion for cultivating orchids, so when we spent time together we always had plenty to talk about. Whenever we went out anywhere, it was almost always together. Would any of the staff of the pubs or restaurants we’d been to remember which couple was which? I very much doubted it.
But then, in the next moment, the solution came to me. Susan was opening her mouth to speak, but I gestured her to silence as I turned back to Sergeant Fuller.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll tell you what you want to know.”
Fuller still looked sceptical.
“The people you need to find,” I told him, “are Tony and Susan Phillips. They should be driving a blue 2002 Nissan Patrol. They’ll have started about an hour ago, from a car park just outside Buckfastleigh, near the junction with the A385. The Nissan is our car. This Land Rover is theirs. We swap cars when we walk across the moor. It’s something we do. They were supposed to meet us here, but they haven’t turned up. Now we know why.”
I was trying not to babble, keeping my voice steady and calm, and it seemed to be working. Fuller had pulled out a notebook and was scribbling in it. Mary looked ashen, but I reached out and squeezed her hand to reassure her.
“The number of the car?” Fuller’s pen was poised.
“Of course. It’s … ” But suddenly I was confused and couldn’t remember. “Just a moment,” I said. I was feeling a bit giddy, no doubt from the rapid changes of temperature I’d undergone recently.
“WP52 DVL,” Mary said. Of course! That was it. I could see the car in my mind, with the number plate.
Fuller wrote it down.
“You wouldn’t happen to know Mr. and Mrs. Phillips’ address, would you, sir?”
At least we were back to ‘sir’. Should I tell him, or not? But then another wave of vertigo swept through my head and I experienced that curious memory block again.
“I’m afraid not,” Mary said. Her lips were white, and I was annoyed at the policeman for putting her through this.
“But they do live in Newton Abbott?”
“Yes,” I said.
“All right then.” Fuller closed the notebook and clicked his pen.
“I’ll put out a call,” he said. “Please stay here in the meantime. There’ll be forensics coming soon. I advise you to cooperate fully.”
“Of course, sergeant,” I said.
He turned to go and I opened the front door for him, happy to be polite now he was leaving us in peace.
“Sergeant,” I said, “what brought you here? Can you tell us that?”
Fuller scratched his chin and thought for a second. Then he tilted his head towards the Land Rover in the drive.
“The vee-hickle,” he said. “There was a witness. I’ll be back later.”
I watched him walk down to the police car in the street before I closed the door.
Mary came to me and I gave her a big hug. She was trembling. It wasn’t fair that Fuller upset her like that. And what about that last, enigmatic remark of his? Was he trying to alarm us?
Mary had her arms wrapped tightly round my waist. She turned her head up to me.
“Oh, Ken, darling,” she said. “What are we going to do now?”
§
Once the police picked up Tony and Susan the whole thing would be sorted out quickly, I was sure of that. Even if they—one or both of them—hadn’t killed Baxter, they must have had the Land Rover at the time his body was loaded into the back. Yes. It must have happened after we exchanged cars and drove off to opposite sides of the moor. Once the police talked to them and matched up times, vehicles and locations, Mary and I would be in the clear. Thank heavens I’d kept my head while I was talking to the understandably suspicious Sergeant Fuller.
Another car had parked in the street and a man and a woman in plain clothes—presumably Fuller’s “forensics”—were messing around behind the Land Rover. Before that they had taken Mary’s and my fingerprints—routine, they said, in cases like this—and samples of our hair, fingernails and saliva for DNA testing. I felt fatigued by the whole business and paid them little attention. I smoked a pipe and read the newspaper. It was nothing to do with me, anyway. I explained my reasoning to Mary, but she seemed to be struggling not to cry.
All this time, a disturbing thought kept insinuating itself. What about Roger? He used the Land Rover on occasion, albeit very rarely. Tony had a short fuse on occasion, but Roger was something else altogether. And there was something at the back of my mind about Roger and George Baxter, something about him seeing Baxter look at Mary in the wrong way. Roger was very protective, not to say jealous, even though he had no cause to be. Had he left me a note about it? Sent me an e-mail? I started to feel confused again.
Mary had never met Roger, and I was pretty sure Tony and Susan didn’t know he existed. Should I tell the police about Roger? I decided to keep my counsel.
When Fuller returned late that afternoon, his face was grim in the porch light. I invited him and his partner inside. Their breath was steam until they stepped indoors. The temperature had dropped even further and must have been well below freezing
“We’ve found the car,” Fuller said without preamble. “It was parked on the edge of the moor, near where you told us. It was empty. But Mr. Phillips’ driving licence was inside.”
He seemed to be waiting for some comment from me.
“So?” I said.
“According to his driving licence,” Fuller continued, emphasising each word, “Mr. Phillips lives here. At this address.”
The hall seemed to swirl around my head. I felt the same dizziness as earlier. A vertigo, a loss of balance, like standing on the edge of a cliff and feeling compelled to lean just a little further.
Then I was shouting at Fuller; I grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him, trying to make him understand. How did he dare to come here with his false accusations, disrupting my home, scaring Susan, saying things that didn’t make any sense? As if through cotton wool, I could hear Susan calling to me: “Tony, stop. Please stop.”
Then I was on the floor, my face pressed into the carpet, as Fuller’s partner handcuffed me, his knee pressed into my back. And then I was calm again. Numb. I didn’t care. None of this was happening to me. The policeman rolled me over and sat me with my back to the wall.
“My husband has dissociative identity disorder,” Mary was saying. “Multiple personalities.” There were tears on her cheeks and she wouldn’t look at me.
“Has he ever been in trouble before?”
Mary shook her head.
“Not really. Tony’s short-tempered. He’s occasionally got into fights. But Ken would never hurt anybody.”
“Well, I suppose that explains his two names,” Fuller said. “What about yours?”
“I was baptised Susan Mary. Tony married Susan, but the first time I met Ken he said he liked Mary better.”
Now she was talking nonsense. The stress must have unhinged the poor dear.
“Calm down, Mary,” I told her. “Don’t get upset. We’ll sort all this out, don’t worry”
To Fuller I said, “You’ve got the wrong person.” I tried to explain. “It was Tony, not me. Don’t you understand? I’m not to blame.”
“We’ll have to book him,” Fuller said to Mary. “At least until the forensic analysis comes back.”
She nodded.
Fuller said, “I’ll just charge him with assaulting a police officer. For now. Do you have medical records and so on?”
“Yes,” Mary said. “Tony is under treatment. I never expected anything like this.”
What on earth was she talking about? I wanted to complain, explain, reassure her, but even when I formed the words in my mind, I couldn’t get them to my tongue.
“He has this idea that Ken and Mary are friends with Tony and Susan,” Mary continued. “I play along. Usually both of them manage it well. I’ve never seen him so confused before.”
“I don’t know how you cope,” Fuller said. “What about the car?”
“We like to walk across the moor and we use both cars, so we get a start and an end point. We usually drive round after we’ve finished and we bring them both home. It sounds complicated, but that way we get a good walk without going in a circle.”
“And today?”
“The Nissan has a problem with the carburettor. We were going to phone for a tow truck. I mean, Tony was. The Nissan is his. Ken usually drives the Land Rover.”
And Roger, too, I thought. Suddenly it seemed funny. In police radio language, Roger meant understood, got the message. Roger understood all right. Oh yes!
Fuller turned to me.
“Mr. Rutherford,” he said, “I’m formally charging you with assaulting a police officer. I’m taking you into custody, pending an examination of your health records. Do you understand?”
I felt a surge of glee. He was charging Ken! The idiot was charging the wrong person.
“Roger!” I said “I understand.” Then I couldn’t restrain myself any longer and had to giggle. Susan was weeping and Fuller obviously didn’t get the joke. The laughter poured out of me like a river bursting its banks, and didn’t stop as they draped Ken’s overcoat around me and led me down the drive to the police car.
- End -
© Copyright Philip J. Lees 2009