Human Remains

sigh. ‘We’ll stop there, for now. I’ll ask the custody sergeant to take you back to your cell.’
     
     
    Now that I have finally calmed down, lying on my narrow bunk back in my cell, I realise something that makes me smile. The newspaper is their best weapon. Which means they haven’t found my notebooks or the images. If they don’t find those, they have nothing at all.

Maggie
     
     
    I wasn’t always like this. Alone, I mean. I had a husband and a family, two boys. When they grew up and left home it was just back to Leonard and me, and that was fine with me. I worked two days a week at a tea shop in the village, and that was only for fun really. Leonard was quite senior in his organisation when he retired, and with the boys gone it left us with quite a bit of money. Stephen said we should sell the house, buy something smaller, but that would just give us more money sitting in the bank earning next to no interest, and what were we supposed to spend it on? We had holidays, of course; a cruise, usually, and a month or more in the sunshine during the cold, dark days of winter. But even when we were away I was always looking forward to coming home.
    Our house was large, on a quiet lane outside the village, with a garden extending right down to the river, trees hundreds of years old which groaned and sighed when the wind was strong. This house had nurtured us, looked after us, kept us safe and grown my boys into tall, proud men. Why would I want to live anywhere else?
    Stephen got married to a Norwegian girl called Ina. They settled in north London and had two daughters. I saw them regularly, at least once a month. They would come for Sunday lunch. My younger son, Adrian, met a girl and went travelling with her. They ended up settling in Australia because she had family there, and a year after that they had a boy. They never got married. Of course I didn’t see them nearly as often as I saw Stephen and Ina. Adrian and Diane came home for Christmas, once. They came for my sixtieth birthday. And then they came back for the trial.
    They came for him early on a Tuesday morning. He was still in bed, fast asleep. I was up because in those days I had trouble sleeping past five. I’d made a cup of tea and I was sitting at the kitchen table reading yesterday’s newspaper, waiting for it to get properly light so I could go outside and do a bit more of the weeding that I’d abandoned when the daylight faded the evening before.
    There was a knock at the door. I thought, ‘The postman’s early today,’ but of course it wasn’t the postman. It was two detectives, a man and a woman.
    ‘What is it? Is it the boys? What’s happened?’ I demanded.
    ‘We need to speak to your husband, Mrs Newman. Is he in?’
    I took the ID the man offered me, shut the door and studied it in the hallway, and then I opened the door and let them in.
    ‘Where is your husband?’ the woman asked, once they were in the hallway. ‘Where is Leonard?’
    ‘He’s in bed, of course, it’s half-past six. What’s all this about?’
    The male detective went upstairs and I waited in the kitchen with the female. It was all very quiet, upstairs. There was no shouting, no crashing and thumping. A few minutes later Leonard came down the stairs with the police officer, dressed in the clothes he would wear to do the gardening: jeans, a sweater over an old shirt. His hair was standing up away from his head because he hadn’t brushed it. He was by the door with the man, putting his shoes on, and I thought for one dreadful moment he wasn’t going to acknowledge me at all, so I called out, ‘Leonard!’
    He spoke to the man for a moment and then came through to the kitchen. The look on his face was terrible, as though he’d just received the most appalling news.
    ‘What is it, Leonard? What on earth’s happened?’
    He didn’t move towards me, or try to touch me. He just said three words: ‘I’m so sorry.’
    He didn’t even use my name.
    When they’d taken him away I called his solicitor, who promised to get to the police station as soon as he could. My house was full of people; in the end I had no idea who they all were. I made them cups of tea and some of them looked at me with pity. Some of them with other expressions that I couldn’t interpret.
    They practically dismantled Leonard’s office. They took his computer away in plastic bags, and the laptop, all the mobile phones, including mine.
    I used the landline to call Stephen. I