Gift Wrapped by Peter Turnbull Page B

I had got away with it and the neighbour wasn’t going to say anything after all. I even sent James a letter to the bedsit telling him we could pick things up again when Shane went to Hull to join his ship, but the neighbour, the cow, was just playing a waiting game, I reckon, holding off until she knew that I was beginning to think I had got away with it. Then Shane gets the anonymous letter I’d been dreading printed so as to disguise any handwriting, telling him all about me and my “fancy man” and enclosing a photograph of us with our backs to the camera. She must have turned round and taken the snapshot when we were walking away from her but it was me all right, wearing a very distinctive jacket I had then, purple with a fawn patch on the back. I don’t mean a repair make-do-and-mend patch but a designer patch. So then Shane keeps it to himself and tells me that we are going for a drive. We drive out into the country and he parks up in a narrow lane by a field and shows me the letter and the photograph, then he takes me into the field and plays football with my body ... all the time wanting to know who the “fancy man” is. After that I don’t remember anything – it’s all blank. It’s still all a blank. Shane got arrested for assault but got away with it ... no witnesses ... no trace of my blood on his clothing. He’d changed his clothes by the time the cops arrested him. He had probably burnt the ones he was wearing in the field.’
    â€˜Will we know your ex-husband?’ Yellich asked.
    â€˜Oh, yes, he’s got a record. He’s got convictions for violence. Anyway,’ Muriel Bond continued, ‘I never heard no more from James. I just assumed he’d gone back to his wife and was keeping his head down because he knew a mad mountain of a trawlerman was looking for him. It never occurred to me that Shane had murdered James. Not once did that occur to me.’
    â€˜You know that’s what happened?’ Ventnor pressed.
    â€˜No ... no, I don’t ... Shane never said anything, it’s just that’s what I assume. The murder, well, that I can understand, but not the burial part.’ Muriel Bond held eye contact with Ventnor. ‘The Shane Bond I know, or knew, would have left James’s body lying in the open somewhere waiting to be found ... so long as no one saw anything and there were no witnesses ... that’s all Shane would be worried about. He wouldn’t go to the trouble of burying someone he’d killed. Mind you, he had the van; he had all the tools he would need to dig a deep hole kept in his allotment shed ... a pick ... a spade ... so I don’t know. It’s just what I think must have happened.’
    â€˜So what ... yes, so I gave her a bit of a slap, so what? She was fishing for it.’ Shane Bond sneered at the question. He was, Yellich and Ventnor found, a tall, muscular man, as Muriel Bond had described him as being, with the biting salt sea air seemingly engraved in his ragged, jagged facial features. He had, thought Yellich, very small pupils, which seemed to pierce rather than look. ‘I mean, you tell me, what marriage doesn’t have that bit? Which wife never gets what’s coming to her now and again? It’s what makes any marriage work, isn’t it?’
    â€˜It didn’t seem to make your marriage work, Shane,’ Somerled Yellich observed coldly.
    â€˜It didn’t exactly destroy it either,’ Bond retorted savagely. ‘She left, didn’t she? I didn’t chuck her out. She could have stayed but she left. Her choice.’
    Shane Bond’s house and home was a small, soot-black terraced house in Holgate behind the railway station. Like all the other houses in Holgate, it had just two rooms downstairs and a kitchen. Upstairs were two bedrooms and a bathroom. There was a small backyard enclosed by a high wall and a cobbled stone-surfaced alley running