Just What Kind of Mother Are You? (19 page)

Pushing the chair out from her desk, Joanne says, ‘I’m getting a coffee, Ron. You want one?’

‘Aye, okay. You’ve not got any Rennies in your handbag, have you? My stomach needs settling.’

‘It’s all that pastry you keep eating for breakfast. Get your wife to make you some porridge.’

Ron gives her a look. He is not really a porridge type of guy. ‘I was fine before I started looking at these sick bleeders.’

‘Fair point. I’ll see if I can find you something.’

Joanne leaves the office as Ron’s muttering, ‘Like a needle in a haystack of Gary Glitters, this is—’

She walks down the hallway, past DI Pete McAleese’s office, where he’s shouting and bawling at someone on the phone. She’s humming Gary Glitter’s ‘Rock and Roll Part 2’, louder than she probably ought to … not really the done thing if you’re working on a child-rape case.

Shame about Gary being such a fuck-up, Joanne muses. She always did like his music.

She presses buttons on the machine for two milky coffees and thinks about Guy Riverty. She can’t shake the feeling he’s involved somehow and so has been checking online which of his properties are occupied by holidaymakers. Not many. Most are empty right now, the next bookings coming just before Christmas.

They’re nice, his properties. All high spec. Gone are the days of the cheap and cheerful B&Bs, the fifteen-quid-a-nighters, including a full cooked breakfast. That doesn’t exist any more. The Lakes has a different clientele now. The walkers, hikers and outdoorsy types still frequent, but the place caters more for the country-retreat brigade. They want marble-tiled bathrooms as big as Joanne’s house. They want Michelin-starred restaurants. They want midnight cruises with pink champagne.

Guy Riverty’s holiday lets are all listed as five-star. He goes a
bundle on a modern finish, and underfloor heating comes as standard. For a while this afternoon Joanne had become lost in dreaming up her ideal life in one of his cottages over at Hawkshead. Walking around barefoot, her feet padding softly on the solid-oak flooring, her hand running over the built-in espresso machine, across the wall-sunk TV. No wires dangling down to annoy her here. A faceless, nameless, good-looking Adonis lying on the bed upstairs, waiting for her …

That’s when she’d snapped herself out of fantasy mode and got back to work.

She tracks down some Rennies for Ron from Mary, the station cleaner, and returns with his coffee to find him looking grave.

‘D’you want the bad news or the bad news?’

She perches on the edge of his desk. ‘Fire away.’

‘Another girl’s gone.’

‘Shit. How?’

‘No details yet, I’ve just heard. Which means—’

‘Which means he’s not let Lucinda Riverty go. Which means she’s probably already dead.’

‘Do you want the other bad news?’

‘Go on.’

‘Desk sergeant’s fighting off the tabloid press downstairs. McAleese wants you to stand in on the statement, thinks it’ll look best with a woman officer present … 
and
—’ he says, sighing out a long, unhappy breath.

‘There’s more?’

‘Yeah. Your Mr Riverty was nowhere near where this one was taken. Sorry, Joanne, but it’s just not him.’

The feeling inside him is growing to the point where he knows he can’t contain it for much longer. This is the best part. The part just before. Right before
.

She lies there, her eyes open, glassy. Seeing but not seeing. He would like for her to see him fully, but that’s not possible. Perhaps later
.

Her skin is paler in this light. There’s not a blemish, not a crease. No lumpy flesh adorns her inner thighs. No silvery-white streaks crawl across her belly
.

Instead there are two, sharp, angular hipbones jutting skyward. More like wrongly positioned shoulder blades than bones of the pelvis
.

She doesn’t speak
.

He lies next to her. The cotton sheet slides upon the polythene beneath, the scratchy sound incongruous in the serenity before him. She moves her head. She knows he’s here, but she’s not scared. She wants him. Her mouth parts, but not in that trashy way he knows. She’s communicating to him. If she could form words she would be urging him on, telling him it’s time to begin
.

Forming a light pincer grip between thumb and first finger, he circles his wrist in the air above her abdomen. He’s removed her bra already and, as he suspected, she didn’t really need it. Following her friends. Just fitting in. He really wished they wouldn’t do that. Plenty of time for growing up later. Seems they all want to do it so fast, and if only they knew how wrong they were
.

The air between his fingers and her body is warming now. The transfer of energy, a mixing of each of them, here in this space. Sacred space. The two of them joined together in the purest way
.

Her mouth whispers inaudible guidance and it’s time to remove his clothes. With his now-gloved fingertips, he gently parts her legs and takes his camera from the desk. Her neatness he finds astonishing
.

Then he lies down upon her and lets her take him to where he needs to be
.

23

I
T
’
S JUST AFTER SEVEN
in the evening and Joe and I are sitting at the kitchen table. The kids are upstairs. Sally is on the phone to her school friend, Kitty. She seems to have reached the stage where she needs to talk and talk – but not to us. The police spoke with her again this afternoon, about the man Lucinda’s been meeting, but she’s sketchy with the details, makes out like I’m pressuring her and tells me she’s told me everything she knows already.

The two lads are playing Minecraft. This game seems to have every teenage boy across the country hooked, but I am yet to see its appeal. I feel a stab of guilt. Now and then I nag Joe about us doing more things together. ‘We should play a board game, or have a meal out … we never spend any quality time with the kids.’

And Joe will say, ‘We get fed up after half an hour of Monopoly, we haven’t got a spare eighty quid
to eat out with
, and how many times do I need to tell you, kids
don’t like
quality time?’

He’s right. They don’t. But then I watch
Supernanny
and feel shitty when she says parents only spend around forty minutes a day with their kids, and that’s the reason for their bad behaviour. ‘Those kids can’t behave,’ Joe says, ‘because their parents are idiots. We’re doing the best we can, Lise. Let it drop, will you?’

Joe’s exhausted today. He’s driven to Lancaster (twice), not usually a big deal in itself, but a band of freezing rain came across late this afternoon – a meteorological event I have never witnessed before – and the roads are a nightmare. They are treacherous.

On leaving work, I’d assumed we’d had a brief respite from the snow, as everything was rain-covered, dewy-looking and clean. But then I stepped on to what I thought was a damp step, only to realize the rain had frozen on impact and the damp was in fact colourless ice.

I saw three cars in ditches and two accidents by the time I got home. And I could’ve cried at one point when I spotted an elderly guy crawling up to his front door on his hands and knees rather than risk trying to walk.

Joe came home and went straight out again. A group of his friends from the pub wanted to search along the river for Lucinda – without Kate and Guy knowing – and he’s only just got back.

He’s shattered, and he looks awful. There are deep creases beneath his eyes, his left eyelid is drooping slightly and his three-day-old stubble is growing through grey. This seems to have happened so suddenly. Almost overnight. As if the day he hit forty the black pigmentation was all used up. I put my arms around him from behind and kiss his neck softly. Then, as I straighten, I see a deep gash on the back of his head, visible through his hair.

‘How did you do that?’ I ask him.

‘Twatted it getting out of the car. My legs slid from under me.’

I don’t reprimand him for his use of language. Oddly, I don’t mind the word ‘twat’ when used as a verb instead of a noun.

Needless to say, they found nothing on the search. Joe wore his golf spikes to give him some marginal grip on the ice, but the search party didn’t stay out long. One guy lost his footing and
slipped a good thirty yards, so they gave up and came back. And from what I hear, the police are no further along.

I’m telling Joe about the theft of Bluey and asking whether he thinks I should call the police and report it. But he rubs his eyes, saying, ‘Reckon they’ve got a bit too much on their plates to be dealing with stolen dogs right now. Besides, Bluey’s got a home. Which is what you wanted. The bloke probably just didn’t want to give a donation – maybe he couldn’t afford to.’

‘But that’s the thing,’ I tell him, ‘he comes in dressed all expensive and says he’s a solicitor. He could clearly afford it.’

‘What car did he drive?’

‘Didn’t see it.’

‘People are weird, baby. Who knows what goes on? I’d let it go.’

He can’t be bothered listening, and I can’t blame him. He looks fit to drop. His skin’s so grey it’s like he’s been dug up.

I clear away our plates. Joe’s is littered with green stalks where he’s bitten off the flesh part of the chillies, straight into his mouth. I check beneath his chair for any bits that might have fallen, because Ruthie, the Staffy cross, has a habit of eating them and then growling at the floor afterwards when her mouth is burning.

‘School might be shut tomorrow,’ Joe says, pouring himself a bottled ale. ‘There’s black ice everywhere. No one’ll be able to get in … I’m thinking maybe we should switch your car for a Land Rover soon. It’d be safer—’

‘Nice idea, but what with? I’m not swapping it for an ancient one because we can’t afford to trade up.’ Then I say halfheartedly, ‘I suppose we could always get a loan.’

Joe doesn’t answer. Our finances are bordering on disaster at the moment. We own nothing except our cars. There’s no chance of us ever owning a property around here, and if we hadn’t got this house through the housing trust, which provides affordable housing for people born in the area, we couldn’t even
afford to rent in the village. Not when rents average around two grand a month. My credit card is maxed out after buying the kids’ Christmas presents and, well, it goes on and on.

Joe looks up. ‘We’ll put the car on the back burner,’ he says decisively and I know as I sit back down at the table that both of us are thinking the same thing. A new car is immaterial when we have all three children, safe upstairs, here with us. Joe gives me a sad smile. ‘Maybe we should offer to run Fergus to school tomorrow if it’s open. Save Kate and Guy doing it.’

‘Good idea. I was going to ring her in a bit and check on her. I’ll ask her.’

James comes in and helps himself to a packet of crisps I bought from Asda this morning. We’ll be lucky if there are any left by morning. Sometimes I think I’m housing locusts, not children.

James notices his dad’s not his normal self and starts rubbing Joe’s arm up and down in an uncharacteristically gentle, soothing way. I watch on bemused, because James is not a touchy-feely kind of kid. ‘Dad,’ he says, ‘you might not know this, but I have some medical training … and I think you might be having … a
stroke
—’ He laughs, still rubbing Joe’s arm, tickled by his own joke. Then he takes off upstairs, oblivious, it seems, to the stresses of the past two days.

I run Joe a bath. The bathroom is like an icebox, because there’s no double glazing in our ancient cottage and the insulation above that room is woefully lacking. You have to get in and out of the bath as fast as you can.

I’ve poured Joe another beer and leave it next to endless bottles of shampoo and bubble bath Sally’s bought when she’s been out shopping with her friends. I put Joe’s pyjamas and dressing gown on the radiator in the bedroom, like I used to do for the two older kids, still do for Sam, and give him a shout to come and get in.

When Joe’s soaking and happy, I go downstairs and phone Kate. Guy answers before it’s even had a chance to ring twice.

‘Guy, it’s Lisa. Any news?’

‘What?’

‘Any news?’

I can hear noise in the background, a door slam, muffled shouting. It could be Kate, though I’m not sure.

‘Guy,’ I say gently, ‘is everything all right?’

‘What do
you
think?’ he snaps, and I’m taken aback.

‘I’m sorry—’ I stammer. ‘I rang to see if you needed any help with Fergus tomorrow. You know, what with the weather being so bad? We can take him to school if it’s easier for you.’

Guy sighs out what sounds to me like a slow, scornful breath. ‘It’s really not a good time right now, Lisa.’

‘Oh, okay, I’m sorry to have bothered you, I only wanted to—’

‘Just go, would you? Just go, and get off the fucking line.’

‘I … I—’

But he’s gone. Put the phone down on me.

I stand there in the kitchen looking at the receiver in my hand, then someone starts hammering on the front door.

I rush to open it, thinking,
It’s Kate! Or Lucinda!
But as I pull the door back a blast of bitter air hits my face and I see it’s neither of them. There on the step, shaking, is Alexa.

‘Alexa,’ I cry, ‘how on earth did you get here? It’s not safe to be outside.’

‘Where is Joe?’ she demands, pushing past me, striding inside.

‘In the bath – why? What is it, Alexa, what’s happened?’

‘Tell him to get out,’ she says.

24

S
ALLY IS IN THE
kitchen pouring herself some milk when Alexa barges in. ‘Would you mind giving us some privacy, Sally?’ she says.

Sally stares at me, because Alexa looks completely unhinged.

She’s wearing pyjama bottoms – blue flannelette with sheep on them – snow boots and a black, padded dealer’s jacket. Her ordinarily silky blonde hair is damp, scraped back into a ponytail and starting to frizz around the temples. And she has black smudges beneath her eyes where she’s not taken her mascara off properly.