No Place of Safety (2 page)

‘That's right.'

‘So quite recent. I'll take this. Does this mean he was on the holiday with a friend?'

‘Oh yes. We wouldn't have let him go otherwise. As it was, his mother worried herself sick. He was with Darren Sorby, from his form at school.'

‘Perhaps I should talk to Darren. Are they still good friends now?'

‘Oh yes. They're mates. Darren's very worried, but we couldn't get anything out of him we didn't know already.'

Charlie took his leave. He had no doubt this man had been a good parent by his lights, but he found both the man and the house dispiriting. He thought he should try to speak to Katy Bourne's parents before he went to the pair's school. She lived a mile and a half away in a little box on an estate of little boxes, built in a hideous orange brick, with a sign at the end of the street saying Pelsett Homes and showing there were still some for sale. These were houses for the newly-married, the newly-divorced, and the old. Katy's box had come out in a rash of lead-lighting. He rang twice and got no answer.

‘She won't be back till four,' came a voice. ‘She works at the post office in Morley Road.'

There was an elderly couple working in a little scrap of garden next door, and bumping bottoms every time they took a step backwards. It seemed an act of faith to plant anything natural in such an environment. No doubt they had bought the house on retirement, wanting a place where everything was new, and everything would go on working for their lifetime. Fifty per cent right. Charlie strolled over to the knee-high fence.

‘Thanks. Is there a Mr Bourne, by the way?'

‘No,' said the woman, pushing a strand of hair out of her eyes. ‘I'm not sure there ever was. There was a man – I'm pretty sure he wasn't a husband – when they moved in here,
but he took off soon afterwards – matter of weeks, so far as I remember.'

‘I see. Do you know why?'

‘Just said he'd had enough.' She hesitated, then lowered her voice as if the secret police might be listening. ‘She's . . . well, not a very sympathetic sort of person.'

‘Right. I'll bear that in mind. And the daughter?'

‘Oh, very quiet. Don't see much of her. She's not in any trouble, is she?'

‘I hope not,' said Charlie, moving off.

The school he drove to, parking with the teachers' cars, was so familiar to him he hardly gave a glance to the peeling paint on the board walls, the ill-fitting windows, the litter-bestrewed playground, and the general air of neglect, as if children would soon be a thing of the past and it wasn't worth spending money on them. The headmaster had been alerted in advance, and was waiting for him.

‘I thought you'd want to speak to their best friends,' he said, almost the moment Charlie came into his study, ‘so I've alerted them. Darren Sorby and Sharon Reilly.'

‘Excellent. But what about you?'

The headmaster, who obviously wanted to shunt him on immediately, spread out his hands.

‘We have four hundred pupils here. The most I get is an impression, unless they're problem students or very bright. I've talked to the form teachers though. Alan seems – or seemed, before this – unproblematic: quite good at his work, not a great one for games, hot on the environment. It may not go very deep, but it's a step in the right direction.'

‘Sure. And Katy Bourne?'

‘Ah, there may be some problems there. Rather a lonely child – adolescent, I should say. It wasn't easy to find a friend of hers. I would say a distinctly unhappy young woman.'

Charlie thought for a moment.

‘Unhappy because she's lonely, or lonely because she's unhappy?'

‘I think you may be the best person to find that out. You're closer to their age.'

He had made available an unused classroom. There seemed
to be plenty of them: school rolls were declining. When the two friends came in Charlie took a desk by the window, through which a fearsome draught beat on his neck, and sat them in two desks on the other side of the aisle.

‘Now,' he said, looking first at Darren Sorby, ‘I get the sense of Alan Coughlan being fairly bright, well adjusted, with a lot of interests – would that be right?'

Darren Sorby nodded.

‘So what went wrong, or what happened? That's not the sort of person who suddenly goes missing as a rule.'

Darren screwed up his mouth.

‘Well, he never said anything to me.'

‘Had he been any different these last few weeks – or perhaps just the last few days?'

Darren considered this.

‘Maybe a bit quieter like. Sort of thoughtful. But you see, we'd just done our GCSEs, so I thought that he was probably worried, or had been overdoing the studying.'

‘He was going to stay on at school if he did well?'

‘Yes. Or maybe go to the Jakob Kramer College.'

‘Did he have any reasons to think that he might have done badly?'

‘No. At the time he seemed quite happy with the papers.'

‘So how long had he been quiet and thoughtful?'

Darren considered again. He was a slow considerer.

‘Difficult to say, really . . . Just a few days, so far as I remember. He was rather quiet on the Wednesday before he took off. We'd been intending to go into town to
The Last Knight
, but then he said he wasn't in the mood.'

‘Without giving a reason?'

‘No. I'd have said if he had.'

‘And you have no reason at all to connect him with Katy Bourne?'

Darren shook his head vigorously.

‘No. So far as I know he'd never heard the name. Certainly he'd never mentioned her to me. And he would've if she was his girlfriend, or if he was even interested.'

‘She was younger than him, wasn't she?'

‘Yes, a year younger. But he's had girlfriends in lower years before. It wasn't that.'

Charlie transferred his gaze to Sharon Reilly. The girl was a little overweight, not pretty, but with sharp eyes.

‘She never said anything to me. But – '

‘But you're not all that close,' supplied Charlie.

‘No. And . . . she never told you things. Especially not things like that.'

‘Do you mean she was secretive?'

Sharon screwed up her face.

‘Not that exactly. More that she was . . . unhappy.' Charlie noted it had been the headmaster's word too, no doubt suggested to him by one of the girl's teachers. ‘She didn't think anyone could be interested in her. Didn't think she was
interesting
enough. She could hardly believe it if you made friendly gestures. I think it's what the magazines call low self-esteem.'

Sharon seemed a lot brighter than Darren Sorby. Charlie wondered if it was this that had led to the low-key friendship between her and Katy – wondered whether it was the sort of school where a bright pupil was left very much to herself, and perforce made alliances with other loners.

‘I'm guessing the problem was at home,' he suggested quietly. The girl nodded.

‘It must have been. She didn't talk about it – not
talk
. But you could tell by her reactions. If her mother was mentioned she went silent, or sometimes made an ugly face. She was sending signals, but she clammed up if you tried to get any details out of her. I tried to help, because I thought it was probably serious, but I never got through to her. There's lots of us don't get on that well with our parents, but this . . .'

‘This went deeper?'

‘I thought so. That was the impression I got.'

Charlie nodded. He suspected that was the impression the neighbours had had too.

‘There was a man, wasn't there, in the household until recently?'

‘Yes. Not her father.'

‘There couldn't be any question of . . . of him and her, him and Katy? . . .'

‘Oh, I don't think so. I never got any hint. When he moved out Katy just said he “didn't like the atmosphere – couldn't take it any longer”.'

‘Well, that tells me something, at least. Did Katy see her natural father?'

‘If so, she kept very quiet about it. I never once heard her mention him.'

‘Long gone?'

Sharon shrugged.

‘For all I know. There's plenty of kids here from one-parent homes. Lots of them don't know who their father is.'

‘You think Katy was one of them?'

‘That would be my guess. But we weren't that close, you see. Not
friends
.'

‘And there was nobody here who was closer?'

‘No. I certainly never heard her mention Alan Coughlan, or any other boy as a boyfriend. There was . . . nobody.'

‘Bleak.'

The girl considered Charlie's word.

‘Yes. I think that's what her life was. Bleak.'

There was a light shining behind the lead-lighted windows of Katy Bourne's box. It was a long way from Dingley Dell, but it suggested there was now human habitation. Charlie squared his shoulders for an unsatisfactory encounter and went up and rang the front door bell. Three descending notes and a recorded dog's bark.

Slow footsteps down the hall. The woman who opened the door had a narrow, straight mouth, deep lines of discontent along the forehead, and eyes that were cold and hard. Also tired. No doubt a day spent dispensing pensions, dole money, TV stamps and car licences would take their toll even on a tough lady well capable of taking care of herself.

‘Yes?'

‘Mrs Bourne?' The woman gave a tentative nod. ‘I'm DC Peace,' said Charlie, showing her his ID card and making sure that she read it.

‘Oh.'

This time Charlie got a message loud and clear: she was surprised to encounter a black policeman, and not pleased. Or was it that she was not pleased that the police were following up the case at all?

‘It's about Katy, Mrs Bourne.'

‘Well, I could guess that. Do you want to come in?'

‘Please.'

After a second's pause she stood aside and led him into a hallway barely large enough for the two of them, then into a living room that was tiny by any standards, in which paths had been made between the furniture – hand-me-down stuff
in a variety of different tastelessnesses. Charlie sat down on a meagrely stuffed chair with wooden arms, conscious of being the first black person to have penetrated this fastness (though he doubted whether visitors of any colour or creed had been frequent occurrences).

‘Right. Let's get this over,' was Mrs Bourne's unpromising opener. Charlie took his cue from her and pulled out his notebook.

‘Certainly. When did you realize that your daughter had left home, Mrs Bourne?'

‘Saturday, when I got home from work. I do one Saturday in four, and that was it.'

‘You realized at once she'd gone?'

‘Well, no. Just that she wasn't in the house. If she wasn't at school, Katy was usually around the house. I thought she must have forgotten something in the shopping. I had my lunch, and then I began to unpack the shopping she'd left on the kitchen table. That's when I realized.'

‘Oh. Why?'

‘She'd bought odd amounts.
One
pork chop. Half the milk we usually get. There was more change than there should be. That's when I realized.'

Charlie nodded.

‘I suppose you went up to her room?'

‘Yes . . . almost everything had gone.'

‘How could she have transported all that?' asked Charlie, surprised.

‘She didn't have that much. But I did think maybe someone had come and got her.'

‘That worried you?'

‘It surprised me. I couldn't imagine who it might be.'

Charlie had a sudden insight of these two women, living together in this tiny, unwelcoming box, having only each other and hating each other. Or perhaps – almost as bad – being totally indifferent to each other.

‘Did Katy have any contact with her father?' he asked, out of the blue to surprise her. The woman laughed bitterly.

‘Don't make me laugh! He took off before she'd even made an appearance.'

‘No attempt to make contact since?'

‘None. I'd have handed her over soon enough if he'd shown any interest.'

‘Did you resent getting pregnant?'

There was a further tightening of the lips.

‘I wasn't best pleased.'

‘Why did you go through with it?'

Now they were really getting down to basics, to the bedrock of this woman's hardness and bitterness. There was another laugh – short, shot through with grievance.

‘Because he was over the moon. Can you believe what men do to women? He was cock-a-hoop, insisted I had it, said it would be loved. And like a fool I believed him, wanted to hold on to him. So when I was eight months gone, what did he do? He upped and left me. Us, I should say.'

‘Leaving you to bring up a baby you had never wanted to have, on your own?'