Off Minor (15 page)

“All right,” Skelton began, “wide awake, let’s have your attention.”

The appropriate section of the city map had been enlarged and attached to the wall behind him. Photographs of Gloria Summers and Emily Morrison on either side. Colored pins flagged their homes, the last places they had been seen alive. Ribbon marked the journeys they would have taken to their respective schools, the roads along which they might have been taken to the rec.

“Two girls,” Skelton was saying, “similar ages. Slip a shoehorn between their birthdays if you’re careful. Missing within three months of one another. Homes, schools, no more than three-quarters of a mile apart. Coincidence?”

The superintendent looked at the faces of the officers, grim beneath an early morning haze of cigarette smoke.

“We’re running the Summers case back through the computer, looking for connections. Up to now, the second incident, the mother’s our best bet. We’ve got a lead to West Yorkshire, DC Patel’s on his way there now, liaising with Chief Inspector Dunstan, Halifax C1D. The rest of you, you know the priorities: three vehicles—a red hatchback, Ford Sierra, green transit—and two individuals, the jogger and a woman who might or might not prove to be the girl’s mother.

“Questions?”

There were none.

Chief Inspector Lawrence spelled out the rest. Uniformed officers would back up CID on house-to-house, double-checking, broadening it beyond the immediate vicinity of the Morrison house. Others, along with civilian volunteers, would begin to search the wasteland along the canal and beside the railway tracks; divers were standing by. A watch was being kept at the house in Kimberley in case Diana Wills returned under her own devices.

Skelton was on his feet again. “I don’t need to tell you the urgency here: we want the girl found and as soon as possible.”

He didn’t add
while she’s still alive
.

He didn’t need to.

“Michael.”

He pushed away Lorraine’s hand and rolled towards the far side of the bed.

“Michael.”

“What?”

“There’s people outside, filming the house. I asked them to go away and they refused.” He was sitting upright now, staring at her; all the while he had been sunk in sleep it had been possible to think that it had not really happened. “They say they want us to talk to them, make a statement.”

A stone clinked against the window.

“Mr. Morrison! Wakey-wakey! Rise and shine!”

Twenty

There’s a statue of J. B. Priestley in the heart of Bradford, an imposing figure in a loose raincoat, not unlike Resnick, Patel had thought on more than one occasion. He had never read a word of Priestley, knew little enough about him, but he had, fifteen, been taken by the school to an afternoon performance of one of his plays. At the Alhambra:
When We Are Married.
A kind of sitcom, Patel remembered it, bluff-talking folk who smoked cigars and talked of brass, a maid in uniform, adultery—except it wasn’t really that—endless high teas. He had tried to tell his parents about it later, but his mother, unable to follow Patel’s tenuous grasp of the plot, had kept asking him to go back to the beginning; his father had queried what it had to do with education, suspected it of preaching values that were decadent, immoral.

One thing you could do if you were standing alongside the statue: lift up your head and see, above the furthest ridge of housing, the green of hills. Patel had grown up with this, woolen towns built in a valley, the power of water, streaming down. Even though that industry had largely gone, changed, the towns lived on. Bradford. Wakefield. Halifax.

Patel had been swept past the police station in the swell of traffic that sped around the broad ring road. His apology had been on his lips before Chief Inspector Dunstan looked ostentatiously at his watch.

A thin-lipped constable drove them out along the valley road towards Hebden Bridge, past stone walls and blackened stone chapels, tiny chippies that seemed to have been built into the front rooms of people’s houses, factories that sold sheepskin coats and clogs, fishermen in green plastic, glimpsed here and there along the canal.

Dunstan sat alongside Patel in the back of the car, gazing through the window and saying next to nothing. Sheep stared back at him, bedraggled, from steeply sloping fields.

“That photo you faxed up,” Dunstan offered, passing through Mytholmroyd, “next to bloody useless.”

It had been a color snap, eight or nine years old, just about the only picture of his former wife Michael Morrison had kept.

“I were your boss, I’d be beating a path through the woods with sticks, dredging the local reservoir, the canals.”

Patel nodded politely, said nothing.

“Another kiddie, weren’t there? Not so long back?”

“Sir.”

“Where was it they found her?”

“Old railway sidings.”

“That’s it then. That’s the place to be looking. Not having us chasing us tails with a needle and haystack job up here.”

Hebden Bridge
, the sign read,
the Pennines center.

Elsewhere, the day began well. One of the Morrisons’ neighbors, eight doors along, called the station and told the duty sergeant about the transit van that had been parked outside their house. A couple of men had been doing some decorating; on the Saturday they had stripped the wallpaper from the living room and prepared it for a fresh coat of paint. They left the van through Sunday, prior to returning on Monday morning.

Divine found the pair through a contact number, the two of them moonlighting from their regular jobs with a large building firm, currently engaged in transforming one of the Victorian factories in the old Lace Market area into exclusive flats and offices. Where the original owner had installed a chapel in the basement and paid his workers to attend between seven and seven-thirty each morning, the new entrepreneur was thinking along the lines of a squash court and sauna.

“Yes,” conceded one man, “old green van. That’s ours. Not a problem, is there? Not the tax? In the post.”

“Doing a little job out there,” the second man said, “more a favor than anything else. Friend of a friend, you know? Look, you don’t have to say anything about this to Inland Revenue, do you? VAT?”

Graham Millington had been half-way to his car, heading off towards the house-to-house, crack the whip a little, when the constable called him back. A Mrs. McLoughlin, sounded quite distressed, wanted to talk to somebody working on the investigation. Not just anybody.

Moira McLoughlin was waiting behind the door as Millington drew up, a house not unlike the Morrisons’, just two short streets away. She opened the front door and drew Millington swiftly inside. She was a small woman with swollen ankles, with soft permed hair and a beige dress that fastened all the way up to the neck.

“This is about the missing girl?” Millington asked.

“Please,” she said, anxiety wobbling her voice between registers, “come through to the other room.”

They sat in a Dralon dream lounge with the standard lamp burning, curtains drawn, not yet eleven in the morning.

“It’s the car,” Moira McLoughlin said.

“Car?”

“The car that was parked in the crescent. You were asking about it on the news.”

“The hatchback? Nova?”

She nodded, a forward dart, like a bird at a feeder.

“What about it?”

The woman’s fingers steepled momentarily then crumpled into one another, a movement of swelling knuckles and rings. “You see,” she said, not looking at Millington, looking anywhere but at him, “we parked it instead of outside here …”

“We?”

“He. My … friend.”

Sweet Jesus, Millington thought, that’s what this is all about. She’s having an affair.

“It wasn’t often that he came to the house and when he did, he always parked the car in different places, so as not to attract suspicion.” Her mouth was dry and the pale pink of her tongue kept sliding across it. It didn’t make any difference, Millington was thinking, not age, not appearance, not a damned thing. There they were, half the population, shedding their marriage vows as easily as they can shuck off their knickers. Even women like this, wouldn’t guess she’d had a sexy thought in her life, wouldn’t think another man would look at her twice. For a moment, as Moira McLoughlin continued talking, Millington realized he was thinking about his own wife, all those evenings in stuffy classrooms learning about Russian verbs or Barbara Hepworth’s bronzes, the chatter afterwards over coffee, articulate young men with degrees and aspirations who weren’t compelled to work strange hours then come home smelling of beer and other people’s cigarettes.

“I wasn’t going to say anything at all, you see, but I knew that Alan never would, and you did say, the police report on the news, it did say it was important.” She touched her fingers to the loose skin bunching at her throat. “That poor child.”

Millington uncapped his pen. “The gentleman in question, er, Alan, how long would you say he was here?”

“I don’t know, I suppose, until five. It must have been until five. My husband, his mother is in a nursing home you see, all the way down in Hereford, and he travels down to see her. Sundays. Some Sundays. After lunch.”

Soon that’s where we’ll all be, Millington thought, tucked up in wheelchairs up and down the country, slobbering over our Sunday mashed potato and trying to remember who it was we committed adultery with and why.

“You won’t have to contact him, sergeant? You see, I thought if I told you myself that would be all right.”

“I’ll just take a note of his name, and address. It shouldn’t be necessary to speak to the gentleman himself, but if it is I assure you we’ll use the utmost discretion.”

A job for Divine, Millington thought: Oi, which of you’s been humping the dwarf with the swollen legs? He wrote the details carefully into his book and rose to his feet. “We’re very grateful that you came forward. Now we can forget about the car, at least.”

“Do you think you’ll find her?” Moira McLoughlin asked at the door. “I mean before …”

“I don’t know,” Millington replied, a slow shake of the head. “I honestly don’t know.”

Twenty-one

“Are you married?”

Lynn Kellogg shook her head. “No.”

“Must be difficult, a job like yours. If you were, I mean. Shift work, things like that.”

“Yes,” Lynn said, “I suppose so.”

“Still,” Lorraine Morrison tried for a smile and missed, “plenty of time yet.”

Tell that to my mother, Lynn thought.

They were sitting at the back of the house, the living room, French windows out on to the garden towards which Lorraine’s eyes kept returning: as if Emily would be miraculously there, the same old game continuing, dolls and babies and mummies and prams, happy, happy families.

“I was nineteen,” Lorraine said, “when I met Michael. We were in this restaurant. Mama Mia. I’d gone there with a bunch of girls from where I worked. The bank. Somebody’s leaving do, you know?”

Lynn nodded. The traffic noise from the main road nearby was ever-present, dull, cushioned by double glazing. They had been sitting there long enough for their too-weak coffee to grow cold, for Lynn to marvel at the correctness of everything in its place, the vases, the cushions with their bright floral blues and greens, the print of pink ballet dancers on the wall. Earlier that day, when Lynn had first arrived, she had found Lorraine lifting ornaments and picture frames and dusting underneath. She imagined Lorraine as a child, following her mother from room to room with the Hoover, watching, cleaning, falling into step. Here she was, younger than Lynn by a good six years, already married, a husband, a house, a missing child …

“I suppose we must have been making a lot of noise,” Lorraine was saying, “the way people do, evenings like that. Michael was there with this other man, business. After a while he came over, tapped me, you know, on the shoulder. He and his friend had been having a bet on what it was we all did. I told him and he laughed and called out that he’d won. Next day, I looked up from the counter and there he was, half-way down the queue. ‘You didn’t tell me which branch,’ he said, when he got to the window. ‘I’ve been walking my feet off all over the city center.’ The cashiers either side of me were listening, one of them laughed and I could feel myself going red. He pushed a check through to me and it wasn’t even the right bank. I asked him what he was doing. ‘I thought you could endorse it,’ he said. ‘Address and telephone number on the back.’ As much to get rid of him as anything else, I did.

“‘You’re asking for trouble,’ one of the other girls said. ‘Married man. He is good looking though, nice clothes.’

“‘How d’you know he’s married?’ I said. He hadn’t been wearing a ring, I had noticed that.

“First time I went out with him I asked him and he laughed and said, ‘No, what kind of a bloke do you think I am?’ After we’d been seeing one another for maybe a month, he told me that he was. I went mad, really screaming at him, calling him a liar, all sorts. ‘Steady, steady,’ he said, catching hold of my hands. ‘I didn’t tell you before ’cause there wasn’t any point.’

“What do you mean?’ I said.

“‘I wasn’t in love with you then,’ he said.”

Michael had phoned in and asked for time off, compassionate leave. When Lynn had arrived at the house, he had been on the point of going outside, running the gauntlet of the news photographers, the video cameramen. She had persuaded him it was not, perhaps, the best idea, since when he had stayed in the kitchen, blinds closed, chain-smoking and working his way through a bottle of Bulgarian wine.