Off Minor (16 page)

“Fifteen years older than me, Michael. It’s all my mum could think about, that and the fact that he’d been divorced. Fifteen years.” She glanced at Lynn. “I don’t think that’s a lot, do you?”

Lynn shook her head. “Not necessarily.”

“‘By the time you’re thirty,’ my mum used to say ‘he’ll be forty-five. Middle-aged. Have you thought of that?’ “Lorraine was on her feet by the French window: a robin was squatting near the edge of the lawn, so still that it could have been a plastic toy. “It’s not as if,” Lorraine said, “he acts his age. Not, you know, old. Only since he lost his job, had to take another miles away, all the traveling, well, he gets tired. I mean, he’s bound to. Anybody would. His age, that’s got nothing to do with it.”

Lynn stood up, smoothing down her skirt. She didn’t know about Michael, but being around Lorraine somehow made her feel young and old at the same time. Lorraine was the kind of girl Lynn hated sharing a communal changing room with whenever she was buying something to wear; there she’d be, struggling into a size twelve, glance up and there’s this kid with a model-girl figure sliding down into a ten with inches to spare. Remember Michelle Pfeiffer in
The Fabulous Baker Boys?
The scene where they take her out for new clothes and one of the Baker Boys, one of the Bridges brothers, says to her, “What are you? A ten?” and she just looks at him and says, “An eight.”

Lynn loved the film, had seen it three times, but that really got to her. An eight!

Lorraine had time and money to spend on herself as well; hair done each week and more than the occasional hour on the sun bed. Where else was she going to get that tan, that shine on her skin?

“If I could use your phone,” Lynn said, “I’ll check in with the station.”

Raymond had been fifteen minutes late for work and Hathersage had given him a proper bollocking in front of half a dozen others, enough to bring tears to the corners of Raymond’s eyes as he stood there, head down, smarting. An inch away from chucking it all in, asking for his cards, walk right out of there and go into town, maybe Sara was on early lunch. But he stuck it out, as much afraid of what his father would say when he found out, his dad and his uncle Terry, organizing his life for him between rounds at the pub.

Raymond kept his head down and kept on working: the day hadn’t been invented that lasted for ever.

All around radios crackled about him as he moved, none quite tuned to 96.3, their sounds all but drowned beneath the loud, mechanical swearing of the men, the high whine of electric saws, the thump of cleavers hammering down. Offloading a fork-lift truck, Raymond missed Emily Morrison’s name on the news report, but registered what had happened, a young girl missing from home.

“Look at you now! Clumsy young bugger!” bawled Hathersage, passing through. “Want to keep your mind on what you’re sodding doing!”

Raymond’s mumbled apology went unheard, scrabbling as he was, down on his hands and knees among ox livers, deep dark red.

Twenty-two

Hebden Bridge seemed to be tea rooms closed for refurbishment and antique shops presided over by damp little men with grubby hands and sunken faces. Perhaps things brightened up in the summer when the walkers came in from Manchester and Leeds, greedy for barm cakes and fresh air. What Patel did find, close by the canal, was a record shop that stocked the devotional Sufi songs of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and he left there happily with two CDs in a recycled Pricerite plastic bag. Chief Inspector Dunstan had long since departed for Halifax, leaving Patel the services of two uniformed constables and an ominous, “Good luck, Sunshine. Catch anything here aside of a stinking cold and sore feet, you’re going to need it.”

Passers-by barely stopped to glance at the blurred picture of Diana Wills before shaking their heads and moving on. In the pubs, provision shops, the chemists staffed by pleasant-faced women in sensible shoes and spotless pink uniforms, it was the same. Even the caretaker of the Calder Valley Spiritualist Church could offer no hope of a sighting. It was only when Patel, weary of the omnipresent drizzle that came down from the hills in waves, ducked into a café for shelter that he struck lucky. At the counter he ordered a pot of tea and two slices of toast, then took a seat to wait. The only other customer was a woman in a duffle coat, mechanically rocking the handle of her pram as she forked her way through a large piece of passion cake.

A second woman, the one behind the counter, carried over Patel’s order on a tray. She was setting the teapot on the circular table when her hand stilled in mid-air.

“What’s this, then?”

She was looking at the slim sheaf of pictures near Patel’s arm.

While Patel explained, she continued to unload her tray. “Oh, yes,” she said, finished. “Regular, comes in all the time.”

“You’re sure?”

“Weekends.”

“Every weekend?”

“No,” picking at a loose cotton on her apron. “Not every. Every other, maybe.”

“She was here this weekend, just gone?”

“Let me see, I … No. No, I’m certain I’d remember. Pot of tea, like yours, but weak, extra water. Always takes out the tea bag as soon as pot’s on table. Paying over good money for something tastes of nothing’s not my way of doing things, but there’s some you get in here, worse habits than her, so I never say a thing. Good morning, hello, maybe a few words about the weather. Yes, pot of tea and a slice of carrot cake.”

“Diana Wills,” Patel said.

“Is that her name? It’s not often I know people’s names.”

“But you are sure this is the woman you know?”

She picked up one of the sheets and looked at it carefully. “Terrible likeness, but it’s her right enough.”

“And when she’s here,” Patel said, “weekends, I don’t suppose you would have any idea where she stays?”

“What’s she done, then, this—what did you say?—Diana Willis?”

“Wills.”

“Wills.”

“Nothing.”

“Seems an awful lot of fuss to go to about nothing.”

“We want to get in touch with her, the police, something we have to tell her. It is important.”

“I used to like hearing those messages on the radio,” the woman said, taking a chair opposite Patel. “After the news. We have an urgent message for so-and-so, so-and-so, at present on a caravanning holiday in so-and-so, so-and-so, will she please get in touch with so-and-so hospital, where her mother, Mrs. so-and-so, so-and-so is seriously ill. You don’t get them so much any more. Wonder why that is?”

Patel took a deep breath. “You have no idea, then, where she stays?”

“Don’t say I said so,” the woman said, rising, “but why don’t you ask at that bookshop back down on the main road? That’s where her friend is, the one she comes to see.”

“Which shop exactly?” Patel asked. As far as he remembered there were three, possibly four.

“Up the hill by the Heptonstall turning, past the wholefood place. That’s the one.”

Patel started to move and she rested a hand on his shoulder. “They’ll likely not pack up and go within the next five minutes. Meantime that tea’ll be stewed and your toast’s curling up and going cold.”

Against his wife’s and Lynn’s advice, Michael Morrison had left the house, waving off the reporters and threatening to punch a cameraman who positioned himself outside the garage and refused to move. Within twenty minutes he was back: crossing the bridge by the marina he had seen men with sticks, clearing a path slowly through the woods.

“Investigation!” he yelled at Lynn Kellogg as he slammed back into the house. “You’ve already made up your sodding mind!”

“That’s not true.”

“No? Then what’s all that going on out there?”

“What d’you mean?”

“Search parties, that’s what I mean. You don’t carry on like that, looking for anyone you reckon’s still alive.”

“Michael,” Lorraine said. “Please don’t.”

“Emily!” Michael shouted full into Lynn’s face. “Everything else is a cover-up. You think she’s bloody dead.”

“Mr. Morrison, Michael, that isn’t true.”

“Don’t lie to me. I’m her father, so don’t.” For an instant Lynn thought he was going to lash out at her, but he banged his way out of the room instead.

Lorraine followed him into the kitchen, where he was opening a fresh bottle of wine. “Do you think you should …?” she began, but the look in his eyes when he rounded on her was enough to choke her words.

“It’s routine,” Lynn explained when Lorraine came back into the lounge. “Cases like this.”

Lorraine slowly nodded, never quite believing. “It’s all this stress,” she said, “why Michael’s drinking. Before he lost his job, had to move, he scarcely drank at all.”

In the kitchen Michael lit a fresh cigarette and poured another glass of wine. Sitting at the breakfast bar, elbows on the speckled surface, in his mind he was hurrying into the hospital and seeing the truth on Diana’s face before either nurse or doctor could intercept him, take him quietly to one side, explain. “We’re desperately sorry, Mr. Morrison. We did everything we possibly could. I’m afraid James slipped away from us.”

Slipped away.

For an instant Michael could feel again the earth at his hand’s center, wet and cloying, hear the spatter as it struck the tiny coffin and rolled away.

“It’s all right, Diana. Diana. Diana, it’ll be all right. Give it time, you see: We have to give it time. We can have another baby, when we’re ready. When you’re ready. You see.”

But it had never been all right, not really. Not after that. And then Emily had been born and each time she cried to be fed she reminded Diana that James was dead: each and every waking hour a living rebuke.

Michael splashed wine over his hands slamming the glass down and barked a shin against a stool on his way to the kitchen door. He was in the car and backing out of the drive when Lorraine came running, cameras clicking; Lynn in the doorway watching. Both women knowing where he was going.

“It’s Morrison, sir,” Lynn said to Resnick on the phone. “Gone off like the start of the Grand Prix. And he’s been drinking pretty heavily. I’d say he’s on his way to his ex-wife’s place.”

She put back the receiver to find Lorraine looking at her, dark-rimmed eyes primed for more tears. Lynn reached for her hands and when the younger woman tried to shake free she didn’t let her go. “I don’t know about you,” Lynn said, “but I’m famished. I wonder what you’ve got that would be good on toast?”

And she stood there, holding on to Lorraine’s hands, until Lorraine said, “Baked beans, there’s always loads of baked beans. Marmite. Cheese. Sardines.”

Twenty-three

The name over the door read Jacqueline Verdon, Bookseller. There were books under a canopy outside, paperbacks in crates, dogeared and damp, ten pence each. In the window, more expensive, volumes on astrology, astronomy, motherhood and diet, the lives of the great composers, forgotten women artists. If Patel had ever known the name of a woman artist, he had forgotten it. A bell jingled above the door as he went inside.

The interior smelt of slow-burning incense. From the back of the shop there was music playing, chime-like and repetitive. On a central table several vases of dried flowers were surrounded by a display of maps. Almost the entire wall to Patel’s left was crammed with green-backed books published by Virago.

“How may I help you?” The woman lifted her glasses from her face before she spoke, treating Patel to a welcoming smile. She was in her forties, he thought, neat brown hair, one of those essentially English women whose good manners impelled them towards liberal attitudes on race relations and capital punishment. When Patel had first moved to his present station he had lodged with one, bran flakes for breakfast and the toilet bowl had shone; the day she had caught Patel with a Cape apple in his room, she had reacted as if he had been enjoying sexual congress with her miniature schnauzer.

“There’s a lot more stock upstairs. You’re welcome to just browse. But if you’re in any kind of a hurry, it might be best to let me know what it is you’re interested in.”

Without her glasses she seemed to be staring at him, accentuating the frankness of her gaze. She smiled again and moved her head slightly, so that the circular earrings that she wore brushed against the sides of her face, reflecting such light as there was.

“You are Jacqueline Verdon?” Patel asked.

“Yes.” Less certain now, questioning.

“I thought perhaps you could tell me something about Diana Wills?”

Her hand jerked sharply sideways, sending her fountain pen skittering across the desk where she had been working and leaving a line of tiny blots across her papers, each smaller than the last.

Patel rounded the display table, drawing his identification from his pocket.

“What’s happened?” Jacqueline Verdon asked. “Diana. What’s happened to her?” Alarm clear in the hazel of her eyes, the rising voice.

Resnick got stuck behind a ready-mix concrete lorry going over Bobbers Mill Bridge and was kept fuming in a single line of traffic that stretched from the ring road as far as Basford College. On his radio, the infirm and over-sixties were gamely phoning into Radio Nottingham, reminiscing about real Christmas trees and real holly, mince pies half a dozen for half an old crown, goodness knows how many shopping days to Christmas and they were bitching about it already. I remember the time, croaked one, when there was a Santa Claus in every store in the city: the last Santa Resnick had been in contact with had been up on a charge of molesting small boys in his grotto.

He changed to Gem-AM, sixteen bars of Neil Sedaka and switching off wasn’t very hard to do. A gap appeared in the traffic ahead and he accelerated into it, earning the upthrust middle finger of a peroxide blond delivering auto parts. He arrived in Kimberley in time to find the nineteen-year-old constable sitting on the curb, helmet between his knees, while the woman who had slipped Patel his brandy-laced drink dabbed at his cut forehead with cotton wool and Germolene.

“What the hell happened here?”

“Oh, the poor love …”

The PC blushed.

“He’s old enough to answer for himself,” Resnick said. “Just.”

“Excuse me!”