Off Minor

Thirty-nine

Lorraine had spoken to her mother three times that day; Michael had called twice from work, the second occasion on a portable phone that had kept breaking up, reducing his conversation to a sequence of barely related sounds. The same person claiming to represent one of the national tabloids had offered her fifteen thousand for her story of a young mum’s grief, conditional on exclusivity, a thousand now, four more when the body was found, the remainder on publication. As usual, Val Patterson called round for a coffee and a chat, stayed long enough to eat half a packet of Lorraine’s chocolate digestives-“The last one, I swear, not doing a thing for my figure”-and smoke her own cigarettes-“Last one, I swear it, ruining my lungs.” The assistant manager at the bank had rung to see how she was-“No, you stay out, stay at home until you feel you want to come back in. Your decision, your decision absolutely.” Lorraine had tried to speak to Lynn Kellogg at the police station, either her or Inspector Resnick, but both had been busy. She had taken down the curtains in the bedroom in order to reline them, something she had been meaning to do for ages, and now they lay in swirls around the sewing machine, unpicked and, since then, untouched.

When the doorbell sounded, her first thought was that it was Michael, home early, although, as she hurried down the stairs, why hadn’t he got his key? She blinked at the woman she found standing there, not recognizing her, shorn of context, as one of Emily’s teachers.

“Mrs. Morrison, Joan Shepperd. I hope you don’t mind my calling?”

“Oh. No. Of course not. I …”

“I was going to sooner. I wanted to, only …”

The two stood there looking at one another self-consciously, for all the world like mother and daughter. “Please,” Lorraine said, stepping back, “won’t you come in?”

“Thank you, I didn’t mean …”

“No, please, come in.”

While Lorraine boiled the kettle for tea, Joan Shepperd passed complimentary remarks about the house, the neatness of the kitchen, the pattern on the china, wondering all the while just why it was she had come, what, exactly, she was hoping to find.

“Emily was a …” she began, stumbling to correct herself. “She is a bright child, interested in everything. Since the term began, you can really see the progress.”

Lorraine smiled a reply.

“Nothing’s been heard?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“And you’ve no idea …?”

“Not really. None at all.”

Joan tasted the tea, asked Lorraine about Michael, about Emily’s mother. “She’s in hospital,” Lorraine said. “She’s not been well for some time. I don’t think she knows what’s happened.”

When Joan Shepperd looked up, tears were sliding down Lorraine’s face. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really shouldn’t have come. It was thoughtless of me, it’s only upsetting you.”

“No,” Lorraine shaking her head, “I’m afraid I do this all the time. Sometimes, I don’t even notice.” She pulled a crumpled tissue from her pocket and began opening it out. “I went to pay the window cleaner yesterday and the same thing happened; he stood there, looking at me gone out. I just hadn’t realized.”

She dabbed her cheeks and patted her eyes, blew her nose and asked Joan Shepperd if she wanted another cup of tea.

“No, thank you. That was lovely.” She surprised herself by reaching for Lorraine’s hand. “I wanted you to know how sorry I am, about Emily. I do think about her a lot.”

Tears returned to Lorraine’s eyes and she moved away to stand by the sink, turning on the tap so that the water dribbled out. Emily was: Michael had said the same himself only last night, there in that room. Emily was. Was it only the police, then, who thought there was some chance she might yet be found alive? Or were they, too, merely going through the motions, unable to admit what in their hearts and minds they knew, that wherever she now was, Emily was surely dead?

“It can’t go on.”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“Like this. Ignoring me.”

Stephen was standing at his work bench, in the cellar, back towards the stairs. “I’m not ignoring you, I’m working.”

Joan looked at the fleshiness of his neck, the breadth of his shoulders, hunching forward, despising him. Promises he had made and broken.

“What did the police say?”

“Nothing.”

“Then what happened this afternoon?”

“Nothing. They made me stand in a parade, a line of men to see if this woman recognized me.”

“Which woman?”

“I don’t know. How should I know? Anyway, it was all a mistake.”

“What do you mean?”

Turning now to face her, swiveling from the waist. “What I said, she didn’t recognize me. She couldn’t. I wasn’t there.”

“Where?”

Stephen had swung back again and was reaching towards the bench. “I was swimming,” he said and bent over his bench, working the wood steadily until he had heard his wife’s feet moving away, the door closing. There was something so special about the touch of newly turned wood, its smoothness, the slight warmth left from the lathe, like blood beneath young skin.

The Partridge was busy enough for all the seats to be taken, both bars with groups standing, the occasional lone drinker nursing his pint of mixed between both hands. It had been Vivien’s suggestion, a pub she knew and sometimes used, one which had long been a favorite of Resnick’s, one of the diminishing few where all attempt at conversation wasn’t lost to karaoke and disco. They found a space near the rear wall between a group of adult education students practicing their Spanish-how did you ask for a pint of mild and a packet of cheese and onion crisps in Madrid? — and the usual collection from the poly, wearing Oxfam overcoats and whinging on about the cost of CDs and how difficult it was to get decently pissed on a grant.

“I used to teach a class round the corner,” Vivien said.

“Canadian studies?”

“Not exactly. Women and Utopia. Or was it Utopias? I can’t remember.”

She was wearing a green cord skirt and a rust-colored sweater with a crew neck; a light cotton coat hung open from her shoulders. She had surprised Resnick, who had almost gone ahead and ordered a dry white wine, by asking for vodka and tonic.

“You don’t work there any more, then?”

She shook her head. “I was just filling in. Working at the university part-time and waiting for somebody to move on or die.”

Resnick smiled. “I’ve got a sergeant who’s a bit like that.”

Vivien drank some more of her vodka. “I’m sorry about this afternoon. That’s why I wanted to see you. Apologize.”

“No need.”

“You were angry.”

“I was disappointed.”

“Do you think he’s the one? I mean, do you think he’s responsible, whatever’s happened to the girl?”

“Who?”

“Number three.”

A little of Resnick’s beer spilled over his hand, began to drip towards the floor. “You did recognize him.”

“No. I didn’t. Not really. Otherwise I would have said.”

“Then what did you mean, number three?”

“Well …” more vodka “… he was the one who looked like the man I saw the most, no doubting that.”

“Then I don’t see why …”

“Yes, you do. I had to be positive. I had to be prepared to go into court …”

“Not necessarily.”

“But quite probably. And say, under oath, that was the man. What use, if all I could say was well, I think it was, or it might have been?”

Resnick sighed and supped some beer. To his left one of the party had taken out her snapshots of Barcelona and was passing them round.

“You’re telling me now.”

“That’s different.”

“Is it?”

“Will you arrest him because of what I’m telling you now?”

“Probably not.”

“And if I’d picked him out this afternoon?”

Resnick looked across the room. “More than likely.”

Vivien drained her glass. “Besides,” she said, “it’s not exactly a fair system.”

“Why ever not?”

“The perspiration coming off that man this afternoon, he was scared half out of his wits. None of the others was anything but bored.”

Resnick finished his beer. “Another?” he said, expecting her to say no. But she handed him her glass and let him shoulder his way through to the bar to buy a second round. Maybe that was one of the things about women and utopias? Men waiting on them hand and foot, always sodding off to pay for the drinks.

Her flat was high up in one of those vast Victorian houses near the city center, dormer windows pushing out from the shallow slope of roof. The main room she had painted white, tall walls without decoration save for pictures no more than postcard size, black and white photographs or etchings, each mounted inside a considerably larger frame.

“My colleagues laugh at me,” Vivien said. “Accuse me of trying to re-create Canada right here at home.”

Resnick had been surprised when she had suggested he called in for coffee; from her expression, she was almost equally surprised when he accepted. As it turned out, she hadn’t brought her car. “I thought I might get you to drive me home,” she said, “sooner or later.”

She put on some music, a woman singing something classical, but low enough that it didn’t matter. There were fewer books than Resnick had anticipated and those were scattered in half-neat piles around the floor. A round table beneath the window was covered in piles of papers, photocopied articles, magazines. Aside from a low two-seater settee, the only chairs were wood and canvas, painted black. The television, if there was one, Resnick guessed to be in the bedroom; he wondered if that room were as austere.

Coffee came in tall, narrow cups, black on the outside, white within.

“Milk or sugar?”

Resnick shook his head.

Vivien sat opposite him on the settee, legs pulled up beneath her skirt. “Nobody you should be rushing back to?” she asked.

Only the cats, smacked of self-pity. “No,” Resnick said.

“Isn’t there some kind of appalling statistic about the number of police marriages which end in divorce?”

“Is there?”

She could tell from the sharpness of his voice that she’d started down the wrong track, but retreat wasn’t a tactic she was used to employing. “You were married?”

“A long time ago.”

“Long enough to have children?”

His face said it all. No need for words and Resnick was staring back across the room at her, not saying a thing. He finished his coffee and stood up. Was he angrier with her for asking or himself for getting so instantly, so irreversibly upset?

“Look,” Vivien said, “it’s meeting people in classes, tutorials, some weeks I swear it’s the only talking I do. It gets you out of practice for normal conversation.”

“That’s all right,” Resnick said. “It’s probably good for me to be on the other side of an interrogation for a change.”

“Is that really what it was?”

“Why don’t we just forget about it?” he said, leaving Vivien standing there, a coffee cup and saucer in either hand.