Off Minor

Forty

“I went to see the Morrisons yesterday afternoon.”

Stephen’s spoon hovered short of his mouth, Joan behind him, close to his right shoulder, still warm from her bath, wearing her dressing gown.

“After school. The father wasn’t there, but the mother, I talked to the mother, told her how upset I was, we all were, at the school. Not her mother, really, stepmother, but even so.” She passed in front of Stephen, reaching for the cereal packet on the shelf. “The dreadful time that young woman’s been going through. She didn’t seem to be able to stop crying. Terrible.”

Stephen, head bowed, carried on chewing his prunes.

“I’m surprised you haven’t been, Stephen …”

“Me? Why should I …?”

“It’s not as though you didn’t know Emily …”

“I suppose I knew who she was …”

“I always thought she was one of your favorites.”

Stephen staring at her now, not eating, breakfast forgotten.

“One of the ones you always made a point of talking to. Well, she was certainly a pretty girl, everyone said. I mean, you weren’t alone in noticing that.”

Stephen twisted round on his chair. What did she think she was playing at, sitting there with her bowl of Fruit and Fiber, chattering on, matter-of-fact?

“You should go, Stephen. Why not this morning? I’ve got one or two little bits of shopping to do, you could go then. Walk over, if you didn’t want to take the car. It’s not far, the other side of Gregory Street; but I keep forgetting, you know that.”

Without his meaning it to, one of Stephen’s hands jerked out, overturning his bowl, prune stones and juice across the Formica-covered table, spoon skittering to the linoleum-covered floor.

“A nice house, where the Morrisons live, garden front and back. Quite a view of the rear garden from the road, lawn mostly; I suppose with both of the parents working they don’t have a great deal of time to do much else. And besides, it must make a lovely space for Emily to play.” She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin. “Don’t you think so, Stephen?”

Stephen was running water at the sink, fidgeting cutlery through his hands, spoons, forks, knives. A dribble of sweat ran from his eyebrow into the corner of his eye.

“So much nicer for Emily than anywhere that other poor little soul had to play. Aside from the rec, of course. I always wonder, don’t you, Stephen, what they can get up to, cooped up in one of those tall flats with only a balcony to run along? Balcony and, I suppose, the stairs.”

A spiral of blood ribboned up from where the tine of the fork had pierced Stephen’s thumb, staining the water pink.

“What was her name, Stephen? You remember, that pretty blond child? The one you were so taken with.”

But Stephen was no longer there to answer. Door slam after door slam and finally the bolt inside the cellar work room being drawn across. Joan Shepperd drained the soiled water from the sink and ran new, never liking to get on with the rest of the day before the breakfast things were washed and stacked away. Gloria, that was right, Gloria Summers. She had known all along.

Since the new greengrocer’s had opened where the butcher’s used to be, Joan Shepperd seldom bothered to shop further afield in the week. With three Asian shops, each staying open late into the evening, it was always possible to pop back out for anything she might have forgotten. This morning it was tomatoes, a pound of apples, easier now it was all right to buy South African, orange juice, a book of stamps from the post office, second class. She couldn’t believe that she was feeling this calm. Lying awake in the night, listening to Stephen, his even breathing beside her, undisturbed, sleeping the sleep of the just. Lorraine Morrison’s face, her tears. She had to wait for the telephone, two kiosks but only one of them functioning, nothing new. “Hello,” she said, connected, “I’d like to speak to a Detective Constable Kellogg. Yes, that’s right, Lynn.”

“You sure it was her? Shepperd’s wife?”

“She didn’t say. Like I said, wouldn’t leave a name. But, yes, I’m pretty sure. Though I only spoke to her the once.”

“Well,” Resnick brushing crumbs from his front as he stood, a toasted ham and cheese that was filling the gap between breakfast and lunch, “for now that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is the information right?”

Lynn nodded. “I called the education office and checked. You’d have thought I was asking them to divulge state secrets, but finally we got there: Joan Shepperd was at Gloria Summers’s school for most of the summer term before she disappeared. On supply. Gloria’s regular teacher went abseiling in Derbyshire and broke her leg in three places.”

“Joan Shepperd stepped into the breach.”

“She’d worked there before, two years previously. Seems they were pleased to have her back. Experienced, reliable.”

“An otherwise unemployed husband, who’s got a way with a hammer and nails.” Resnick looked at Lynn sharply. “I wonder if he drove her to work there, too? Collected her?”

“I could check.”

“Do it now.”

Resnick followed Lynn into the main office. “Kevin,” he called. “Downstairs with a car, five minutes.”

At first, they couldn’t get anyone to come to the door, though the intermittent whine of an electrical motor told them someone was in the house. When Stephen Shepperd finally appeared, he was wearing his old white coveralls, a bandage taped around the end of his left thumb.

“Thought that was the thing separated out you professionals from amateurs like me,” Resnick said, nodding towards Shepperd’s hand, “never hit themselves with a hammer.”

Shepperd looked from Resnick to Naylor and back again, saying nothing.

“Maybe you should nip back down,” Resnick said, “make sure everything’s switched off. If she’s not here, you might want to leave your wife a note.”

“Are you arresting me?” Shepperd asked.

“Should we be?”

A nerve began ticking at the far corner of Stephen Shepperd’s eye.

“What we’d like you to do,” Resnick said, “is come with us to the station, answer some more questions.”

“Why can’t I do that here?”

“You’re not frightened of us, Mr. Shepperd? Nothing about the way you were treated yesterday?”

“No, but …”

“No special call to be worried about anything we might ask?”

“No, of course not, but …”

“Then we’ll just wait here while you do whatever it is you need to do.”

Shepperd hesitated beyond the moment when he might have refused; he turned back into the house, hand reaching out to close the door behind him, but Naylor got there first.

“No need to shut that, Mr. Shepperd,” Naylor said. “I’m sure you won’t be that long.”

Lynn Kellogg intercepted Resnick on the stairs, drew him off to one side while Naylor escorted Shepperd towards the interview room. “Drove her there every day, there and back, regular as clockwork. The staff used to remark on it, tease her a little, the head said, how she had her husband so well trained. ‘Lend him to me for the weekend, Joan, so’s he can do a few odd jobs for me.’ That kind of thing.”

“And did he do a few odd jobs for the school?”

“Wonderful, the head teacher reckons. Repaired equipment, all sorts. Got so she started to feel quite guilty about it, wanted to give him something out of the school fund. Wouldn’t accept a penny. Said helping them out, that was reward enough.”

“Right,” Resnick nodded. “But maybe not quite enough.” He made to move on, but Lynn detained him with a touch on the arm. “Seems there was this one occasion, sir. Mrs. Shepperd got held up, talking to a parent in her classroom after school. Head happened to pass through the cloakroom and there were three or four children still hanging around. Shepperd was there, talking to them. No suggestion of anything, you know, at all funny. Wrong. But she does think Gloria Summers was one of them.”

“She thinks?”

“She can’t remember for certain.”

“Did she say anything about this at the time?”

“No, sir. Didn’t seem important, I suppose. Relevant.”

“Fax that drawing out to Mablethorpe. Wherever the nearest station is with a fax machine. Get someone to take it round to Mrs. Summers, see if she can remember him hanging around the school, talking to Gloria.”

Lynn nodded and was on her way. By the time Resnick got to the interview room, Stephen Shepperd was sitting at the table, staring at the burn marks left by a score of cigarettes. Naylor was slipping a pair of fresh tapes into the machine.

“Do we have to use that?” Shepperd asked, looking towards the recorder. “I hate those things.”

“Keeps an accurate record of what’s said,” Resnick explained. “More reliable than struggling to get it all written down. Quicker, too. In your interests, I’d say.”

Shepperd wiped the palms of his hands along the legs of his trousers and, for a moment, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Resnick was standing immediately before him, directly across the table. “We’re going to ask you some questions relating to the disappearance of Emily Morrison, Mr. Shepperd, also to the murder of Gloria Summers.”

Shepperd’s hands ceased to move, gripped his thighs.

“As I told you before, you are not under arrest at this time. Which means you have the right to leave at any time you choose. It also means if you wish to have a solicitor present or want to obtain legal advice, you’re free to do so. Do you understand all of that?”

Drawing in air through his mouth, Stephen Shepperd nodded.

“In that case,” Resnick continued, “I am cautioning you that you do not have to say anything in relation to these matters unless you wish to do so, but what you do say may, at some later stage, be given in evidence. All right, Mr. Shepperd? Stephen?”

Using his fingers to still the nerve that had begun to beat again alongside his head, Stephen Shepperd murmured, “All right.”

Joan put the tomatoes and the orange juice in the fridge, the apples into a bowl. She took one of the stamps from the book and stuck it to the corner of the envelope that was addressed and waiting, a letter to her friend in Redruth, just about the only friend from college with whom she still kept in touch. Stephen’s note was on the table, held down by a jar of basil he had taken from the shelf. She read it with neither surprise nor passion. She knew that she had let things slide for far too long, taken assurances at face value, looked the other way, she could acknowledge that. Well, now matters must take their course. The tranquilizers her doctor had prescribed that autumn she had never taken, not until last night, and she thought she might take another now, swill it down with some water before her mid-morning cup of tea. One: maybe even two.