Stone Cold Red Hot

Chapter twelve

I introduced myself and thanked her for the letter. “I wanted to ask, registering for admittance – is that what students do when they actually arrive, during Fresher’s Week?”

She expelled air quickly, sounding frustrated with my question. “Yes,” she said brusquely, “we have to keep track of numbers obviously, and if someone had been through admissions and joined the Faculty they would be on the general register.”

“What if she’d been admitted but dropped out of the course early on?”

“Then there would be a record of admission.”

“Do you know if Jennifer contacted the university to say she wasn’t going to take the place?”

I heard her tut in exasperation. “No. And that sort of documentation wouldn’t have been kept as a matter of course. Our records weren’t computerised until the mid-eighties, space was at a premium, official records were all we could find room for and there are boxes full of those, I can tell you.”

“And you checked for other departments as well?”

“According to the formal admissions records Jennifer Pickering did not attend this university at all.”

I was stunned. Everything had been resting on Keele. Jennifer’s last known residence. Except it hadn’t been. I’d hoped to find a firm lead there, a forwarding address, perhaps the names of course mates who might still be in touch. I made another coffee and tried to work out what this meant. Jennifer never went to Keele. Everyone assumed that she had. There was more to it than that. I dug out my earlier notes and went back over them. Both Roger and Mrs Clerkenwell had spoken about Jennifer dropping out of her course, so had Lisa MacNeice. And who had told them that Jennifer had left Keele? Mrs Pickering – Jennifer’s mother. And who had told Mrs Pickering? Had Jennifer pretended to be at Keele when she was really elsewhere? Or had the Pickerings invented the story for reasons of their own? I had to talk to her. She must be able to tell me more about where Jennifer went at the end of that hot, dry summer. When I saw Roger later that day I would insist on meeting Mrs Pickering as a condition of carrying on with the case.

I looked at the letter again and tried to adjust my view of events to fit. I must erase the part about Jennifer going off to university. Why hadn’t she gone? Her grades were good, people said she was excited about the move away, looking forward to it by all accounts. The pregnancy must have changed things. Did this mean she hadn’t had an abortion but had decided to keep the baby, or at least continue the pregnancy? Where had Jennifer gone if not to Keele? To a mother and baby home? Couldn’t she have deferred her course for a year while she had the baby?

I picked up the little mosaic vase that Mrs Clerkenwell had given me and turned it to and fro, examining the tiny fragments of glass mosaic the glinting gold pieces, the irregular colours of the small tiles. It felt cool to the touch. Together the broken pieces made something whole thanks to the craft of its maker. My work felt like that, lots of bits that needed matching together; facts, secrets, hearsay, rumours, all needed fixing in the right place, juxtaposing with the others until the true shape could be discerned. I was re-creating truth not beauty. And truth could be hideous or poignant or whimsical or mundane.

I felt uneasy about the job. It had been hard enough at the outset with so many years since anyone had seen Jennifer but now to find that one of the few facts I had to work with was false made it feel even more of a lost cause. I shivered. The office suddenly felt small, cold and confining.

I rubbed my eyes, got up and switched on the heater, looked at the list I’d made first thing. Tell insurance, borrow car. Who from? Diane didn’t have a car, she roped me in everytime she had to transport frames or canvases or collect new tubs of inks and chemicals. Ray hadn’t got one at the moment, he borrowed mine too and more recently made use of Laura’s. Everyone I could think of who had a car actually used it and wouldn’t be prepared to lend it out. I thought about the next few days. Most of my appointments could be done by bicycle. I should be able to manage. If Mr Poole rang again I’d get a taxi.

That reminded me to get the tape off to Mandy Bellows. I’d brought it to the office. I replayed a section of it in the camera to check that it was reasonable quality. It was. I could make out the individuals, cocky faces sneering as they took turns to ram the ball against the house. I packed the tape in a jiffy bag and rang the courier service I use.

Then I rang the insurers and began the long, slow process of giving them all the details they needed about my stolen car.

Once the courier had called I got ready to leave. There was a noise upstairs, someone coming in. Unusual, as Grant and Jackie Dobson are teachers and rarely home when I am there, and their daughters are at school.

I went upstairs quietly, feeling foolish at how hard my heart was beating. There was someone in the kitchen. I positioned myself near the front door before calling out, “Hello?”

“Sal?” a husky voice replied and Vicky Dobson, the eldest daughter, popped her head round the door. “Hiya. I’ve just got back. Don’t come too near, I need a bath, seriously.” Vicky had been doing the festivals; Glastonbury, Reading, WOMAD and had gone backpacking round Europe in-between. She looked the part; muddy blonde dreadlocks, a set of rings in each nostril, enough in her ears to hang curtains on, a stud in her eyebrow, distressed clothing, acid green Doc Martens. She looked great.

“Good trip?”

“Top. I’m knackered. And starving. I must eat – you want anything?”

“No, I’ve got to get going. See you soon.”

Frances Delaney had a baby draped over her shoulder when she answered the door. “Typical,” she said, “he always sleeps at this time, until I arrange something. Come in.”

“Don’t worry,” I said, “mine was just the same.”

“How many have you got?”

“Oh, only the one of my own but we share a house so there’s a little boy as well.”

“I’ve four,” she said, “well, four at the moment.”

“You’re having another?”

She smiled. “I always wanted a big family, sometimes you get what you want.”

We sat in a large room, strewn with baby gear and children’s toys. There was a distinct smell to indicate she’d just changed a nappy. She wore a shapeless, navy jogging suit and moccasin slippers. Her dark wiry hair was pulled back in a yellow hair band. The baby wriggled on her shoulder, she rocked and patted its bottom. She looked ridiculously happy.

I asked her to tell me about the weeks before Jennifer left. I wouldn’t let on to Frances that Jennifer had never gone to Keele; it was my job to find things out not divulge them. Roger Pickering was paying my way and any information belonged to him first and foremost.

“I remember it well, actually, with it being so hot. It was incredible, everything drying up. We used to watch her father watering his plants, every night after work he’d be out there.”

Like my Dad with his vegetables.

“You watched him?” I was trying to picture where the girls had been.

“From my room, it overlooked the gardens. Jenny would come round a lot, our house was right at the back of theirs. We could see across to each others bedrooms.” The baby grizzled and made climbing motions, the stretch fabric of the baby-gro outlining his small limbs and feet. Frances shifted him onto her lap, laid him across her knees on his stomach and stroked his back. His head bobbed like those nodding dogs people used to have in the back window of their cars.

“Jenny would come over through the back, climb over the wall and come in our back door. We even had a code,” she laughed, “if I was going out I’d close my curtains so she’d know not to call.”

“She always came to yours?”

“Yes, her family were pretty old fashioned, it was easier at mine,” she shrugged. “That summer Jenny was working up at The Bounty and I was just messing about. I’d got a place at Manchester University. Jenny and Lisa went off to Knebworth, I don’t know why I didn’t go, short of cash I suppose. I went up to the Lakes with my family for a week. When I got back Jenny came over. She told me about the baby.” She looked at me to check my reaction, had I known? I nodded, it wasn’t news to me.

“Did she say whether she was going to keep it?”

She shook her head, her expression clouded. “We didn’t talk about it much. I was pretty anti-abortion then, Jenny knew that. We had a lot of visits from LIFE at my school, gory slide shows.” She sighed. “So, I told her places she could go, have the baby adopted, but she was very mixed up. After that we skirted round it, really. I was pretty blinkered back then. You know how teenagers can be, everything’s black and white, we all think we know it all. I think I’ve mellowed since then, I hope so. When I got to university I got involved in the Catholic Feminist Society.”

Something of a contradiction in terms I thought to myself.

“It was all very radical, certainly opened my eyes. We wanted to reform the position of women in the Church and challenge a lot of the dogma. I suppose my position changed but I never saw Jenny again.”

“Can you remember the last time you saw her?”

The baby wailed, a loud, harsh cry as though the world had suddenly ended. “Shush, shush, come here,” she turned him over, cradled his head and body in one arm while she lifted the corner of her top with the other and slipped him onto her breast. “You’d think he hadn’t had a feed for hours,” she commented. The baby was quiet immediately.

I had a flash memory of the sensation of breast-feeding, breasts tender and heavy with milk, the initial buzz almost painful as Maddie latched on, the relief as she sucked, the other nipple leaking in sympathy. I’d had my share of problems, two bouts of mastitis when it felt as though someone had poured hot concrete laced with acid into my breast but apart from that I’d loved it.

“I couldn’t tell you what day it was, or anything, but I remember it because Jenny got upset and I wasn’t sure if I’d said something, you know, something stupid…”

“Go on,” I encouraged her.

“We’d been in my room, it was early evening but it was still hot. My room was stifling and we decided to go out in the garden. I got a rug and the radio, pop, that sort of thing.” She stroked the baby’s legs and squeezed his feet all the time she was talking. “Jenny was a bit low really, most of the time she was so sparky, tons of energy but she was on edge. I probably did most of the talking. It got late and she was all ready to go. She climbed up the wall and then she came back. I thought she’d forgotten something but she pushed past me and went off down the side. I ran after her, asked what was wrong, she rounded on me, told me to leave her alone, said I’d no idea – something like that. She was crying. I felt awful.” She chewed at her lip. “I tried ringing later but the phone was engaged.”

“What do you think upset her?”

“I don’t know, something I’d said, maybe me prattling on when she was so worried? There was I lounging around not a care in the world, and she’s pregnant and confused. Plus she can’t even confide in me because she knows how I feel about abortion. Or maybe it was the thought of going home, maybe she just couldn’t face them.”

“Had she told her parents she was pregnant?”

“No, I don’t think so. Lisa said that Jenny wanted to decide what she was going to do before she said anything. So she’d stormed off and I phoned the next day, it was Caroline’s birthday do, we were going to go into town together, but there was no answer. I felt awful. I thought Jenny had not come because she was cross with me. I got horribly drunk. I did try to ring a couple of times after that then when I finally did get through her mother said she’d gone to Keele. I couldn’t believe it. I rang Lisa and she told me it was true.”

“Why was it hard to believe?”

“She never said goodbye – not even to Lisa. And she never took her mascot, it was still on her windowsill – that’s why I thought she was still at home. We all had them, little troll things, peculiar really. We took them into exams for good luck. Jenny had kitted hers out in this glam rock outfit and drawn make up on it.”

I felt an unpleasant undertow of apprehension. It didn’t add up. Jennifer had been a gregarious teenager with a circle of close friends. She’d left without so much as a goodbye. Without her lucky mascot. None of them had ever heard from her. She hadn’t even sent her little brother a birthday card on the day they shared. Had she run away? Had something happened to her that meant she couldn’t keep in touch with her friends?

My imagination conjured up new pictures, Jennifer on the run. Lost in London. Hurt. Worse. I was being melodramatic, I told myself. There must be a simple explanation. But a seed of suspicion had taken root. I kept coming back to the explanation that fit everything so far. If Jennifer Pickering was dead then it all made sense.