The Sleeping and the Dead

Chapter Six

It was hot again. The local news was all about the weather. A magistrate had been prosecuted for using a sprinkler at midnight. Tankers were driving the region’s water south. The lake at Cranford was so low that flooded buildings were starting to emerge from the sludge and a body, trapped under a pier for years, had been found by a canoeist.

Hannah switched off the radio and parked her car. There was a new officer on the gate so she had to show her pass. The photograph was two years old and she saw him look at it then back at her, squinting, unsure at first that it was the same person. He pushed it back under the glass screen and Hannah stared at it too. It didn’t look like her. The woman in the photograph was younger. She was smiling. Not relaxed exactly – Hannah had never been that – there was a tension around the mouth. But content, complacent even. It was taken while she was still part of a family. Before Rosie hated her. Before Jonathan left with a twenty-five-year-old PE teacher, to set up home all over again.

She had to wait for a moment in the gate room for two officers to come in through the outer door. The inner door wouldn’t open until the outer was locked. Then she stood back to let them go ahead to collect their keys. She was in no hurry, early as usual. Punctuality had been a curse since childhood. She threw her tag into the chute and waited for the new man to find her keys. Ahead of her the officers were talking very loudly. She recognized them but they were too engrossed in conversation to acknowledge her. She gathered there’d been some trouble on the wing the night before. Nothing serious. She thought it had probably been caused by the heat. Those huts must be insufferable in this weather. The men walked off before she could hear any more, the heels of their highly polished shoes reflecting the sunlight. They were still talking. Every other word, she knew, would be a blasphemy.

Hannah followed them from the gatehouse and thought that generally, in the prison, the officers were less polite than the inmates. They were usually courteous, grovelling even, like the child in a class who is always bullied. Especially if they wanted something – to use the library on an unscheduled day, for example, or to be let off a fine for a lost or damaged book. ‘Please, miss, it’s not my fault. Honest,miss.’

Of course, they weren’t all like that. Neither were the officers all boors. Today she was feeling particularly jaundiced, because the photograph had reminded her of a time of certainty, and because she’d had a row with Rosie last night. Rosie. Named by her parents Rosalind, she’d changed her name with her personality in adolescence. She was Hannah’s only child. The night before, Rosie had come in drunk again with a gang of friends. It was midnight. Hannah’s room was over the kitchen and she’d heard the freezer door open and the banging of a cooker shelf, and she knew that when she got up in the morning there’d be plates everywhere and half-eaten pizza ground into the carpet. And probably a body snoring on the sofa in the dining-room and two more in the spare bed. So she’d gone down and made a fuss. Rosie had stared at her in apparent horror and amazement, actually enjoying every minute of the drama.

‘Get a life, Mum,’ she’d said. ‘Make some friends and get a life.’

Then she’d stormed off to spend the night in someone else’s spare room.

Jonathan had never minded the late nights, the loud music, strange kids in the house. At first Hannah had been surprised by his tolerance. Then she’d been jealous of his ability to get on with Rosie’s friends.

‘We’ve all been young,’ he’d say. ‘Even you, Hannah.’

He’d take them to the pub at the end of the street, buying them drinks even before they were eighteen, talking music, reminiscing about bands he’d seen and festivals he’d attended. That side of his life had been new to Hannah. Perhaps he hadn’t wanted to admit to a vaguely hippy past until the sixties became fashionable again. Perhaps he’d made it all up to impress the stunning sixth-form women who sat around the beaten copper tables in the Grey Horse, downing their pints of Stella as if they were glasses of lemonade. Perhaps, stirred by their admiration, that was when he recognized there were other possibilities in his life and he turned his attention to the lycra-clad Eve.

Not Eve the temptress, he had said earnestly when he explained that he was leaving. She was shy. She hadn’t wanted it to happen. She’d be the last person ever to want to break up a family. They’d both fought it.

When Hannah failed to respond he had gone on more petulantly, ‘At least we waited until Rosie finished her A levels before making it public.’ As if that had deserved a prize. As if it hadn’t been more about embarrassment, because Jonathan and Eve both taught in Rosie’s school. As deputy head, Jonathan was Eve’s boss.

Before leaving the gatehouse Hannah clipped the keys on to her belt and tucked them into the leather pouch which was designed to keep them hidden from view. The pouch was hardly an attractive garment but she always wore it. It was a rule and she’d never had any problems with rules. Perhaps that was why she’d settled without too much difficulty into the routine of the prison. There was a comforting hierarchy: governors of different grades, prisoners with different privileges, a system and a structure. Rosie’s life seemed to have no order and that was why Hannah was alarmed for her. She had personal knowledge of how unsettling disorder could be.

The prison was category C, medium security, taking men who had been dispersed from local jails and lifers nearing the end of their sentences. It had once been an RAF base. There was still an enormous hangar which housed the workshops. The lads slept in billets where once conscripts spat on boots and folded blankets. Hannah had slipped into the way of calling them lads, though some of them were older than her. That showed, she thought, that she had become institutionalized into prison life.

The library was in a hut of its own, attached at the back by a brick corridor to the education department. The site of the prison was vast. Now, at the beginning of July, it was a pleasant if sticky walk from the gate. There were flowers everywhere. Huge circular beds had been planted in formation as in a municipal park. The grass was closely cropped. The prison regularly won prizes for its gardens. In the winter it was a different matter. Then she came to work dressed for an expedition to the Arctic. The wind blew straight from Scandinavia. Horizontal rain and sleet seemed to last for days. Men who’d grown up in cities further south spoke of their sentence as if they’d been sent to a Siberian work camp. They called it the Gulag. The nearest railway was twenty miles away.

Hannah’s orderly, Marty, was waiting outside for her, leaning against the door where the week before she had stuck a poster saying: NO SHORTS PLEASE. Since the beginning of the heatwave the men had started to dress as if for the beach. The exposed flesh and muscular thighs had seemed inappropriate for a library and, with the Governor’s authority, she’d put a stop to it. As Hannah approached she realized the phone was ringing inside. Marty must have heard it, but he hadn’t called or waved to hurry her along. By the time she’d unlocked the door it had stopped. Automatically she wondered if it had been her daughter. Anxiety about Rosie stayed with her constantly, eating away at her. She knew it was a silly habit, like checking the gas was switched off before leaving the house and always being early, but she couldn’t help it. Knowing the history of the habit didn’t help at all.

‘You can’t be on her back all the time,’ Jonathan would say. ‘Relax. What’s wrong with you? Hormones, I suppose.’ And if Rosie was there too they would snigger together. After all, what was more amusing than a middle-aged, menopausal woman scared to death that her reckless daughter would get into trouble? Because Rosie was reckless in an overreachingly confident way that left Hannah breathless.

Of course, she hadn’t come in that morning before Hannah left for work and Hannah didn’t know which friend she’d imposed on for a bed for the night. When she’d heard the phone it had occurred to her briefly that Rosie had called to apologize, but she dismissed the thought as ridiculous. Some chance. She picked up her bag, let Marty through ahead of her and locked the door behind them.

Marty was new to the job, different from any other orderlies she’d been given. It was a cushy number and the other men she’d worked with were eager to please, desperate to make themselves indispensable so she wouldn’t find it easy to sack them before the end of their stint. They were only allowed six months in the job. It was a security concern. Supervisors and prisoners shouldn’t have the chance to get too close. Marty was self-contained, efficient. He didn’t tell her about his family or try to impress by talking about the books he’d read. He didn’t say anything much unless it was about the library. Hannah thought he was probably in his thirties but he had one of those pale-skinned, freckled faces which always look boyish. She watched him lift a pile of newspapers on to a table and begin to sort them.

‘Why don’t you put the kettle on, Marty?’

He looked up, surprised, then nodded. Usually they had a cup of tea just before opening for the first session and today business didn’t start until the period of lunchtime association at eleven thirty. But it wouldn’t have occurred to him to comment.

For the first time she wondered what crime he had committed. Her friends – because she did have friends, despite Rosie’s jibe – always asked about that.

‘But what are they in for, Hannah?’ they’d say with the disapproving curiosity of a Telegraph reader sneaking a look at the Sun. ‘Who do you have to mix with in there? Rapists? Muggers of little old ladies?’

They were surprised when Hannah said she didn’t know. She was never sure that they quite believed her. It was etiquette, this lack of interest. She wouldn’t have enquired of the borrowers in the community library where she’d previously worked if they’d ever been prosecuted for speeding or tax evasion. Besides, it was irrelevant. It didn’t matter. The prison was separate from the outside world. So long as the men fitted into the system and caused no bother, nobody much cared what had happened to bring them there. Except perhaps Arthur, her colleague. It seemed to matter to him very much.

Looking at Marty filling the kettle at the small sink in her office, she thought suddenly: it must have been an offence of violence. It was a revelation and she wondered why she hadn’t realized it before. He was angry. Continually angry. He controlled it well and kept it hidden but now that it was obvious to Hannah she thought it explained a lot about him. That was why he kept himself to himself. It was the only way he could keep his anger in check.

She phoned home. There was no reply. Of course. Rosie would still be in a bed in a strange house, sleeping off the excesses of the night before. Not that she’d wake with a hangover. The young never seemed to have hangovers. Then, with the same sense of startling revelation she’d had when looking at Marty, it occurred to her that Rosie might not be on her own in bed. They never discussed her relationships with men. If ever Hannah broached the subject, talking elliptically perhaps about safe sex, she’d roll her eyes towards the ceiling and say, ‘Oh Mum. Please!’

Hannah thought there was a boy. Joseph. He phoned and when Rosie was out she took messages. If she was in they talked for hours and she’d hear Rosie laughing. But when he came to the house it was always as part of a crowd and often he had his arm round another girl. If Rosie was hurt by that she didn’t show it. Hannah hoped Rosie did have a love. She wanted something magic and gut-wrenching for her daughter. Don’t wait, she wanted to tell her. Do it now. Soon you’ll have responsibilities. You’ll be too old. Trust me. I know what I’m talking about.

While Marty squatted by the tray on the floor, squeezing tea bags in the tasteful National Trust mugs she’d brought from home, Hannah started opening her mail. There wasn’t much. A memo from her boss in the Central Library about budgets. An agenda for the prison librarians’ summer school. A plain white envelope with a handwritten address which she recognized immediately. Something similar came every year. Before she could open it the phone rang again. It was Rosie, bristling with righteous indignation.

‘Well,’ she said, ‘I hope you’re ready to apologize.’

It caught Hannah on the hop. She didn’t know whether to snap back a sarcastic answer or make an attempt to be conciliatory. She knew why that was. She was afraid Rosie would up sticks and move in with Jonathan and Eve if she upset her too much. Rosie had never mentioned it, hadn’t used it as a threat, but Hannah was always aware of the possibility. In the end she wasn’t given a chance to respond.

‘Look,’ Rosie said. ‘I’m sorry. It must be a difficult time at the minute.’

Hannah could have fainted with shock. ‘And for you. Waiting for your results…’

‘Oh, sod the A levels.’ She paused. ‘I’m working this afternoon but I’ll be home by six. You can take me to the Grey Horse. Buy me a pint.’

Hannah bit back a lecture. She was always telling Rosie she drank too much. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Why not? That would be great.’

When she replaced the phone Marty was standing looking at her, a mug in each hand.

‘Trouble?’ he asked, in an offhand sort of way to show that he wasn’t prying.

‘No. Not really. You know what kids are like.’

‘I know what I was like when I was a kid.’

‘Trouble?’

‘All the time.’ They smiled. He went back to sorting newspapers.

Dave the prison officer attached to the library came in, jangling his keys, demanding tea. Hannah opened her letter. Inside there was a printed invitation and a handwritten note. She read the note first. The handwriting was scrawled but familiar. She recognized it from way back. It had been dashed off in a hurry and there was a stain which could have been coffee on the back.

Hannah

Hope this reaches you in time.

You can always stay with me.

Do try and make it this year.

She didn’t need to look at the signature. It was from Sally. At school Sally had been her best friend. She hadn’t seen her for years but they kept in touch, spoke occasionally, sent Christmas cards. The card was an invitation to a school reunion. Cranford Grammar. Sally tried the same tactic every time something similar was arranged. Recently the invitations were always sent to the prison. Perhaps she thought it was Jonathan who prevented Hannah’s attending.

Hannah threw the card on to the desk where she sat to stamp the books, then picked it up again to look at the date of the party. It was only a couple of days away, one of her late shifts. She thought it was typical of Sally to allow her so little time to come to a decision and arrange her affairs. For the first time she was tempted to go to the reunion, to see Sally and her other friends again. It was only pride which had kept her away. She propped the card between her mug and a box of library cards.

Hannah was never sure how the argument started. Perhaps she’d done something to provoke it, but she didn’t think so. Rosie’s phone call had made her more mellow. Later she remembered the conversation she’d heard on her way in about a disturbance on the wing. Apparently there’d been rumours of an early lock-up because of a Prison Officers’ Association meeting and the whole place was still tense. There’d been no sense of that though when she’d let the men in.

In the first group there was a lad she didn’t recognize as one of her regulars. He was young, squat, muscular. A tattoo of a snake twisted from his wrist to his shoulder. His hair was cropped so short that pink skin showed through the stubble. He mooched around the shelves for a bit, but Hannah didn’t have the impression that he was looking seriously for anything. She noticed that Marty was keeping an eye on him too. She wondered if he was new, though he hadn’t been at the last reception talk she’d given.

She came out from behind the desk. Dave was in her office with the door shut. She’d heard that he was moonlighting in one of the clubs in town. Certainly he liked to catch up on his sleep in the mornings. She approached the lad with the tattoo, thinking she could be making up a ticket while he was choosing. ‘Can I help you with anything?’

He turned to face her squarely. He was slightly shorter than she was.

‘Not doing you any harm, am I?’

‘Of course not. I’ll leave you to it.’ She was thinking she’d had enough of oversensitive adolescents. Perhaps something of the weariness showed in her face, but she wasn’t aware of it.

Suddenly he banged his hand on the edge of a metal shelf then lifted it towards her, a gesture of warning. She could see the red mark from the shelf on his palm.

‘Don’t look at me like that.’

‘I’m sorry. Like what?’ Out of the corner of her eye Hannah saw Marty standing behind the man, his knees slightly bent, watching. She willed him to keep out of it.

‘Like I was a piece of shite. Like I was something on the bottom of your shoe.’

‘I think you’d better leave,’ she said, much as she’d said to the drunken kids lounging around her kitchen the night before. ‘Come back when you know how to behave properly in a library.’

‘Don’t worry I’m going.’ He pushed out and sent one of the shelves flying. On the top was a plant – one of her attempts to cheer up the room. The pot shattered. The books were covered in dry compost. ‘Do you think I want to stay here and look at an ugly cow like you?’ He spoke quietly, with intense contempt, looked around the room and swaggered out.

It was the sort of incident that happened every day in the prison. There was no physical violence against her. No threat of it even. She’d handled worse in her time there. Much worse. But Hannah went to pieces. She started to shake and then to cry.

Dave the library officer emerged from her office, yawning, wanting to know what the noise was about. He was embarrassed, desperate to play the incident down so he’d not get into trouble. Hannah got rid of the other prisoners then sent him away.

Marty pulled the shelf upright and replaced the books, shaking out the compost, checking the spines so they were in order. Then he put on the kettle and made more tea.

‘You need a break,’ he said. ‘A holiday.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘We have to stay in this place. You can escape whenever you like.’

‘Perhaps.’ She sipped the tea. He’d used powdered milk and the liquid was very hot. It burnt her mouth. ‘My husband left me three weeks ago. I’m not sure where I’d go on my own.’

She thought she shouldn’t have spoken to a prisoner like that. They’d been taught not to give personal details away.

‘What about a trip to the hills? You could look up your old friends.’

She was shocked. He must have read the card when he collected her mug. She wasn’t surprised that he’d read the invitation but that he’d commented on it. It wasn’t like him.

‘Sorry,’ he said, blushing slightly as if he’d read her thoughts. ‘None of my business.’

‘No.’ The temptation returned to run away. ‘No. It’s an idea.’

Arthur Lee was sitting in his office in the education block. His door was open. He saw Hannah walking down the corridor and waved her in.

‘Aren’t you busy?’ She had walked that way hoping to talk to him, but had to pretend she didn’t want to intrude.

‘Nah, it’s good to see a friendly face.’

Arthur was a Home Office imposition on the education department and they’d never liked him. He was too clever and reported straight to the Governor. A psychologist by training, he ran courses in anger management, victim awareness and special sessions for sex offenders. That was another reason for his unpopularity. Since Jonathan had left, Hannah had taken to dropping in on him more often, using him, she sometimes thought, as a personal therapist. He was in his early fifties, the age her father had been when he died. She’d have liked a father like Arthur, plump, comfortable, understanding. He’d been born in Liverpool and had never lost the accent. John Peel, she thought, without the beard.

‘I hear you’ve had a bit of bother.’

She should have known it would be impossible to keep the incident in the library quiet. She shrugged, explained what had happened. ‘Some lad kicking off. Marty thinks I should take a break.’

‘Marty?’

‘My orderly. Fox. D Wing. You haven’t had him on one of your courses?’

She was thinking anger management. Arthur shook his head. Perhaps he wouldn’t have told her anyway.

‘Sounds like good advice.’

‘There’s a school reunion. In Cranford. Up in the hills where I grew up. But I’m not sure…’

‘I’ll come with you if you like.’

Hannah was surprised. She knew he was on his own but they’d never met outside the prison. She hadn’t thought of him at all as the sort of person she’d take to a party and needed time to get used to the idea.

‘It’s too far to come back the same night. I thought I’d stay with my pal Sally. Make a weekend of it.’

‘That’s fine then.’ His tone was easy but she felt she’d been unkind. She didn’t want to offend him.

‘I’m taking my daughter out for a drink tonight. Why don’t you join us later?’

‘Yeah,’ he said. He seemed pleased but he never gave much away.

Hannah wondered what Rosie would make of him. At least, she thought, it would prove to Rosie that she did have a life outside the family. She did have friends of her own.

On her way home Hannah called in to her boss at the Central Library and told her she wanted to take a week’s holiday. It was short notice but something had come up. Marge, her boss, was so sympathetic that Hannah knew she’d heard about Jonathan and Eve. ‘Have as long as you like, pet.’

They lived in a small town. By now it would be common knowledge.

Chapter Seven

Her mother always made her feel so sodding guilty. Rosie replaced the receiver, glad the conversation was over. The house was quiet. Mel was still asleep and Mrs and Mr Gillespie had left hours before to go to work. Mel was Rosie’s best mate and had been since coming to the school three years before. She had spiky red hair and green eyes and she played the bass guitar. Rosie was starving but she could hardly pour herself a bowl of cornflakes in someone else’s house. Besides, she needed to go home to change or she’d be late for work. Mel, whose parents were seriously rich and seriously generous, hadn’t felt the need for employment between A levels and college. Rosie didn’t mind working. It was a distraction.

Outside it was hot already, though here on the coast there was usually a breeze. Just as well because she had on what she’d been wearing in the club the night before – a lacy black dress and tarty sandals. The shoes were OK for dancing but they knackered her ankles if she tried to walk any distance. She took them off to go barefoot and as she stepped in and out of the shadow thrown by the trees she felt the changes of temperature on the soles of her feet.

The houses round here were big Edwardian semis set back from the road. In one of these houses Joe lived. She took care not to turn her head as she sauntered past.

Her home was more ordinary. A tidy semi on a tidy estate. Her parents had bought it from new when she was five. It would have been her mother’s choice. They must have realized by then that there’d be no other children. This boring three-bedroomed box would be big enough.

Inside she switched off the alarm and went straight to the kitchen. She put on the kettle, stuck a couple of pieces of bread in the toaster, took orange juice from the fridge and drank it straight from the carton. Inside her head she heard her mother telling her off about that. How pathetic could you get? She was eighteen, an adult, and there was her mother, nagging away at her, a worm inside her head: ‘For goodness’ sake, Rosalind, can’t you get a glass?’

In her bedroom, when she switched on the light the bulb fizzled and died so she had to open the curtains. She saw the place in daylight for the first time in months. There was an unpleasant, musty smell, which she’d tried for too long to ignore. She pushed a window open. In the garden next door a neighbour was pegging baby clothes on to the line. Rosie waved to her. Before the job in the pub she used to babysit quite often. The woman waved back. Rosie saw pity on her face, imagined her gossiping to the rest of the street. ‘Poor kid. Her dad’s left. And they seemed such a happy family.’ When the woman bent to lift more laundry from the basket Rosie stuck up two fingers at her back. She turned over the pile of clothes on her floor like a peasant turning hay with a fork. For the pub she had to wear a uniform – black trousers, white shirt, stupid little green apron and green bow-tie. The tie and the apron were still in the bag from her last shift. There was a white shirt in the pile but the collar and the cuffs were filthy and there were spatters of red wine down the chest. Her father had left clothes when he’d decamped the month before and her mother had been too civilized to throw them out. She’d moved them instead into the spare-room wardrobe. As if he might return one day as a lodger. There, on a hanger, was a single white shirt.

There was no sign of the trousers and the hassle was starting to bug her. Her mother had recently dreamed up a rule about Rosie doing her own washing and since then things had been chaotic on the clothes front. She’ll not have stuck to it, Rosie thought. It’ll be like all the other threats and ultimatums. She’ll not have been able to stand the thought of her daughter going out in mucky pants. And sure enough her trousers were washed and dry with a load of towels in the tumble in the utility room. In the spirit of conciliation which had led her to phone her mother she folded the towels and loaded the washing machine with part of the muck heap from the bedroom floor. She rolled the trousers into a tight ball and shook them out. She never understood why anyone bothered with ironing.

She looked at her watch. She could have done with a shower but there was no time, so she cleaned off last night’s slap, put on more and she was ready. She only realized how dirty her feet were when she pushed them into her flat work shoes. No one would see. The pub was a big, white place close to the sea front. It was called the Promenade, known as the Prom. She’d got the job because she had the nerve to ask. Like all her friends she’d been drinking there since she was sixteen and she’d thought working in the place would be a dream. In fact when it was full of kids in the evenings, being behind the bar was a bit of a drag, not the buzz she’d expected. She had to watch her mates drinking, having a good time and usually she was too busy to exchange more than a couple of words. Sometimes she saw more than she wanted to, heard more too. It was as if the uniform made you invisible.

The first inkling she’d got about her father had been in the pub. Two lads, who she’d known fine well were in Year 11 and shouldn’t have been in the place anyway, were playing darts. She’d been emptying ashtrays. It was a Friday night, somebody’s birthday. The Prom was packed. They’d had to yell.

‘They say he’s going to get the sack.’

‘You don’t get the sack for screwing someone you work with.’

‘You do if you screw them on the staff-room floor. My dad’s a governor. He should know.’

‘You can’t blame him though, can you? I mean, have you seen her on the trampoline?’

‘But what does she see in him?’ The boy put his fingers in his mouth and pretended to throw up.

She’d almost gone up to them to find out who they were talking about, curious, eager to share the gossip. Then they’d seen her and something about the look that had passed between them had warned her, made her pretend not to have heard. Episodes, which had meant nothing to her at the time, slid into sharp focus. Miss Petrie volunteering to do the choreography for the play her father was directing. Miss Petrie on the school trip to Stratford, though what interest could a brainless PE teacher have in Shakespeare? Every time she thought of the two of them together she lost control of her body. Her breath came too fast and she almost fainted.

She didn’t mind the pub during the day. There was a different kind of customer then. Grown-ups. Old men sitting for ages reading a paper, office workers wanting lunch, tourists.

When she got there Frank was outside watering the hanging baskets. He looked at his watch and grinned. She always turned up with only a second to spare. Frank was the manager, fat and forty, divorced. He’d been the one to give her the job. She’d chatted him up when he’d had a few drinks and allowed them a lock-in, then she’d turned up next morning for an interview he couldn’t remember having arranged. She thought he’d given her a job out of embarrassment. It was only after learning about her dad and Miss Petrie (she couldn’t bring herself to call her Eve) that she wondered if he might fancy her. He’d never tried anything on but she always made sure to keep her distance.

It was only twelve o’clock and the pub was nearly empty. Two old ladies with wispy hair and floaty dresses sat by the window in the dust-speckled sunlight, sipping brandy and lemonade. When Rosie went over to collect their empty glasses they continued to sit, engrossed in conversation, making no move to leave or to order more drinks. They were lost in memory. They had come to the coast when they were girls on charabanc trips from town. Back behind the bar, Rosie heard them giggle suddenly over a shared memory. It was a slightly awkward giggle. A boy was involved. Rosie thought, Is that how Mel and I will be when we’re old? We’ll sit in the Prom getting pissed on brandy and reminiscence, laughing about Joe. If Mel lives long enough to get old, that is.

Then, almost as if the thought had conjured him out of thin air, there Joe was, standing at the door, skinny as one of the pipecleaner men her granda used to make. She had to make an effort to compose herself, to breathe slowly and regularly. Joe saw her and smiled, showing a mouth of gappy teeth. He looked crumpled, as if he’d slept in his clothes – baggy cotton trousers and a T-shirt so tight that she could see the frame of his ribs. What could anyone in their right mind see in him? He had bigger feet than anyone else in the world. Black hair tied back in a loose ponytail. He loped to the bar.

‘Mel said you’d be working.’

‘You’ve seen Mel this morning?’ She was surprised. She thought Mel would be dead to the world.

‘Spoken to her on the phone.’

‘Everything OK?’

He frowned without answering. She poured him a pint. Mel was usually the subject of their conversations. She demanded their attention. She had an eating disorder – anorexia, Rosie thought. Rosie didn’t know the details, didn’t like to ask. She suspected Joe knew more than she did.

Joe fidgeted in his pocket for money. ‘Has she said anything to you?’

‘What about?’

‘She’s really stressed out about something.’

‘Isn’t she always?’ Rosie regretted that immediately. It sounded petty. But what was Mel about? She was bright and gorgeous and her parents doted on her. And so did Joe. So why all the shit?

Joe took the pint, stared into it. ‘Have you started doing food yet? Any chance of a burger?’

Although he was so thin, there was nothing wrong with Joe’s attitude to food. She shouted his order through to the kitchen. Frank came in with the watering can still in his hand, letting it drip on the carpet. He nodded to Joe, winked at Rosie. She knew she was blushing but Joe seemed too preoccupied to notice.

‘We’re going away,’ he said. ‘Mel and me.’

‘I thought you were skint.’ Joe worked all night shifts at the big supermarket on the ring road, but he never had any money. He spent it on drink, junk food, music, stupid presents for them all. His parents were both doctors and could have bailed him out but they said he had to learn to budget before going to university. They took university for granted; Rosie wasn’t so sure. Joe hadn’t done much work before the exams. He’d been too busy obsessing over Mel.

Joe shrugged. ‘Mel says she needs to get away. It’s like she’s really spooked by something. She won’t let go. But she won’t talk about it either. Haven’t you noticed?’

No, Rosie thought. I’ve had my own problems lately. If you hadn’t realized.

Joe was continuing. ‘Her mum and dad say they’ll pay. We’re only going for a week. They think she could do with a holiday. It would do her good. A friend of theirs has a villa in Portugal.’

‘Very nice.’ This time Rosie managed to keep her voice noncommittal. She was thinking, It’s not Mel who wants to go away. It’s their idea. They’ve just had enough of her illness. They’re fed up with seeing her like that. They want the problem to disappear for a while.

They’d sent Mel away before and Rosie couldn’t blame them.

‘I’m not sure I can handle it,’ Joe was saying. ‘It’s the responsibility. What if something happens while we’re away?’ He paused. ‘They want her to think about going into hospital but she’s dead against it. They want me to persuade her.’

‘She doesn’t seem too bad to me,’ Rosie said. ‘No worse than usual.’

A punter came up to the bar. A salesman, she thought. Suit and a briefcase. He was sweating. It was very hot out now. From where she stood she could see the glare on the water as far as the horizon. Families walked past in shorts and skimpy tops and they seemed to turn pink as she watched them. Making the most of the summer. She expected the man to order a meal and a bottle of lager, but instead he barked, ‘Scotch. A large one.’ His voice was desperate. She watched him take it to a table in the shade, knew he’d be back in five minutes for another.

Joe slid back along the bar so he was facing her again.

‘You don’t have to go,’ she said reasonably. ‘Explain how you feel.’

‘I can’t let her down.’

They teased him sometimes because he’d been a choirboy as a kid. He said he’d been dragged along to church by his parents but she thought some of it had rubbed off. He had too many principles.

‘When do you leave?’

‘A couple of days.’

‘Mel didn’t say anything to me.’ Rosie convinced herself that was why she was so angry. She felt herself close to tears. They were supposed to be best friends.

‘She wanted to keep it a secret. I don’t know why.’

Because she likes secrets, Rosie thought. She likes keeping things to herself. She’s a hoarder. Perhaps that’s what the stuff with food is about.

‘What was all that with your mum last night?’ he asked with a complete change of tone. He pulled a prim, schoolmistress face. This was the Joe the others knew, the gossip and the clown.

Rosie was cross. Hannah was an easy target. ‘She’s had a bad time. All the talk. You know what it must be like, finding out that your husband’s a rat after twenty years. And she has it rough at work. It’s not a bunch of laughs in the prison.’

‘No,’ he said quickly, seeing that he had offended her. ‘It won’t be. I didn’t mean…’

The businessman came back to the bar. He held out his glass to her. She saw that his hand was shaking.

‘Your mum’s all right,’ Joe said. ‘We were being stupid.’

Rosie served the customer and let it go.

His burger came. He ate it quickly, holding it in his hand and tearing away at it as if he were ravenous. He stood still when he’d finished and she thought he was going to say something else about Mel. Perhaps he wanted to enlist Rosie’s support in finding out what lay behind the paranoia. But he just nodded.

‘See you in a week then. If I don’t catch up with you before we go.’

And he was gone.

That evening at a different pub, Rosie’s local, it was still warm enough to sit outside. She’d eaten the veggie lasagne her mother had cooked for dinner, had a shower and changed into a sleeveless frock. The beer garden was at the back, away from the road, though there was still a far-off hum of traffic. A row of conifers separated the pub from playing fields. There were tubs on the terrace and shrubs under the trees, a faint exotic smell of flowers and pine.

‘Melanie and Joseph are going away,’ Rosie said, using the full names as if it were a formal announcement. As in ‘I, Melanie, take you, Joseph’. That wouldn’t surprise her either. Joe was besotted enough to do it and he’d always been into crazy gestures. Melanie’s parents would be delighted. Melanie would have a full-time minder and they could go back to the real business of making money.

‘Isn’t Melanie’s name Gillespie?’ her mother asked.

Rosie hardly heard. She was imagining Mel’s dress, the church, the flowers. Her as chief bridesmaid. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Melanie Gillespie.’

‘And her dad’s the businessman?’

‘That’s right.’

When she’d first asked Melanie what her father did she’d said he ran a chip shop. Computer chips, it turned out. He’d set up a huge plant on the site of a derelict factory, was a major local hero because of all the jobs it provided.

‘He was on the television again tonight,’ Hannah said.

Mel’s dad was always on the television.

‘They’re going to the Algarve,’ Rosie said. ‘Mel and Joe.’

‘Will you be at a bit of a loose end then?’

‘I have got other friends!’

For a while she had been watching a small, plump man hovering just out of her mother’s line of vision. She thought he had been listening in, waiting for them to finish their conversation. Now he was approaching and Hannah stood up to greet him. Rosie thought, She planned this all along. She knew I’d not come if she warned me.

‘This is Arthur,’ Hannah said.

Rosie could tell her mother was nervous and decided to be gracious. ‘Hi.’

‘Arthur works with me at the prison. He’s a psychologist.’

Rosie nodded. What could you say?

‘Rosie was just telling me that two of her friends are going on holiday.’ Hannah shot her the look Rosie remembered from Sunday-afternoon tea at her grandma and granda’s house. A pleading look which said, Please behave, please don’t show me up.

Rosie said nothing. Arthur smiled. It would be easy, Rosie thought, to be taken in by that smile.

Hannah continued, ‘I was just going to tell her about my trip.’

‘What trip?’

‘There’s a school reunion. I thought I should go…’

‘Great. Can I come?’ It was a malicious offer. She didn’t want her mother to go off with this little round man with the beguiling smile. She wanted to pay Hannah back for treating her like a six-year-old.

‘Do you really want to?’

Hannah looked so pathetically grateful that Rosie couldn’t say she didn’t mean it. Anyway, what was wrong with running away for a couple of days?

‘Why not?’

Arthur smiled again as if this was what he’d been planning all along and he went to the bar for drinks.

Chapter Eight

Although Hannah had avoided Sally since she’d left the town to go to university, she had kept in touch with her friend’s news. Sally had gone up in the world since they’d first become mates in Cranford. At school she’d lived with her parents on a small council estate, a couple of streets which ran down the hill to the west of the town. Her father had been a barber. Her mother had worked in the chemist’s in the high street. There’d been a younger sister, a pretty child called Joanne. Hannah’s dad had worked in the only bank in the town and they’d owned their own home, but the families’ lives had been very similar. There’d been an emphasis on good manners and tidiness. Of course, after Hannah’s father had died things were never the same again. Then she’d loved spending time with Sal’s family. Everything in their little house had seemed safe and respectable.

Sally didn’t go to university. She’d had no academic ambition though she’d been bright enough. Instead she’d got a job as office junior on the local paper. She was still there in a more glorified form, writing features and running the women’s page. She’d sent Hannah a cutting when she first got the post as features editor. There had been a photograph at the top of the page and she’d put on a lot of weight. Hannah thought she made the job sound grander than it was. The paper had turned into one of those free weeklies which are seventy per cent adverts. She did write back to congratulate Sally about the promotion. She hadn’t wanted to appear mean spirited.

When she was nineteen Sally married Chris, a lad they’d knocked about with. A baby arrived soon after. Chris worked for a printer and on summer evenings ran a disco in the caravan site near the lake. There was one more baby then Hannah heard that they’d separated. Much later she saw a piece in a Newcastle paper saying Chris had been sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for selling drugs. She wondered if he would turn up at the prison, but if he had she’d never met him. Not so far as she knew. Would she have recognized him after all this time?

When Sally wrote to say that she was getting married for a second time to a local businessman, Hannah had imagined a shopkeeper or someone running a small unit on the business park near the river. A barber even, like her dad. But it turned out that Sally’s new husband was an hotelier. Hannah might have gone to the wedding – in fact had been building herself up to it – but in the end she was never invited. Sally said it was a very small affair because she and Roger were busy preparing for the holiday season. The hotel was close to the lake and attracted tourists.

On the drive to Cranford Rosie fell asleep before they’d left their estate and didn’t wake until they’d nearly arrived. She sat with her head tipped back, snoring slightly through an open mouth. Hannah didn’t mind. It was a reminder of what she’d looked like as a small child.

She had only been back to Cranford once, for her mother’s funeral, and that was in her third year of university. Because she was so far away – she had been at university in Exeter – the funeral had been organized by Hannah’s aunt. Hannah had stayed with her for one night then returned to the West Country, glad of the excuse of exams.

Jonathan couldn’t understand her refusal to return to the place of her birth. In the beginning at least, he had been interested in going. ‘For Christ’s sake, H, it’s only fifty miles away. We could be there and back in an afternoon. Show me the scenes of your wild youth.’ He’d thought he was being funny. Hannah had made no attempt to explain her reluctance.

They came upon the town almost before she realized, and then she saw with a start that it had hardly changed at all. It felt as she remembered it: stately, quiet, seductive; a place which was hard to leave, very different from Millhaven, the town on the coast which was now her home. That was rakish and full of people passing through – students, hotel workers, yuppies using it as a staging post. And affluent businessmen like Richard Gillespie who lived there to show they had a certain style and personality. Though no doubt he would be moving on too.

The hotel was in a village called Cranwell, very close to the lake. She must have passed through it on her way to the caravan site but she had no recollection. It was pretty enough. There was one main street with stone cottages, a small first school backing on to open fields, a large church. The hotel was down a track next to the church and was called The Old Rectory. It was a big, grey Victorian house with steep gables, an immaculate garden and a view of the graveyard. Hannah had been imagining something seedy, with draughty corridors and stained baths, and was pleasantly surprised. It had an air of class and of money. Rosie had stirred as they pulled on to the drive and now stretched, yawned and scrabbled under the seat for her shoes. Hannah wished she didn’t look quite so grubby or dishevelled. She wanted Sally to admire her daughter.

There were other cars in a courtyard at the side of the house. All of them were newer and larger than Hannah’s Polo – Jonathan of course had taken the Rover when he left. Rosie got out of the car and Hannah saw that the seam of her skirt had split at the back. She began to feel nervous, as if they had no right to be there. There was complete silence, of the sort that you find in small Spanish towns at siesta time. It was even hotter here than on the coast and Hannah was reminded of the dense, bright heat of a Mediterranean afternoon. Although the house was close to the main village street there was no sound of traffic or conversation. They walked through an arch and round the house to the main entrance. The front lawn was set for croquet. Two mallets lay with balls on the grass. Beyond a green wire-mesh fence was a tennis court, freshly marked. No one was about.

Rosie whistled and said, ‘Not bad.’ She pulled the hair back from her face, twisted it and fastened it with a comb. She looked immediately tidier. ‘I can’t see a pool,’ she said regretfully. ‘Still, in a normal summer, when would you use it? Really, it’s not bad at all.’

The front door was open and led to a large wood-panelled hall with a stone fireplace. There was no reception desk, no bell to ring to attract attention. They stood for a moment. It seemed very dark after the glare outside, and wonderfully cool. Three doors led into the hall but all were shut.

‘Well,’ Rosie demanded. ‘Are we going to stand here like lemons?’ There were times when Hannah wondered that she had created such an assertive young woman. Rosie raised her voice. ‘Hello,’ she shouted. ‘Anybody home?’

‘Ssh…’ Hannah felt awkward, as if she’d wandered into a private home and sworn at the hosts. She would have stood there all day.

Rosie began to shuffle impatiently. There was a woodblock floor. She’d learned tap dancing as a child and began to tap her heels and toes to some rhythm in her head. It was an irritating habit and came upon her whenever there was space to move. She’d never been able to stand still. In the distance a door opened and shut and they heard footsteps. Rosie continued to hop and shimmy and click her fingers. Hannah motioned at her to stop. The middle door into the hall opened and a man appeared. Beyond him she saw a corridor, a sunny window. She didn’t at first take him to be Sally’s husband. He was older than she would have expected, at least fifty-five, but it was more than that. He wasn’t the sort of man she thought Sally would be married to. He wore an open-necked shirt, brown trousers with a neatly pressed crease and, despite the heat, a cardigan with pockets. His hair was thin and grey, too long at the back. Perhaps after Chris Sally had had enough of wild men. Rosie slid to a halt.

The man blinked in a way which Hannah found oddly familiar, smiled a thin, long smile and held out his hand.

‘You must be Sally’s friends.’ His voice was light, clipped, a little spinsterish, and again she felt she should recognize it. ‘Not a good day for a drive, I’m afraid. Poor you. This weather doesn’t show any sign of breaking. I suppose we shouldn’t complain. By the time you’ve had a chance to freshen up Sally will be home. She was sorry not to be here when you arrived, but today’s a busy one for the paper. She’s looking forward to the reunion.’

He picked up Hannah’s holdall and directed them towards a curving staircase. Rosie went first and he stared as she walked ahead of him at the long brown legs appearing through the slit in her skirt. Hannah wanted to hit him, but knew Rosie would probably take the attention for granted. Across the graveyard the church clock struck five. The noise seemed to shock him out of a trance and he turned to Hannah, muttering something about the age of the tower. Their room was at the back of the house. It was large and high ceilinged with a full-length window looking over a rose garden and across more lawn. Beyond that, dazzling in the sunlight, was the lake.

Roger seemed to have regained his composure. He gave them an arch little smile as if he were enjoying some private joke and left them alone.

‘Hey,’ Rosie said. ‘This is a bit of all right.’

Hannah dragged her attention from the lake and looked at the room. Solid Victorian furniture was lightened by pale yellow bedspreads and curtains. Rosie dropped the sophisticated pose she put on for her friends and became a child again. She bounced on the bed and danced around the room opening drawers and doors. ‘No mini-bar but two sorts of biscuits on the tea tray and very nice smellies for the bath. And Sky.’ She began to strip for the shower with a sort of mock striptease, not caring that the curtains were still open. Remembering Roger, Hannah closed them.

They had made themselves tea and were watching the early-evening news when Sally came in. Hannah thought she had put on weight, especially on the hips and the bust, but that she’d have known her anywhere. She was stylishly dressed in a thrown together, ramshackle way, in a cream linen skirt which came down to her ankles and a long cream top, crumpled at the back where she’d been sitting. There wasn’t any awkwardness. She pulled Hannah towards her so she bounced against the pneumatic bosoms. Then she sat on the bed and started talking.

‘God, what a gorgeous daughter. You’re so lucky, H. I only had boys and they were monsters. They left home long ago, thank the Lord, and they only appear when they want something. Roger puts up with it, the sweetie. God knows why.’ She paused. ‘You know, it’s so good to see you. I’d given up thinking I’d ever get you here.’ She grinned wickedly. ‘You didn’t recognize Roger, did you? He didn’t think you did.’

Hannah was embarrassed. She dredged back in her memory for the circumstances when she’d heard the pedantic voice. She had a fleeting image of school, of sitting with a crowd of others on the edge of the stage in the hall, then it was gone.

She mumbled, ‘Something about him was familiar,’ knowing how pathetic she sounded.

‘Probably best forgotten,’ Sally said. ‘That’s what I thought until I met him again. I came to do a feature on him when he bought this place. You won’t believe it but he swept me off my feet. Perhaps this will jog your memory.’ She stood up, put her hands behind her back and in a surprisingly accurate imitation of her husband’s voice said, ‘If that homework’s not handed in tomorrow, Miss Marshall, I’ll be down on you like a ton of bricks.’

It was the final phrase that released the memory. It was the threat for every occasion. Hannah started to giggle, quickly put her hand over her mouth to cover it.

‘You married Spooky Spence?’ It was impossible to keep the astonishment from her voice. She wanted to ask Sally how on earth she came to do anything so ridiculous.

‘Exactly,’ Sally said, enjoying Hannah’s surprise. ‘Spooky Spence.’

He had taught them Latin for O level. At the time Hannah had thought of him as middle-aged, verging on the elderly, but he could hardly have been more than thirty. Now that she had fixed him in her memory she thought his appearance had hardly changed over the years. She remembered those lessons as restful occasions. A quiet sunny classroom. Mr Spence’s voice a drone in the background as they plodded through Virgil and Caesar’s Civil Wars. And he had been involved in the school play. That was what the flash of memory had been about.

‘But you couldn’t stand him,’ Hannah said.

Sally had never liked drama and had hated the Latin lessons. She’d never got to grips with the grammar. Spence had been quietly but menacingly sarcastic.

She grinned. ‘He couldn’t stand me either. He hated teaching. I mean, he didn’t mind fiddling round with the theatre club but standing in front of a class all day was a nightmare. Food’s always been his real passion. You wouldn’t recognize him in the kitchen. When his mum died she left him a house and a bit of money. It gave him enough to set up this place. It’s been an exciting project for us both.’

Rosie had been watching the conversation with interest. Perhaps she was wondering what it would be like to get involved with a teacher much older than her. A bit close to home.

‘Why did you call him spooky?’ It wasn’t a tactful contribution, but again Sally didn’t take offence.

‘It was his way of appearing beside you without warning. Apparently out of thin air. When you least needed it. Like when you’d just lit a fag behind the changing rooms. Or you were planning to mitch off early before his lesson.’ She grinned again at Rosie. ‘Not that your mother ever did anything like that. Hannah Meek was the biggest swat in the school.’

Hannah didn’t say that she remembered things rather differently. They’d called Roger spooky because of the way he looked at them. At the hems of their skirts which were still very short at the time, at the shirts bursting at the buttons over newly formed chests. There were stories that he’d been caught staring through the gym window at third-form gymnasts, at the girls in their knickers and airtex vests doing straddle jumps on the box and cartwheels on the beam.

Sally didn’t go with them to the school for the reunion. She said she’d meet them there. She had to nip back to town. It was work. The editor was away and there was a press conference she needed to cover. Again Hannah felt she was making her work sound grander than it was.

Still, she was pleased to go in on her own, with only Rosie to keep her company. Sally would have rushed round introducing her to everyone, and she wanted a moment of anonymity. She wanted to stand just inside the door and look for Michael. She had dreamt that he would be there. If she was honest with herself, that was what the trip had been all about from the start. Michael was what had kept her away from the town for all those years and now it was Michael who had brought her back. When Roger dropped them off at the school – it seemed that he was too busy to attend the party – the futility of the venture hit her. She was embarrassed that she had allowed her fantasy to develop this far.

Michael Grey had come to the school when Hannah was in the lower sixth. He was a year older than the rest of them but for some reason had been placed in their year. She remembered having been given a number of reasons for that – he had been living abroad, had been ill, there had been a family problem. Still she didn’t know which, if any, of them had been true. Certainly he hadn’t been asked to retake the year because he was thick. He was quick and conscientious and the teachers loved him. He was doing art, English and biology, but art was his thing. He noticed the way things and people looked. She remembered the big, battered portfolio he used to cart around, the way he always had a smear of paint on his face.

So she collected her name badge, stood just inside the door and looked around. He wasn’t in the room. She saw that immediately. Even after nearly thirty years she would have recognized him. She didn’t think that was self-delusion. She would have stood there longer, but Rosie gave her a shove in the back.

‘Go on then,’ she said. ‘Do the business.’

It turned out to be easier than Hannah had expected. Sally still hadn’t arrived but Hannah was greeted by people who knew her, who were pleasant enough to say that she’d hardly changed. The name badges were in sufficiently large print to allow the possibility that this was a kind fiction, that they remembered the face only after reading her name, but soon she felt less nervous.

This hall was newly built when she was at school. Previously the dining hall had been used for everything. For the first time the students had somewhere for assembly and drama that didn’t smell of school dinners. She recalled her first speech day there. Some sixth-form boys always ran a book on the length of the headmaster’s lecture. Parents were invited and when Hannah won a prize for English her mother had turned up. Her husband had just died and people were still talking about it so it was a brave thing for her to do, but she was the only woman to be wearing a hat and Hannah wished that she’d stayed away.

The new hall was where school plays were performed. In Hannah’s final year, Michael was Macbeth. He looked like a Viking warrior with his long white hair and papier-mâché armour. Jenny Graves was Lady Macbeth. People said she was very good, but Hannah had been prompting and too busy following every line to notice individual performances. What she did remember was the knife, because she’d helped with props too. She didn’t know where Mr Westcott had found it, but it was seriously sharp. One of the first years was messing around and cut herself. Hannah thought that nowadays, when everyone was so conscious of health and safety, it wouldn’t be allowed.

Once she’d persuaded herself that of course it would have been impossible for Michael to be there, Hannah even started to enjoy herself. At first the music was far too loud for sensible conversation but someone persuaded the disc jockey to turn it down. She could catch up on news of people who had once been close friends. No one mentioned her father. She supposed, even in a town as small as this, that had been forgotten long ago.

She was talking to Paul Lord when Sally arrived. Hannah saw her from the corner of her eye, but continued the conversation. In school Paul had been something of a figure of fun – a spotty scientist, too conventional for his age, more conventional even than her. He had become rather handsome. Certainly he was married. He mentioned a wife and child. It seemed he had his own business and was doing rather well.

‘What happened to that blond lad you used to knock around with?’ he said suddenly. ‘Did he go away to art school in the end, or did he settle for university?’

Hannah said calmly that she had no idea. Then Sally interrupted them quite rudely, taking Hannah’s arm and dragging her away. Something had excited her. She could hardly contain herself. But she kept her face serious.

‘There’s something you have to know.’

‘What is it?’

She turned everything into a drama. Hannah was expecting a piece of local gossip. Someone had run away with someone else’s wife. She should know not to mention it in front of the people involved.

‘The body in the lake,’ Sally said.

Hannah must have looked at her stupidly. It wasn’t at all what she was expecting.

‘You had heard that they’d found a body in the lake?’

Hannah remembered a snatch of a radio report. ‘Yes. It came to light because the water level’s so low.’

‘That was what the press conference was about. The police have got a positive ID at last. Dental records or something. It’s too horrible to think about.’ She shivered theatrically. ‘It’s Michael Grey. He’d been down there for nearly thirty years.’

She was whispering. Perhaps she wanted to add to the theatre of the occasion. Perhaps she didn’t want to spoil the party. Hannah felt the room spin around her.

‘Pull yourself together,’ Sally said sharply. ‘You’ll have to speak to the police. We all will, but you’re most likely to have something useful to say.’ She looked at Hannah, waiting for a sensible response before adding impatiently, ‘Michael Grey was murdered.’

Hannah remained silent. She could hardly say that the news had come as something of a relief.

Chapter Nine

So far, Rosie thought, she’d been very good, very much the mummy’s girl, putting on a clean frock, tying back her hair in a French plait, saying what a brilliant time she’d been having.

The school was pretty much what she’d expected, comprehensive now, but still to Rosie’s eyes, rather grand. Her high school on the coast was a seventies glass and concrete slum. The window frames had warped and the roof leaked. This was a stone building, approached by a drive through trees. There was a couple of new blocks, a scattering of mobile classrooms, but still it was hard to imagine kids dealing dope in the toilets or sniffing glue behind the bike sheds. More Mallory Towers than Grange Hill. Rosie wasn’t sure about being there. ‘Look,’ she had said. ‘I’d just be in the way.’ Hannah had given her a look so geeky that Rosie could have strangled her but not deserted her.

They had been early of course. Her mother was always early. It drove Rosie crazy. There had been people in the hall, but they were still setting out food and glasses. Rosie had taken her mother’s arm. She was shaking.

‘Why don’t you give me a guided tour of the place before we go in?’

They had walked together round the outside of the building, peering in through windows. Hannah had pointed out the domestic-science block, the room where Roger had taught Latin, the sixth-form common-room. Rosie had listened. She had felt supportive and grown up. She had even wondered if she should bring up the subject of Eve and Jonathan – they had never really discussed it – but she hadn’t wanted to spoil things and had left Hannah to her memories.

When they returned the party had begun. The hall doubled as a theatre and it was blacked out by heavy curtains and lit by coloured spots. Outside the sun was still shining. On the stage sat a DJ playing seventies music. The lines on his face were so deep that they seemed chiselled. It was hard to tell whether his head was bald or shaved. But he still seemed younger than the people standing awkwardly in the hall, juggling paper plates and plastic glasses. He put on a David Bowie. ‘Life on Mars’. It had always been one of Rosie’s favourites and she was itching to dance. If Joe had been there she’d have dragged him on to the floor to get things moving.

There’d been a bit of a queue at the door, where a fat woman stood behind a table doling out laminated name badges. She was short sighted and had to squint like a mole over the table to find the one she was looking for. Hannah had found her own. Hannah Meek. How bloody appropriate, Rosie had thought. The fat woman had stared at them, as if the name or her mother’s face should trigger a memory, but the effort had seemed too much for her because she just shook her head, smiled vaguely and let them walk on into the hall.

At first everything was as tedious and civilized as Rosie had expected it to be. She was introduced to old friends of her mother’s. She smiled a lot, was polite and dutiful. When she laughed she felt as if she were making too much noise. The people she met seemed frozen in middle age. It was impossible to imagine them being yelled at by a teacher in this hall, or sitting at small tables to take exams. They talked about their children, the iniquities of student fees and student loans, their homes and their foreign holidays. All the time the rhythm of the music nipped at her ankles and made her want to sway away from them back into the middle of the floor.

This is your music, she wanted to say. Doesn’t it take you back to how you were?

And sometimes she saw a woman or a man with dreamy eyes, who would look at her with a start, as if they were staring at themselves or a girl they fancied. But it didn’t last, and when someone did start the dancing it was a peculiar shuffle as if they all had arthritic knees or a broom handle strapped to their spines.

Then she looked up at the stage and saw the DJ, who must have been at least as old as her mother and the others in the room, but who didn’t seem it. He seemed to be laughing at them too. She moved through the dancers and hoisted herself on to the stage so her legs dangled over the edge. He didn’t look at her.

‘A bit young for this, aren’t you?’

‘I came with my mum.’

‘Who was she, then?’ Now he did turn to eye her up. ‘I might know her.’

‘Did you come to this school too?’ For some reason it seemed unlikely. He looked too different from the smartly dressed men and women. She thought he must be a refugee from the city.

‘No, not bright enough. I was at the secondary modern. But I used to hang around with some of them.’

‘Hannah Meek,’ she said. ‘That was what my mother was called then.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I can see.’

‘Can you?’ She had seen the occasional photo of her mother as a young woman and saw no resemblance. Her mother was so reined in. Her features were small and sharp.

‘She was skinnier of course.’

She felt her face colour. Most people were skinnier than her. Hannah said she was over sensitive. ‘Carry on like that and you’ll end up like Melanie Gillespie.’ As if she wouldn’t have adored to be the same weight as Mel.

‘But you’re bonnier,’ the DJ said after some consideration. Rosie could have kissed him.

‘Can you recognize her?’ she said, falling into the joky, flirty voice she used with the older punters at the Prom. She didn’t have to shout. Someone had moaned about the music being too loud and he’d turned it down. He scanned the room but so briefly that she thought he wasn’t really bothered.

‘Can’t see much at all in this light,’ he said.

There was a bit of a scuffle at the door as Sally came in. She pushed her way through the blackout curtain and was silhouetted briefly against the light outside. The woman behind the table knew her and tried to offer her a badge but Sally ignored her. The DJ was watching the scene too, with the same detached amusement as when he’d been looking at the dancing.

‘That’s Sally Spence,’ Rosie said, wanting his attention again. ‘She’s my mum’s best mate. We’re staying at her hotel tonight.’

‘Oh, I know Sal very well. When you see her say Chris sends his love.’

The track he was playing came to an end. He murmured a few words into the microphone. No one seemed to be listening. Hannah was deep in conversation with a tall man, dressed in black. He had more style than the rest of them and Rosie might have fancied him if he’d been twenty years younger. Suddenly Sally broke in on the couple. She said a few words to Hannah then steered her away from him. From her position on the stage Rosie watched. Caught in a livid green spotlight, with Roxy Music in the background, she saw her mother’s face crumple. The normally sharp features fell in on themselves. Sally led her out of the room and Rosie followed. At the door she stopped and looked up at the stage. Chris, the DJ, gave her a little wave and a knowing grin.

Outside it was still light, and at The Old Rectory four guests sat on the flagged terrace having drinks before a late dinner. Sally had driven them back from the reunion immediately. Rosie thought it was a fuss about nothing. Sally playing the drama queen. An old body dragged out of the lake. What could that have to do with her mother?

Roger insisted that they shouldn’t decide anything until after dinner and Sally had deferred to him. Hannah seemed to think she had no right to express an opinion. Rosie thought Roger had been transformed. That afternoon he’d been a crabby and grey old Latin teacher. Now, talking to his guests, dressed in a brocade waistcoat and floppy bow-tie, he was in his element. When they arrived he was taking a tray of drinks to a couple in the lounge and he sat beside them for a moment to chat. He flattered the woman without annoying her husband, camping it up a little to make himself harmless. Rosie, who was no mean actor herself, appreciated the show. She knew the effort which went into a performance.

Over dinner Sally and her mother talked in a series of elliptical comments which made little sense to her. At one point Sally said to Roger, ‘But you must remember Michael Grey, even if you didn’t teach him. Everyone knew Michael.’

Roger stared into his wine. ‘Of course I remember him,’ he said in a sad, solemn voice. Then he made an excuse to go into the kitchen and when he returned he was his old self, solicitous and funny.

At the end of the meal they were the only people left in the dining-room. The main lights were switched off. Their table was lit by a wall lamp with an engraved glass shade, which could have covered a gas lamp. The room had been designed to look like a Victorian parlour, with glossy-leafed pot plants, red plush, heavy furniture and silver. For Rosie it took on a nightmare quality. She prided herself on being able to hold her drink, but Roger had filled her glass every time it was empty and by the end of the meal her head was swimming. She listened to snatches of the women’s conversation, and the image of the white corpse from the lake caught her attention immediately and stayed with her.

It was partly to shake off this feeling of melodrama, partly because she was so drunk that when the thought came into her head she couldn’t stop it coming out, that she interrupted their conversation.

‘Oh, by the way, Chris sends his love.’

‘Chris?’ Her mother seemed puzzled.

‘The DJ.’

Hannah looked at Sally. ‘That was Chris?’

‘Didn’t you recognize him?’ Sally seemed pleased. ‘He hasn’t worn very well, has he?’ Then she seemed to think Rosie deserved an explanation. ‘Chris,’ she said, ‘is my unmissed ex-husband.’

Soon after, Rosie left them to it. Roger winked and wrapped a half-drunk bottle of wine in a napkin for her to take with her. Hannah would have objected if she’d noticed but she was too preoccupied to see what was going on.

In her room Rosie drew the curtains. The window was open and she heard young voices, smelled the grilling flesh of a barbecue. By the edge of the lake someone was having a party. She switched on the television and flicked through the channels, but nothing held her interest for long.

She poured wine into a beaker from the bathroom and wished she were outside. Leaving the set on, but with the sound turned right down, she dialled the Prom on her mobile. Frank answered.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘It’s me.’

He recognized her voice. She wondered idly if he’d know all his part-time staff by voice. ‘Good God, girl,’ he said. ‘Can’t you keep away from the place? I thought it was your night off.’

‘Sad, isn’t it?’ She thought it really was sad.

‘You’re pissed,’ he said. It was a statement of fact.

‘Shit, Frank, you sound like my mum. Is anyone in?’

‘Can’t you hear them?’ He must have held the receiver over the bar. The roar was deafening.

‘Not anyone. Anyone I know.’

‘Nah. They were in earlier. The whole crowd.’

‘Except Mel and Joe.’ She thought they’d be in Portugal by now, sitting by the pool under the orange trees.

‘I’ve got some news about them.’ He was like an old woman about gossip. He paused, tormenting her, knowing she’d be gagging for the information.

‘What?’

‘They’re still here.’

‘Why?’

‘Mel refused to go, didn’t she.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She refused to go on holiday. They called in here on their way to the airport. Bags all packed. It was supposed to be just to say goodbye. Then all of a sudden she threw a wobbly. She said her parents wanted to get rid of her. The holiday was a trick to get her out of the country. They never intended to let her back.’

She kept her voice flat. ‘Was Joe OK?’

‘He didn’t say much, but what was there to say? His girlfriend had practically accused him of kidnap. That girl needs help.’

She switched off her phone and dialled Joe’s house. The answerphone clicked in straight away. She left a message for Joe saying she’d call him the next day. She thought then that she should phone Mel and check that she was all right but knew that should wait until she was sober. She’d only lose her temper. She seemed to lie awake for hours but she didn’t hear her mother come in.

Chapter Ten

Sally was very eager that Hannah should go to the police station as soon as they returned from the school reunion.

‘It’ll be all over the papers tomorrow. They’ve got a picture. Someone will tell that detective you were Michael Grey’s girlfriend. Better he hear it from you. Of course, I’ll come with you if you like.’

Of course, Hannah thought. That was what Sally wanted. She was a journalist, even if not a very grand one. She saw a story she could sell.

‘Let the poor woman eat,’ Roger said.

Hannah was grateful. Perhaps it was the shock but she was ravenous.

In the end two detectives came out to the hotel. It was Sally’s suggestion. She said the national press was already sniffing around in the town. On second thoughts this would be more discreet. And, thought Hannah, it would give Sally more control. Hannah didn’t mind. She felt very tired. She didn’t think she could face going out.

It was after ten when the detectives arrived, just dark, still very warm. Rosie didn’t seem to have grasped the significance of the body in the lake. She went, a little unsteadily, to their room. The staff were clearing up in the dining-room and there were still guests in the lounge, so Sally let them use her private sitting-room. Roger brought in a tray of coffee. There was a bowl of roses on the table. Later Hannah would remember their fragrance, the scent of filter coffee and another smell which she realized was pipe tobacco. Although the older detective made no attempt to smoke on that occasion, it seemed that he was an addict and his pipe was always in his pocket. It must have been hard for him to sit there for so long without it.

She couldn’t decide at first which was the senior officer. The older man was shorter, slight and dark, with an accent which suggested he came from the coast, from one of those villages where the pits used to be. He had the look of a collier about him. He wore a grey suit. The trousers were too big for him and held up by a thin belt. His shoes were as black and shiny as a prison officer’s boots. The younger man was tall, prematurely balding. If she’d met him on a social occasion, Hannah would have guessed that he taught humanities at a college for further education. He could even have been a librarian. He wore odd socks and scuffed suede boots. The older one was called Stout, the younger Porteous. They must have given their ranks when they introduced themselves but Hannah had been in too much of a daze to take in the information.

They were very polite, but something about their manner put Hannah on her guard. She drank a cup of Roger’s good, strong coffee and tried to clear her head. She had heard the prisoners talking and knew that the police weren’t always to be trusted. What they wanted now was to clear up their case as quickly as possible. There wouldn’t be two detectives here, at this time of night, if they didn’t think there was something in her story for them. For the first time she wondered what Sally had told them. There had been a muttered conversation at the door before she’d shown them in. She had been surprised when Sally had left them alone together without any fuss. But perhaps she was standing at the door now with a glass to her ear. Or perhaps there was a tape recorder hidden under one of the cushions on the sofa.

‘I don’t know what Sally has told you…’ she said. She wanted to take the initiative, to appear purposeful, to let them know she couldn’t be browbeaten.

Porteous, the younger, answered. He seemed diffident, almost apologetic. The voice was educated, but somewhere behind the polish there was a Midland whine.

‘She said that you and Mr Grey were close at the time of his death.’

Stout interrupted briskly. ‘We think it’s possible, Mrs Morton, that you were the last person to see him alive. That, at least, is the information we’ve been given.’

Hannah stared at them. Trust Sally to stir things up. Trust her to turn this into the plot line of a soap opera. Hannah thought her judgement had been right all along. She should never have been persuaded to come back.

‘I know it’s a long time,’ Porteous said. ‘But if you could just take your mind back…’

‘How did he die?’ Hannah demanded. ‘You must have done a post-mortem if you know he was murdered. You pulled him out days ago.’

They seemed shocked and the words sounded callous even in her own head, but Hannah needed to get the facts straight, neatly catalogued like books on a shelf. Stout looked at Porteous who nodded imperceptibly. She realized then that Porteous must be the superior and was glad to have another fact sorted.

‘He was stabbed,’ Stout said, ‘with a sharp, wide-bladed knife.’

Hannah had an image of Jenny Graves at a school play rehearsal. It must have been a dress rehearsal because she was in costume. Her dress had been hired from the local amateur-dramatic society and was scarlet, laced at the front, daringly low cut. She had fake blood all over her hand. Mr Westcott had been so pleased with her performance that he had clapped. Hannah realized that the detectives were staring at her, waiting for her to speak.

‘Have you told Michael’s family?’ she asked, not putting off answering but fishing again for information. She was still curious about Michael’s family.

Again Stout and Porteous looked at each other. Again, it seemed Stout was given permission to answer.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, we seem to have come up with a bit of a problem there. We’re having some difficulty tracing them. He seems to have been a real mystery your young man, a real mystery. That was one of the reasons why we were so keen to talk to you.’

They looked at Hannah expectantly. At last she felt obliged to tell them at least something of what she knew.

‘When we were at school together Michael Grey lived with foster parents. His mother had died and his father had worked abroad a lot. Or was ill. I’m not sure.’ It had seemed to Hannah even in the beginning that Michael had made himself up as he went along. He changed his story to suit his audience. She had caught him out a few times and at first it had seemed to disconcert him. Later, when he realized how she felt about him, he had only grinned.

‘What did the father do?’ Stout asked. ‘Work, I mean. The boy must have said.’

‘I got the impression that he was employed by the Government. Some high-powered diplomat or civil servant. Something that took him away a lot.’

‘He must have come back sometimes to see his son.’

‘No. Never. Not that I remember. I never met him.’

‘Didn’t that strike you as odd?’

Hannah didn’t answer. Michael’s strangeness had been part of his attraction.

‘What about the foster parents?’ Porteous asked. His voice was gentle. Hannah thought he had set out to win her round. ‘You must be able to tell us about them.’

She knew he would have got that much at least from the school records, but decided to play the game.

‘Their names were Brice. Stephen and Sylvia. An elderly couple, more like grandparents than parents. They’d never had children of their own. Stephen was a retired vicar. They were devoted to each other, kind to everyone, into good causes. They lived in one of those terraced houses near the school.’ She looked up at him sharply. ‘You must know all this.’

‘Part of it. I haven’t been able to speak to anyone who knew them.’

‘I didn’t really know them,’ she said quickly. ‘I only met them once or twice.’

They had come to the performance of Macbeth. From her position as prompt, Hannah had seen them sitting proudly in the front row. At the end they had stood up and cheered, more like elderly eccentrics on the last night of the Proms than the audience of a school play. She could imagine them dressed up and waving a Union Jack. They had seemed to her then very old and even now, looking back from middle-age, she thought they must have been in their late sixties or seventies. They both had silver hair. Sylvia wore hers long, pinned back with a tortoiseshell comb. Their house was the quietest Hannah had ever been in. There was no television or radio. She remembered a ginger cat which purred and a clock which chimed the quarter-hour. She presumed this was not the sort of information which would be of interest to Porteous or Stout.

‘They never reported him missing,’ Stout said in a slightly aggrieved way, as if he took the Brices’ failure to make a fuss personally. ‘Nobody started looking for him until they died. Then the solicitor tried but couldn’t trace him.’

Hannah wondered what had happened to the small, tidy house. It seemed unfeeling to ask. She had gone there first for tea. Michael had asked her. Although the Brices hadn’t been expecting her they were thrilled to see her. ‘We’re always telling Michael he should invite his friends in.’

His attitude to them was delightful. He was thoughtful and playful. He called them Sylvie and Steve. But as they sat in front of the fire in the tiny drawing-room, eating seed cake and crumpets, the thread of the conversation had led Hannah to think that they knew little more about his past than she did. It seemed that Stephen had been invited to a theological college in Idaho to give a lecture on the Psalms. They had been discussing flight plans, when Sylvia asked suddenly, ‘Have you ever been abroad, Michael? I can’t remember your saying.’

It was as if they had depended on what he told them for their knowledge of him. Hannah struggled to explain that to the detectives. ‘I don’t think they were relatives. They probably didn’t think there was anything sinister in his disappearance. They’d be sorry he hadn’t kept in touch, but they wouldn’t see it as their affair to meddle.’

‘What was he doing with them then?’ Stout demanded. ‘You wouldn’t just invite a strange teenager into your house.’

‘I think they were the sort of people who might.’ She paused. ‘They called him their gift from God.’

She’d always thought it was a strange thing to say. Michael had spoken of it in a slightly shamefaced way. ‘Look, Steve, that’s a big thing to live up to, you know?’ But the detectives remained impassive and unsurprised. She continued talking, trying to give an explanation they would accept as reasonable. ‘He arrived with them out of the blue, then disappeared in the same way. Perhaps that’s why they never reported him missing. They felt they had no claim on him.’

‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ Stout said. ‘That’s all very well, but they must have met up with him somewhere. He wouldn’t just have knocked on the door.’

‘Perhaps it was arranged through a charity,’ Porteous suggested. He looked at Hannah hopefully. ‘Was anything like that mentioned, Mrs Morton? Can you remember the name of any organization which might have put Michael in touch with the Brices?’

She shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have told me,’ she said. ‘He liked being a mystery.’

‘All the same he must have said something. When you asked about his family, his previous school, he must have given some scrap of information.’

Despite her resistance, memories were already clicking into her brain, jerky images like an old home movie.

‘He told me a lot of things,’ she said. ‘Not all of them were true.’

‘But..?’ Porteous prompted.

‘But I really think his mother died when he was little. He was quite specific about that. She died of leukaemia and he could remember the funeral. Nobody had explained to him properly what was going on. He couldn’t understand where his mother was. When a black car turned up at the house, he thought it was to take him to see her.’ Hannah stopped, then continued hesitantly, ‘It was early spring. There were crocuses on the lawn. I don’t know if that’s any help.’ She thought: Unless that was one of his fictions too.

Porteous said, ‘At present everything is helpful.’

‘There is something else.’ She paused. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself and she had a sense too that she was betraying Michael. But it was a matter of self-preservation. She had to give the detectives something to get them off her back. ‘He resat the lower sixth. He was a year older than the rest of us.’ Again she saw she was telling the men something they already knew and wondered what other secrets they were keeping to themselves. ‘He made up a tale about his having been ill, but it was quite similar to his story of his mother’s illness. I was taken in by it at the time. Why wouldn’t I be? But now I work as a prison librarian and it’s occurred to me that there might be another explanation for his missing year. I wondered if he might have been in trouble. Youth custody. Borstal, I suppose it would have been then. That would be something he wouldn’t want to admit to the Brices or to me. That wouldn’t fit into the Michael Grey myth.’

She realized she sounded bitter and to hide her confusion poured herself another cup of coffee, though by now it was cold. Porteous jotted a few lines in his notebook but gave no other indication of what he thought of the theory.

‘Was he the sort of lad who might have been away?’ Stout asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You work in the nick, Mrs Morton. There aren’t many well-read, nicely spoken blokes in there.’

‘More than you’d realize.’ She thought of Marty, whose consideration had led to her being there.

‘But you know what I mean,’ Stout persisted. ‘Most of the men will have been brought up with some degree of physical and emotional deprivation.’

It seemed an odd thing for a policeman to say. She took his point more seriously.

‘Michael was a brilliant actor. And he was quick and bright. He could be whatever anyone wanted him to be. Do I think he was brought up in the west end of Newcastle or on a council estate in Wallsend? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be astonished if that turned out to be the case.’

‘Where was he brought up then?’

‘West Yorkshire. At least that’s where he said he went to school.’ Hannah waited for another question: And before that? But it never came. Besides, she had told them the truth. On Michael’s first day a girl from the upper sixth had asked which school he’d come from and he’d answered, without pausing a moment, giving her a smile: ‘A place in West Yorkshire. You won’t have heard of it.’

When Hannah told Porteous that, he wrote it down and said seriously to Stout, ‘It seems a strange thing to make up, that, off the cuff. Check out approved schools, borstals and detention centres for that period in Yorkshire. Or perhaps that’s where his family lived. We might find his mother’s records.’

I don’t think you will, Hannah thought, and wondered why she didn’t speak the words out loud. Porteous turned to her with his diffident smile, which wasn’t very different from one of the expressions in Michael’s repertoire. ‘Is there anything else you remember from that first meeting, Mrs Morton?’

She didn’t answer. She thought she’d given him enough.

‘You don’t know how much this is helping us. We’re very fortunate to have found a reliable witness at this early stage. What about his voice? Could you believe that he came from Yorkshire?’

‘It depended to whom he was talking.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It was a habit. I explained he was an actor but I don’t think this was self-conscious. He didn’t realize he was changing his voice to suit the occasion. But he was. When he was speaking to us he spoke as we did. With the Brices it was old-fashioned English. We had a biology teacher from Edinburgh. She thought he came from there too because when he spoke to her he had something of the accent. It wasn’t imitation or that he was trying to impress. He was a sort of verbal chameleon.’

Hannah sipped cold coffee. She thought she had nothing left to tell them. Surely now they would let her go. But Porteous shifted uncomfortably in his very comfortable chair.

‘Tell us about you relationship with Mr Grey,’ he said gently. He was more like a counsellor than a police officer. ‘In some detail if you wouldn’t mind, Mrs Morton. If you could cast your mind back.’

‘We were friends,’ Hannah said.

‘More than friends surely.’

‘Not at first.’

The men waited for her to say more.

‘What are these questions about?’ She’d had enough. ‘You know who he is. Sally told me you found the dental records. There must be more efficient ways of finding what you want than listening to my ram-blings.’

Porteous gave another little apologetic smile. ‘Unfortunately not. Apart from your ramblings we’ve very little. We know that the body in the lake was that of a young man known as Michael Grey. One day he had toothache and Mrs Brice took him to her dentist. We’re lucky that the practice kept records, but it hasn’t provided us with a conclusive identification. It hasn’t helped us to trace the victim’s family. Because no birth certificate was issued to Michael Grey on the date he gave as his date of birth. There are no medical records or child-benefit records for him. There is no record of his having existed before he started school with you.’

They looked at her. It had been a long time since anyone had given her their full attention. She found it flattering. No doubt it was a technique they often used. She was taken in by it. She dragged her memory back almost thirty years.

Chapter Eleven

Her father died the summer Michael arrived. He committed suicide. He rigged up a hose-pipe from the exhaust of their Austin and the fumes killed him. Hannah didn’t find him. He had timed it so her mother would do that when she went into the garage to fetch potatoes to peel for their supper. Mr Meek had an allotment. He kept the potatoes in the garage in wooden trays in the dark to stop them sprouting.

Looking back, Hannah thought her father and mother had never got on. He was nervy, quick to snap. Any noise or disruption to his routine threw him. She thought perhaps she’d inherited her own intolerance of change from him. He was a chain smoker. Every evening he came home from work, threw down his briefcase and would sit for an hour, sucking on cigarette after cigarette, going through the imagined slights of the day. He felt he was much undervalued at the bank. No one appreciated the work he put in. The only time he was anything like content was in the allotment. Perhaps the physical activity helped him to relax. Perhaps in the mindless routine of digging and weeding he could forget his troubles.

Hannah’s mother didn’t like the idea of the allotment. She pretended it didn’t exist. She had been pretty as a girl and could have had her pick of the lads in the town, the ones who came back after the war. She had chosen Edward Meek over the plumbers and bricklayers because he worked in the bank. He wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty. It put her on a par with other professional wives. Perhaps she imagined dinner parties and coffee mornings, but in fact she was awkward in company and if the invitations had ever come they soon dried up. When Hannah was a child Audrey Meek seemed to have no friends at all. She confided in her daughter, shared her loneliness and her disappointment with her. She had spent her life being disappointed.

At first Hannah thought that this disappointment had been reason enough for her father’s suicide. She supposed he felt responsible for her mother’s unhappiness; he had never been able to live up to her expectations. Then Hannah learned it was much worse than that. By the time of his death he’d progressed to the post of assistant manager, and he’d been stealing. Perhaps he hoped to buy his wife’s approval with little luxuries for the house, but Hannah thought it was more that he felt the bank owed him what he took. It was his way of fighting back. Of course, he wasn’t very good at covering his tracks and he knew he would be caught. He couldn’t face it. But Hannah and her mother had to face it. They had to face the questions from the bank and the police, the prying neighbours, the dreadful sympathy. And Hannah had to come to terms with the fact that her father hadn’t loved her enough to stay alive. He had put her through this embarrassment to save himself the ordeal of it.

Then it was September and time to go back to school. Hannah was dreading it. Her father’s face had been plastered all over the local paper. Even if the teachers were too sensitive to mention the suicide she’d be aware of their curiosity, and some of the kids, at least, would be merciless. Hannah wasn’t popular. She was known as a swat. Rock music was important then. Status was conferred by knowledge of obscure groups and Hannah couldn’t join in those discussions. There wasn’t even a record player in her house and anyway she wasn’t really interested. Over the holidays she’d avoided most of the people from school. She’d seen Sally a couple of times, but only in her home. She’d kept away from the pub and the parties.

On the first day of term Michael Grey turned up. There weren’t many new kids at the school and he was immediately the centre of attention. For Hannah his appearance was a relief. It took the heat off her. While the rest of them were gathered around him at registration she slid into the room, dumped her stuff in her locker and slipped away to her first class. There was such a crowd around him that she didn’t even see his face. At the mid-morning break she wanted to hide again, but Sally dragged her to the common-room.

‘Look,’ Sally said. ‘You’ll have to face them sometime. Better now when they’ve got the beautiful Michael to distract them.’

He always was Michael. Never Mike or Mick.

The sixth-form common-room was a mobile classroom. It was square, flat roofed, freezing in the winter, but that September was hot, an Indian summer. Sixth formers didn’t have to wear uniform and they’d all chosen their clothes on that first day with care. It was a season of peasant fashion. The boys wore wide trousers and cheesecloth shirts. The girls, even Hannah, were in smocks and long flowery skirts. Michael stood with his back to the window so the light was behind him. That could have been deliberate. He had what Mr Westcott called a theatrical eye. He wore a pair of denim jeans which looked new, a black T-shirt, and desert boots with black leather laces. His hair was blond, almost white. He had a suntan. Foreign travel was unusual those days and it was hard to get a tan in her northern town, so that made him stand out too. There was something about him that made the others listen. It wasn’t just the novelty.

Sally nudged Hannah in the ribs. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think he’s cocky,’ Hannah said. ‘He’s good looking but he knows it.’

He can’t have heard what she said. There was music playing and everyone talked at once. But he looked over the heads of the others towards her as if he knew what she was thinking. He gave a self-deprecating little shrug. I know, he seemed to be saying. This is all bullshit. But it’s a game and I’ve got to go along with it.

Later Hannah saw her first meeting with Michael as a turning point. After that she was seen differently within the school. She could face them all without embarrassment. It was possible that her memory played tricks – that there were unpleasant comments about her father, days when she wanted to stay at home. It was possible that her re-creation of her friendship with Michael was as great a fiction as the story he told about himself. But his arrival did make a difference. Some incidents remained clear and vivid. These, she was convinced, were true.

There was the day he first invited her to the Brices, for example. Hannah remembered that as soon as she started talking to the detectives. Michael was placed in the same English group as her, and on the day of his arrival he chose the seat next to her, at one of the old-fashioned desks with the lift-up lids that you never see now. Despite her disdain, her sense that he was too cocky by half, there was a rush of excitement when she turned and saw him there. Through habit they kept the same seats all term. They were reading Middle-march. The rest of the group hated it. They found it tedious and Hannah suspected that most of them didn’t make it to the end. She loved it and so did Michael. There’d been this guy in the old place who’d been passionate about it, he said. Who’d done it as part of his Ph.D. and passed on his enthusiasm. Hannah presumed then that the ‘guy’ was a teacher, the ‘old place’ a school. Later she was to presume nothing. Michael said he had some notes at home. Perhaps she’d like to borrow them to help with an essay they’d been set? If she wasn’t in a hurry she could go back with him, have a cup of tea. The old folks would be thrilled to bits.

Recreating the scene in her head, Hannah thought it had been the beginning of December. She could remember the cold. He must have been in the town for three months but still she had no idea that his family was different from anyone else’s. They hadn’t talked about it. She hadn’t told him about the drama with her father, though it was possible that the others had been whispering behind her back. At that age families weren’t as important as friends.

‘Old folks?’ she said. It seemed an odd way to talk about parents.

‘Sylvie and Steve. You’ll see.’

‘You call your mum and dad by their first names?’

‘No. They’re not my parents. My mother’s dead. My father…’ He seemed thrown for a moment. ‘Well, I don’t get to see much of him.’

They walked slowly up the school drive to the house. It was almost dark by the time they arrived at the house, one of a small row, flat faced. As the light went the temperature plummeted. They stood for a moment on the pavement, looking in. There was a street lamp and they could see their breath as a white mist. The lights were on inside but the curtains had not been drawn. There was a fire in the grate and an elderly man sat on a leather armchair, with a cat on his knee, reading.

‘That’s Steve,’ Michael said with enormous affection. He took out a Yale key and let himself in.

Inside there was a smell of fruit and spice. A small kitchen led straight from the hall and she’d seen Sylvie, red faced, turning a cake on to a wire tray. She looked slightly flustered. Her hair had come loose from her comb. Michael put his arm around her.

‘This is Hannah,’ he said. ‘She’s a George Eliot fan too. I’ve brought her home for tea. You don’t mind?’

‘Of course we don’t mind.’ She smiled at Hannah. ‘We haven’t met any of his friends before. I think he’s ashamed of us.’

‘How could I be?’ he said.

Hannah didn’t know what to make of the relationship between Michael and the Brices. Usually she was jealous of other people’s home lives. Her own was so bleak. Her mother struggled on to keep the house as she wanted it. They hadn’t been forced to sell, though at one time that had been a possibility. There was even less money than there had been before and Audrey hated the forced economies. She pretended not to mind the gossip and in fact seldom went out to hear it. Television had become her consolation. Hannah was grateful because it provided a safe topic of conversation. Without it they would have had little to say to each other. Later she thought that her mother had been depressed and had been brave to keep things as normal as she did. Then she longed to be a part of a different sort of family. That’s why she spent so much time with Sally. Her dream family would have been quite like Sally’s, but the parents would have been younger, interested perhaps in different things. There would be a brother as well as a sister and they would have shared meals together discussing ideas about books and plays. There would have been noise and laughter. At the time she didn’t consider Michael’s situation as ideal. It was too different from her dream. Everything was so quiet. There was discussion but it was calm and measured.

There was one room which served as living- and dining-room. They sat at a round mahogany table and drank tea from translucent china cups, ate crumpets which Michael squatted by the fire to toast, and the cake Sylvie had baked. They talked about Stephen’s lecture on the Psalms. At one point Michael reached out and touched Sylvie’s hand.

‘Why don’t you go too?’ he said. ‘You know you’d enjoy it and I’ll be perfectly fine here on my own.’

‘I’m sure you would be.’ Her voice was serene. ‘But Stephen and I have had a lifetime together and I’ll have your company for such a short while. I’d prefer to stay and make the most of it.’

Then she asked him the question about his having been abroad.

Hannah had always been an observer. Even in her youth she could usually work out what was going on between people. But the situation in the Brices’ home confused her. She couldn’t make out at all where Michael fitted in.

After tea the Brices refused the offer of help with the washing-up and Michael took Hannah to his bedroom to find her his notes. She was tidier than most of her friends but his room was almost Spartan in its lack of clutter. She wondered if he had planned to invite her back and had cleared it specially, but she went there on subsequent occasions and it was always the same. It reminded her of a cell.

‘Are they your grandparents?’ she asked.

‘No, we’re no relation. They’re just friends.’

‘Friends of your father’s?’

‘Yes,’ he said, seeming grateful for an explanation that worked. ‘That’s right.’

It was a small room but there was a big desk under the window, of the kind that you’d have found in offices everywhere. It had three drawers on each side of the knee-hole. It wasn’t well made. The varnish was scratched and the top was chipped. Michael seemed flustered when he couldn’t find the notes where he’d expected them to be, with others in the top drawer.

‘Sorry, I thought I’d brought everything with me. But obviously not.’

‘Couldn’t they be somewhere else?’ Hannah yanked open a bottom drawer which was wider than the others. When it came to school work she was competitive. She wanted the notes, a chance to shine in the essay. She hadn’t come along just for the chance to know Michael better. She had expected to find more files in the drawer, neatly labelled, but it was empty apart from a shoebox, the sort she had collected when she was young for use in Blue Peter projects. He must have had the box for a long time. It was too small to hold shoes of the size he wore then.

Michael slammed the drawer shut with a ferocity which almost trapped her hand.

‘There’s nothing in there. I told you, I must have left them behind.’

‘Sorry.’ She looked at him, expecting an explanation. He said nothing.

The incident seemed to have thrown him. Hannah thought he was angry about the invasion of his privacy and apologized more profusely. It was something she could understand. He hardly seemed to hear what she was saying and when she said that her mother would be expecting her he seemed relieved to see her go. When Hannah saw him at school the next day he greeted her as if nothing had happened.

For several weeks she was haunted by the mystery of the small, blue shoebox. She imagined it contained answers to her questions about Michael.

Just before Christmas she was invited back to the Brices for mince pies and mulled wine. She made an excuse to go upstairs, slipped into Michael’s room and opened the drawer. She hated herself for doing it. Her hands were sweating as she tried to turn the knob. She had kept the door open so she would hear if anyone was coming. But it was an anticlimax. The drawer was empty. When she returned to the others Michael looked at her as he had on his first morning in the common-room, as if he knew exactly what she’d been up to.

Chapter Twelve

Throughout the interview both Porteous and Stout went on about Michael having been Hannah’s special friend, as if they had been lovers from the start. But they were never lovers, not in the sense the detectives meant, and they didn’t even start going out with each other until after the lower-sixth exams. She tried to explain that to them. The detectives listened but she wasn’t sure they understood.

The town itself had nothing to attract young people. The cinema had shut and the pubs were gloomy and unfriendly. In the summer at least, they were drawn to the lake. A couple of years before, the valley had been flooded to provide water for northern industrial towns and the biggest man-made lake in Europe was created. It was news at the time. Although it was surrounded by forestry plantations and was miles from everywhere, the novelty of the development and the scale and spectacle of it attracted tourists. An enterprising farmer opened a caravan site, then built a bar and a club, so it was more like a small holiday camp. It hardly provided a sophisticated night life but it was livelier than anything else the town had to offer and it drew the kids like a magnet.

The Saturday after the end-of-year exams they gathered on the shore in the afternoon and collected dead wood to build a bonfire. Hannah had expected Michael to be there but he didn’t turn up. You could never guarantee his presence on these occasions, and he never offered explanations. They ate chocolate and crisps as a makeshift picnic and later moved on to the caravan park, to the bar where Sally’s boyfriend was DJ. It was only supposed to serve residents but no one asked questions when they all piled in. It was June, early in the season. No doubt the owners were glad of their money. The bar was a horrible place, furnished like a transport café with Formica tables and plastic chairs. Along one wall a row of one-armed bandits clacked and flashed. Hannah and her friends didn’t mind. There were no awkward questions about under-age drinking, and they took it over and made it theirs. When they arrived there were two residents, an overweight Brummie and his wife, leaning against the bar. Soon they shrank away and the Cranford Grammar brigade had it all to themselves.

Hannah still found events like that evening daunting, but she began to enjoy herself. She thought she’d done well in the exams, better than she’d expected. And she’d arranged to spend the night with Sally, so for once she didn’t have to worry about her mother. Since Edward’s death, Audrey had become increasingly anxious, in an obsessive, unhealthy way. It seemed that anxiety was the only way she could express her concern or her love. When Hannah went out Audrey always waited up. She would be pacing up and down the dining-room, her face knotted with tension, although Hannah was always back before the agreed time. Later she was to understand something of what her mother had gone through – she could never sleep until Rosie was in – but then it had seemed an unnecessary intrusion.

The evening of the party it was a relief to know there would be no prying questions to answer and she felt she could let herself go. She started drinking her usual halves of cider but later Sally’s boyfriend, Chris, bought all the girls vodka. He was always throwing his money about, trying to impress. They made him play the music very loud and they started to dance. At closing time, as she stumbled and giggled with the others down the sandy path to the shore, Hannah thought this must be what it was like to be drunk. She had led a very sheltered life.

The bonfire was already lit. They could see the flames from the path, reflected in the water beyond. Sparks from the burning wood shattered in the sky like fireworks. Michael had lit it and he was there, alone, tending it, throwing on more wood as soon as the flames subsided. While the others ran down the bank to join him, pretending to be angry because he’d started the fire without them, Hannah stood and watched him. He was absorbed in his watch over the flames and seemed not to notice the approaching crowd. Even when the others crowded round him, yelling and cheering, he didn’t look away.

Of course, she fancied him like crazy. In the beginning she had thought him cocky, still did if it came to that, but that was part of the fascination. And perhaps he’d seen her resistance as a challenge, because he’d made an effort to win her over. No one else had bothered to do that. She wasn’t seen as much of a catch – skinny with no figure to speak of, black oily hair and the hint even then of dark down on her upper lip. He said she looked Mediterranean. Perhaps he had heard about her father and felt sorry for her, though if his friendship was prompted by pity he hid it well. She could usually pick up a reaction like that. It turned her spiky and moody. Perhaps their unusual homes in this conventional town of happy families gave them something in common. She thought he was happy in her company and for a while that was enough.

After Hannah’s first visit to his home the relationship continued to revolve around the books they were reading, the essays they had to prepare. When school finished for the day they went to the library together. Not to the school library where the few recommended books of criticism were fought over but to the dark building in the town centre, a Victorian heap, with enormous polished tables and rows of reference books smelling of damp. Hannah never wanted to go home immediately to face her mother. The Brices placed no restrictions on Michael’s movements. That always surprised Hannah. She would have expected such elderly people to share her mother’s anxieties. He would have stayed with her all evening if she’d wanted. As a friend, of course. Not a lover. But she had her pride and sent him home at five o’clock in time for the tea Sylvie would have prepared. She knew that the pretty girls with the short skirts who lusted after him never felt jealous of the time they spent together. They didn’t consider Hannah as any sort of competition.

By the night of the bonfire he’d been at the school for nearly a year, but he’d never had a proper girlfriend. Some of them saw it as a challenge. He tantalized them with the possibility, snogging them at parties, but nothing came of it. He was indiscriminate in his physical contact in a way which was unusual at the time. He liked to put his arm round people, boys and girls. He often hugged Sylvie, making her blush with pleasure. He had never touched Hannah though, not even a hand on the shoulder, not even brushing against her by mistake. She longed for it.

She didn’t make straight for Michael when she reached the shore. The booze had made her up for the games other people played. Let him come to her if he wanted to. That night there was a huge orange moon which lit the scene, so she would be able to see Michael even if he moved away from the fire.

She latched on to a tall lad from the upper sixth, who was a figure of fun, because his picture was once in the paper when he got a Queen’s Scout award. Someone had torn it out and stuck it on the noticeboard at school. He had stood in the photo in the ridiculous uniform, blushing in a way which made his acne stand out. Since then he’d got rid of the acne, but the reputation of being what they now called a geek had stuck with him. He did science and maths, and was considered brilliant at both, which didn’t help. He came along to parties like this, but always ended up on his own.

‘Isn’t this brilliant, Paul? I mean this enormous sky. The landscape seems so huge, doesn’t it, tonight. It seems foreign. Like we’re in a country with wider spaces.’

She leaned against him, knowing as she did it that it wasn’t fair. It was the sort of trick that had been played on her. Tentatively he slid his arm around her shoulder. She felt his breath on her neck. On the other side of the fire Michael was watching. She saw him get up. He walked over the pebbles towards the caravan site and the road into town. Hannah waited for a second, then pulled away from Paul Lord and ran after him. She caught up with him by the jetty where the water-sport freaks launched their dinghies and canoes. She took him by the elbow and swung him round to face her, exhilarated by the first touch and her daring. She felt muscle and bone under the denim shirt.

‘Where are you going?’

‘Home.’ He paused. ‘To Steve and Sylvie’s.’ As if the two were not the same thing.

‘Where is home, Michael, really?’ She hadn’t had the nerve to ask him about his personal life before. After the incident in his bedroom, she’d been scared of frightening him off. ‘What is going on here?’

He shrugged and walked off like a sulky child, not bothering to turn on the charm. She realized he resented the attention she’d given to the other boy, even though it was Paul Lord, who was a figure of fun, almost a charity case. He wanted her to himself. She was flattered but felt a sense of injustice. It was all right for him to flirt and kiss and touch, but she had to be there for him whenever he wanted the company. On other occasions she would have been apologetic, grateful that he needed her. Tonight, because of the vodka, she had more confidence.

‘Suit yourself,’ she shouted and started back towards the party.

‘No.’ He called after her and she heard something like panic in his voice. She hesitated, determined not to give in too easily, then continued walking. The tactics paid off because he scrambled over the pebbles towards her. He put his arms around her and clung on to her as if she were the most important person in the world. Triumphant, she stroked his white hair and told him everything would be alright.

‘Shall we go for a walk?’ He took her agreement for granted. He knew she wouldn’t let him go again. He took her hand and led her along the edge of the lake. Sheep-cropped grass fell away into sand so it was almost like being on a beach at the seaside. But there were no waves. The water was glassily still. If the others saw them she presumed they’d think she was just another of his party conquests.

‘Poor Hannah,’ they’d say. ‘She’s been hanging round him for months and now he’s taking pity on her.’

At that point the road skirted the edge of the lake. There was the flash of headlights. For a moment she thought it might be the police, that there’d been a complaint about the fire, or even something more serious. She wondered sometimes what Sally was getting into. There’d already been rumours about Chris and drugs. But it was a blue 1100. It stopped and the driver got out, leaving the engine running. He was a small middle-aged man, rather nondescript. Hannah thought it must be a parent, come to collect errant offspring. He peered over towards the fire trying to make out individuals, trying, it seemed, to pluck up the courage to go over. He couldn’t see Michael and Hannah. They were in the shadow. But they could see him quite clearly, caught in the headlights. She turned to Michael to make a comment about the man, to ask him to guess which of their friends he belonged too, but saw at once he already recognized him.

‘Who is it?’ she whispered.

‘I’m not sure.’

‘But you do know him?’

‘Perhaps.’

The man gave up his search, got into the car and backed it erratically up the lane.

Michael put his arm around Hannah and they walked on.

‘Why don’t you ever talk to me?’ she said.

‘I do.’

‘Not about the important stuff.’ Or the not so important. Like a bloke in a Morris 1100 looking for his kids. ‘Is it just that you like the mystery?’

‘No. You don’t understand.’

‘Whatever it is I won’t be shocked. You must have heard about my dad. So you know about my shady past.’

‘That was him. Not you.’

‘What do you think I’ll do? Shop you? Dump you?’

He didn’t answer at once. ‘I’m frightened,’ he said. ‘Not just for me. For you.’ She thought that was the old Michael again. The attention seeker. The boy who made up stories in his head and almost believed them himself. She didn’t care.

He pulled her beside him on the grass. She thought he was kissing her to stop the awkward questions. By the fire someone had started playing the guitar. There was a smell of pine and wood smoke. She lay on her back and looked at the orange moon.

All that came back when she was talking to the detectives, but of course they weren’t interested in the detail, only in the clues which might lead to information about their victim’s past. The party by the lake had taken place a year before Michael’s disappearance. What happened then could have no relevance to his death.

Chapter Thirteen

So they became a couple. Michael Grey and Hannah Meek. She always liked the way their names scanned. Now, listening to Porteous and Stout talking about the mystery of their victim’s birth, she thought it would be a shame if that turned out not to be his name, if the rhythm were lost. Though now of course she was Hannah Morton and she had more important things to worry about, like convincing these policemen that she knew nothing at all about Michael’s murder and that she had no reason for wanting him dead.

If their friends thought about it, they must have assumed that Michael and Hannah were lovers. Porteous and Stout, of course, had made the same assumption. After all, they went out with each other for nearly a year. Their intimacy was for everyone to see. They walked round the school hand in hand, despite a rule banning physical contact. It only got them into trouble once. They were walking across the yard towards the common-room for morning break. Michael had his arm around Hannah’s waist and they were laughing at a joke, some piece of nonsense. There was a shout and they turned to see Mr Spence bearing down on them. Spooky Spence. Now husband of Sally.

‘Mr Grey, Miss Meek. A little decorum, if you please.’

They looked puzzled. Like the ban on smoking in the common-room, the rule was never enforced. Spence must have taken their bewilderment, their failure to comply immediately with his instruction, as impertinence, a personal insult. Suddenly he lost his temper. He stood in the middle of the playground, gathering a small crowd of giggling onlookers, and he ranted about the younger generation in general and Hannah and Michael in particular, about their lack of morals, their failure to comport themselves with decency and modesty. As he yelled flecks of spit came out of his mouth. It took them a moment to realize what had provoked his anger. At last they got the message and pulled apart. Spence regained a shaky control and walked away. They didn’t mention the incident to their friends. They were embarrassed by it. It wasn’t the way adults were supposed to behave.

They never went to bed together. Spence and the gang they hung around with would have found it hard to accept, but they never even discussed it. Hannah thought that was because Michael was living with the Brices and felt he should conform to their standards. An exaggerated idea of good manners. She wouldn’t have known how to raise the subject. Later she wished she had, that she’d lost her virginity to him and not to a plump mathematician after a drunken freshers’ ball in her first week at university. Sally was certainly sleeping with her disc jockey. At weekends she told her parents she was staying at Hannah’s house, but she’d spend the evening with Chris and the bed in the Meeks’ spare room was never used. Her parents never checked up on her. Perhaps they didn’t want to know what she was up to. Hannah was worried about her, concerned she’d get caught up in his shady deals. It wasn’t only the drugs. There was an air of aggression about him.

‘Are you sure you know what you’re doing?’ she asked once.

Sally had told her not to be stupid. She wanted Chris and he wanted her. That was all that mattered. Sally also wanted the things Chris could provide. He had two jobs, more cash than the rest of them could dream of. She liked the presents, the fact that she never had to buy her own drinks. On the evenings when Sally was supposed to be at the Meeks, she would go with him to work, to the disco at whichever village hall or hotel had hired him, or more often to the caravan site which was his regular gig and seemed to have become her second home. Then she would go with him to the scruffy flat he was renting over the betting shop in a back street behind the police station. She once took Hannah there when Chris was away for the weekend. He’d given her a key to feed his cat – an angry black tom. Inside the flat was surprisingly ordinary. There was the same utility dining suite as Hannah’s mum had in their house, and a floral carpet. One of the bedrooms was locked and Sally didn’t have a key to that. She said it was where Chris kept his sound system, but Hannah wondered what else was inside. Sally agonized about going on the pill as if it were a decision Hannah must be making too. ‘Doesn’t it make you put on weight? Chris would hate me fat. It’s all right for you. You could do with a few extra pounds.’

Hannah was noncommittal and Sally was too wrapped up in her own affairs to notice. Michael and Hannah didn’t spend all their time together. They were ambitious. It was the A-level year and they wanted to do well. Hannah for herself; Michael, she thought, for the Brices. Hannah went through the process of applying to university, filling out UCCA forms, going for interviews. Michael, however, refused to make any plans. None, at least, that he would talk about. It was as if he wanted to shroud his future as well as his past in mystery. He said he’d take a year out, travel perhaps. Hannah wondered if he had more specific ideas. He worked for his exams with a purpose which suggested he had a project in mind. He spoke once of a crusade. He had a responsibility, he said. There was something he had to put right. When she asked what exactly this mission was, in a teasing voice, because she refused to let him take himself too seriously, he clammed up. She didn’t push it. Talking to the detectives she thought it was incredible that she should have taken any of his stories at face value. Why didn’t she ask where his father was, why they never saw each other? Because she was perfectly content. She knew she would never be so happy again. She was determined to do nothing to spoil it.

The school play was planned for the end of the Easter term. When Michael went for the auditions, just after Christmas, she thought he was mad.

‘You are joking. Our last full term before the exams. You’ll never manage it all.’

‘Sod the A levels,’ he said, much as Rosie would do, then gave her a grin to show he didn’t mean it. Perhaps managing it all was the challenge. Perhaps it was part of his game plan.

Hannah went with him to the audition, not to try for a part, but to offer her support. She thought he might be given a small role. When she saw that Spooky Spence was one of the auditioning panel, she thought he’d be lucky to get that. It never occurred to her that he would go for Macbeth. She perched on a window-sill at the back of the hall and waited for his turn. The teachers sat in judgement on a row of chairs at the front: Spooky Spence, Miss Davies who taught English and drama, and Mr Westcott, still slightly tipsy from his lunchtime in the pub. The actors stood on a block to read, but when it was Michael’s turn he didn’t stand. He sat with his legs crossed, quite relaxed, and when he spoke, despite the language, it was as if he were speaking just to her. She knew at once that he would be chosen to play the lead.

Hannah saw Jenny Graves audition that day too. She was in the lower sixth, a year younger than them, tall and willowy, rather nervy. Hannah thought it was typecasting. The panel had gone for the look. She wasn’t sure she would have chosen Jenny over some of the others. She realized that Michael and Jenny would have lots of rehearsals together. It didn’t bother her at the time, but nearer to the performance she thought she could afford to get involved and she volunteered to help with props and to prompt. She never admitted to herself that she wanted to keep an eye on him.

One Saturday, at about the time of the Macbeth auditions, Michael and Hannah took a trip to the coast. Occasionally they wanted to get away from home and homework and explore the surrounding district. Hannah liked to have Michael to herself. On this day they went to Millhaven, the seaside town where Hannah would end up living. Where Rosie would be born. Where her husband would fall in love with a PE teacher called Eve. They caught a bus into Newcastle, then another to the coast. It was the longest trip they had made and she wasn’t sure how they came to decide on it. On the bus Michael said he liked seaside towns in winter.

When they arrived, however, she could tell that he had been there before. It was a freezing day. Flurries of snow blew in from the sea, gathered like piles of confetti against the lampposts and wrought-iron benches. They walked shoulder to shoulder, hands deep in coat pockets, heads bowed against the wind. But not in an aimless way. Michael knew where he was going, where he wanted to be. He found his way immediately to the sea front, knew which way to turn for the funfair, closed and deserted for the winter. He stood there for a moment, looking in over the padlocked gate at the entrance to the ghost train and the helter skelter, at the still and tarnished horses under their gaudy awning. Hannah guessed he had been taken there as a child, though it didn’t seem to hold any happy memories for him.

‘A penny for them,’ she said lightly.

‘Sorry?’ He turned to her, still preoccupied.

‘What are you thinking about?’ She had to yell above the wind and felt a bit ridiculous. They weren’t ideal conditions for a deep and meaningful discussion.

‘My mother,’ he said. ‘Actually.’

She sensed that he was ready to talk, took his arm and pulled him into a pub.

Talking to the detectives, she was aware on a number of occasions of coincidences, links between her life as an eighteen-year-old and her life as a mother. Often she caught herself thinking, What would Rosie have done if that had happened to her? Certainly she would have been more assertive. She wouldn’t have waited for almost a year, content with a kiss and a fairly chaste grope. She would have wanted to know what was going on. The pub was the most obvious coincidence. When Rosie first started work in the Promenade, Hannah thought the name was familiar. She called in occasionally to collect her daughter from a late shift but the place stirred no memories. By the time Rosie worked there the Prom had become one big room with long windows painted white. One evening, when she wasn’t quite ready for her lift home, Hannah looked at the old photographs on the walls. They hadn’t been bought as a job lot by the brewery; they showed the place as it had been before it had been taken over. With a start she realized it was the pub where she and Michael had sat on that winter’s day. Then, the Promenade had two small bars separated by a gloomy corridor. The walls were half panelled in wood covered in a sticky yellow varnish, wrinkled like custard skin. They had sat all lunchtime in the corner of the snug, with their half-pints in front of them, and nobody disturbed them.

That was the time he told her about his mother’s funeral, the story Hannah passed on to the detectives, without giving them the context, without telling them where she sat to hear it. He talked in short phrases, not trying to call attention to himself this time, but trying to get it right. He described the big car whose purpose he could only guess at. The stern people in black clothes. The crocuses on the lawn.

But the funeral hadn’t taken place in Yorkshire. Hannah was sure of that. It had taken place in the windswept town on the coast. Why hadn’t she passed on that particular gem of information to Porteous and Stout? She had her reasons. Because they had irritated her with their insinuating questions. Because Michael wouldn’t have wanted them to know.

In the pub it was cold, so cold that she found it hard at first to concentrate on what Michael was saying. At one point she put her hand on the radiator and pulled it away because it was freezing, almost literally, so she felt her skin might stick to the pipe. They sat, huddled in jackets with the hoods still pulled up, Michael talking in spluttering fits.

‘I don’t remember much of the time she was ill. A visit to the hospital with my father. He was holding flowers – orange lilies, I think – and when we got to the bed he pushed them into my hand. The smell. In hospital and at home. Disinfectant, I suppose. Her face. I think I remember her face, but I’ve struggled too much to hold that in my mind and I’m not sure how accurate it is. You lose something, don’t you, if you try too hard?’

‘You must have photographs,’ Hannah said. Even after just a couple of years her memory of her father seemed to come from family snaps. There was one of him, taken at Christmas, with a paper hat on his head and a forced smile on his face, which she’d have been glad to forget.

But Michael shook his head. ‘I don’t know where they all went.’

‘Doesn’t your father have them?’ He shook his head again. He was so upset that she didn’t feel she could push it. Later she knew that to be a mistake.

‘Did she take you to the fair?’

‘I think she must have done. It’s one of the pictures I have in my head. We went down the helter skelter together. I sat between her legs. She wore tan nylons. I remember the mat we sat on. I was wearing shorts and it was prickly like coconut fibre. The sun was shining.’ He paused. ‘I chose the wrong day, didn’t I, to re-create the atmosphere?’

‘We can come back in the summer.’

‘She was buried here,’ he said suddenly. ‘In the cemetery by the lighthouse.’

‘Shall we go to look for the grave?’

He shivered. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough now. Let’s go home.’

He placed an emphasis on the last word as if he’d come to a decision. Home was the Brices’ house. It wasn’t this place.

Chapter Fourteen

Rosie stood behind the bar of the Prom with her back to the punters and took a moment to catch her breath. It had been a crazy evening. Friday nights were always busy, but this had been wild. On Friday night the locals came out and trippers and people from the city. They dressed up and paraded along the sea front from one pub to another, ending up after closing in the clubs. On Friday nights every pub along the sea front had a bouncer outside. The clubs were heaving. Scantily dressed waiters and waitresses pranced between the tables with trays held high above the customers. The Prom wasn’t really part of this circuit, but some people who did the Friday-night gig as a bit of a joke started off there, because the beer was cheaper, and to show that they weren’t really taking it seriously.

Early on, a visiting rugby team had arrived and taken up residence in front of the widescreen television.

‘Isn’t rugby a winter thing?’ Rosie had asked vaguely.

They had explained it was a special tournament but she had already lost interest. She had never seen so many similar-looking men before. They were like clones, she thought. They wore matching sweatshirts with a sponsor’s logo on the back. All had square jaws and squat, square bodies. All drank the same brand of lager. As the evening wore on they grew more raucous. They bought two pints each to save queuing at the bar. They whistled and shouted at the female images on the television, but when Rosie went to clear the tables they seemed not to see her.

Tonight was even busier than usual because they were one person down. Lindsay, their most experienced barmaid, had called in sick. Frank was grumbling. Rosie, preparing to dive back into the fray to collect glasses, heard him muttering to himself. She grinned. It’ll be his age, she thought. Poor old thing. He can’t stand the pace.

Just before closing time the crowd suddenly thinned. The rugby team stumbled away to look for a curry or a late-night bar. The holiday makers returned to their B &Bs. In the distance she heard the wail of a police siren. Then Joe came in. Mel wasn’t with him.

Rosie hadn’t seen him since she’d come back from The Old Rectory with her mother. He hadn’t returned her calls and she’d almost given him up. She’d tried to talk to Mel but hadn’t got through to her either. Mrs Gillespie always answered the phone – even during the day, which was a sign that something was wrong. Mrs Gillespie was usually as much of a workaholic as her husband, certainly worked the same sort of hours. At first when Rosie phoned, Mel’s mum had been evasive – Mel wasn’t available and she wasn’t sure when she’d be back. Later she’d come clean.

‘Look, I’m sorry, Rosie. She’s really not very well.’

‘I could come round.’

‘Not just at present. Maybe when she’s a bit better.’

So when Joe turned up at the Prom on his own that night, Rosie wasn’t surprised. She pulled him a pint.

‘On me,’ she said, because she knew he’d have no money, even if he hadn’t been on holiday.

He sat on one of the high stools by the bar.

‘How’s Mel?’ she asked, though if she was honest by now she really didn’t care. He cared though, which is why she asked.

He shrugged. ‘Her mother says she doesn’t want to see me.’ He looked over the glass. ‘I don’t know what to make of that woman. When Mel first introduced us I thought she was OK. Smart. Funny. Mel always made out she was some kind of monster but I didn’t get it. Now I don’t know… I’ve spent the last few days at home waiting for Mel to phone. I’m not even sure if her mother passed on the messages. I had to get out. I need some air. Or space. Whatever…’

‘Why wouldn’t she go to Portugal with you?’

‘I don’t know. She was excited at first. We were all set to go. It must have been something I did.’ He went on in a rush. ‘I do everything wrong. I always say the wrong thing. Perhaps it would be better if we finished. What do you think?’

Yes, she cried silently. But he didn’t want an answer. Not that one at least.

‘She’s so delicate.’ He spoke slowly, struggling for the words, looking to Rosie to help him. ‘So fragile. And I’m clumsy. Perhaps she’d be better off without me.’

Then, for the first time in such stark terms, Rosie saw what she was up against. She understood the competition. She was a size fourteen. Healthy. As strong as an ox. She laughed too loudly and could drink Joe under the table. He didn’t want that. He was a romantic. Mel was frail and needed looking after. Consumption would have been better, but now that was no longer feasible, anorexia came a close second.

‘Well?’ he demanded.

She shook her head. What was the point of speaking?

He drank the beer without thanking her. To be fair that wasn’t like him and she couldn’t use it as an excuse to be mean. She felt like howling but she couldn’t freeze him out. No point throwing a wobbly like Mel. Really she’d always known the score.

‘My mum’s a suspect in a murder inquiry.’

She thought that would grab his attention. It might not have the romantic appeal of anorexia but she thought it deserved some sympathy, some interest. It should take his mind for a moment off Mel’s skinny body, her huge and haunting eyes. And he did look up, suitably curious.

She told him about the corpse in the lake. ‘He was the love of Hannah’s life.’ Keeping her voice cynical, though she had been moved by the tale of first love, at least the bits of it which Hannah had told during the drive home.

Frank was getting rid of the last of the drinkers. As she talked to Joe she was washing glasses, holding them over the machine, then standing them on the draining board to dry.

A taxi stopped outside for three of the other barmaids. Frank asked, ‘Do you want to go in that?’

‘I’ll walk home with you,’ Joe said, so she shook her head.

She undid her tie and her apron, rolled them into a ball and stuffed them in her bag. Frank waited at the door for the women who were catching the taxi. The driver was getting impatient and hit the horn. They scurried out swearing and laughing. He watched for a moment until the car drove off then he shut the door and switched off the main lights. Even with the door shut they could hear the noise outside. The street was full of people moving from one club to another.

‘Fancy a nightcap, you two?’ Frank had never suggested anything like that before. Rosie was glad Joe was there. She thought her boss must be lonely. Word in the pub was that his ex-wife was getting funny about access and he was missing the kids. Rosie didn’t particularly want a drink. It wasn’t that her mum would kick up if she were late. She was always late on a Friday. Sometimes it took over an hour to clear up. Sometimes she went on to a club with her mates. But she was knackered. And she wasn’t too proud to want a bit of time with Joe to herself. Joe seemed to take the invitation as an honour though and brightened up.

‘Yeah. Great.’

Frank didn’t ask what they wanted. He stood by the optic and poured three whiskies. He’d taken off his jacket and as he stood with his hand above his head they could see the flab spill out over his trousers. When he turned round with their drinks he was sweating slightly. He set one of the whiskies in front of Joe.

‘Did that bloke ever catch up with your lass?’

‘Which bloke?’

‘There was a bloke in here a couple of nights back asking after your Melanie.’

Frank kept his voice casual but Rosie could tell he was desperate to know what had been going on. That was probably why he’d invited them to stay. She thought it was really sad, this need he had to know all their business.

‘What sort of bloke?’

‘Middle-aged, respectable. A mate of her dad’s maybe. I didn’t like to say where she lived. He didn’t seem that bothered so I expect he had some other way of catching up with her.’

‘Perhaps she’s into older men.’ Rosie had meant it as a joke, but when she saw Joe’s face she wished she’d kept quiet.

‘Didn’t he leave his name?’ Joe said.

‘No,’ Frank had drunk his whisky and was getting another. ‘I asked but he seemed in a rush. He didn’t even stop for a drink.’

Out on the street Joe took her arm as he often did and steered her through the crowd on the pavement. A middle-aged woman in a see-through leopard-print shirt was throwing up in the gutter. A teenage girl was sobbing on her friend’s shoulder. Joe held Rosie’s hand and pulled her at a run across the road and on to the sea front. She had learned to take no notice of these gestures of affection but she still enjoyed them.

‘Where are we going?’

‘The scenic route.’ He paused. ‘You don’t mind going the long way?’

‘No.’

There was enough light from the street to see the white line of foam fall on to the beach. They walked in silence. She was thinking of her mother, of the body in the lake. If Joe disappeared into thin air, Rosie thought she’d make some effort to find him. She’d hassle his family, contact the rest of his friends. If they couldn’t help she’d go to the police. Yet from what she could gather her mother had done none of these things. Michael Grey had disappeared and she had accepted it without a fuss. That was a very Hannahlike way to behave, but even so it just didn’t make sense. She hadn’t even been to see the couple Michael had been living with. She hadn’t gone to the police. She’d sat her exams as if nothing had happened and then she’d left the area without trying to trace him to say goodbye. And she’d never gone back.

Rosie stopped. Without the noise of their footsteps they could hear the tide dragging back the shingle.

‘That stuff I told you about my mother being a suspect in a murder inquiry. It was a joke, right?’

‘Of course it was a joke.’ He sounded amused. That was all she was to him. One big joke.

‘It’s just she’s had enough to put up with. Everyone talking about my dad…’

‘I know.’ He squeezed her hand.

Of course her mother hadn’t killed anyone. She was the least violent person in the world. When Jonathan walked out on her, she hadn’t even raised her voice in anger. But it was odd all the same. Her mother couldn’t have told the full story. Something had happened.

They had come to the lighthouse, which had been converted years before into an art gallery. It still had a whitewashed wall around it. There was no need for the light now. The rocks in the bay were marked by navigation buoys on the water. Looking back towards the town, they saw the flashing neon which marked the entrance to the funfair, the strings of street lamps, the inevitable blinking blue light of a police car. From the lighthouse a footpath led inland, skirting the cemetery and arriving at last at the housing estate where Rosie lived. The free drink and the walk seemed to have cheered Joe up. He didn’t mention Mel again, or the stranger who had been looking for her. As they sauntered past the cemetery he started making howling, ghostly noises. There were houses banking on to the footpath and Rosie had to tell him to shut up.

Outside her house Joe lingered. If she’d invited him in for coffee, he’d have accepted like a shot. She could tell he was too wired up to go home. But Rosie couldn’t bear any more confidences. Not tonight. She might end up confiding in him. A small wind had got up. Down the street a Coke can rattled against the kerb and startled them. The trees threw strange shadows.

‘You’d better go,’ she said. Then she imagined him turning up at the Gillespie house, making a scene. ‘You’re not going to try to see Mel?’

‘God no.’

He kissed her on the cheek as if she were a favourite aunt. She gave him a quick hug. Then he loped off. Inside her mother was still up, watching a late film on Channel Four, half dozing.

‘Sorry I’m late.’ Since the drama after the school reunion Rosie had been sporadically worried about her mother. She wasn’t getting much support. When Rosie had told her father about the police investigation he’d had difficulty in stopping himself laughing. ‘Hannah! Mixed up with the police. God, she’ll hate it.’

Yet if the murder had happened recently, everyone would have considered it horrifying. Rosie could tell that the past had become very real to her mother. She seemed to have become lost in it. Hannah said nothing, but Rosie could tell that in the long silences she was reliving it. Now, half asleep in front of the television, she was probably dreaming it too. To bring her back to the present Rosie offered her a piece of information. Usually she never told her mother anything about herself unless she could help it.

‘Joe walked me home.’

Hannah stirred at this but wasn’t, Rosie thought, sufficiently distracted. Not as distracted as she normally would have been. Usually she took an unhealthy interest in Rosie’s relationships with men.

‘The police phoned,’ she said. ‘They want to come here to talk to me. More questions. After work on Monday.’

‘I’m sorry. It must be shitty.’

Hannah was usually prudish about language and Rosie expected her to object to the word. Instead she repeated it. ‘Shitty. Yes, it is, rather.’

‘It can’t be important if it can wait until Monday.’

‘I suppose not.’

At the top of the stairs there was a landing window which looked over the street. She stopped and looked out, not expecting to see anyone because Joe walked very quickly and would have been long gone. But someone was there, half hidden by a windblown sycamore on the pavement opposite. Her mother called downstairs to ask if the front door was locked. Rosie turned away to answer her. When she looked again, the figure had gone.

Chapter Fifteen

That Monday the weather broke and Hannah went back to work. She woke too early, unrested, to bright sunlight, but by the time she went out to the car the sky was hidden by thin cloud like smoke. She ran back to the house to fetch an umbrella just in case. The prison was five miles to the north. She drove along the coast road towards mountains of cloud. The first rain started just as the barrier lifted to let her into the staff car park. The drought which had brought Michael’s body to the surface of Cranford Water was over.

Apart from the weather it was just like any other morning. She queued at the gatehouse with the officers. Some spoke, others didn’t. No one realized she’d been away. After she’d collected her keys she bumped into Arthur, who was sheltering from the downpour, blocking the doorway so the officers had to squeeze past. She thought he’d enjoy being an irritation.

‘I thought it might blow over. It was fine when I left home. I’m not really prepared.’ Grinning at himself, liking looking such a mess.

He was wearing a short-sleeved shirt, jeans and open sandals. Everything was dripping. His dress was another excuse for the education department’s disapproval. The principal thought it set the wrong tone. Hannah had heard comments from the inmates too. They didn’t know what to make of him. The officers were openly hostile. Despite his lack of hair there were muttered comments in the mess about ageing hippies.

She opened her umbrella and they ran together towards the education block. The rain was a deluge which had already formed a lake over the hard-packed ground. Inside, she walked with him as far as his room.

‘Did you have a good break?’

She paused. ‘It’s a long story.’

‘I’m not doing anything for an hour. I can make you a coffee.’

‘My orderly will be waiting. Perhaps I could meet you at lunchtime.’ She thought she sounded like a teenager suggesting a date, regretted the words as soon as they were spoken.

‘Sure,’ he said easily. He unlocked his door and went inside, his sandals squelching on the tiled floor.

Marty was waiting outside, his face pressed to the glass door to see if anyone was in the room. There was no porch and by the time Hannah had opened the door he was soaked. He was wearing a thin, prison-issue shirt which clung to him.

‘Oh God.’ She pulled the hand towel from her cupboard-sized cloakroom and threw it to him. ‘I’m so sorry. I went in the other way and I was talking.’

He rubbed his hair and looked like a five-year-old just out of the bath.

‘I’ll make some tea,’ she said, realizing she was staring. ‘Warm you up.’

‘It’s OK, really.’ He folded up the towel and handed it to her, pulled his sodden sleeves away from his wrists.

‘Everything been all right?’

‘I’m glad you’re back. The guy they sent didn’t know the ropes. And he didn’t want to be told.’

‘No bother then?’

He shook his head.

‘The lad that kicked off before I went on leave wasn’t in?’

‘Don’t worry. He’ll not be back.’

‘You’ve not done anything stupid?’ She was thinking threats if not actual violence.

‘Nah. Too much to lose. He’s out soon. Doing his pre-release course now. He’s lucky you didn’t say anything and that Dave’s a good sleeper.’

Hannah made the tea, handed a mug to Marty.

‘I could get used to this,’ he said.

‘Don’t tell anyone. You don’t want to spoil my reputation.’ Which was, she knew, as a tough bitch, a bad-tempered cow who was OK at sorting out books, would move heaven and earth to track down a requested title, but who wouldn’t listen to excuses about lost or damaged copies, would have you up on report for a bit of chewing-gum stuck to a page.

He smiled. The rain hammered on the flat roof, streamed down the windows so it was impossible to see outside. The perimeter wall had vanished. They could have been in a rain-soaked library anywhere.

‘Do you mind if I ask what you’re in for?’ she asked. Suddenly she felt she had the right to know. Perhaps it was that being the subject of a police investigation gave her some fellow feeling. It made her position in the prison more ambiguous.

‘Don’t you know?’

‘I suppose it was in your file. If I ever did know I’ve forgotten. Look, it doesn’t matter. It’s none of my business.’

‘Manslaughter.’

She thought that was all he was going to say. She didn’t blame him for not wanting to go into any detail. She shouldn’t have asked. He’d been kind to her and she’d been rude. But he continued.

‘It was a fight in a pub. Stupid. I was pissed and I can hardly remember now what started it off. The court accepted it was self-defence. To be honest I think I was bloody lucky. I had a good brief.’ He drank the tea. Hannah didn’t know what to say. ‘The lad I killed had a wife and a baby. Sometimes I think, well he shouldn’t have been in the pub then should he? Getting tanked up and gobby, spoiling for a fight. He had responsibilities. He should have been at home. But that’s bollocks, isn’t it? I can’t blame him. You can’t blame the victim.’

Hannah thought of Michael Grey. ‘No, I suppose not.’

‘Listen to me,’ he said. ‘I sound as if I’ve been on one of those courses. Victim awareness.’

‘And have you?’

‘Not here. But I’ve been through it all. I can talk the jargon standing on my head.’

‘Where then?’

He didn’t answer directly. ‘I’ve done supervision, care, probation, community service. Spent more time in prison than I’ve been out. Long enough to know the right thing to say when you’re after parole.’

But he’d meant it, she thought. That thing about not blaming the victim. He’d meant that.

‘Have you got a release date?’

He shook his head. ‘First board comes up next month.’

‘Then what?’

‘Then I’m going to stay out of trouble. Of course.’ He gave a twisted grin. ‘That’s what all the cons say, isn’t it? I bet you’ve heard it before. “I’m serious, miss. You won’t see me in here again.” Then a couple of months later, there they are at your reception talk.’

‘And you?’ she asked. ‘Will you be back?’

‘No. Not this time.’

‘What’s different this time?’

‘I’ve grown up, I suppose. About time.’

‘And?’

He smiled. ‘You’re in the wrong business. You should be a cop. You’ve got a better interview technique than most of them. And there’s a girl.’ He corrected himself. ‘A woman. She’s an actress. Younger than me but not that much. Dunno what she sees in me. Crazy.’ He shook his head in wonder. ‘She said she’d wait. This time. No second chances. We got together when I was on bail. My solicitor wangled me a hostel place. She was running a literacy course. A volunteer.’

‘Does she visit?’

‘Yeah. Regular as clockwork. With a list of books I should be reading.’

‘So. A happy ending.’

‘For me, yeah. One last chance. Up to me not to blow it. Not so lucky for the guy in the pub.’

Or for Michael Grey, she thought.

‘You said you’d been in trouble when you were a kid…’

‘Oh yes.’ Now he’d started talking about himself it seemed he couldn’t stop. ‘We were the classic dysfunctional family.’ She could hear the quotation marks in the self-mockery. ‘My dad beat up my mum. My mum left him and took me with her. She couldn’t cope so I was in and out of care. Where I met real little thugs. I was brighter than them so I didn’t get caught so often. But often enough to go right through the system. I never did drugs but I drank too much, even when I was a kid. It clouds your judgement. If I hadn’t been a boozer I’d probably have been a brilliant criminal. But I needed the drink.’

‘Did you ever do youth custody in West Yorkshire?’ This is ridiculous, she thought. A waste of time. Leave it to the police. But she held her breath while she waited for an answer.

‘Why?’

‘I’m just after some information.’ She wasn’t quite daft enough to trust him with the truth. He might keep it to himself, but if it got round the prison that she was involved in a murder inquiry her position would be impossible. ‘A long shot. Something came up at the school reunion. Someone we’re trying to trace. There’s a place at Holmedale isn’t there?’

‘Yeah. I was there for a few months. It was all right. There was a farm. Pigs. Some of the instructors were OK.’

‘When would that have been?’

‘Early seventies.’ He was older than he looked. ‘I’d have been fourteen.’

‘The timing would be about right. Like I say, it’s a long shot but do you remember a lad called Michael Grey? Very blond hair. He’d be a few years older than you.’

He paused and she thought for a minute he’d remembered the name from the news reports. But he must have sorted the daily papers without reading them. Certainly he hadn’t seemed to have made the connection.

He shook his head. ‘It’s a long time ago. And I knocked around with so many lads over the years.’

‘He might have been using a different name. You’d have noticed him. Posh voice, well educated, bright.’

He used almost the same phrase Stout had done. ‘You didn’t get many like that in borstal. Nice boys in trouble got probation or were sent off to see a shrink. I think I’d have remembered a lad like that.’

She could tell there was no point pushing it. ‘Thanks anyway.’

There was a jangling of keys. Dave the prison officer came in, snug in his uniform waterproof. He raised an eyebrow at them drinking tea and the papers not sorted. Hannah could tell he would have liked a cup himself but was too idle to make it. He took off the coat, shook the water all over the floor and went into the office for his kip.

When Hannah went to find Arthur at lunchtime he was still running a class. He’d got them to pull the tables together and they sat round as if they were at a board meeting. The prisoner who’d pushed over the library shelf was standing at the front, writing on a flip chart with a fat felt-tip pen. This must be the prerelease course. Hannah knew it was feeble but she didn’t want to meet him again so she waited in Arthur’s office until they all streamed out. There was a list of the men attending the course on his desk, with their dates of birth and release dates. By a process of elimination she identified her troublemaker as Hunter. The next day he’d be gone.

Despite the rain Arthur took her out of the prison for lunch. It was her choice. The food in the officers’ mess was cheap but she hated the noise in there, the banter, the unspoken implication that anyone not in uniform was an outsider. They went to a pub in the nearest village. Often that was full of prison staff too, but today it was empty. They sat in the bay window but low cloud hid the view. Arthur went to the bar for drinks and to order food. As soon as he returned he said, ‘I’m sitting comfortably. Let’s hear the story.’

She didn’t know where to start. She would have liked to go back to the beginning, to her first meeting with Michael and the bonfire on the beach. She would have liked Arthur’s opinion. He was an expert. But the friendship hadn’t developed to the stage of discussing ex-lovers. And besides, they only had three quarters of an hour for lunch.

‘Did you meet up with your friends?’

‘Yes, and I’ll go back. It’s broken the ice.’

‘But something happened?’

‘Yes.’ She sounded abrupt and ungrateful – Rosie on a bad day. She’d found it easier to talk to Marty. Arthur was a professional. The reassuring voice, the laid-back manner, these were techniques he’d perfected. He listened to people’s confidences for a living. She felt resentful. She didn’t want to be one of his clients. Anyway, wouldn’t he resent her spilling out all her fears in his lunch break? It was like asking a mechanic to check your brakes in his dinner hour. Still, she couldn’t stop now and she stumbled on. ‘Did you hear on the news that a body was found in the lake?’

‘Exposed after the drought. Yes.’

‘I knew him. When I was at school he was my boyfriend.’

There was a minute of silence. It was obviously the last thing he’d been expecting. ‘I’m so sorry.’ The response seemed genuine. But so, she supposed, would his Monday-to-Friday compassion with the inmates.

‘The police think he was murdered.’

‘Can they tell after all this time?’

‘There’s evidence of a knife wound. Apparently.’

‘You went to the hills to escape all the crime and punishment thing here, then you ended up with that.’

‘I know.’ She forced out a laugh. ‘As Rosie says, it’s shitty.’

‘How is Rosie? Is she giving you grief?’

‘No. She’s being a sweetie.’

There was a slightly awkward pause. ‘She seems a nice kid. Protective.’

‘She is. Usually. I’m sorry she was so prickly when you met the other night.’

He shrugged. ‘Understandable, isn’t it?’

A middle-aged waitress approached with the food. She had flat feet and they could hear her as soon as she left the bar. Arthur waited for her to put down the plates and retreat.

‘Just because it happened thirty years ago doesn’t mean you won’t go through the normal stages of bereavement. You’re bound to feel anger, guilt, all the usual junk.’

Of course he was right. Hannah supposed she should be grateful. No one else had given her the right to mourn. But it wasn’t what she wanted to hear. It wasn’t any of his business. She didn’t need a psychologist.

‘It was all a long time ago,’ she said briskly.

‘But you’ll have memories. Intense at that age.’

‘No danger of forgetting,’ she said. ‘The police are coming tonight to interview me.’

‘Whatever for?’

She was about to make a flippant remark. Something like – Perhaps they think I killed him. But that was too close to the truth. That was what really frightened her. She didn’t want to tempt fate by saying it, even as a joke.

‘After all this time they can’t find out much about him. They haven’t even traced his family. They think I can help.’

‘Ah.’ That satisfied him. He hesitated. ‘Would you like me to be there with you? Not to interfere. Just for support.’

It was tempting. If she hadn’t dismissed his earlier kindness she would probably have accepted. But she’d decided the body in the lake was none of his business. She couldn’t have it both ways.

‘No,’ she said. ‘Really. It’s just a few questions.’

She looked at her watch. It was time to go back inside.

Chapter Sixteen

When Hannah got in from work Rosie was in the kitchen and there was a smell of cooking. A wooden spoon hung over the edge of the bench and dripped tomato sauce on to the floor. Pans were piled on the draining board. Hannah moved the spoon. ‘This is a surprise.’ A nice surprise. Since the end of exams, Rosie had seldom been there to share a meal with her.

‘I’m supposed to be at work at seven but if you want me to stay while the police are here I can phone in sick.’

‘Don’t be silly. You can’t do that.’

Usually they ate in the kitchen but Rosie had laid the table in the dining-room with the white linen cloth Hannah saved for Christmas and special events. It was a monster to iron but she didn’t suggest changing it. Rosie proudly carried dishes from the kitchen – a tomato and aubergine casserole with a yoghurt topping, a green salad. She’d bought a bottle of wine.

‘You should cook more often,’ Hannah said.

Rosie smiled.

Afterwards there was the usual scrabble for uniform and she ran off to work. Hannah watched her through the window. Rosie wore a thin hooded jacket which hardly kept out the rain and every so often she looked at her watch and put on a spurt of speed. She ran like a toddler, legs flailing out from the knees. Then she disappeared round a corner and the house seemed very quiet. Hannah was finishing the washing-up when the doorbell rang. There was wine left in her glass and she drank it guiltily before going to the door. Porteous and Stout stood outside. They wore almost identical waterproof jackets. The sight of them – one tall and lanky, one short and squat – reminded her of a music-hall double act.

‘Come in.’ She had made sure the living-room was tidy before starting on the dishes. The gloom outside had made it seem almost dark and she turned on a table lamp.

‘On your own?’ asked Stout. He took off his jacket and waited for Hannah to take it.

‘There’s only my daughter and I. She’s at work.’ Usually she hated that explanation, but tonight it made her rather proud.

She offered them tea and was surprised when they accepted. She thought it wasn’t a good sign. They expected to be here for a long time. On the way to the kitchen she hung the coats in the cupboard under the stairs. Stout’s smelled of tobacco and reminded her of the night in The Old Rectory when she’d learned that Michael had been stabbed.

When she returned from the kitchen with a tray the men were perched side by side on the sofa. They sat with their cups and saucers on their knees, looking all prim. Hannah thought they could have been a committee of volunteers, perhaps organizing a charity jumble sale. She had sat on many such committees. It would have been more appropriate for them to interview her in the prison. That was the natural home for what Arthur had called the ‘crime and punishment thing’.

‘I’m afraid we’re no further forward,’ Stout said. ‘We checked out your idea that Michael might have been in trouble when he was young. I know you thought he might have done time in Yorkshire. But no joy. There is a youth-custody institution near Leeds…’

‘Holmedale,’ she said.

‘Holmedale, yes. It was a borstal in those days. But no one called Michael Grey was there in the years in question.’

‘I thought you said he must have changed his name.’

‘We’ve tracked down a couple of staff. There’s an officer who’s since retired and a senior probation officer who was a young welfare officer there at the time. No one recognizes the lad you describe.’

‘It was a long time ago and they’d have worked with a lot of boys.’ She wondered what made her push it. Marty hadn’t known Michael either. Why was she so sure he’d been inside?

‘Not many posh ones,’ Stout said. ‘Not many who go on to take A levels.’

‘We’ve been looking at boarding schools in Yorkshire too.’ Porteous gave a polite little smile as if to say – You see, we did listen to you, we did take your ideas seriously. ‘Just in case Michael was telling the truth when he said he’d gone to school there. We started with boarding schools. If his father were a diplomat as you thought, that would be his most likely education. Don’t you agree? We’ve been asking for a list of boys with the same date of birth as Michael gave to the dentist. We’ve tracked down every individual. They’re all accounted for. No one’s gone missing. Of course, it’s an incomplete picture. Places close, records are destroyed. The team is working through the state schools now.’

‘I see.’ She didn’t know what to say. Did he want a pat on the back for his thoroughness?

‘We haven’t found the mother’s grave yet,’ Stout said. ‘But that’s hardly surprising when we don’t have a name, a date or a place.’

That would have been the time to tell them about the cemetery by the lighthouse. It would be possible to explain it away as a stray memory which had returned. But the tone of Stout’s voice frightened her. He made it clear he hadn’t believed her, that the story of the funeral was a fantasy she’d made up for her own ends. How would he accept she’d forgotten a detail of such significance, something which might finally pin an identity on Michael Grey? The moment passed without her speaking.

‘So we thought we’d look at things in a different way,’ Porteous said. ‘From the other end, as it were. Not looking into Michael’s origins but into where he was going. Or where you thought he was going. Because you didn’t report him missing either, Mrs Morton, and that does seem rather odd. You had been his girlfriend for a year. We’ve been speaking to your friends, to teachers at the school, and everyone says you were very close.’ He gave a sympathetic smile. ‘Deeply, madly in love, someone said. I don’t think you’d simply accept his disappearance. So he must have given you an explanation. Perhaps he told you the same story as he’d told the Brices.’

Hannah wondered which friends had been talking to him. The prose style sounded like Sally’s.

‘No,’ she said. ‘No story.’

‘Oh but there was.’ He sounded apologetic, as if he didn’t like to contradict her. ‘At least there was a story for the Brices. Unless they made it up.’

‘They wouldn’t have done that.’

‘So it was a story they believed, even if it wasn’t told to them by Michael himself. Let me explain. You were all sitting A levels. Michael’s first exam was art. We know because we’ve spoken to the school. It hasn’t been easy but we’ve chased up some of his subject teachers. The art teacher is retired but still living in the area. Michael didn’t turn up for the exam. He was one of the few pupils in the class predicted to get a top grade. It was a subject he enjoyed, so it wasn’t a case of last-minute nerves. The teacher was frantic – perhaps Michael had made a mistake about dates. He phoned the number on the school record and got through to Stephen Brice, who was perfectly calm, who seemed bewildered by all the fuss. “Didn’t Michael tell you?” he said to the art teacher. “He’s gone back to his father.”

‘If there was any other information given during the conversation the teacher can’t remember it. He assumed it was a case of family illness or bereavement. It must have been something serious, he said, because Michael had been working hard for the exam and was determined to do well.’

Oh yes, thought Hannah, remembering lunchtimes in the art room, watching Michael, smudged with paint, working on his display. He was certainly determined.

Porteous set his teacup carefully on the coffee table. ‘You never heard that story?’

She shook her head. ‘I didn’t see anyone much at that time. I went in for the exams and straight home. As soon as the A levels were finished I left the area. I’d found a summer job in a hotel in Devon. I didn’t even come back for the results. They were posted on to me.’

‘You must have noticed that Michael wasn’t around?’

‘Yes. I realized he’d gone. Back to his family, I thought. Dramatically. The way that he’d come.’

‘But you didn’t go to see the Brices, to ask what had happened, to get a forwarding address?’ Porteous was faintly incredulous.

‘No.’ She hesitated, unsure how much to say. ‘It was a bit embarrassing. We’d stopped going out with each other actually. I suppose I didn’t want them to think I was chasing him. Pride, you know.’

‘A row, was there?’ Stout asked. ‘Lovers’ tiff?’

He said it casually enough, but then they both looked at her in a way that made her realize the answer was important to them. She sensed the danger just in time. Sally hadn’t just told them how much in love she’d been.

Hannah matched her voice to his. Kept it light. Implying, You know what dizzy things teenage girls are. ‘I suppose so, but I’m blessed if I can remember what it was all about. Not wanting to face the details, even after all this time.’

‘Serious though, at that age.’

‘Not as serious as passing the exams. That was our priority at the time. That was probably why we fell out.’

‘You were jealous of the time he spent studying?’

‘I think it was more likely the other way round.’

They looked at her. They were still sitting side by side on the sofa. It was leather. One of Jonathan’s affectations. It didn’t go in the room at all. Hannah thought of Michael’s audition for Macbeth – Jack Westcott and Spooky Spence sitting in judgement on the red plastic chairs at the front of the hall. Porteous and Stout were sitting in judgement too. They thought she was lying but they were trying to decide if it was because Michael had dumped her and she didn’t want to admit it, or because she had killed him. It was impossible to tell if they’d reached a conclusion.

‘Why don’t you take us through the last couple of days of his life?’ Porteous said.

‘Is that possible? Do you know when he died? Exactly?’

‘Perhaps not,’ he admitted. ‘But we know when he disappeared. If we can believe the Brices.’

She was starting to panic. Incoherent thoughts pitched one after another into her brain. She forced out a reasonable voice. ‘It’s a long time ago. I’m not sure how much I’ll remember.’

‘We can help you.’ Porteous leaned forwards so his elbows were on his knees. He clasped his hands. More like a priest than a cop. Or a counsellor. Not very different in tone from Arthur. ‘There was a school play. Macbeth. I’ve seen an old programme. Mr Westcott has kept them all over the years. There was a photograph of Michael – we’ll call him Michael for now, shall we? It’s different from the one which was in the paper. It’s rather faded and grainy, but it gives an impression. He was a striking boy.’ He stopped, miming a man who’s had a sudden thought. ‘I don’t suppose you kept a photograph, did you?’

She shook her head. She’d always regretted not having one.

‘No? Pity. Still…’ He seemed lost in a thought of his own, then ditched all the make-believe vagueness. ‘The final performance of Macbeth was on the Friday night. You were prompting and looking after the props?’

She nodded, remembered like a slow-motion replay the Brices rising in their seats to cheer.

‘Did you talk to him that evening? In the interval perhaps, or afterwards?’

‘I’m not sure. Probably.’

‘So you were still going out with him on the Friday then. So far as you’re aware. The disagreement between you must have happened on the Saturday or the Sunday.’

‘The Saturday,’ she said. She felt she was being boxed in, tricked. She should have claimed not to remember. How could she be expected to have perfect recall of that sort of detail after so many years? But she did remember. She had played the scene over and over in her head ever since.

‘You’re absolutely certain about that?’

She nodded. She wished suddenly that Arthur were there. So much for pride. They wouldn’t push so hard if another person were present. They’d be more circumspect. She wondered if she should refuse to answer their questions, demand to have a solicitor there. But she’d never been much good at demanding. Besides, then they’d assume that she was guilty, that she had something to hide.

Porteous straightened his back and looked satisfied as if it were just as he had supposed. He was taking the lead in the questions. Stout had taken out a soft, thick pencil and was making notes on a shorthand pad. As Porteous had waited for her answer Hannah had heard the lead move over the paper.

‘We’ll come back to Saturday later,’ Porteous continued. ‘If you could cast your mind back to the Friday.’ He paused, gave her a look of reluctant admiration. ‘You do have a most remarkable memory, Mrs Morton. It was the same during our previous conversation. So tell us what happened in the interval. Did all the actors remain backstage?’

‘Yes.’ An easy question. ‘Mr Spence, the producer, was strict about that. There was to be no running around the hall. The PTA organized refreshments for the audience and took juice and biscuits for the actors and crew.’

‘But you were prompting, I understand, from the front of the audience. It wasn’t a traditional stage with wings.’

‘That’s right.’ Good God, she thought. He’s a magician. How can he know all this?

He closed his eyes as if he were picturing the scene. ‘Did you go backstage in the interval or stay where you were?’

‘I stayed in my seat. Mr and Mrs Brice came to speak to me.’ That had been a relief. Her mother had been in the audience too, a gesture of support which she should have welcomed. Hannah wouldn’t have known what to say to her and the Brices kept her away. Hannah had seen Audrey from the corner of her eye, circling at a distance.

‘Did they mention that Michael might be leaving the area?’

‘Definitely not. They talked about the play.’

‘Of course. So either they didn’t know about his plans at that stage – if indeed there were any plans – or Michael had asked them to keep a secret. Otherwise they would have discussed his leaving with you.’

‘Yes, I’m sure they would.’

‘What did you do after the performance?’

‘We walked into town together and bought fish and chips.’ Again to avoid her mother. So she wouldn’t have to talk to Audrey on the way home. She saw he was astonished that she had remembered a detail like that and added, ‘At least I think that’s what we did. It could have been another time.’

‘What about the props?’ he asked. ‘Did you clear them up that night?’

She thought, He knows about the knife. Felt the last of her control slipping. Held it together.

‘Some of them. While I was waiting for the others to change and take off their make up. A team of us came in on the Saturday afternoon to do the rest.’

‘What did you do with all the stuff?’

‘Packed it into boxes. I don’t know what happened to it then.’

‘Did any of the cast keep anything? A souvenir perhaps. Something to remind them of the play?’

She shook her head. She couldn’t trust herself to speak.

‘Was Michael there that afternoon?’

‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘He was the star. Too grand to muck about with props and costumes.’

Porteous smiled. ‘Well that takes us nicely to Saturday evening.’

‘There was a party,’ she said. ‘For the cast and the crew and a few of the teachers who were involved in the production.’

‘Mr Spence?’

‘I’m not sure. Yes, perhaps he was there.’

‘Mr Westcott?’

‘I don’t think so. It was mostly the younger staff. I believe there was someone from the art department…’

‘Don’t worry. We can check the names if we need to.’

‘We weren’t allowed the party in school. Not the sort of party at least that we would have wanted. We hired a room on the caravan park. The DJ ran the disco for nothing.’ She paused. ‘Chris Johnson. He’s still around in the town. He’s got a record. You probably know him.’ She was going to add that he’d been married to Sally but decided that would be petty. They’d find out anyway if they asked around. She watched Stout scribble furiously on his notepad.

‘And you and Michael had a row?’

‘Not a row.’ She’d had enough. She could hear her voice raise a pitch. ‘We just decided it would be best if we didn’t see each other until after the exams.’

She expected him to probe with more questions but he nodded understandingly.

‘Did you see Michael on the Sunday?’

‘No. I had an exam the next day. I didn’t go out at all. I was working.’ It wasn’t a lie.

‘And on the Monday the Brices told the art teacher that Michael had gone back to his father…’

He sat for a moment as if he was musing the significance of the detail for the first time, but it was all show. He must have gone over that information dozens of times before visiting her. He stood up suddenly, seeming to take Stout by surprise. Hannah fetched their coats and showed them to the door. Stout was still stuffing his notebook and pencil into his pocket as he left. It had stopped raining so Stout was able to light his pipe on the way to the car, curling his hand around the match to nurture the flame.

Chapter Seventeen

Frank sent Rosie home early. Perhaps that’s what she’d been hoping for when she told him about the police and her mum. He was a good boss. It had been quiet in the pub anyway and she knew she’d been ratty. Raging PMT. Sometimes it got her so she wanted to roar with frustration. Like a huge lioness. She’d made a real effort with her mum earlier so she’d taken it out on Frank and the others at work. No wonder he’d wanted shot of her.

When she got in Hannah was sitting in the living-room. She must have heard the door, but she didn’t get up or turn around. There wasn’t the usual inquisition about what had happened to Rosie at work. No television. The only light came from a small table lamp. Hannah was sitting in shadow. She’d opened another bottle of wine and nearly finished it. She hadn’t got drunk even on the night Jonathan had walked out, but tonight she was ratted. Rosie sat on the arm of the chair and put her arm around her. She took the glass from her hand.

‘You’d better let me have that. You’re not used to it and you’ve got work in the morning.’

‘I was used to it once. When I was your age.’

Is that how I’ll get? Rosie thought. Pissed after a couple of glasses of wine.

‘I take it the police came,’ she said. ‘Was it dreadful?’

‘They were all right. Polite. Just doing their job.’ Hannah turned to her and Rosie saw lines on her face she’d never noticed before: on her neck and framing the bottom of her jaw. ‘But they think I killed him,’ Hannah said in the same flat voice. ‘They think we had a row and he dumped me and I stabbed him.’

The next day Hannah must have got up in time to go to work but Rosie didn’t hear her. She never woke up much before lunchtime unless she was on an eleven o’clock shift. Today she had a day off. She hadn’t made any plans.

She was jerked awake by the phone, which didn’t stop, even after the seven rings when the answerphone usually clicked in. Her mother must have forgotten to switch on the machine before leaving for work. Rosie got out of bed, saw it was only nine thirty, swore and took the call in Hannah’s bedroom. The bed was made, the few clothes left out were neatly folded on the chair. Even with a hangover her mother couldn’t bear to leave the house without tidying. Talk about anal.

‘Rosie? That is Rosie Morton?’ The caller had waited so long that he seemed surprised to get a response. She didn’t recognize the voice. It was a middle-aged male. Somewhere in the background a woman was talking very quickly.

‘This is Richard Gillespie.’ She was still fuddled with sleep and didn’t answer so he added with a trace of impatience, ‘Mel’s father.’

‘Oh yes. Hi!’ She’d never met Mel’s father. She’d seen him on the telly, but whenever she was at the house he was working. ‘How’s Mel?’

There was a pause. ‘We’ve a bit of a problem here. I wonder if you’d mind coming round.’

‘Is Mel OK?’ Rosie wondered if it was Mel’s voice she could hear in the background. If so, she was almost hysterical.

‘I don’t really care to discuss it on the telephone. Look, if you like I’ll come and pick you up.’

‘I can walk thanks.’

‘As soon as possible then.’

He hung up. She wished she’d put up more of a fight. She thought she knew what it was about. He wanted her to persuade Mel to go into hospital. Mel hated hospital, always had. She’d hinted darkly about past experiences. Rosie imagined scenes from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and wasn’t going to force her into something she didn’t want. Then she thought there must be something seriously wrong with Mel to keep Richard Gillespie away from his microchip empire. She dialled Joe’s number. He might know what was going on. The line was engaged. Was Mr Gillespie enlisting him to do his dirty work too?

Outside, the rain had cleared the air. The sun was shining again but the day didn’t feel so humid or sticky. She paused in front of Joe’s house, considered calling in to find out if he had any news of Mel. But there was a car in the drive. Joe’s mum only worked part-time. Once she’d seen Rosie very drunk and ever since Rosie had sensed the disapproval. She couldn’t face it today. Besides, Richard Gillespie had made it clear he expected her immediately and even over the phone she’d found him intimidating.

She loved Mel’s house. It was three storeys, set back from a quiet road. An old brick herring-bone wall separated it from its neighbours. At the back there were apple trees and blackcurrant bushes. There was nothing flash or showy about it. The Gillespies had money but didn’t feel the need to flaunt it. Even the Volvo parked in the drive was a couple of years old. She thought that showed real style. Jonathan insisted on a new car every year.

Despite all that, Rosie wasn’t sure she’d want Richard and Eleanor Gillespie as parents. Perhaps it was because style mattered to them too much. Image at least. Eleanor had made a career out of it. She was head of marketing for the big brewery which owned the Prom. According to Mel she’d been responsible for the huge posters which had recently appeared all over the city, featuring an elephant and a beer bottle and a slogan about gigantic thirst.

Image mattered to Richard too. Rosie had seen him on television talking about his family. The picture he presented was of a close and supportive group. ‘Really, I couldn’t cope without them.’

How did a nervy anorexic fit in with that? Mel said he had ambitions to go into politics. ‘Power. That’s what really turns him on.’ It must have bugged him that he couldn’t turn her into the daughter he wanted.

Richard opened the door to her. She recognized him from the newspaper articles and television reports. He looked younger than Eleanor, hardly old enough to be Mel’s dad. She wondered if he dyed his hair.

‘Hello. You must be Rosie.’ A firm handshake and a smile. Charm on tap. A habit.

He showed her through to the kitchen. It looked over the garden and she thought, as she always did, that you could fit the whole of her house inside it. The style here was farmhouse chic. There was an Aga, a rack of stainless-steel pans hanging from the ceiling, a huge dresser with shelves of glass jars full of beans and pulses. Rosie had never seen either of the parents cook but she imagined them having dinner parties here at the weekends. Of course, the guests would sit at the scrubbed pine kitchen table. Richard would probably do the cooking – Thai perhaps or Mexican. She could imagine him in an apron. Melanie wouldn’t be invited. She couldn’t be trusted around food.

Mel’s mother was sitting in a wicker chair by the Aga. She was wearing leggings and a big sweatshirt – aerobics-class clothes. Rosie knew she belonged to a gym but had never seen her dressed casually before. Without the suit and the make-up she looked like a different woman. She sat with her feet on the edge of the chair, her knees near her chin, her arms clasped around her legs in a sort of foetal coma.

‘Where’s Mel?’ Rosie demanded, thinking from Eleanor’s desolation that an ambulance had already come to cart her away.

Eleanor came to life, shifted position, put her feet on the floor. The wicker creaked. ‘She didn’t come home last night.’

‘I thought she might be at your house,’ Richard said. ‘But obviously not.’

‘Have you tried Joe’s?’ Rosie wasn’t quite sure why they were so worried. Not after one night. They weren’t usually like Hannah, who panicked if Rosie was half an hour late.

‘She’s not with him either. But I’ve asked him to come round. Between us we should be able to work out where she is.’

Rosie sat on one of the reclaimed pine chairs. ‘Is there any chance of a coffee? I came straight out.’ Usually she wouldn’t have had the cheek to ask, but they needed her help, didn’t they?

‘Of course.’ Richard filled the filter machine.

‘Where did she go when she left you last night?’ Eleanor demanded.

‘I didn’t see Mel last night. I haven’t seen her for days. You said she was too ill.’

‘Last night she insisted on going out. She said she was going to the Promenade. It was only down the road, so we thought…’ her voice tailed off. ‘Anyway, we couldn’t stop her.’

That explained some of their anxiety. Mel had left in a strop after a fight. They’d be feeling guilty too.

‘What time did she leave home?’

‘Late,’ Richard said. ‘She told us she’d just go in for last orders. She knew you’d be working. We thought she’d be all right with you.’

Christ, Rosie thought. As if it’s my fault.

He went on. ‘It was probably about quarter-past ten. We went to bed soon after, assumed she’d go back to your house or Joe’s and let herself in late. It was only this morning when Eleanor got back from the gym that she realized Mel’s bed hadn’t been slept in.’ And had an attack of anxiety and guilt and summoned Richard back from work.

‘I’d already left the pub at ten,’ Rosie said. ‘Frank let me go early.’

‘Were any of her other friends in the pub?’

Rosie thought, shook her head. Monday was usually quiet; people spent all their money at the weekend. ‘Have you spoken to Frank?’

‘Frank?’

‘The manager. To check that she arrived there.’

‘Not yet. We didn’t want to make a lot of fuss until we were sure it was justified.’

‘Do you want me to phone him? He needn’t know she’s missing.’

‘Yes,’ Richard said. ‘That’d be helpful.’ Another flash of the smile.

Rosie would have preferred not to have an audience, but they obviously expected her to use the phone in the kitchen. She looked at her watch. Ten o’clock. Frank should be up by now. He answered quickly. ‘The Promenade. Frank speaking. How may I help you?’ Very brisk and efficient. He must have been expecting a call from his boss at headquarters.

‘Hi. It’s me. Rosie.’

‘Hey, lass. I hope you’re in a better mood than you were last night.’

‘Did Mel come in after I left?’

‘Aye but only to poke her head round the door to ask where you were. I’d have bought her a drink if she’d hung around. She looked like she could do with one.’

‘Do you know where she went after?’

‘No idea, pet.’

Rosie replaced the receiver. ‘Sorry,’ she said. Both Gillespies were staring at her. ‘She was there but only for a couple of minutes.’

Eleanor gave a little whimper. Rosie felt sorry for her though she’d never much taken to her before. She’d been friendly enough, but in a desperate way. She tried too hard to be one of the girls.

There was a knock on the door. Richard touched Eleanor’s hand, extinguishing the hope before it was lit. ‘That’ll be Joe.’

Joe looked shattered. He was still wearing his uniform from the supermarket. It had been one of his nights for work. Any other time Rosie would have teased him about the shiny grey trousers, the blazer with the company logo on the breast pocket.

Now she just said, ‘You must have had time to change.’ His night shift finished at seven thirty.

‘It’s been a nightmare. I borrowed my mum’s car. It broke down on the bypass on my way home. It took the AA an hour and a half to get there and then they couldn’t fix it. By the time they’d got it to the garage…’ He stopped, shrugged, turned to the Gillespies. ‘Anyway, I got your message.’

Richard seemed to have forgotten about the coffee. Rosie tipped some into a mug, waved the jug towards the others.

‘Yeah,’ Joe said. ‘Thanks.’ She poured one for him and replaced the jug on the hotplate.

‘Mel’s gone missing,’ Rosie said. ‘She came to see me at the Prom but I wasn’t there. She didn’t come to your house? It would have been between ten thirty and eleven.’ She felt the need to take charge. Even Richard seemed to have given in to lethargy. He was staring out of the window.

‘It was one of my regular work nights,’ Joe said. ‘She might have forgotten and gone to the house but no one would have been there. Mum and Dad were at the theatre and Grace spent the night with a mate.’ Grace was his thirteen-year-old sister.

They sat round the table looking at each other. Eleanor had moved away from the Aga to join them. Richard was at the head. He dragged his attention away from the garden. The chairman of the board, Rosie thought, trying to hold his team together.

‘She has other friends,’ he said. ‘She’ll have wanted to teach us a lesson. That’s what this is all about. It would be best if the kids phoned around.’ He looked at Rosie and Joe. ‘You know the names and the numbers and they’d be more likely to tell you the truth.’

They started with a pretence of enthusiasm, but soon it was obvious to them both that Mel wasn’t with any of the usual gang. Eleanor would have had them phoning all day. It was Joe, hollow-eyed and fraught, who said, ‘Look, I think you should go to the police.’

Eleanor and Richard shot a look at each other which Rosie couldn’t interpret.

‘This evening,’ Richard said. ‘I promise. If she’s not back this evening…’

Soon after, they left – Rosie to town to check on some places Mel might be and Joe to sleep. They were standing, talking together on the corner of the street before going their separate ways, when the Volvo pulled out of the drive and accelerated away. Richard Gillespie off to do some other deal. Rosie imagined Eleanor Gillespie curled up again in the wicker chair waiting for the phone to ring or the door to open.

Chapter Eighteen

Hannah’s father had been cremated. Her mother had wanted the whole business over quickly, without any fuss. Hannah remembered the undertaker coming to the house to discuss arrangements. He was young, with impeccable clothes and a nervous cough. Perhaps Edward had been his first suicide.

‘No fuss,’ Audrey said immediately, before he had a chance to sit down. ‘No show.’

‘Nothing in the papers then?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Flowers?’

‘No!’ She spoke very fiercely and he asked no more questions.

Hannah and her mother stood alone in the crematorium and watched the flimsy coffin slide behind the curtains. Afterwards they went home for tea and Battenberg, a cake Edward had always particularly disliked.

Michael’s mother, however, had been buried. There had been mourners dressed in smart clothes, a black limousine which had taken Michael from wherever he had been living as a child to a church and then to the cemetery by the lighthouse. Had he mentioned a church? Hannah thought he had. The crocuses on the lawn, a church filled with weeping people, then another ride in the car to the cemetery.

Hannah had felt lousy all day. The encounter with the detectives had left her with a thick head and a jumpiness verging on paranoia. She was frightened that they’d turn up at any time to ask more of their questions. In the prison Marty saw at once that she wasn’t well and had the kettle on before she asked him. She was tempted to seek out Arthur at lunchtime but something stopped her. More pride. She didn’t want to admit to a hangover at her age. She didn’t want him analysing her problems, coming to conclusions about her weakness and loneliness. She’d always been a person to give support, never to need it.

When Hannah got home, the house was empty. There was a cryptic note on the table from Rosie saying something urgent had come up and she’d be back by eleven. Hannah’d had nothing to eat all day but she couldn’t face supper. She couldn’t settle. So she went for a walk to the cemetery to look for Michael’s mother.

Michael hadn’t started school when his mother died. She was sure of that. It was the way he’d spoken of the wrench of her going into hospital. She must always have been around before. So, Hannah thought, when his mother died Michael would have been five at the oldest, three at the youngest. His memories had a clarity and sophistication which would have been unlikely in a toddler. The death would have occurred between forty to forty-two years previously. Even then it would have been unusual for a woman to die so young. Perhaps on the headstone there would be mention of a child. At the very least, Hannah thought, she should be able to provide Porteous and Stout with a short list of possible names. Information for the team to check, to get them off her back.

She walked along the sea front towards the lighthouse. The salty breeze and the smell of seaweed cleared her head for the first time that day. The car ferry from Bergen slid past on its way to the dock further up the river. Hannah remembered a family holiday in Norway. Rosie had been six. She’d been sick on the boat. Jonathan had sulked all week because the food in the farmhouse hadn’t lived up to his expectations and he hadn’t been able to get hold of a decent bottle of wine. Even before the arrival of Eve the temptress it hadn’t been much of a marriage. ‘You’ll be better off without him,’ her friends said. Until now it had been too much like admitting failure to agree.

The cemetery was almost empty. In the distance a workman was mowing the grass paths but the sound of the machine hardly reached her. At first she wandered aimlessly, her attention caught and held by unusual names, ornate carvings, simple messages of bereavement. Then, as the shadows lengthened she brought more order into the search. The modern graves – those dug within the last twenty years – were at the far end, the furthest inland. Those could be ignored. The remaining plots were in a more random jumble. There seemed to be no chronological order. The space was divided occasionally by a high cypress hedge or a stone arch. Rooks were gathering in the trees which separated the graveyard from the road. She walked up and down the lines of headstones to the jarring sound of the rooks, moving on quickly if the deceased were a man or too old, only stopping for a woman and if the date was right.

Most of the women had been elderly when they died. Most, it seemed, had been widows. The Elsies, the Mays and the Maggies had all joined dear departed husbands. She had almost given up hope when she came across one which fitted her dates. The grave had been planted with ivy and she pulled the plant away from the headstone to read the letters. Frances Lumley, aged thirty, daughter of Elizabeth and Miles. Hannah crouched on her heels to clean the rest of the text, convinced that her search was over. But Frances Lumley had been drowned at sea and there was no mention of a husband or child. And she had died in September, not a season for crocuses.

Michael’s mother was buried in the grave next to Frances Lumley’s and, despite her care, Hannah nearly missed it. In comparison to Frances’s headstone the white marble was clean; the engraving looked as if it had been chiselled the day before. And there were fresh flowers in a brass pot which gleamed in the last of the sunlight. At first she thought this was a new grave, slotted in amongst the others to fill a space. It was only when she read the date that she saw the occupant had been buried the year after Frances. She had died on 19 February.

So there were relatives who lived near enough to tend the grave. She hadn’t expected that. She still thought of Michael as he had been then. Quite alone. With only her and the Brices to care for him.

She read aloud. ‘Maria Jane Randle née Grey. Daughter of Anthony and Hester. Beloved wife of Crispin and mother of Theo.’ The facts were as bold as the carving. There was no comforting verse or religious text.

She knew her search was over. If she had opened the shoebox in Michael’s bedroom on that day after school she would have found a birth certificate, and probably a passport too, in the name of Theo Randle. She couldn’t guess where Michael – because that was how she would continue to think of him – had filched his first name. The family name he’d taken from his mother’s parents. All the same she continued her walk past the last two lines of graves. She had to be sure and she hated a job half done. There were no other women of the right age buried in the place. She returned to Maria’s grave and though she could remember them by heart she jotted down the details of her death and her birth, copying the engraving word for word. The sun had almost gone and she was starting to feel cold.

Hannah hadn’t managed to eat anything after her interview with the detectives the night before, and after her walk along the sea front she was starving. In the town she queued up with the trippers to buy fish and chips and sat on a bench looking over the sea to eat them. She finished everything, even the thick pieces of batter she usually left behind, and licked her fingers. She had to pass the Prom on her way home and looked through the open door, thinking that Rosie’s urgent appointment might involve a drink with her friends. But there was no sign of her or of anyone else Hannah recognized.

She had intended phoning Porteous as soon as she got home, had been gearing herself up to it all the way home. But when she got in the answerphone was blinking and there was a message from Arthur. ‘Hi, I was hoping to see you today. How did you get on last night?’ The taped voice had a stronger Liverpudlian accent than she remembered, was even more mellow and laid back. He’d left his home number and she dialled it quickly before she thought too much about it. He answered after a couple of rings. ‘Hi,’ again, as one of the kids would. Her mother, who’d been very strong on telephone etiquette, would have had a fit.

‘Arthur. It’s me. Hannah. Are you doing anything?’

‘Nah, a couple of reports. Nothing interesting. Nothing urgent. And have you seen what’s on the telly?’

‘Would you come over? I could do with your advice.’ She felt breathless. She thought he must be able to tell from her voice how nervous she was.

‘Do you want to go for a drink?’

‘Not a drink, no.’ The idea of alcohol turned her stomach. Even the fish and chips seemed a mistake. ‘Would you mind coming to the house?’

She gave him directions then sat and waited, thinking she’d made a fool of herself. Melodrama wasn’t her style. It didn’t suit her. He’d think, as Jonathan had done, that she was menopausal and hysterical. Or he’d get the wrong idea entirely and see her as one of those pathetic women, recently dumped, who’d do anything for the company of a man.

He arrived sooner than she’d expected. It hadn’t given her time to work out what to say so she opened the door and stood awkward and tongue-tied in the hall.

‘Are you OK?’ He’d come out so quickly that he was still wearing carpet slippers – battered suede moccasins. Jonathan would never wear slippers. He said they were old men’s garments, like pyjamas.

She began an explanation for calling him, but stumbled over the words. He put his arm around her.

‘Hey. What is it?’

She pushed him away gently. ‘Look, I’m really sorry to have dragged you out.’

‘Just tell me what’s going on here.’

So she sat him on the sofa where the night before Porteous and Stout had played their double act and she told him about it – about Michael Grey whose real name was Theo Randle, about the detectives who thought she was a murderer, about her discovery of Maria Randle’s grave in the cemetery. He listened. He didn’t move or give any of the usual verbal encouragements to prove he was listening, but she could tell she had his full attention.

‘Can you be sure,’ he asked, ‘that Theo’s the same person as Michael?’

‘There’s no other explanation. Maria’s the only person buried in the cemetery who could be his mother. His memory of the funeral was so clear and precise that I’m sure he was telling the truth. And it can’t be a coincidence that he chose Maria’s maiden name as his surname.’

‘Of course, you’ll have to tell the police.’

‘I know. But what will they think? I could have told them at the first interview that Michael’s mother was buried there.’

‘They’ll think you were in shock, intimidated. I don’t suppose they’re stupid. They know how law-abiding people can react to police questioning.’ He stretched his legs. He was wearing paint-stained sweat pants. He’d bought a cottage near the prison and seemed to have been decorating for months. ‘Do you want to phone now, while I’m here? Then I can stay if they want to come to talk to you.’

‘Yes.’ Again she knew she was being pathetic but she couldn’t help it. ‘Are you sure that’s all right?’

The phone was answered by a young woman who said that Porteous was no longer in the office. She was polite but distant. Any secretary talking about any middle manager. Was it urgent? She could find someone else to speak to Hannah. Otherwise, if Hannah wanted to leave a message she could be put through to his voicemail.

‘Yes.’ It was some sort of reprieve. ‘I’ll do that.’

She listened for the beep. ‘Hello. This is Hannah Morton. I’ve remembered something which might be useful for you. Perhaps you could get in touch.’ She replaced the receiver. Arthur pulled a face of mock disappointment.

‘Bugger. So I miss out.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I was hoping for the chance to play detective.’

‘You can’t be serious?’

He put out his hands, palms up, a gesture of being caught in the act. ‘OK I admit it. I love crime fiction. I’m a sucker for all those crappy cop shows on TV.’

‘This is hardly the same!’

‘I know.’ He paused, continued slowly, a dream confided. ‘I’ve always thought I’d make a good psychological profiler. At least in my work I meet real criminals and I’m not sure how many academics could say the same.’

‘You’re welcome to be here when the police talk to me.’

‘Right.’ He paused. ‘What about making a few enquiries on our own? While we’re waiting for the police to get in touch?’

‘This isn’t a game, Arthur. Not for me.’

‘I know.’

But she couldn’t bear to disappoint him. It was like when Rosie really wanted something. She always gave in. She thought, Being a mother is like trying to please the world.

‘What did you have in mind?’

‘We might find something which would divert attention away from you…’

‘That’s an excuse.’

‘What about having a shot at tracing the boy’s father? I don’t mean camping out on his doorstep. Just finding out where he is.’

‘How would you go about that?’

‘Through the records office, the archives of the local paper. There may have been a death notice when Maria died, an address. If the Brices said Michael was going to meet his father just before he died I’d say Crispin Randle makes an adequate suspect. If we hand him to Porteous on a plate it’ll give him someone else to harass.’

‘Why would he kill his own son?’

‘Why would he desert him? We’ll have to find out.’ He was like an overenthusiastic boy. Michael was a stranger to him. A puzzle to be untangled. He must have sensed her reservation, her distaste. ‘God,’ he said. ‘What an insensitive git. Look, I’ll clear out and leave it to the police.’

‘No,’ she said. He must have known she would give in eventually. ‘You play detective. If it makes you happy.’

Chapter Nineteen

Rosie spent the day looking for Mel in some of the places she could be lying low. There were days when Mel couldn’t face the Prom. Then she’d turn her back on her friends and Frank’s teasing and she’d go walkabout. Usually she wanted to be on her own but sometimes on the trawls around town she’d take Rosie with her. She didn’t speak much. She just waited for Rosie to follow her round the arcades, the sleazy snack bars, the tiny back-street pubs where a couple of pensioners sat all evening in silence. Everywhere people seemed to know her. Rosie stuck with her because in that mood Mel frightened her.

Rosie went first to the snack bar next to the bus station. A Formica shelf ran shoulder-high around the room and there were tall stools bolted to the floor. A water heater steamed behind a counter. The windows ran with condensation. There was a smell of frying bacon, which made her want to throw up.

A pimply youth was wiping tables with a grey cloth.

‘Hey, Robbie. Seen Mel?’

Robbie was one of Mel’s admirers. She had them everywhere, picked them up. Robbie was from Edinburgh, had run away from a loutish stepfather and lived now in a hostel run by a children’s charity. Rosie had never talked to him about any of this but Mel had told her. Robbie was passionately in love with Mel. You could tell by the way that he blushed whenever she spoke to him. Mel encouraged him. He was into Idlewild and they’d talk about album tracks, Mel strumming an imaginary guitar, the boy banging out a rhythm on a tabletop until the manager came out from the back to shout at him.

‘No.’ He squirted cleaner from a spray, turned his back to her. He could be lying. If Mel had asked him to, he’d lie.

‘Her parents are worried about her. They’re talking about getting in the police.’

He faced her. ‘Really. I haven’t seen her for ages.’ He seemed scared, but perhaps that was the talk of the police.

‘If you see her, tell her to get in touch. With me or Joe if she’s not up to going home.’

He nodded. His face was blank. Years of practice at not letting on what was going on in his head.

The amusement arcade was next to the funfair, old fashioned in the same sort of way. It was decorated in red and gilt and a cashier sat in a booth in the entrance. Mel said the booth reminded her of one of the windows in Amsterdam where a prostitute would sit. Carol, the cashier, wasn’t one of Mel’s admirers and the hostility was mutual. Mel went to the arcade to play the machines, not to chat. Carol was a middle-aged, once-upon-a-time blonde, a single mum. She was outraged by the money Mel lost; enough, she’d say, to feed her kids for a week. Mel didn’t taken kindly to the lectures. She played the machines as if nothing else mattered, completely focused on the patterns which spun before her. The money was irrelevant. Sometimes she left her winnings in the tray and had to be reminded to go back for them.

On rainy days the arcade was packed. Today there was a middle-aged couple playing on the penny scoop and a few teenage lads bunking off school. Carol waved to Rosie. She got bored out of her mind imprisoned in her booth and she wanted the company. She’d keep you talking all day given the chance.

‘Mad Mel not with you then?’

‘No. I was wondering if she’d been in.’

‘I’ve not seen her since she went away on holiday. Portugal, was it? Did she have a good time?’

‘She didn’t go in the end.’ Rosie inched her way towards the door. She couldn’t face explanations.

Carol seemed to realize she’d not get much more from the conversation and picked up a copy of Hello! magazine from a shelf under her desk. She began to flick over the pages. Her nails were sugar pink. She looked up once more to flutter the nails in Rosie’s direction to wave goodbye.

It was early afternoon. Joe would still be sleeping. Rosie tried a couple of pubs without much hope. There was one in a back street, near the health centre, run by an ex-jockey, a little wizened old man with no teeth. Another of Mel’s fans. The bar was full of men studying form in the racing pages. Rosie had never been able to understand why Mel went in the place. She had become a sort of mascot. She sat at the bar on a wooden stool and the punters asked her advice, though she admitted she knew nothing about horses or racing. Today her stool was empty.

‘She needs looking after,’ said the landlord sentimentally when Rosie explained that Mel had gone missing. ‘Proper loving care.’

Rosie thought secretly that Mel had been loved too much, spoilt rotten at least. But she kept that opinion to herself.

She walked down the steep hill from the health centre towards the sea front. Terraces of pastel-painted guest-houses ran away from the road. In the windows were signs saying ‘Vacancies’ and ‘Contractors welcome’. On the corner was the hostel where Robbie lived. A young woman was hanging sheets out on the washing line. Rosie thought Mel could hide herself away in this town for months if she wanted to. The Gillespies would make sure there was money in her bank account. Eleanor obviously wanted her found, but Rosie thought Richard wouldn’t pry too much as long as he knew she was safe and she didn’t cause a fuss which could be picked up by the press. At the sea front Rosie crossed the road and went down to the level of the beach. The traffic became a distant hum above her.

The Rainbow’s End was a café, two arches cut out of the bank of the promenade. It was run by middle-aged drop-outs selling organic food and herbal teas and it was one of Melanie’s favourite haunts. She said it was like a cave. She would sit near the counter, as far away as possible from the natural light, her back turned to the sea. She’d drink decaffeinated coffee and smoke roll-up after roll-up although there was a big sign saying NO SMOKING. Maura, who ran the place, turned a blind eye. Another example of one rule for Mel and another for the rest of the world. In the Rainbow’s End, Mel was drawn to the food. Sometimes she’d buy a slab of carrot cake. She’d sit and look at it, a paper napkin folded on her lap, but she’d never eat. In the end she’d push the plate across the table towards Rosie.

‘I don’t feel hungry. You have it.’

Rosie was always hungry but she didn’t know what to do for the best so the cake would sit there, the cream-cheese topping slowly melting, until they left.

Maura was a big woman, an earth mother in an Indian-print caftan and beads woven into her hair. She looked out for Mel. If the café was quiet – which it usually was – she’d sit with her and talk earnestly about the things which would ‘get her head straight’. Things like plant remedies, hypnosis, acupuncture. Mel would listen with a bored expression on her face. So far as Rosie knew she never followed up any of the suggestions.

Today two young women sat near the window. The tide was in, right up to the concrete walkway, and it felt like being in a boat. The women had children with them – a toddler apiece in pushchairs and a baby in a sling. Maura was going gooey-eyed over the baby, talking about the benefits of terry nappies and breast milk. The women agreed about the breast milk at least. They all seemed very smug.

Perhaps that was Mel’s problem, Rosie thought facetiously. She probably wasn’t breastfed.

She interrupted the baby talk and ordered a sandwich – mozzarella, tomatoes and basil on ciabatta.

‘Has Mel been in?’

Maura shook her head. ‘Not today.’

‘Yesterday?’ In the evenings the place had a licence. It sold veggie meals and organic wine in candlelight. So you couldn’t see what you were getting. Often there was live music.

‘Yes. Last night. First time in ages. She stopped for one beer and then she left.’

The Rainbow’s End only had a table licence but that had never bothered Mel.

‘Was anyone with her?’

Maura shook her head again. The beads and the braids swung and clacked. ‘I felt a bit mean actually.’ She had a surprisingly classy voice, very deep and well modulated. ‘She wanted to talk. But we were busy. We’d hired a student band and they’d brought all their friends. You know what it’s like.’

Rosie didn’t really. She didn’t go there in the evening. She thought the people and the music a bit pretentious. She liked something you could dance to.

‘How did she seem?’

‘Not brilliant. A bit jumpy. Sort of desperate actually. I let her have the drink and told her to wait. Adam was on his break. I thought when he came back I’d take her out for a walk, calm her down a bit. But when I looked again she’d gone. She didn’t even bother to say goodbye.’

When Rosie had finished the sandwich there didn’t seem much point in staying and she couldn’t think of anywhere else to look. She went home and snoozed on the sofa in front of a black and white movie. She didn’t want to talk to her mother – she couldn’t face the fuss of explanation – so she wrote her a note and at five o’clock she went round to Joe’s. Joe’s sister Grace let her in. She was a gawky thirteen-year-old with pointed elbows like the legs of a tree frog and a mouth full of metal brace. Grace yelled up the stairs. There was no answer. She shrugged.

‘He’s in. You’d better go up.’

Joe’s room was in the attic. It had a sloping roof with a big velux window and even more crap on the floor than Rosie’s. Divine Comedy was rolling away in the background.

‘I was just going out,’ he said, guilty because he’d been sleeping all day while Mel was missing.

‘I’ve been everywhere I can think of.’ She sat on the bed.

‘Anything?’

‘She went to the Rainbow’s End after the Prom. Maura said she was a bit jumpy, but nothing new there… It was a student gig. Maybe she met someone…’

There was a pause.

‘The police think she might have been kidnapped.’ He couldn’t keep a shiver of excitement from his voice. He was still worried but kidnapping was something out of the movies, glamorous even.

Rosie frowned. ‘The Gillespies went to the police?’

‘Eleanor did. I think she cracked. Richard didn’t sound very happy. I phoned just now and I could hear him in the background. He says everyone’s overreacting.’

So do I, Rosie thought. I think she picked up a bloke at the Rainbow’s End out of boredom or desperation or devilment. She’s hiding out in a hall of residence or a grotty bedsit, waiting for the maximum fuss before making her appearance. Rosie wouldn’t have told Joe but it wouldn’t be the first time Mel had gone home with someone she’d met on one of her walkabouts.

‘Why do they think she was kidnapped?’

‘Apparently it’s not much more than a theory. Eleanor and Richard are high-profile parents. And there was a case a couple of months ago. The kidnappers got away with a half a million. Since then there has been a spate of copycat attempts. Mostly amateurs, the police say. Mostly easy to deal with.’ He paused and sat beside her on the bed. His feet were bare. She could see every bone and joint under the skin. ‘Do you remember Frank saying someone was in the Prom looking for her? An older bloke.’

‘Yes. Do the police think he might have been the kidnapper?’

‘I told Eleanor anyway. It’s up to them. She thought they might want to talk to us sometime.’

‘Me too?’

‘Why not? You know her as well as anyone. You’re best mates.’

Suddenly she felt sick with guilt. She remembered the good times. The girlie sleepovers with bottles of wine and soppy videos, the gossip about lads, mega shopping sessions in the city. She imagined Mel being held somewhere and what they might be doing to her. And she’d been thinking it was all some attention-seeking stunt.

‘Let’s go and look,’ she said. ‘Just in case. I can’t sit here doing nothing.’

They spent the evening in the city, tramping through all the pubs, even those Mel had never set foot in so far as they knew. They asked in the arcade and the pizza places and the roller-skating rink. No one had seen her. They ended up with Maura in the Rainbow’s End, shouting their questions over a flamenco guitar. Had there been an older guy in the night before? Anyone taking a special interest in Mel? Maura tried to answer their questions but in the end she got fed up with them and sent them home.

Joe walked Rosie all the way to her door. On the step he held on to her in a desperate bear hug. She pushed him away in the end, feeling confused and guilty. As guilty as if she’d played some part in Mel’s disappearance.

Chapter Twenty

Hannah had been expecting Arthur to be waiting for her at the prison but she went through the gate to the library without seeing him. It was halfway through the morning when he bounced in.

‘Can you spare a minute?’

She turned to Marty. ‘Are you OK on your own? Dave’s in the office.’

Marty rolled his eyes towards the ceiling. ‘Is that supposed to be reassuring?’

‘Well…’

‘Go on. I’ll be fine.’

They sat in Arthur’s office drinking coffee. He was a different man: the super-cool Scouser had gone; he was bubbling, the words falling over themselves. She regretted her impulse of the night before to involve him. She could tell there would be no stopping him now.

‘I’ve been to the Central Library, tracked down the back copies of the local rag. It’s great that they’ve still got them.’

‘Aren’t they all on microfilm?’ She wanted to slow him down, rein back some of the enthusiasm. Stop, she wanted to say. You don’t know what you’re getting into.

‘Mm?’ The interruption only checked him for a moment. ‘It’s amazing what you can find in the births, marriages and deaths columns.’

‘You haven’t wasted any time.’

‘I started with Maria’s death. The notice said she died after “a brave struggle with illness”. Cancer isn’t mentioned but that’s the implication.’

‘That would fit in with Michael’s memories.’

‘Then I went back a few years and found the report of her marriage. A front-page spread. Obviously a big do. The wedding of the season. Crispin Randle seems to have been a member of the local gentry. He owned land not far from here. He was an MP. Tory of course. Master of the Hunt. You know the sort of bloke. He married Maria Grey in 1952. Two years later Theo’s birth was announced. He was named Theo Michael, so I don’t think there’s any doubt we’re on the right track.’

She nodded, felt irrationally pleased that she could continue to think of her ghost as Michael.

‘I almost gave up the search then. I mean, I’d got enough for the police to be going on with. But I thought Randle was still a young man. What if he’d remarried…’

‘And had he?’ Just to show she was still listening.

‘Yeah. Three years later. That wedding was a much quieter event. The bride was Stella Midwood, who’d been working as his secretary. A year later they had a daughter, Emily.’

The names and dates washed over her. She thought she’d have to write it all down like a family tree to make sense of it.

‘Why didn’t they have Michael to live with them?’ she asked. ‘Why board him out with the Brices?’

‘Wait. There’s more drama to come. In 1964 when Theo Michael was ten, there was a fire in the family home. It was big news. The place was burned to a shell and Emily, the little girl, Michael’s stepsister, was killed. Crispin Randle sold the estate and some months later he resigned his seat in the Commons. Michael isn’t mentioned in the account of the fire or the resignation.’

‘Is that significant?’

‘Dunno. Perhaps it was too painful for Crispin to have him around. Perhaps Michael reminded him of the death of his first wife and his daughter. Perhaps Crispin had some sort of breakdown and couldn’t cope.’

‘Michael was only ten!’

‘Old enough to be shipped off to boarding school.’

‘Why did he come to Cranford then? And why the change of identity?’

Arthur shrugged. ‘Teenage rebellion? It’s possible he didn’t get on with his stepmother. Perhaps he resented the way his father dumped him.’

‘Perhaps.’ It’s all guesswork, she thought. Really, despite Arthur’s excitement we’re not much further forward. ‘Do we know where Stella and Crispin are living now?’

‘There’s no record. But the police will find out easily enough. We’ve done all the hard work for them.’ He hesitated. ‘Don’t you have an early finish today?’

‘Why?’ She knew he wanted something from her. Living with Rosie had given her a sixth sense about people bumming favours.

‘What about going to Cranford? This afternoon. We can give all this information to Porteous in person. That’ll stop him hassling you.’

Who are you kidding? she thought. That’s not what this is about. This is about you showing off to the police. You want the glory. You want to sit there and gloat.

‘We could stay the night. I could meet your friends. We could be back in time for work tomorrow.’

‘Go on then.’ She couldn’t think of an argument against it and, as Rosie knew, she’d always been an easy touch.

She phoned Porteous from the library. Dave had sloped off and Marty pretended not to listen.

‘Mrs Morton,’ Porteous said. ‘I was hoping to speak to you. More questions I’m afraid. Something’s come up.’

‘I can’t talk now. I’m at work.’ She couldn’t face an interview over the phone. She wanted Arthur there.

He said he was tied up all day and that he’d come to The Old Rectory in the evening. She sensed he was preoccupied and wondered if there’d been a development in the case. Perhaps he’d discovered Michael’s background without Arthur’s help.

Later she phoned Sally and asked if she could put the two of them up for the night as paying guests.

‘A double room?’ Sally asked mischievously. ‘The honeymoon suite?’

‘Of course not!’ Hannah thought her humour hadn’t developed since they were children. She’d always been a tease about sex.

Arthur hadn’t quite finished his class when she arrived at his room at lunchtime. Some form of role-play was going on. Hannah walked back down the corridor so she wouldn’t be tempted to watch. She found that sort of exercise embarrassing enough without spectators, though she’d come to realize that Arthur liked play-acting and games.

He admitted as much in the car. He’d been asking about the people who’d been around at the time of Michael’s death. She described Roger Spence, Sally and her disc-jockey boyfriend, Stephen and Sylvia Brice. By the time they arrived at The Old Rectory she had the feeling that he knew them as well as she did and probably understood them better.

‘What’s all this about, Arthur?’ It was her librarian, who’s-been-turning-down-the-page-corners voice.‘I really think we should leave it to the police.’

‘Come on, girl. Don’t spoil my fun.’ She was about to say tartly that it wasn’t fun for her when he added, ‘I might leave it to them if I could be certain they’d get it right.’ He paused. ‘You must have met men inside who don’t deserve to be there.’

‘I’ve met men who say they don’t.’

‘Well, I don’t want any cock-ups in this case.’ He smiled but she wasn’t reassured. He worked for the Home Office. He should have had more faith in the system.

It was just after two when they arrived. Hannah had expected Sally to be at work but she was there to meet them. Curiosity about Arthur, Hannah thought, and a nose for a story. Sally hustled them into the dining-room and organized a late lunch. Later, over coffee, Roger joined them too.

They talked about Michael Grey. It was Arthur’s doing, but perhaps the Spences were eager to talk about him anyway. Sally had her own agenda.

‘I had the impression he’d come from the private system,’ Roger said, ‘but his Latin wasn’t up to much. Hardly prep-school standard. Not what you’d expect.’

‘Was he doing Latin A level?’ Arthur gave the impression he was just being polite. Hannah knew better.

‘No, but I dragooned him in to help with one of my first-year groups. In the end I let him go. He wasn’t any use at all.’

‘Perhaps he just wanted his free period back.’

‘Perhaps. I don’t think so. It’s quite hard to fake genuine ignorance, isn’t it?’

‘How did you get to know him if you didn’t teach him?’

‘Through the school play. I coached him. Individual rehearsals.’

‘Were you surprised when he disappeared?’

‘Not very surprised. Not at first. He liked mysteries. I remember one session when I talked about him bringing his own experience into his acting. He said he was already doing that but he refused to discuss his past with me. I was more surprised when he never returned. I kept expecting him to turn up out of the blue to astound and amaze us.’

Arthur turned lazily to Sally. ‘How well did you know him?’

‘Only as Hannah’s boyfriend. And I’m sorry, pet, but I didn’t really take to him. He was a bit arty-farty for me. There was too much pretence.’

‘Whereas you…’ Roger interrupted, ‘you had your own bit of rough.’

She laughed, not offended in the slightest. ‘Quite right,’ she said. ‘And very nice it was too. You’ll be able to meet him tonight, Arthur. Chris. My ex-bit-of-rough.’

She narrowed her eyes. Hannah thought Sally knew what he was up to. Perhaps journalists and psychologists had similar techniques when it came to ferreting out a story.

Sally continued, ‘There’s a wedding party in the annexe and Chris is doing the disco. He’s still playing the same sort of gigs. I think it’s a bit sad that he’s never moved on.’

In the afternoon they left the car at the hotel and walked to the lake. There was a footpath through an old deciduous wood and then a strip of forestry-commission plantation. The footpath was overgrown and looked as if it must have been there in Hannah’s time, but she couldn’t remember having used it, and at the lakeside everything was so different that she found it hard to get her bearings. A group of teenagers in orange life-jackets stood where once Chris had bought her vodka. A woman was spelling out the rules of safety on the water, shouting to get their attention. Hannah thought that if they capsized they’d be able to walk back to the shore. The water level was even lower than she’d expected. The beach, which she’d remembered as a narrow strip of sand, had widened to an unsightly expanse of mud, rock and shingle. The trainee sailors had to push their dinghies to the water on trolleys, lifting them occasionally over the larger rocks. A new island had been formed at the north end of the lake.

She didn’t know what Arthur hoped to gain by the walk. A sense of place perhaps. She’d told him about her first romantic encounter with Michael by the bonfire on the beach. But this scene, on a sunny afternoon, with the giggles and squawks of the school party coming to them over the water, had nothing in common with the night after the exams. She felt it was an anticlimax. She’d waited so long to come back and now it meant nothing. Arthur seemed dissatisfied by it too, because he sat for a moment in the sun then suggested that they return to The Old Rectory by the lane. On the walk back she started to fret about what Porteous would want from her and how she would explain her failure to pass on the information about Maria’s grave. She said nothing to Arthur. How could she tell him she felt like a schoolgirl, waiting for one of Spooky Spence’s beastly tests?

Outside the hotel a battered white transit was parked. One headlight seemed to be held on by gaffer tape. Chris was standing by the sliding door, shuffling a loudspeaker towards him so he could get his arms around it. Hannah didn’t want to face him yet and touched Arthur’s arm to stop him from approaching. Chris shifted the balance of the speaker so he was taking all the weight and walked slowly with it round the side of the building. His hair was a lot shorter and he was a bit thicker round the waist but he hadn’t changed much. It could have been the same black T-shirt as the one he’d worn to the party after Macbeth.

‘I don’t suppose you recognize him,’ Hannah said.

‘No. Why should I?’

‘He’s been done for dealing. He might have ended up in our place. If he did he never used the library. I wondered if you’d come across him.’

‘No. Look, why don’t we talk to him now? Once all the wedding guests turn up it’ll be impossible.’

‘I wouldn’t know what to say.’ Again she regretted starting all this. But Arthur was unstoppable.

‘Just introduce us. Leave the rest to me.’

The party would take place in a room Hannah hadn’t seen before, a large one-storey annexe built on to the back of the house in stone. It had a polished wood floor for dancing, a bar at one end and a scattering of small tables around the walls. It was quite different from the rest of the hotel – more up-market working men’s club than country house – but she supposed that in the winter the dos held here would make up most of the Spences’ income. Chris was setting up his equipment on a low stage. He was bending over so his T-shirt had ridden up his back. He heard their footsteps and turned round.

‘Hannah Meek,’ he said. ‘Well, well, well. The police haven’t locked you up yet then?’

She blushed. She’d always known Chris was hostile. He’d thought her stuck up and prudish. But she hadn’t expected such an obvious display of rudeness.

‘Why should they lock her up?’ Arthur sounded interested, a bit amused.

‘Who are you?’

‘Arthur Lee. I work with Hannah.’

‘Oh? Where’s that then?’ He pretended to stick wires into sockets but his heart wasn’t in it.

‘I’m a librarian. I work in Stavely Prison.’ She threw that out as a kind of challenge but he didn’t seem bothered.

‘I never got there. Not a long enough sentence.’

‘Perhaps another time.’

He laughed. ‘Nah. I’m too old for that now. Didn’t Sal tell you? I’m settled. Content. I’ve got a lady. She’s expecting our kid.’

The kitchen door must have been open. Hannah could hear the clattering of pans. There were cooking smells.

‘What were you like then?’ Arthur asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘When Michael Grey was murdered. You weren’t so settled then.’

He accepted that as a compliment. ‘We were all a bit wild I suppose.’ He paused. ‘Except Hannah. You never did wild, did you, H?’

‘What about Michael? Was he wild too?’

‘I never knew him that well.’

‘You didn’t know anything about him before he came to live here? You’d never met him before?’

‘How would I? He went to some sort of posh school.’

‘Did he tell you that?’

‘Him or someone else. How should I know? Anyway, what’s it to do with you?’

Arthur ignored that, continued with the questions, sharp and impersonal.

‘What was he like? You were older than the others, more experienced. What did you make of him?’

‘He wasn’t the angel they all thought.’ It came out grudgingly.

‘One of your customers, was he?’

‘No,’ Hannah said. She glared at Arthur. ‘He wouldn’t.’

‘Come on, Hannah,’ Chris was fighting back. ‘You know as well as anyone that Michael Grey was hardly the perfect gentleman. Don’t you?’

She didn’t answer. She wanted to drag Arthur away, to drive immediately back to the coast, but knew there was no way he’d give up now. She’d have to stick it out.

‘Have the police been to see you yet?’ Arthur asked.

‘Of course they’ve been to see me. Anyone farts in this town, they knock on my door.’

‘What did they want?’

‘They wanted me to tell them about the party at the caravan site. The last time any of us saw Michael Grey alive. The party after the play. You remember the one, Hannah.’

‘Did you tell them?’ she asked.

‘Of course I told them. I’m a law-abiding citizen now. What else could I do?’

He smiled. His teeth were brown and uneven. Then he turned back to the large, black speaker.

Chapter Twenty-One

Macbeth had gone well. Everyone involved in the production felt the buzz, lapped up the success. Even Hannah, who was on the edge of it. It was a manic time. Exams were only days away. People were up all night revising. You’d have thought it was the worst possible day for a party, but everyone had so much nervous energy and they felt like celebrating.

Hannah never knew whose idea it was to hire a room at the caravan site. Perhaps one of the cast was related to the manager. She thought it was something like that. She spent the afternoon at home getting ready. On her own. She’d asked Sal to come round. Sal was better than she was at clothes and make-up. But Sal hadn’t had much to do with the play and anyway seemed to spend all her free time with Chris. Years later Hannah would be able to remember the clothes she was wearing that night. She wanted it to be special. After the exams everyone would move away. It would probably be the last time they’d be together.

She soaked for an hour in the bath, got dressed and looked at herself in the long mirror on the landing. She was wearing a long skirt with tiny green flowers printed on to a cream background. It had a drop waist and she’d made it herself. There was nowhere in Cranford to buy clothes. It was the first time she’d worn it. A cream top with a gathered neck. A shawl which Sylvia Brice had crocheted for her birthday. Jesus sandals. And masses of black eye make-up. The last throes of flower power, which anyway had come late to the town.

Then, just as she was about to leave, her mother threw a wobbly. Hannah should have seen it coming. It had been building for days – resentful comments every time she went out, tearful self-pity when she returned.

Now Audrey blocked the front door, stood in front of it with her arms outstretched.

‘Don’t go.’

Hannah was panicking. ‘I must. They’re expecting me. It’s to do with the play.’

She didn’t say it was a party because Audrey would have played the guilt card – I never go out, you see your friends every day. That sort of thing. And Hannah had to go. During rehearsals she’d hardly seen Michael. He’d seemed to be slipping away from her.

Audrey crumpled. Her knees buckled and her back slid down the door until she was sitting on the floor. She began to sob. The tears gouged drains in her face powder. Hannah could see the tops of her tights and her knickers. Words came in muffled, snotty bursts.

‘I’m so sorry. You mustn’t mind me. I only want you to be happy.’

Hannah couldn’t leave her like that, though more than anything she wanted to ignore the tears, step over the body and force her way out of the door. She took Audrey’s arm and coaxed her to her feet, settled her on the sofa and made her tea. She switched on the television. Immediately Audrey became absorbed in one of her favourite programmes.

‘I’ll go now, Mum, shall I?’

Audrey turned, waved briefly and returned her attention to the set.

They’d hired a minibus to take party-goers to the lake. Courtesy again of some anxious parents. A disabled lad had gone missing a couple of years before and for a while there’d been a fuss about youngsters out on their own. Hannah was too late to catch it. She began to walk, sticking out her thumb for a lift every time a car went past. She’d never hitched on her own before but now she was too desperate to think of all the adult warnings. It was still light and the road was busier than she’d expected – mostly families on their way back to the site. They didn’t seem to see her. Each time a car sailed past she stared after it with loathing. Her sandals were new and a strip of leather cut into her toes.

Then, when she was thinking she’d have to walk the whole way, someone stopped. A young bloke in a rusting estate car. He was chatty and in the few minutes it took to drive the rest of the way she found out he was visiting his girlfriend. She worked on reception in the site office and had been given a free caravan for the season. He was obviously smitten.

She heard the music as soon as she got out of the car.

‘Some party, that,’ he said, before driving off through the maze of caravans to find his love.

The party wasn’t in the bar, but in a room next to it, which sometimes held bingo for the older visitors and talent competitions for the kids. In natural light it would be gloomy, but Chris had rigged up some coloured spots and someone had decorated it with balloons and streamers. It was full. The dancers jostled for space. The first person she saw was Mr Spence, who was dancing with the fifth former who’d played Hecate. Some of the cast had dressed up in their costumes and hers was black, floaty and long. Ribbons of frayed black cloth trailed from her cuffs. Mr Spence danced with his eyes half shut, his body twisting and swaying to the music. Hannah saw at once that Michael wasn’t there.

She didn’t ask any of her friends if Michael had been with them on the minibus. The music was so loud that her ears were already singing and the room was full of people she didn’t know well. Boyfriends and girlfriends and stray hangers-on had gatecrashed. Sally was there, though her only contribution to the play had been to hand out programmes at one of the performances. She was beside Chris, dancing on her own. She already seemed drunk. Hannah didn’t want to ask her about Michael. Chris would have made some sarcastic comment. He always did.

She went outside, walked down towards the lake where the noise of the music wasn’t quite so loud. She told herself that Michael might have gone for a walk on the shore, that he might be waiting for her there. The sky was a crazy mix of colours. Violet streaked in the west with gold and grey. Soon it would be completely dark but now it was light enough for birds still to be singing and she could make out the paler strip of sand and the reflection of the last light on the water.

They were lying on the spiky grass between the road and the lake. Jenny Graves, otherwise known as Lady Macbeth, was sprawled naked on the grass with Michael Grey, otherwise known as Theo Randle. The picture had the quality of a photographic negative. The background was grey, their bodies milky. Michael’s hair was startling white, her black braid lost in the shadow. It wasn’t a shock. She’d looked out for Jenny in the dancing crowd too and registered that she wasn’t there. Hadn’t even expected her to be. Throughout the rehearsals she’d watched Michael and Jenny, his charm, her flirting. But Hannah hadn’t felt able to demand an explanation, because then he’d have told her, not using the exact words of course, that he wanted her as a friend and an audience, not a lover. That is was Jenny Graves he’d write his poems for. Hannah stood for a moment staring, fascinated despite herself by the entwined limbs, the panting, the moans, thinking in a dispassionate way – So that’s what happens, that’s what it’s all about.

Then she turned and ran. They must have heard her footsteps on the shingle but she didn’t care. She hoped Michael did hear, that the encounter would be spoiled for him. It serves him right, she thought. Over and over again, spiteful and childish, a schoolyard chant. She stumbled back towards the music, not because she could face going back to the party, but because it was the only way home. A figure was standing outside the building. He leaned against the wall rolling what she realized later was probably a joint. It was Chris. There was an outside light fixed to the bar and she was caught in the glare of it. He saw her tears. He gave a mocking smile and beckoned her towards him. She turned away and hurried down the lane. She didn’t try to get a lift. By then it was pitch black and she had more sense. And she didn’t want anyone to see her crying.

She was home earlier than her mother had expected. Audrey was still watching television, though she’d moved from the sofa to her usual upright chair and there was a plate with some crumbs on the coffee table. The earlier panic was forgotten. She was touchingly pleased to see Hannah, who sat on the floor beside her to watch the end of the programme. She found herself making allowances for her mother’s behaviour now, as she would with someone who was very old or very sick. Audrey seemed not to notice that Hannah was upset until they went upstairs together, then she asked suddenly, ‘Are you all right, my dear?’

‘Of course.’ Audrey would be the last person she’d talk to about her troubles. What could parents know?

‘You should leave this place,’ Audrey said sharply. ‘As soon as your exams are over. I stayed far too long.’

‘Oh yes,’ Hannah said. ‘I will.’ She spoke as if it had been her plan all along but it had never crossed her mind before that evening.

‘Good.’ She shut the bedroom door firmly behind her, but Hannah still heard her repeat the word to herself. ‘Good.’

The next morning Michael phoned. It was Sunday and her mother was still in bed. Hannah hadn’t been able to sleep. She knew it would be him before she picked up the receiver but she couldn’t let it go unanswered.

‘Hannah, I have to see you.’

‘No.’

‘You don’t understand. I’m scared.’ He did sound terrified, as if he’d just woken from a nightmare. But she told herself he was a good actor. ‘No one else will believe me.’

She didn’t say anything.

‘There are things you should know. We should talk.’

‘Talk to Jenny.’ She knew it was petty but she couldn’t help it.

‘This isn’t anything to do with Jenny.’

‘And it isn’t anything to do with me.’

If Chris hadn’t seen her running away from the beach she’d probably have agreed to meet Michael. She wanted to see him. But Chris had seen her and she could tell from the way he’d grinned that he knew about Michael and Jenny. He’d have told Sally. Hannah was proud. She couldn’t bear to be seen scuttling back to Michael after she’d been so publicly betrayed. She wanted to help him but knew it was impossible.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as firmly as her mother had said the word ‘good’ the night before.

She was replacing the receiver when she heard him say goodbye.

That was the story she told Arthur as they sat on the terrace waiting for Porteous to arrive at The Old Rectory. It was quiet. The newly-weds and their friends hadn’t yet arrived. It was the story they agreed she would have to tell the detectives.

Porteous was late and when he did arrive he was looking crumpled and breathless. She was thrown because he was on his own. She felt she should ask after Stout. It was as if a husband had turned up at a dinner party without his wife.

‘Oh,’ Porteous said. ‘We’re very busy…’ She had the impression that he’d been rushing around all day.

‘You don’t mind if my friend joins us. He’s responsible for most of the information.’

‘No,’ Porteous said. ‘Of course.’ Though he seemed surprised. Perhaps he thought she wasn’t the sort to have friends.

They sat in the lounge where he had interviewed her on the evening of the school reunion.

‘I remembered something. Michael once mentioned the cemetery on the coast…’

Porteous’s head shot up. He’d been taking notes. It seemed an overreaction.

‘Which cemetery, Mrs Morton?’ The voice as bland and polite as always.

‘Near the lighthouse. Do you know it?’

‘I’ve heard of it certainly.’

‘I looked at the graves, narrowed down the possibilities. I think I’ve found Michael’s mother. She was called Maria Randle. If we’re right, Michael’s first name was Theo.’

Arthur took him through the dates and the family history. Eagerly. A magician pulling each new bit of information from his hat. ‘Theo’s father, Crispin, remarried his secretary Stella. They had a daughter. She died in a fire in the family home. Since then there’s been no mention of the boy.’

Porteous wrote meticulous notes, but Arthur seemed upset by his lack of reaction. He must have been expecting gratitude, to be welcomed with open arms into the investigation.

‘You don’t seem surprised,’ he said. ‘Had you worked all that out for yourself then?’

‘No, Mr Lee, you’ve been very helpful.’ Still polite but dismissive. Porteous turned his attention back to Hannah. ‘When did you say you were at the cemetery?’

‘Yesterday evening.’ She added in a rush, ‘I did try to phone you then.’

‘Did you?’

‘There’s something else. I’ve remembered the party after the school play.’

‘Ah,’ Porteous said. ‘Michael and the young Lady Macbeth. Yes. Mr Johnson told us about that.’

‘Yes. And the next morning Michael phoned me. He sounded anxious, scared even.’

‘Tell me, Mrs Morton, why are you telling me this now? It’s not something you’d have forgotten. Seeing your boyfriend with another girl. Not when you remembered other details so clearly.’

She was saved from the need to answer because her mobile phone rang. It was Rosie.

‘Mum. Something terrible’s happened.’

She was almost screaming and Arthur and Porteous couldn’t help overhearing. They both stared out of the window but Hannah could tell they were listening.

‘What is it?’ Her first thought was Jonathan. A car accident. He drove like a maniac.

Rosie was panting, trying to steady her voice so she could speak.

‘It’s Mel,’ Rosie said. ‘She’s dead. Someone found her body today on one of the footpaths by the cemetery. She was stabbed.’

Hannah’s first thought was, Thank God it’s not Rosie. Then she pictured her daughter frightened and alone in the house.

‘We’re coming,’ she said. ‘Leaving straight away.’

She clicked off the phone and stood up. Porteous was already on his feet, blocking the door. ‘Do you know Melanie Gillespie, Mrs Morton?’

‘Not well. She was my daughter’s best friend.’

‘Why?’ Arthur asked.

Porteous looked down at him as if he were considering whether or not to answer. ‘I’m running the investigation into her murder.’

‘A bit far from your patch, isn’t it?’

Hannah knew what Arthur was up to. Being deliberately provocative in the hope of prising more information from the detective.

Porteous hesitated then chose his words carefully. ‘We have reason to believe that the deaths of Michael Grey and Melanie Gillespie are connected. Go back to your daughter, Mrs Morton. Of course she’s upset. I’ll be in touch shortly when I’ve checked the information you’ve given me.’ He paused. ‘You’ve nothing more to tell me now? About your visit to the cemetery?’

‘No!’ She understood for the first time how Audrey had felt, when she’d crumpled in a heap on the floor.

‘There will be more questions. Of course you understand that.’ He turned and let himself out.