The Sleeping and the Dead (19 page)

‘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.

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.