The Sleeping and the Dead (3 page)

He judged them, just as a betting man would pick a horse from a racing paper, using a mixture of fact, experience and superstition. There were three. After those he had picked a dozen or so more
to follow up if nothing came of the first group. He set the three sheets before him in alphabetical order and read them again.

The first was Alan Brownscombe, the boy who could swim like a fish. His parents still lived in Cranford. They came originally from the West Country and had planned on moving back there when they
retired, but even after retirement they had stayed where they were – ‘otherwise how would Alan know where to find us?’

Porteous had spoken to the mother. She had worked as a dinner lady in Cranwell Village First School. The father had worked for British Gas and taken a redundancy package when the company was
privatized. Mrs Brownscombe could remember exactly what happened when Alan disappeared. She had the story pat, word for word, like a favourite bedtime tale repeated over and over to a child. He was
the eldest of three, a bright boy, and he’d gone to Leeds University to read electrical engineering. He’d never been away from home before. Perhaps he was homesick. Perhaps the course
was more demanding than he’d expected. At any rate when she managed to get through to him on the phone she sensed he was unhappy. It was Easter when he went missing. He was nineteen. It was
1978, a bit outside Porteous’s preferred time-scale but not by much. Alan had come home for the holidays and managed to get a job on the caravan site by the lake, cleaning the vans before the
start of the season, doing small repairs. One day he set off for work and never arrived. He didn’t take anything with him other than the packet of cheese-and-pickle sandwiches she’d
made up for his lunch. So far as they knew he had no money. He didn’t return to university and they never saw him again.

‘You say he was unhappy,’ Porteous had said. The woman’s West Country accent was preserved intact. If they could tell her what happened to her son, even if he were dead,
she’d feel she could move home. He’d wanted to help her. ‘Could he have been clinically depressed?’

‘I don’t know,’ she’d said. ‘It wasn’t something you thought of then. Not with a nineteen-year-old lad. And he was home with us. We’d not have sent him
back if he didn’t want to go, whatever sort of noises his father was making.’

The height and the build fitted the body in the lake. She gave Porteous the name of Alan’s dentist without asking why he wanted to know.

Michael Grey was reported missing only after his foster parents had died and the executors of their wills had tried to trace him. They’d left him the small house where they’d been
living. He’d have been twenty-two at the time, but when a firm of solicitors tried to track him down they discovered that no one had seen him since he was eighteen. That would have been in
1972. It was a peculiar case but Porteous tried not to read too much into it. Social Services seemed not to feel too much responsibility for kids in care once they were sixteen. They drifted in a
twilight world of hard-to-let flats, hostels and mates’ floors. And if the next of kin had been named as one of the executors presumably there wouldn’t have been much incentive to trace
the boy. Perhaps they would have received the profit from the house in his absence. The description was vague. Porteous had the feeling that the person reporting Michael as missing had never seen
him. Nothing ruled him out from being the dead boy in the lake, but there was nothing to suggest it. There was nothing as useful as a photograph.

Carl Jackson had lived twenty miles from Cranford with his parents, who farmed sheep on the other side of the lake. He beamed gappily from a school snap attached to the file. He was sixteen and
had learning difficulties and was described by the constable who’d taken the first missing-person report as ‘mentally retarded’. Because of his vulnerable status there’d
been a big search for him, involving not only the police and mountain-rescue team but also members of the public. He attended Cranford Adult Training Centre and was collected every morning from the
end of the farm track by a bus which picked up all the trainees from rural areas. His parents were elderly, considered by the staff at the centre as overprotective. Usually one of them waited with
him for the bus and was there to meet him in the evening. In an attempt to encourage Carl’s independence it was suggested that he could make the half-mile walk down the track alone. What
could go wrong? The track led only to the farmhouse. It would be impossible for him to get lost. But one day, the third that this experiment in independent living was tried, he failed to arrive
home. His parents waited less than half an hour before going out to look for him. Two hours later they alerted the police. It was as if he had disappeared into thin air.

Porteous had phoned the contact number without much hope of success. The Jacksons had been in their fifties when Carl had disappeared in 1969. He was answered by a machine. ‘You’re
through to Balk Farm Computing. No one is available to take your call . . .’ The farmhouse had been sold to yuppies, the land dispersed. It was happening to hill farms all over the north of
England. It had happened to the farm where he was living.

He looked again at the photo. Carl was dressed in a check shirt, corduroy trousers and a hand-knitted V-neck pullover. Old man’s clothes. It was hard to imagine him wearing a hippy leather
bracelet.

The long case clock in the corner chimed the half-hour. Half-past midnight. Porteous rinsed out his glass, stoppered the bottle and put it in the fridge. In bed he took ten minutes to go through
the breathing exercise which usually helped him to relax, but he slept fitfully, haunted by the grainy photographs of Carl Jackson and Alan Brownscombe, by the fat white body in the mortuary and by
Carver’s grin.

They sat in Porteous’s office, which was so small that their knees almost touched, making an effort to get on.

Eddie Stout had seen Porteous cart off the boxes of files the night before and wondered what was going on. Was the man some sort of control freak? That wasn’t his job. Didn’t he
trust the rest of the team? But Eddie was a Christian, a lay minister on the Methodist circuit, out every Sunday preaching to a handful of old ladies in the windswept chapels in the hills, so he
had to forgive Porteous for being promoted over him and he had to make allowances. It was a strain for him, Porteous could see that. The silence between them was awkward.

Porteous liked Stout. Perhaps it would have been easier if the man had been less hospitable and generous. Why was Stout trying so hard? When Porteous had first arrived Stout had invited him to
dinner at his home – an overture of friendship which had been impossible for Porteous to refuse. It had been an unexpectedly pleasant evening but Porteous felt he had disappointed Stout
because he had given too little of himself away. He had taken flowers and chocolates as gifts instead of wine. Methodists didn’t drink, did they? But it seemed that nowadays they did, and
after several glasses of home-brewed beer Stout had become mellow, almost Dickensian, sitting in a fat armchair, puffing his pipe, surrounded by evidence of his family. Porteous had drunk little
and maintained his guard.

Stout’s wife, Bet, was plump and motherly. There were two grown-up children, settled down with babies of their own, and photographs of them were on the mantelpiece and the window-sills.
Then there was Ruthie, the baby, ten years younger than the others, a wild adolescent with cropped hair, who had eaten with them, entertaining them with stories about school. Afterwards she had
disappeared off to a party with her boyfriend, but not without giving her father a big hug first.

‘You’ve no family?’ Bet had asked, as if it were a loss in his life, something to be pitied, to be compensated for with comforting casseroles and sticky puddings.

He had shaken his head. ‘Never married.’

He had seen them looking at each other and had read their thoughts. At first they had considered that he might be one of them – a Christian. Perhaps of the happy clappy born-again variety,
saving himself for the right girl. That might have explained his reluctance to go to the pub after work, to join in the swearing, the banter about women. But he hadn’t used the right phrases,
as recognizable as a Masonic handshake. He hadn’t made himself known.

So then they had wondered if he might be gay. That too was something he was used to. It was a way for colleagues to explain his apparent celibacy, his love of art and theatre. He had heard the
sniggers and the jokes, though he never responded to them. Eddie and Bet hadn’t sniggered – they were too kind and too tolerant for that. But they had felt cheated because he
hadn’t been more open with them and they were curious. Later he was sure they would ask Ruthie what she thought. Porteous wondered what the answer would be.

Now, in his office, so close to Eddie that he could smell the tobacco, he had a sudden urge to explain. It would have been like talking to a priest or a shrink: ‘Ten years ago I had a
nervous breakdown. Stress. Now I avoid it. You know, prevention better than cure. And I take the medication. I like my life ordered, predictable. That’s why I live alone. So I can control
what goes on. It runs in the family, actually, psychiatric disorder. My dad was a nutter. He jumped off a bridge in front of the Birmingham Intercity. It’s like diabetes. Genetic.’

But it wasn’t like diabetes. Diabetes would have been no big deal; his promotion wouldn’t have been a cause for self-congratulation on the part of his superiors. ‘This shows
that we take equal opportunities seriously, Peter. You’re a trailblazer. But we suggest that you don’t make a song and dance about it. You need authority, the confidence, you know, of
your troops. Your past illness is no business of anyone else, is it?’

He was aware suddenly of Stout watching him, waiting for him to speak. God, he thought, it won’t take him long to work out that I’m a headcase if I sit here with my mouth open,
staring into space. He pulled the three files out of his briefcase, lay them on the desk.

‘Do you remember any of these, Eddie?’

Stout read them quickly, flicking his eyes occasionally back to his boss’s face.

‘Carl Jackson. I remember that one. I was up on the hill with everyone else searching, even when I’d come off shift. It was March but the weather was foul. Low mist. Rain. I thought
I’d been mad to move away from the coast.’

‘Could it be our chap in the lake?’

‘I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.’ He seemed angry with himself.

‘So it could be him?’

‘Carl was murdered, if that’s what you mean. There’s no way he just wandered away from the track and got lost.’

‘But it doesn’t say anything here about a murder investigation.’

‘There wasn’t one. Everyone was content to put it down as an accident. According to the press, if anyone was to blame it was the social worker who suggested that he should be allowed
to walk home on his own. But I talked to her in the day centre and I was impressed. She said Carl was deaf. No one had picked up how profound that disability was, and she thought he was more
capable than his parents allowed him to be. In the few months since she’d known him he’d begun to read quite fluently. She thought he might catch up enough to move on to the technical
college, perhaps hold down a real job. But his parents were horrified by those plans. They wanted nothing to do with them.’

‘Hard, I suppose, to stop being protective after all those years.’

‘There was more to it than that. They were a strange family.’ It was Stout’s turn to stare into space, to drag back the memories, image by image.

‘You think one of the parents was responsible for his death?’

‘Not directly. The wife, Sarah, had a younger brother. I can’t believe I can’t remember the name. He caused me enough sleepless nights at the time. He didn’t live at the
farm but he’d never married and he spent a lot of time there. He was assistant manager in a hardware shop in town. It’s been closed for years but it was a big place then, dealt in
agricultural supplies and machinery too. In his spare time he got involved in community work.’ He turned his head so he wasn’t looking directly at Porteous. ‘Quite a saint if you
listened to Sarah. He was a scout leader in Cranford for years and ran the youth club in our church until I persuaded the committee it wasn’t such a good idea.’

‘Child abuse?’

‘Nothing proved. Never charged.’ Stout paused. ‘It was before all the child-safety legislation, don’t forget. Before Childline. Some people even treated it as a bit of a
joke. If a pervy old man liked to touch young lads’ behinds when they were horsing around, so what? At least it kept the kids off the streets. And no one else wanted the responsibility of
organizing the group.’

‘What put you on to him?’

‘Rumours. Some of the things the kids said. The fact that he was such a loner. He never liked working with other adults. If he had an assistant it was an older lad who’d gone through
the group. I had just enough to persuade my church to drop him. Tactfully of course, with a letter of thanks and a ten-quid book token. But not enough to take it further.’

‘Until Carl Jackson disappeared.’

‘Even then it wasn’t a central line of investigation. I was a young DC. New to the district. No connections. I passed on the rumours and some enquiries were made but it seemed that
the bloke had an alibi for the time Carl disappeared.’ Porteous waited for Stout to continue but he was frowning, preoccupied. ‘I’ve just remembered his name. It was Reeves. Alec
Reeves.’

‘You don’t think much of the alibi?’

‘It was half-day closing at the shop so his boss couldn’t vouch for him. Reeves claimed he was at home taking one of his lads through his paces for the Queen’s Scout
badge.’

‘And the boy bore it out?’

‘Too scared or too involved not to. So far as I know no other checks were made on where they both were that afternoon.’

‘Would you be able to dig out the name of the witness?’

‘Aye. I made sure I kept all my notes on that one. I knew it would come back to haunt me.’