The Sleeping and the Dead (6 page)

That’s what I try to do, Porteous thought. But I never manage it. ‘What do you make of the “known as” in the phrase “known as Michael Grey”?’

‘I supposed it meant the Brices considered him their son, even though he used a name different from theirs.’

‘Not that Michael Grey was an assumed name?’

Stout looked up sharply from his tea. ‘That would complicate matters.’

‘Wouldn’t it just.’ But, thought Porteous, if that’s the way it is I can’t change it, so there’s no point worrying.

They sat for a moment in silence. The coffin was carried from the church and replaced in the hearse, which drove slowly away. The congregation had spilled out on to the street and elderly men in
shiny black suits stood chatting in the sunshine. One of the ladies behind the counter plucked up courage to call over to them. ‘Can we get you anything else, Mr Stout?’

‘Some more tea, Mavis, would be lovely.’

Still there were no other customers. After the tea had been presented Porteous said, ‘What steps did the solicitor take to trace Michael Grey?’

‘Much the same as we’ve done today. He contacted the school. He thought it most likely that Michael had gone on to further education and that the school would have the name of the
college or university even if it couldn’t give him his home address. At that time he thought it would be quite straightforward to find him.’

‘But it wasn’t.’

‘Apparently Michael left quite suddenly without taking A levels.’

‘The Brices must have thought they knew where he was or surely they would have got in touch with us.’

‘I don’t know. Unless they talked to a friend about it, we’ll never find out. The solicitor did report him as a missing person when he couldn’t get an address from the
school. His main objective was to prove that he’d done everything possible to find Michael. Apparently that’s a legal requirement. He advertised for information in the local Cranford
paper, the
Newcastle Chronicle
and the London
Evening Standard
. It’s standard procedure.’

‘No response?’

‘Not even from cranks.’

‘What did the solicitor do then?’

‘He didn’t feel there was anything else he could do. He’d fulfilled all his legal obligations.’

‘What happened to the money?’

‘It went to Sylvia Brice’s next of kin. Because she survived her husband by a couple of days
her
relative was the beneficiary, not his. It was actually a nephew, a commodity
broker in the city. He hardly needed the cash. According to the solicitor all the family have done well for themselves. Perhaps that’s why the Brices decided to leave the estate to
Michael.’

‘I’m glad they never knew,’ Porteous said, ‘that he couldn’t be traced.’

‘There is one complication.’

‘Only one?’

‘The solicitor’s very keen for us to fix a date of death.’

‘Aren’t we all!’

Stout ignored the sarcasm and ploughed on. ‘You see, if Michael’s death predated the Brices’ then the arrangement by which the nephew inherited was fair and legal. But suppose
Michael was still alive when the Brices had the car crash. Suppose he’d just gone to earth somewhere and he was killed and dumped in the lake later. Then that would affect the
inheritance.’

‘In what way?’

‘The cash should have gone to
his
next of kin, not the Brices.’

Porteous found that he could concentrate again on the detail. The dreadful restlessness seemed to have left him. ‘I don’t think that’s likely, do you? He wasn’t the sort
of lad I imagined at first. I don’t see him disappearing for months, moving from one squat to another, spending time inside. He was bright. He had a lot to lose. I think he was killed soon
after he was missed at school.’

Outside, the congregation had dispersed. The grandmothers were banging pots in the kitchen to show they wanted to lock up.

Stout stood up. ‘What now?’

‘Back to the station to organize a press conference. It’s time we went public. The school gave me a photo, a cutting from the local rag, but it could be anyone. Let’s see if
the paper still has the original. I know it happened nearly thirty years ago, but people round here have good memories. There’ll be friends still living in the town. And enemies. Come on,
Eddie. Let’s make you a star.’

In fact Porteous took the press conference early the following evening. There was all the media interest he could have wished for. The body had been discovered because of the
drought and the drought was a big story, so the national press was there. He had wanted to hold the conference in the high-school hall. The only certainty he had in the case was that Michael Grey
had been a pupil at Cranford Grammar. He thought it might jog a few memories. But the head teacher wasn’t keen. He seemed to think that even after all those years murder would be bad for the
school’s image. He used as an excuse the fact that the hall had already been hired out for an event in the evening. Nothing Porteous said could make him change his mind.

Instead they used the community centre next to Stout’s church. It still smelled of the lunch that had been provided for the pensioners’ club which had met earlier in the day –
steamed fish and cabbage. Porteous sat on the stage behind a trestle table hidden by a white cloth. His answers to the press emphasized his ignorance. He didn’t have an exact date of death.
He hadn’t traced the boy’s relatives. That was why he needed their help. All he had was a body that looked like a lump of lard – this he phrased more delicately – and an old
photo of a white-haired boy with a knife.

There was one moment of excitement. In the second row sat a big woman who worked for the town’s free paper. When the photo was passed round Porteous could have sworn that she recognized
the face. But when he looked for her later she had rushed away.

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.