Jenny shook his hand, he had a firm grip but soft skin.
‘Dorothy has told me a lot about you,’ Thomas said.
‘I wish I could say the same,’ Jenny said.
The meeting room on the first floor had great views of Salisbury Crags and Arthur’s Seat. The summits of both were peppered with tourists and walkers, little dots on the skyline.
Thomas had a brown folder open in front of him. Jenny studied him as he flicked through some papers. Mid-fifties, fit, smartly presented, widowed. He was a catch.
He shook his head. ‘There’s not much here, to be honest.’
He flicked a page over, some handwritten notes, an official-looking form.
‘Simple missing-person case, never resolved. He was reported missing by his wife, but we did nothing at first. Then she called again two days later, still no sign, so an officer was assigned the case. They checked his bank and phone, no activity. Nothing on his email, and this was before social media.’
‘How did I not know about this if he was working for us?’ Dorothy said.
Thomas ran a finger along a page. ‘Officer Daniels spoke to Jim and Archie, they said they didn’t know anything, there was nothing suspicious.’
‘The police interviewed Archie?’
‘Not an interview, just a chat.’
Dorothy turned to Jenny. ‘I asked Archie, he never mentioned it.’
‘Maybe he forgot.’
Dorothy shook her head. ‘Officer Daniels, is he still here?’
‘She,’ Thomas said. ‘Lorna Daniels went on maternity five years ago, never came back.’
Jenny looked out of the window, someone was flying a kite on the grass below the cliffs. ‘Do you have contact information for her?’
Thomas put the paper down. ‘I can get it but I’m not sure she’ll be any use. We deal with hundreds of cases, this was a long time ago. She would’ve only spent a few hours on it, given our workloads.’
‘Nevertheless,’ Jenny said.
Dorothy sighed. ‘I need to speak to Archie again.’
‘You think he’s involved?’
Dorothy tucked her hair behind her ear. Thomas watched her, and Jenny watched Thomas. They were friends for sure, but maybe more. Jenny tried to picture her mum sneaking around behind Dad’s back with this guy. Given her history, it wasn’t impossible.
‘I don’t know what to think,’ Dorothy said.
Thomas closed the folder and slid it across. Dorothy placed her fingers on it and closed her eyes as if trying to divine deeper meaning from it, some inner truth.
‘I’m sorry there’s not more here,’ Thomas said. ‘But if there’s anything else I can do, please ask.’
Dorothy opened her eyes. It took a moment for her to focus on the room.
Jenny cleared her throat. ‘Actually, there’s another missing person you could look into for us.’
Thomas frowned and looked from Jenny to Dorothy, who nodded.
16
DOROTHY
Hermitage Drive was a line of large, sturdy Victorian houses on the shoulder of Blackford Hill, with views south over to the Braids. Number eleven appeared a little dishevelled compared to some of its neighbours, but it was still an impressive beast.
Dorothy rang the bell and waited. Eventually she saw motion through the frosted glass, then the door opened. Jacob Glassman was short and hunched over, maybe around ninety, walking with a frame. His hair needed cutting and he’d recently had a bad shave, leaving blood spots and missed bits at his nose and under his chin. But his eyes were clear as he waved her inside, checking the street behind her.
‘Mrs Skelf,’ he said.
‘Dorothy.’
He extended a hand. ‘And I’m Jacob, thank you for coming.’
He shuffled towards a room at the back of the house and she followed. It was a large, open-plan dining room and kitchen, bookshelves lined with old, leather-bound volumes along one wall, bright abstract paintings above. There was a remarkable view out the window down to the Braid Burn in the valley below the house.
Jacob settled in a seat at the dining table, pushing his frame to the side. ‘Did you bring the cameras?’
He waved for her to sit down, so she pulled out a chair opposite.
‘What?’
‘The spy cameras, Mr Skelf was supposed to install them yesterday.’
There was a rattle in his voice, a heaviness to each breath.
‘I’m sorry, there’s been quite a lot of upheaval with Jim’s passing,’ Dorothy said. ‘I couldn’t find his notes on you. Perhaps you could remind me?’
He frowned, looked agitated. ‘I told your husband all this.’
‘And again, I’m sorry.’
‘It’s very simple,’ Jacob said. ‘She’s stealing from me, moving my stuff about too.’
‘Susan?’
His eyes widened. ‘Yes.’
‘And who is she?’
‘She’s my carer.’ He said this last word with disdain. ‘That’s what they call themselves these days. Not nurses. Not that I need anyone to care for me.’
Dorothy had checked the whiteboard. ‘Susan Raymond, is that right?’
‘Yes, yes. My delightful daughter-in-law hired her, so that her and my son wouldn’t have to visit. Not that they ever did that anyway, of course.’
‘So she’s from a private company.’
Jacob lifted a trembling hand to his cardigan pocket, pulled out a card, handed it over. Bright Life Care, a website and telephone number. ‘But she’s no good.’
‘What makes you think she’s stealing from you?’
He got annoyed. ‘Because things have gone missing, of course. I’m not stupid.’
‘OK.’
‘Just because I’m old, doesn’t mean I’m senile. People treat you like an imbecile half the time, just because your body’s fucked.’
Dorothy raised her eyebrows.
He cleared his throat. ‘Oh, the old man can swear? Whoopee. Fuck, shit, bollocks. I lectured on linguistics for forty years, I know all about the power of language. And I came over as a teenager on the Kindertransport, so I’ve had plenty to swear about in my time. My wife has been dead for fifteen years, my children don’t want to spend any time with me, and my nurse is stealing my shit. So forgive me if the odd swearword slips out.’
Dorothy smiled. ‘Not a problem.’
He narrowed his eyes. ‘Where are you from?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Your accent,’ he said. ‘America?’
‘California originally,’ she said. ‘But I’ve been here fifty years.’
He nodded. ‘But they never leave you, do they? Those formative years.’
His stare seemed to burrow into her, and she found herself picturing the waves crashing against the pier on Pismo Beach all those years ago. ‘No, I suppose they don’t.’
‘My wife was Ukrainian,’ he said, nodding at the pictures on the wall. ‘She painted them. She lived through Stalin’s famine as a small child. Incredible, really.’
He coughed again, brought a thin hand to his mouth. ‘So you’ll bring the cameras?’
Dorothy knew they had motion-activated cameras in Jim’s office, but she’d never had to set them up or use them.
‘Tell me more about what’s gone missing.’
He shook his head. ‘Mostly money, but other things too. An old television that was in one of the upstairs rooms. I had an iPad that I can’t find anywhere. Even some books, first editions. And food.’
‘Why would she take your food?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have you confronted her about it?’
‘I want evidence first. So you’ll bring the cameras?’
He was anxious, the tremor in his hand worse.
‘OK,’ Dorothy said, wondering if she’d be able to figure out how they worked.
There was a sound from the hall, a key in the front door, then it opened.
‘Hello, Mr Glassman.’
Jacob tensed up, eyes wide. ‘That’s her. She’s not supposed to be back.’
‘She has a key, how did that happen?’
Jacob shrugged. ‘My daughter-in-law.’
A round young woman wearing lots of make-up and large hoop earrings came into the room and stopped when she saw Dorothy.
‘Hello, there,’ she said.
‘Hi.’
Jacob’s hand shook as he reached for his walking frame and stood. ‘I wasn’t expecting you back.’
‘Forgot my phone,’ Susan said, nodding at it on the kitchen worktop. She scoped Dorothy. ‘We don’t get many visitors, do we Mr Glassman?’
Her voice was too loud, as if Jacob was deaf.
Dorothy stood. ‘I’m Dorothy, a former colleague of Jacob’s. At the linguistics department.’
‘Right.’
‘I was just passing, thought I’d pop in and say hello. But I’ll get out of your hair.’
Jacob was shuffling towards the front door now, and Dorothy smiled at Susan as she passed, got a tight smile in response. She could feel Susan’s eyes on her all the way to the front door. She noticed a stairlift fitted on the stairs as she reached the front door and slid past Jacob.
He raised his eyebrows and spoke softly. ‘Is she still watching?’
Dorothy nodded.
‘She’s not in tomorrow morning, can you come back then?’
Dorothy thought about her own daughter back living with her again, her granddaughter just down the road, a strong network of women supporting each other. She thought about Jacob, alone in his big house.
‘Of course,’ she said.
Judging by the numbers of cars parked on the road outside and along the paths in the graveyard, this was going to be a busy one. As Archie drove the hearse to the crematorium entrance, Dorothy saw a few smokers sucking on cigarettes and stubbing them out. They scuttled inside as the funeral car pulled up behind the hearse.
Seafield Crem was a chunky art deco 1930s build, tall thin windows and columns, half covered in spreading vines like it was partly organic. Dorothy took a breath and got out, smoothing her skirt and tugging on the hem of her jacket. Archie opened the rear of the hearse as the family spilled out of the car behind, three men arching their backs, a woman keeping her head down, nose pressed into a tissue. This was Gina O’Donnell’s family – dad, brother, sister and her husband. The sister, Orla, had organised the funeral, her dad too distraught to handle the details. She was brunette with green eyes and a sharp tongue, a hard look on her face, but then that was probably the circumstances. Dorothy was a little surprised they hadn’t gone bigger on the viewing and ceremony, being Irish, but no two funerals were the same, no two people experienced grief the same way.
Dorothy went to Orla as the men and Archie pulled the coffin along the rollers in the hearse and eased it onto their shoulders. At least they had enough people. Dorothy would have to think about that for future services, with Jim gone they had one less person to shoulder the weight. Dorothy had done it occasionally when she had to, but she was seventy now, she couldn’t carry the weight of the dead forever.
Orla let out a gasp when she saw the coffin. Dorothy put her hand on Orla’s arm then felt a sudden, overwhelming wave of emptiness sweep through her. She pictured Jim’s burning body in the garden then flashed to an imaginary funeral, all the people they’d buried and burned in the last five decades standing in a colossal cathedral, smiling and applauding as the man who committed them to death was carried into the place in a bright-red coffin on the shoulders of the babies they’d buried, the foetuses, the stillborn, the teenage suicides and car-crash victims and overdoses and murders and stupid mistakes and even more stupid accidents, drownings, electrocutions, stabbings, decapitations, bodies crushed and impaled, bloated and dismembered, scooping up the pieces from a railway line or an industrial blender, skulls flattened by concrete blocks or masonry, rib cages and pelvises crushed by articulated lorries, a never-ending sea of death and destruction, and Jim was at the head of it all, had dealt with it his whole life and now it was Dorothy’s turn.
She felt her legs go from under her and collapsed, stroking the fabric of Orla’s skirt as she went down. She lay on the hard ground, the palms of her hands scraped and sticky with flecks of gravel where she’d put them out to protect herself.
The four men with the coffin stared. Archie clearly wanted to run over and help but if he released his corner of Gina’s coffin, the whole thing would unbalance.
‘Are you all right?’ Orla said, rolling vowels in a Cork accent.
Dorothy blinked and brushed at her hands, which stung. The sun seemed too bright in the sky. She looked at the crematorium and thought she saw the vines moving, reaching out to wrap around her, pull her into the vegetation, make her one with the earth, reduce her to constituent molecules, just like her dead husband. She could smell the dirt and trees, pollen sucked into her lungs, and she could smell the sewage plant across the road, imagined the atoms of people’s excrement mingling with her own to form a new kind of life. Somewhere in the trees behind her sparrows were chattering, the trill of wings flapping as they scuttled from branch to branch, and she longed to be up there with them.
‘I’m fine,’ she said, getting to her knees, which ached. She was an old woman now. She accepted that as the way of the world, but right now she despised her body, the wreck it had become, a collection of failing parts waiting to end. And at her core was a hole where her love had been, where her husband had been, where everything she invested in their relationship was lost because he hadn’t been truthful.
‘I’m fine,’ she said again.
She pushed herself up to standing, felt the weight of her skull, throbbing pressure through her body.
‘Are you sure?’ Orla said.
The men were still watching her, holding the coffin, as Dorothy had a breakdown or whatever it was.
She nodded and the men shuffled into the building. Archie threw her a worried look, lines across his forehead, eyes narrow.
She brushed the lap of her skirt as Orla offered the crook of her elbow to take.
‘Thank you,’ Dorothy said, and let herself be led inside by a woman she didn’t know, to the funeral of another woman she didn’t know. But as Dorothy was realising, she didn’t really know anyone.
17
HANNAH
She looked at the menu, full of ham hocks and fish she’d never heard of. Montpelier’s wasn’t cheap but Dad was paying, Hannah liked to choose somewhere decent for his guilt lunch. Montpelier’s was a magnet for the rich Morningside brigade, full of old money and aspiring Tories, posh students who didn’t make it to Oxbridge. There were hunt paintings on the wall and a sense of extreme deference from the white-clad staff. Hannah sipped her Malbec. She had no idea if it was a good wine but it was £38 a bottle.
‘Here’s to a lovely guilt lunch,’ she said.
Craig smiled and raised his glass. ‘Cheers.’
‘Guilt lunch’ was a joke they shared. They’d established a weekly get-together not long after Craig left Jenny to shack up with Fiona, graduating over the years from Maccy Ds and KFC to pub food and now this. Maybe in a couple of years the guilt lunch would stretch to a Michelin star or two.
‘So how are you coping?’ Craig said.
It took a moment for Hannah to realise he was referring to Grandpa.
‘Fine.’
‘And your mum?’
‘She’s OK.’
‘It can’t be easy for any of you.’
Hannah nodded. ‘We’re keeping busy, funerals to deal with. And a case.’
‘For the private investigator’s?’
Hannah took a drink and sucked her teeth as the wine went down. She swirled the glass, watched the legs drag down the side.
‘Mel is missing,’ she said.
‘Your flatmate?’
‘Yeah.’
Craig had met her once or twice at the flat in passing, Hannah remembered, and one day months ago when their guilt
lunch spread into the afternoon, Indy and Mel coming to meet her just as Craig was leaving.
‘Maybe she went to her parents,’ Craig said. ‘Or a boyfriend.’
Hannah shook her head. ‘We tried all that.’
‘We?’
‘Me and Mum.’
‘The pair of you are looking into it?’
‘Sure.’
‘Do you know how to do that?’
‘As much as anyone.’
‘So where have you got to?’
‘I talked to her boyfriend and Mum spoke to a tutor. I had lunch with her brother yesterday.’
‘Anything?’
‘She had a secret phone. I have her regular phone, but she was getting messages on another one.’
‘Are you sure this is a good idea?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You and your mum are both grieving, your mum especially. Her dad has just died, remember.’
‘So?’
‘It’s a stressful time.’
She wondered how she would feel if Craig died suddenly. But that was different, he was in his forties, Jim was seventy. His death wasn’t expected, but he’d had a good life. Indy was always coming back home from the funerals of kids, teenagers, young parents, crying about the loss of potential. That’s what hurt most, the death of hope that the next generation will be better than the last.
‘I think Mel’s case is keeping her mind off that.’
‘That’s living in denial.’
‘Maybe,’ Hannah said. ‘But what’s the alternative, let it overwhelm you?’
Their starters came, terrine for him, scallops for her. The place was busy and Hannah let herself get lost in the hubbub, enjoyed being in a communal space, part of the human ritual of eating together that went back millennia. She was a little drunk, she wasn’t used to wine. The plates went away and mains arrived, lamb tagine and the famous ham hock. They made small talk, a distance between them, ten years of living apart that a weekly guilt lunch couldn’t hide. She asked about her cute half-sister and Craig talked glowingly. Hannah wondered if he was a different dad this time round. Why do guys get a second chance? She should hate him for the way he treated Mum, the way he left them, but ten years made a difference. She felt older than she was, more mature, something forced on her by circumstance. She had a sudden realisation that she didn’t need her dad in her life, but still wanted him somehow. That made her happy and sad. She really had drunk too much wine.
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