China Roses

by Jo Bannister

  And perhaps it still was, because she returned the porcelain flower carefully to the cabinet and closed the door. All the same, she couldn’t leave the subject without some kind of jibe. ‘There’s no law, you know, that says you have to hold onto everything your mother ever bought. Who are you saving them for – the boys? I doubt they’ll thank you. You should get rid of the roses, replace them with something a bit more masculine.’

  ‘What do you suggest,’ he asked, nettled. ‘Guns through the ages? The hand-grenade as art?’

  She laughed, that merry tinkling laugh that had once charmed him utterly. ‘At least that would be something they wouldn’t be too embarrassed to show their friends. Really, Gabriel, what does a collection of china roses say about a man?’

  Ash sighed. ‘Cathy, we both know you do not give a toss, and never have, about the contents of my late mother’s china cabinet. I haven’t seen you for two years. There must be something more important we could be discussing.’

  She turned abruptly to face him. ‘You want to talk about the divorce? Fine, we’ll talk about the divorce. But don’t expect me to give up my claim to my sons just because it would be convenient for you. I carried them for nine months each. I gave birth to them. I raised them for more than half their lives. They are my sons at least as much as yours. I’m not going to pretend they never happened.’

  ‘If you want,’ Ash said slowly, ‘you can leave a forwarding address with me. A bank or post office if you don’t want me to know where you live. When they come of age, I’ll let them have it. They can contact you if they want to.’

  ‘You’re talking of the best part of a decade,’ Cathy pointed out tartly. ‘Not two years, not four. Gilbert won’t be eighteen for another eight years. Guy won’t for another ten.’

  ‘In all the circumstances, joint custody isn’t really an option.’

  ‘It could be. If I cleared my name.’

  So that was it. Blackmail. He wished he could be surprised. He said again, ‘What is it you want, Cathy?’

  Hazel planned to spend Saturday evening in the bath. A long, hot one. Bubbles, holiday brochures, glass of wine. Well, half-glass: you never knew when the phone would ring and there’d be a juicy corpse to draw a chalk line round.

  She’d been out much of the day after all, her weekend eroded by the exigencies of the service as they so often were. She’d done her week’s shopping, and on her way home she’d stopped at Meadowvale to check her messages.

  One of the old ladies had been in to say she’d spotted the young man in the navy-blue anorak hovering outside the Post Office. So – nipping back to Railway Street just long enough to put her frozens into her freezer – Hazel had gone to the Post Office and viewed their security camera footage, only to find that the young man in the navy-blue anorak was a young woman in a dark green anorak with a baby in a sling.

  Informed of her error, and over a cup of tea – the best china, more roses – the old lady was deeply apologetic. ‘It’s these glasses, dear. I don’t know what it is but the optician can’t seem to get the prescription right any more.’

  Hazel was reassuring. ‘We’d much rather check out a possible lead than not hear about an actual one.’ More tea arrived, and cake. And by then it was somehow, unaccountably, early evening.

  The moment she got home she knew she had the house to herself again. Luxuriating in the peace and quiet – she liked David Sperrin, but there was nothing restful about his company – she shut the bathroom window against the winter’s chill and watched the rising steam mist up the mirror and billow along the ceiling.

  Her head was nodding over her brochure, her long fair hair dipping its ends in the bathwater, her weary limbs soaking up the heat, when the phone rang.

  It wasn’t a nice juicy corpse. It was Pete Byrfield, full of worry and apologies. ‘We’ve had a reactor. Did David tell you?’

  ‘What?’ She was still groggy from the bath, didn’t make the connection right away. And then, though she’d spent her formative years in the country, the Bests weren’t a farming family. No farmer’s daughter would have heard those words and thought of Sizewell B.

  ‘Only the one,’ said Byrfield, ‘but we’re just as locked-down as if it had been a dozen. I don’t understand it. She wasn’t a recent arrival – we haven’t had any recent arrivals; the last time we bought something in was the Fleckvieh bull, and he tested clear. But there’s no doubt about it – it wasn’t an inconclusive response, she was a clear reactor. We’ve spent the whole day dividing up the herd, trying to isolate the ones that would have had most contact with her from those that hadn’t. Tracy’s practically in tears. She wants me to sell the lot and replace them with sheep.’

  Hazel had met the new Countess Byrfield. She doubted if tears were in her repertoire, and she’d always preferred her sheep to the Byrfield cattle anyway. But they’d clearly had a shock, and a horrible, exhausting day, and if Pete needed a shoulder to cry on, Hazel didn’t begrudge him the use of hers. ‘What will you do?’

  ‘There’s not much we can do,’ said Byrfield glumly. ‘APHA – the animal health people – will pick up the cow. And the vet’ll be back in a couple of months to retest the whole herd, then again two months later. Till we’ve had two clear tests we can’t move anything, so we’re stuck with feeding a couple of dozen bullocks that were market-ready, knowing that by the time we’re released from restrictions they’ll be overweight and the butchers won’t pay top whack for them.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Hazel feelingly. ‘You could have done without this, couldn’t you?’

  ‘We could,’ agreed Byrfield. ‘But it happens on the best regulated farms, so they tell me. Anyway, I just wanted to apologise again. Tomorrow won’t be so manic: I’ll hit the road after milking, pick him up about noon.’

  It must have been the bath, or possibly the wine. Hazel didn’t understand. ‘Pick who up?’

  ‘David, of course.’ Byrfield sounded surprised. ‘I meant to be there this afternoon, but – as I say – I couldn’t make it. Surely he told you?’

  The effects of both the hot bath and the cold prosecco were dissipating fast. ‘I haven’t seen David since before lunch. He wasn’t here when I got home an hour ago. He isn’t here now. I thought you’d been for him.’

  ‘Er …’ Ninety miles apart, they both glanced at the time. ‘Could he have gone to the pub?’

  ‘Of course he hasn’t gone to the pub,’ snapped Hazel. ‘He’s got his wrist in plaster and his ribs strapped up: it’s only the painkillers keeping him on his feet. I know where he is. Well, I don’t know where he is, but I know what he’s done. He’s gone to ground. I told him it was time he went home, and he didn’t want to. He wanted to stay here until we could figure out what had happened. I explained that might not be a realistic option, but you know what David’s like – you’ve a better chance of knocking some sense into an active volcano! He’s sloped off while I was at work and found somewhere to hole up – a small hotel or a B&B somewhere. He knew I’d assume he was with you, and you’d assume he was with me. When did you talk to him?’

  ‘About ten this morning,’ said Byrfield. ‘He said you were out, he didn’t know when you’d be back. Hazel, we need to find him. He’s not well enough to be fending for himself.’

  Privately, Hazel suspected that Sperrin – who’d survived a fall onto a moving train, had scrambled under the shunting yard fence, had walked into Norbold from the hospital out on the ring road and had now outmanoeuvred both of them – was rather tougher than his brother gave him credit for; or if not tougher, at least more determined, which could get you as far. He’d been in the living room when she dropped her shopping off. By then he’d already spoken to Byrfield, knew his ride home wasn’t going to materialise. Not telling her had been a deliberate choice.

  ‘Wherever he is, he’ll be fine for tonight. I’ll track him down tomorrow. He must have called a taxi – there are only a couple of local companies, I’ll talk to them in the morning. They’ll remember whe
re they took him. If they don’t want me going over their licences with a magnifying glass, they will,’ she added darkly. ‘I’ll have him rounded up by the time you get here.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked Byrfield, clucking like a mother hen. ‘This is David we’re talking about. You take your eyes off him for five minutes and anything can happen.’

  ‘Pete, I was in the bath when you called. I’m standing dripping on the lino right now. I am not climbing back into my clothes to go looking for your idiot brother. Whatever happened to him, it happened fifty miles from here. He’s as safe in the second-floor-back at the Elite Guest House’ – she pronounced it e-light, not as a joke but from habit, because Mrs Semple the proprietor had only ever seen the word written down and that was how she said it – ‘as he is in my spare room. Make yourself a hot drink and go to bed, and we’ll sort this out tomorrow. Either I’ll call you or David will.

  ‘And don’t worry,’ she added. ‘This is Norbold – nothing ever happens here.’

  TEN

  Hazel was wrong about the Elite Guest House, but only by a dozen metres or so. The taxi had deposited Sperrin, with nothing more than the clothes he stood up in, on the steps of Beaufort Lodge, Mrs Semple’s next-door neighbour in Utility Street. Norbold didn’t have a grand parade of tourist hotels in the way that Brighton and Bournemouth do. There was a motel on the ring road, and the faded and over-priced Midland that was built in the heyday of the railway, and there was Utility Street. The general feeling was that if you couldn’t find something to suit you in Utility Street, you could take your airs and graces up the motorway to Coventry.

  Mrs Semple’s neighbour Mrs Warburton knew immediately who Hazel was looking for. ‘You mean the gentleman who can’t pronounce Beaufort.’ She said it to rhyme with Newport.

  Hazel gave a tired sigh. ‘Let me guess. He then went on to give you a lecture on how he was right and you’d been saying it wrong all these years.’

  Mrs Warburton sniffed. ‘I see you know the gentleman.’

  Sperrin was in the residents’ lounge, poring over a week-old copy of the Norbold News. Hazel watched him for a moment through the open door, fighting the urge to throw something at him. ‘David, what are you doing here?’

  He tapped the newsprint with the fingers emerging from his plaster. ‘Cars for sale.’

  ‘I don’t mean here, in this room, I mean …’ Hazel heard the echo of what he’d said and changed direction. ‘You have a car.’

  ‘You have my car,’ he pointed out acidly. ‘No one can tell me when I’ll get it back. And the car-hire people don’t trust me not to wreck their shopping special by driving with a broken wrist.’

  ‘You may find your insurers take the same view,’ retorted Hazel. ‘You’re not fit to drive. You’re only just fit enough to be a passenger.’

  He ignored that, returned his attention to the small ads. Hazel took the paper out of his hand, folded it and put it down on the table beside him. When Sperrin scowled up at her she said, ‘You didn’t tell me Pete couldn’t come.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I didn’t want you to know,’ said Sperrin.

  ‘Because?’

  ‘Because if you’d known he couldn’t pick me up, you’d have driven me back to Byrfield yourself. And as I said before, I’m not ready to leave yet.’

  Hazel sank into one of the armchairs. ‘I don’t know what you think you can accomplish here. Whatever happened to you – whatever you did or didn’t do – happened fifty miles away. It was just the luck of the draw that you ended up in Norbold.’

  ‘That’s probably true,’ he acknowledged. ‘But this is where I started picking up the threads again. I can’t remember – by definition, I suppose – where I lost that chunk of my memory, but I do know this is where it started coming back. Yes, only bits of it – a shape, a name, fragmentary snippets of information dredged up from the bottom of the black lagoon. But here, in this stupid little town with its stupid little people, is where I started to catch hold of them.

  ‘If I leave here – if I go back to Byrfield, where everything’s familiar and every face belongs to my life before any of this happened – maybe I’ll lose that thread. It’s not very strong, and when it does pull something up it makes no sense, it doesn’t fit any kind of a pattern. But it’s still the only connection I have to those lost hours. I won’t risk breaking it. If I can’t do anything else, I’ll sit here in the Beaufort Lodge’ – he pronounced it as Mrs Warburton did, with a savage mocking grin – ‘and wait for the next piece of the jigsaw puzzle to surface. And if it takes weeks, it takes weeks; and if it takes months, well, it’s not as if I’ve anything better to do.’

  ‘You’re determined?’ She saw that he was. She sighed. ‘Then you’d better call Pete and tell him. He’s got enough to worry about right now without making a four-hour round trip for no good reason. He told you about the TB test?’

  Sperrin nodded.

  ‘Do you want to stay here? You can come home with me if you want.’

  ‘Yeah, all right.’ For a moment he looked furtive. ‘Will you tell Mrs Warburton?’

  ‘That you’re not going to be staying? Do you know,’ said Hazel wearily, ‘I don’t think she’ll mind a bit.’

  Sperrin had nothing to pack, and it was barely a quarter of a mile from Utility Street to Hazel’s house in Railway Street. They should have been there in under a minute. But as they drove round the corner, Sperrin saw the street-sign.

  ‘Siding Street. That’s where …’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hazel. After a moment’s hesitation she turned into the back street and slowed the car. ‘Wayne Budgen found you lying just about here. You’d crawled through that gap under the fence.’

  ‘Can we stop?’

  Hazel frowned. ‘There’s nothing to see.’

  ‘Stop anyway.’

  He climbed out, slowly, hissing in his teeth as the pain caught in his ribs, leaning on the car door for support. He looked up the road and down it. There was indeed nothing to see: not just no evidence of his being here, but no other vehicles, no one on foot, no indication of anyone watching from any of the tired little houses. It wasn’t because it was Sunday morning. It was because it was Siding Street. ‘It doesn’t look familiar.’

  ‘I don’t suppose it does. You were unconscious when Wayne found you.’

  ‘I wasn’t unconscious when I crawled through the fence.’

  ‘Pretty close to it, I think. On autopilot, anyway. That was a bad concussion you had. You’re lucky that a few missing hours is all you have to show for it.’

  ‘Lucky,’ he echoed, tasting the word. ‘Do you know, I don’t feel all that lucky.’

  Hazel shrugged. It wasn’t that she was unsympathetic, although there was little enough about David Sperrin to invite sympathy. But her sympathy could do him no service. If the memories didn’t come, somehow he would have to find his way forward without them; if they did, right now it was impossible to predict what that would mean. So far as Hazel could see, all he could realistically do for now was pack away everything that had happened to him in the last week and stow it in some mental attic where the rest of his life wouldn’t keep tripping over it.

  She said, ‘Whether or not you remember, nothing significant happened here. If you’re looking for something to jog your memory …’ She stopped there, abruptly, appalled at her own stupidity, but it was already too late.

  ‘… I need to go back to Myrton,’ finished Sperrin. ‘Yes. Now?’

  Hazel stared at him. ‘What do you mean, now?’

  ‘I mean, will you drive me to Myrton now? This morning. Or do I need to phone up about some of these cars?’ He’d torn the car ads page from the Norbold News, had it folded in his pocket.

  Hazel breathed heavily at him. ‘What about Pete? He’ll be leaving Byrfield just about now.’

  ‘There are these wonderful inventions,’ explained Sperrin, ‘you can talk to someone even if they’re miles away, they’re cal
led telephones. I’ll tell him not to bother. Look, Hazel, I’ll make a deal with you. Myrton’s halfway to Byrfield – if you want to get rid of me, you can take me the rest of the way after we’ve been to Myrton.’

  Hazel was conscious that if she started shouting at him, she wouldn’t be able to stop. Also, his deal had its attractions. She gave him a stony look. ‘I’ll have to OK it with my chief.’

  Sometimes Sunday was a day of rest for DCI Gorman, sometimes it wasn’t. As it happened, though, he was not at Meadowvale when Hazel called but enjoying the luxury of breakfast at the Swan Inn, overlooking the canal. Hazel heard him ordering more coffee as she explained.

  Slightly to her surprise, he agreed to the excursion. ‘Give it a try. Show him the bridge. If anything’s going to trigger a memory, that should.’

  ‘Do you think it will?’

  ‘Not really, no. But I could be wrong. If I am – and Hazel, this is not a suggestion, it’s not a request, it’s an order – do not attempt to follow up on your own. Call me. And don’t let Sperrin out of your sight.’

  This was the third time Hazel had travelled out to Myrton. It took well over an hour: very fast on the motorway section, very slow through the miles of rural lanes. Her first thought was to drive straight to the little humpback bridge and avoid the muddy lane and the tramp across the field. Then it occurred to her that those were the very things that might strike chords in his memory: that it was important for Sperrin to return to the scene the same way he had approached it the first time.

  So she drove up the farm lane, giving the grim-faced farmer a cheery wave as she passed his tractor and trying not to mind the way the ruts were shaking her suspension and the mud was splattering her gleaming sapphire paintwork. She parked where they’d found Sperrin’s Land Rover.

  She had her seat-belt off and was halfway through the door before she realised Sperrin was making no attempt to follow. For a moment she thought he was too sore, his cracked ribs jolted by the same ruts that had bludgeoned her springs, but that wasn’t it. He was staring ahead at the granite fingerpost that was the Myrton menhir. She raised an interrogative eyebrow at him.