As She Left It: A Novel

by Catriona McPherson

  Shelley flushed.

  “You told me her name,” said Opal. “On the phone.”

  And now Shelley put a fluttering hand up to her throat.

  “Did—Did I?”

  “None taken,” said Opal and went on her way. She was unstoppable. Take more than Shelley to slow her down. And she wasn’t just coming along after the little bed girl was dead and gone and telling her story either, because she was still there, alive and kicking. Well, alive anyway.

  And, okay, whoever had done bad things to Norah when she was little might be dead by now and past punishment, so you could ask what was the point. But Miss Fossett had put her head down and said “sorry, sorry” when Opal grabbed her arm. That was the point. She was a white-haired little old lady who’d told no one except her bedposts what was wrong, and a hundred and fifty years later (or however old she was), she was still apologising if someone hurt her arm.

  And, Opal told herself, it might have been some horrible schoolmistress with a bamboo cane or a priest or something. There might have been a coverup, and it might have happened for years and years or even be happening still.

  In fact—she was marching along by now, jaw set, flip-flops smacking against her heels with every angry stride—she knew “it” was happening still. “It” happened to little girls all the time. And “it” had happened to Craig Southgate, in Mote Street, just ten years ago. Some “it” or another anyway. Close enough.

  “Cool down, Curly,” said a voice. Opal swung round. There were two lads sitting on the low wall by the bins on the corner of Monkbridge Road, coke cans and cigarettes in their hands, laughing at her. Opal bared her teeth and made a noise like a cheetah, rasping from deep in her throat, making the lads shrink back, just for a moment, before they shook themselves and started again, whooping with laughter. Opal didn’t care; she’d scared them.

  She’d seen it in their eyes.

  NINETEEN

  AT THE BOTTOM OF Mote Street, she crossed her fingers and hoped that Fishbo wouldn’t see her and grab her for more practising. This silver wedding gig made her mouth turn dry every time she remembered. But she was out of luck. When she peeped round the corner of Pep Kendal’s house to see if the coast was clear, it was only to meet his eyes looking back at hers from where he was sitting on a dining chair set out on the pavement ten feet away.

  “She’s at her book group,” he said, twinkling.

  “Who?” said Opal

  “Vonnie,” he said. “Who else?”

  “A book group?” said Opal, coming round to join him. “For real?” Pep nodded. Opal hitched her backside up onto his living room windowsill and whistled through her teeth. “Sometimes it feels as if I’ve never been away and sometimes … Mrs. Pickess in a book group.” Pep laughed and stretched out in his chair until he was only touching it with his shoulder blades and the backs of his thighs, before relaxing again. “Anyway, it was you I was dodging, if you must know.”

  “What have I done?” he said.

  “Well, Mr. Fish, anyway. Roped me in for this weekend. I’m shitting bricks.”

  Pep waved his cigarette at her, his eyes screwed up, until he had caught his breath, exhaled the smoke, and could talk again.

  “You’re safe enough,” he said. “It’s off. Cancelled.”

  “They heard about me!” said Opal, and Pep laughed again.

  “Naw, we cancelled it, Opal love. The boys and me.” She told herself it was silly to be hurt, told herself it was their job and their reputation and of course they’d cancelled rather than let Opal makes fools of them all. “And don’t look like that, softie,” he said. “We cancelled on account of Fishbo.”

  “Huh?” Opal said. Pep held up one finger and cocked his head telling her to listen, so she cocked her head up too, to the same side, and found that she could hear a rattling, burbling cough drifting down from the open front bedroom window.

  “I had to get the doctor in,” Pep said. “Chest infection. No way he’ll be fit for Saturday.”

  “Cool,” said Opal and then flushed. “I mean—” She stopped to listen to another cough, or maybe a new phase of the same one. It was deeper now, each spasm of it making a clapping, hacking sound that Opal couldn’t imagine happening inside someone’s body, in their chest, without bones breaking. Nicola had sometimes had a hell of a cough in the winters, smoking too much and not eating enough, and one coal fire never really got the house really warm right through to the brick. But Opal had never heard a cough like this one, and she swallowed hard, trying not to shudder as she listened to it ebbing away at last, leaving Fishbo retching and moaning.

  “Okay?” Pep shouted up to the open window.

  “Hoo-yah!” said Fishbo’s voice, faintly. “Okay.”

  Opal noticed that Pep’s face was pale above his stubble and, in spite of the heat, the hairs that usually lay like a pelt all over his arms were standing up, stiff and fuzzy. He rubbed his hands over them as if warming himself and shuddered too.

  “I wish he’d move downstairs,” he said. “I didn’t get a wink last night with that racket. Never mind up and down all day with cups of tea.”

  But he didn’t sound annoyed. He sounded worried and for the first time—funny how you just accept things when you’re a kid—Opal thought about the fact that Fishbo had moved into Pep Kendal’s house, taken over a room to give music lessons in, and just stayed put there.

  “How long have you lived together?”

  “Eh?” said Pep. “We don’t live together. Bloody hell. He’s my lodger. Nineteen eighty-five, he moved in, more or less as soon as he gave up driving taxis and joined the band. Live together!” He lit another cigarette, flustered.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Opal said. “But come off it with the lodger bit. You wouldn’t be running up and down with tea or calling the doctor if he was a lodger, would you?”

  Pep blinked, considered it, and then acknowledged the point with a nod of the head, lips pushed out in a pout.

  “Call him a pet, then,” he said. “Like a parrot. More annoying than a bloody parrot, that’s all.”

  “Yeah, yeah, you can’t stand the sight of each other,” Opal said. “Lived in the same house my whole lifetime cos you annoy each other.”

  “Nothing annoys Fishbo,” said Pep. “That’s one of the things that makes him so irritating.” He looked up at the open bedroom window again. “I hope he can hear me, the old fart.”

  “But you must be fond of him,” Opal said. “All these years. You must be.” She was hoping to get the conversation round to his past, New Orleans and his family again; she couldn’t have predicted where it would suddenly swerve off to.

  “He’s been good to me,” Pep said, and for this he dropped his voice. In case the old fart heard him, Opal supposed. “Stuck by me when times were hard.”

  “And friends were few,” said Opal. She couldn’t remember where she had heard that, but it made Pep smile.

  “Certainly seemed that way,” he said. He had his cigarette in the corner of his mouth, making him squint, and with the low sun making him squint as well, he was grimacing like one of those old cowboys in the films, all screwed up against the desert dust as they stared into the distance. Except Pep wasn’t staring into the distance; he was looking up and down the street, letting his eyes rest on one house after another, like he was doing some kind of stock-take. When he was done, he shook his head slowly. “Fewer than I’d reckoned, anyway. Can I ask you something, Opal love?”

  She nodded. He cleared his throat and wet his lips with a smacking sound.

  “I know you didn’t come to visit,” he went on, “but maybe you talked to your mother on the phone? So I was thinking maybe you could clear it up for me.”

  “Clear up what?’ she asked.

  “Something that’s bothering me for years. Ten long years, if you must know.”

  “Ten years?” Opal echoed.

  “Since Craig Southgate died. Disappeared.” Opal had flinched at the word and hoped he hadn’t seen h
er. It didn’t mean anything. Everyone thought he had died, didn’t they? Everyone knew deep down that he must have. Pep saying it didn’t mean a thing.

  “What about it?” she said. He threw his cigarette down onto the pavement in front of him and ground it away to shreds with his heel.

  “You shouldn’t do that with slippers on,” Opal told him.

  “What about it”—Pep was bringing his foot up to rest on the opposite knee, craning to see his slipper sole and then flicking at it—“was that one of my dear neighbors in this close-knit community here told the police I was a kiddie-fiddler. That’s what about it.”

  “No!” said Opal. That wasn’t what Zula Joshi had told her Doolal had said. Not so clear and harsh as all that. It had just been a hint—bad enough—about all the men in the band, living together. Or maybe Zula couldn’t bring herself to tell the whole truth of it. And no wonder. “No,” Opal said again.

  “Oh yes,” said Pep, grimly. “Wife left, Fish never married, kids in and out for music lessons … you wouldn’t believe what a couple of coppers can make of that if they’ve a mind to.”

  “I was in and out for music lessons,” Opal said. “Jesus!”

  “Aye and when you left, your mother came over more than once asking Fishbo why you’d upped sticks. What had he done to you to make you go. Asked me too. That’s what made me think, years later, she might have said summat.”

  “What was she on about?” said Opal. “I never said anything about not being looked after over here. Was she drunk?”

  “Well, she was breathing, love, put it that way,” Pep said. He paused then. “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be,” said Opal. “It’s a fair comment. What a nerve, though, blaming you for me leaving. That wasn’t exactly Disneyland, was it?” She nodded across at her own house.

  “So she never mentioned owt about it?” Pep said. “Never said to you who she suspected? When Craig d—disappeared?” He had checked himself, making Opal think he’d noticed her flinching before.

  “We weren’t in touch,” she said. “I didn’t even know about Craig till I got back again and Margaret told me the story.”

  “Right,” Pep said, and he slumped a bit in his seat. Opal wished she could have told him different. It had to hurt, him not knowing who’d said something like that. Maybe she could explain. Tell him that Doolal was angry and lashing out, and that his mum was mortified and if his dad knew he’d get a thrashing. Then she shook the thought away. Her granddad always used to say to her—when she was scared of ghosts in her cupboard at night, this was—that it was the living you had to mind out for and forget the dead. Nicola was past caring now, but Doolal could still get his beautiful teeth knocked down his throat if Pep had a mind for payback.

  “Wouldn’t put it past her, mind you,” she began. “If she’d fling that kind of accusation about after I left home, she’d do the same after Craig went, wouldn’t she? I mean, she was pally with his dad, and I think the police took a long hard look at her.”

  “Yeah?” said Pep.

  “Oh yes,” Opal said. “Mrs. Pickess sent them over.”

  “Like pass the bloody parcel,” Pep said. “Vonnie set them on Nic, Nic set them on me?”

  “And then Fishbo set them on someone else to get them off your back?” Opal said, thinking that there was no one much left, since the Joshis had had their turn without anyone pointing the finger.

  “Eh? Fishbo?”

  “I thought that’s what you meant about him being good to you.”

  “No, not Fish. Not his style at all. Wouldn’t harm a fly. He just kept his trap shut, that’s all.”

  “What about?” said Opal, thinking of the way Pep Kendal had said died like that.

  “Little Craig,” Pep said. “About what really happened that night.” Then he stopped and turned right round in his seat to face her. “You’re a sensible girl, Opal, aren’t you? You’d not get any daft ideas?”

  Opal stared at him.

  “What night?” she said, because Craig disappeared on a Saturday morning, so far as anyone knew. But Mr. Kendal was back in the past, and he didn’t hear her.

  TWENTY

  OPAL’S HEART WAS BANGING in her chest again, and she wondered if the pulse in the soft part of her throat was showing.

  “He used to hide in the van, see?” Pep said. “Not just the van—he’d hide anywhere he could—but the van was a big draw. Many’s the time we’d find him in there mucking about with our kit and have to drag him out by the scruff. And once he got locked in there on a hot day and he was like a little grease spot by the time we found him.” He gave a snort that might have been laughter. “Fishbo wanted to throw a bucket of water over him, but I talked him down to a wet flannel and

  a suck of an ice cube. Margaret and Denny just laughed and gave him a clip round the ear.”

  “But surely, that Saturday morning, you checked the van,” Opal said. “I don’t see what’s worrying you.”

  “Well, see, once or twice we didn’t find him, that’s the trouble,” Pep said. “Once we didn’t find him until we’d got all the way to Bradford and started unloading. Margaret and Denny weren’t on the phone, and I didn’t want to get Mrs. Pickess involved and have her wagging her finger at Margaret forevermore, so we just drove him back again and dumped him out in the back lane. I brought him once—the Bradford time—and the boys just had to do without a piano till I was back again. And another time we were out at Pudsey, and it was a short set, just a spot at a festival, so we just bought him a coke and a bag of crisps and … ”

  “What did Margaret say?” Opal asked.

  “She didn’t know,” Pep said. “It was two hours all told he was gone. And when I took him back in the gate from the lane, she just seemed to think he’d been hanging around out of sight for a while.”

  “You must have wondered why they were in such a state the morning he disappeared for good then,” Opal said.

  “Yeah,” Pep said. “I was that. At first anyway. The thing is, we’d been away out to a gig in Shipley the night before.”

  “The night before?” said Opal.

  “And Craig had been in the van the night before. Sometime the afternoon before anyway.”

  “How do you know?”

  “A wrapper,” said Pep. “From an ice pop. You know those things? A blue one. It was tucked right down the side of the wheel arch.”

  “Yeah, but you said he ducked into the van a lot. He could have left that anytime, couldn’t he?”

  Pep shook his head.

  “Margaret still had five more in a box in her freezer. And she’d never bought that kind before. The police made quite a thing out of that blue ice pop. They looked all over for the wrapper. Never found it.”

  “They didn’t find it in the van?”

  “I told them we’d been late back from Shipley Friday night and didn’t even unload the gear. Just locked it up tight and didn’t open it again until Karen came out shouting and wailing on the Saturday morning. No more than the truth. It was later, next day, when I found the wrapper.”

  “But … ” Opal couldn’t see her way through this at all. “If Craig disappeared on Saturday morning, it’s no matter where he ate an ice pop on Friday night. The cops wouldn’t have been interested anyway.”

  “True enough,” said Pep. “If he disappeared Saturday morning. But he didn’t, did he?”

  Opal was sure she could hear the beat of her heart even over the rasping in and out of her breath. What was he saying? How did he know when Craig went missing? What exactly had Fishbo covered up for him?

  “Why are you telling me this?” she said. She heard the old dining chair he was sitting on creak as he turned to look at her again, even more sharply this time.

  “You okay?” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Shouldn’t rake stuff over, I suppose.”

  Of course she wasn’t okay. It was happening again. Zula knew when Craig went missing. She grudged her boys being questioned about Saturday morning when she kne
w little Craig had gone missing Friday night. And Vonnie Pickess knew too; she’d let it slip that Friday night parties might be part of the story some way. And now here was Pep Kendal saying it straight out. Craig had gone missing on Friday.

  And how did they all know that if none of them had anything to do with where he’d gone?

  “I’m fine,” she said.

  “I thought you said Margaret told you all about it,” Pep said.

  “She—She did.”

  “Of course she did,” Pep said. He started a laugh that ended up as a sigh and shook his head. “She can’t help herself.”

  “Oh!” Opal said, and she sat back against the living room window so hard she could hear the putty grating. “That’s how you know? Margaret told you?”

  “What did you think?”

  “Margaret told me it was a secret. She said she had to tell someone or she’d burst.”

  “She probably says that every time,” Pep said. “Or maybe she’s lost track. She’s on six different pills for her nerves, you know. She told Fishbo first and you want to be sure she said it was a secret to him. Of course, he came straight out and told me. Said he’d sooner die than tell the cops Margaret’s secret and get me into trouble.”

  “Would you have got into trouble?” Opal said.

  “If I’d told the police he’d been in the van the night he went missing? I think that would be enough, don’t you? And if I told them I’d had him away to Bradford and out at Pudsey and never told his granny? Added to someone round here telling them I was … What do you think?”

  “But he didn’t actually stow away with you that last night, did he?” Opal said. Pep sat forward and clasped his hands, staring at the pavement, where a short line of ants was rippling along a crack in the concrete, scaling a crown of dandelion and disappearing down its far side.

  “I’ve gone over it and over it,” he said. “And there’s no way. The van was open when it was empty, but when it’s empty there’s nowhere to hide. As soon as we’d put the gear in we locked it up, and the next time we opened it was at Shipley in the function room car park, and I stood in the back the whole time while the boys were unloading. It’s a rough old place; I’d never leave a van open and no one watching.”