As She Left It: A Novel

by Catriona McPherson

  “So he couldn’t have been in there.”

  “Couldn’t have been. And that’s what I told Fishbo. And that’s why he kept the ice pop quiet for me.”

  At that moment, the coughing started again upstairs in the bedroom, and Opal and Pep listened to it in silence for a while. The retching was worse at the end of the bout this time, but eventually he quieted again.

  “Hoo-yah!” he said. “Still down there, old friend?”

  “You okay?” Pep called up to him.

  “I’m okay,” the voice came back down. “Lost my damn lunch on my damn pee-jays, all the same.”

  “Lovely!” said Pep, getting to his feet. He shook his head and laughed, looking down at Opal. “Can’t say I’m not repaying him.”

  “No-o,” said Opal slowly. “But if you want to say thanks in a big way, I’ve thought of how.”

  “Bigger than putting up with him for all these long years? Listening to his yakking on and acting like a nurse in a striped pinny?”

  “Well, nicer,” Opal said. “A what do you call it—a grand gesture. Not just housework and stuff.”

  “Yeah?” said Pep.

  “He really wants to see his family again,” Opal said. “Or at least hear some news from them.”

  But Pep was shaking his head, that same twisted smile on his face as the last time Opal had tried to talk to him about Fishbo going home. “You just keep out of it, Opal love,” he said. “Take it from me and don’t go meddling.”

  “Pep?” came Fishbo’s voice, high and querulous.

  “I’m coming, I’m coming,” Pep shouted. “Just having a word with Opal Jones.”

  “Don’t you bring me any visitors up here.” Fishbo sounded panicked now. “I ain’t fit for comp’ny. You tell her to git gone. No visitors today.”

  “Looks like you’re on your own changing the pajamas,” said Opal. She waited until he had gone inside and shut the door before she went over the road and in at her own.

  It was cool in the living room—or as cool as anywhere would be tonight anyway—and it was pleasant to stand there halfway back where she could see all four houses across the way without any chance of being seen. Even more pleasant to let herself feel the relief of understanding.

  Margaret had told them all. That was why Zula looked so shifty, and why Mrs. Pickess had tried to cover her slip. They knew, but they didn’t know Opal knew. She nodded to herself and turned towards the kitchen to go and make her tea.

  She never got there. She stopped in the doorway and felt the relief drain out of her, could have sworn she could feel it literally pouring out through the soles of her feet, sucking her in to the carpet, leaving her heavy and soft like she’d never move again. Margaret told them to keep the secret, but why had they?

  Pep Kendal was keeping his head down. Fishbo was being a good friend, keeping his down too. But why had Zula Joshi not told the police it was Friday instead of Saturday morning? Friday, when her boys were safely at school. And Mrs. Pickess! Mrs. Pickess, who tattled on Nicola for no reason at all. Would Vonnie Pickess ever have kept Margaret’s secret in a million years?

  Opal put her two hands on the frame of the kitchen door and pulled herself forwards, setting her feet moving again, making herself stumble out onto the linoleum. It’s the heat, she told herself. I’m light-headed from heat, that’s all. And I’ve drunk nothing since dinner break either. I’m dehydrated; that’s all that’s wrong with me.

  But it wasn’t. It was this: if Margaret told Zula, Mrs. Pickess, and Fishbo—all her old neighbors of years and years—wouldn’t she have told Nicola too? And wouldn’t Nicola have blabbed a juicy story like that to a hundred different people on one of her wild Friday nights? Or down at the pub or sitting on a bus or any of the places she opened her mouth and let every single little bit of her business come dolloping out? Only she couldn’t have, could she? Because nobody knew. And so she must have had some really good reason for keeping her trap shut.

  Opal stood at the sink, stared out into the yard, and tried to think of some way around it. There wasn’t one. If Zula choosing not to get her boys out from under suspicion was weird, if Mrs. Pickess not dropping her old friend right in it and calling it her Christian duty was weirder, Nicola Jones managing to keep something quiet for any other reason except to save her own neck was a million miles the weirdest idea of all.

  TWENTY-ONE

  ON THE OTHER HAND, though, the new discovery—finding out that everyone in Mote Street knew everything—meant that Opal wasn’t special after all. She hadn’t been chosen by Margaret, there was no golden thread. Which meant she could stop anytime she wanted. No harm no foul, whatever that meant.

  Only that would be like saying she was too scared to go on. Scared of what she might find out. About her own mother. Like she was saying she thought her mum might really have hurt a child. Somewhere deep down inside her, like a pit dug under a tunnel that ran below the basement of her memories, something moved. She ignored it. And decided to carry on.

  So she cleared off her kitchen table and sat down with a clean pad of paper. If she was going to keep her mind focused on the right questions—not let it drift off around a load of useless old junk that was nothing to do with anything (absolutely nothing at all)—she had to get organised about it. Pep was in the clear. Opal wrote his name at the top of the first sheet and drew a thick, deliberate tick beside it. He was no fiddler. She’d been in and out of his house from when she could toddle over and hold a cornet to her lips. And there were four others who would have seen Craig Southgate in the back of the van when they opened up at the function room in Shipley to take out their gear. She went over the tick again, even harder. Pep had a good innocent reason for keeping his head down and not telling the police how long the kid had been missing before his mum and granny knew.

  But what about—Opal turned to a new page—Fishbo? He had heard Margaret’s confession—the first time she’d made it, Pep said—and he hadn’t breathed a word. Loyalty, Pep reckoned. He didn’t want to get his old friend hauled over the coals. But couldn’t his loyalty help Pep anyway? If Fish told the cops that Craig disappeared on Friday, he could also tell them there was no way the boy could have ended up locked inside the van. So was it loyalty to Margaret then? Was Fishbo particularly close to Margaret? Or Denny, maybe? Opal didn’t think so. Maybe he just didn’t want to get involved, or he didn’t think much of the law, or by the time Margaret told him it was too late to make any difference anyway and his kind heart didn’t want to see her shamed and hurting.

  After all, Opal wasn’t about to tell on Margaret, was she? Why couldn’t Fishbo feel the same? She put her pen against the paper by his name, but instead of the big black tick she was planning, she found herself drawing a question mark there.

  Because Opal knew why she’d never tell the police a single damn thing. She hated the bastards. Hated the way they looked at her mum and the way they spoke, all kind and calm on the surface with their little eyes like pebbles and nothing moving in their faces except their thin mouths. She had never seen a cop with big eyes or full lips. Not one. Asking all their questions, calling her love and pet and darling, and poke poke poking to get her to say what they wanted to hear. “Do you get to school every day, love?” “Do you get your breakfast, dinner, and tea every day, pet?” “Does anyone who comes to the house ever bother you, my darling?”

  “Aye, you!” Opal had yelled at that one and clattered off upstairs to get away from him.

  She went to pour herself a drink of water, letting the tap run and run, waiting for it to come through cold.

  Was it the same for Fishbo? It was hard for Opal to think of old men who wore jackets and hats as needing to worry about what the cops might think. Hard for her to think about Pep and Fishbo and the rest of the Mote Street boys except as grownups to her little-girl memories of them, but if she tried—twenty-five and no fool—she supposed that Eugene Gordon arriving in Leeds all those years ago probably hadn’t got a hero’s welcome and might
well have had a few set-tos that left him supporting whoever was on the other side from the boys in blue.

  She felt the water start to turn and she put both her hands under the tap, letting it stream over her wrists, like her granny used to do when she felt too hot. It didn’t make any difference, though, and it was a hell of a waste of water so she took them out again, held a glass under and drained it in a gulp. In fact, since she was on a meter, she thought, she should probably keep a big jug in the fridge instead of running it cold every time she was thirsty. She’d get herself a jug and start that sometime.

  Right, she thought, sitting down again, drying her hands by pressing them against her neck and shoulders, trying to push some of the coolness from the water drops into her skin. Right then. New page. Who’s next?

  Vonnie Pickess. Now, there was a puzzle. Because for one thing, Mrs. Pickess didn’t have a loyal, friendly, generous bone in her body—and never mind a bone: try a cell, try a chromosome, try a gene (if that was smaller). And for two, Mrs. Pickess obviously didn’t have a problem cuddling up to the cops because she had blabbed to them about Nicola being pals with Craig’s dad, hadn’t she? A big fat question mark for Vonnie.

  Which left Zula, Mr. Joshi, Birbal, Doolal, Sanjit, Advay, and Vikram. She put them all on one page, and for a long moment she sat and stared across the kitchen. Because how was she supposed to know whether all the funny little looks and funny little comments that had freaked her out that day over at Zula’s were anything to do with anything? How did she know what to write down and what to ignore?

  Start with everything, she decided, and then narrow it down. She had to eliminate people—like Pep already, and Fishbo soon to follow as soon as she could get him to tell her how much the pigs had hassled him when he was fresh off the boat—and she had to eliminate … What would she call them? Inconsistencies? Niggles? Shadows? Knots?

  Why did Zula want Opal to come back to Mote Street?

  Why did she sleep in Nicola’s room?

  What was Zula on about with the canoes and mountain bikes?

  Why did she offer to help with DIY?

  Opal sat and looked at the four questions she had written and tried to see any connection to Craig at all. At a stretch, if one of the Joshis knew something they shouldn’t, and if Nicola found out, then it would make sense for Zula to chum up with Nicola and make sure she didn’t spill the beans. That was fair enough. But what would be the point of getting Opal back here? And what could Opal’s hobbies or home improvements have to do with it? No, the more she thought about it, the surer she was that three out of those four … niggles … would be eliminated from her inquiry just as soon as she could think up a way to ask about them without Zula thinking she’d gone off her trolley.

  And that left the big one. Question 5: Why did Zula Joshi not tell the police that Craig disappeared at a time her boys had alibis for? It was a straight choice, wasn’t it? Protect Margaret or protect her five sons.

  Unless it was after the police stopped coming that Zula found out. She could maybe ask one of the boys in the course of an innocent conversation. Less suspicious than tackling Zula again.

  She could hear the boys right now, at least two of them anyway, out on the street: an engine running, loud voices, laughter. She could go out and say hello. After all, she’d been here nearly a month and only waved at them so far. She went through into the living room and edged around the armchair in front of the window so that she could see who was there—Vik in one of the cars and his dad standing at the kerb, holding a steaming mug, wearing Zula’s headset with the microphone pushed away to the side so he could drink his tea. Perfect, she thought. I’ll just nip over and say hello.

  But she heard the car leaving as she was smoothing her hair and finding her flip-flops, and by the time she opened her front door, Vikram was gone and Mr. Joshi was standing there on his own.

  “Hiya,” said Opal, coming over to stand beside him.

  “Zuleika’s not in, love,” he said.

  “Well,” said Opal, “it’ll be quiet on a Monday, isn’t it?”

  “It is if the dispatch coordinator’s not there to keep it busy.”

  “Right,” said Opal, thinking if that was the mood he was in there was no point trying to strike up any kind of conversation at all. “Where is she then?”

  “Morrison’s,” said Mr. Joshi. “Doing the big shop.”

  “Blimey, I thought she was on a girls’ night out, the way you were talking,” said Opal, and at last he laughed. He took a last swig of tea and then threw the dregs into the long grass and dock leaves behind him.

  “She’d rather be in Morrison’s than at the Chippendales any day,” he said. “She’ll be back here with foot spas and paper shredders and ten new shirts that won’t fit me. ‘But they were on offer’. The woman’s a maniac when she gets her hands on a trolley.”

  “You should give me a list and I’d bring it home from Tesco for you,” Opal said.

  “Me?” said Mr. Joshi. “I’m worse, love. That’s why Zul goes on her own. I bought a garden shed the last time I went. And a garden table and six chairs. Solid teak.”

  “You don’t even have a garden,” said Opal, laughing.

  “They were on offer,” Mr. Joshi said. Then he sighed. “So you’re back again, are you? Back to stay?”

  “Yep,” said Opal. “Thanks to—” She bit it off. “Thanks to my mum never getting her act together to tell anyone I left, I’m still the official tenant. Unless someone tells them I’m not.”

  “Bah, that’s nothing to do with anyone else,” Mr. Joshi said, and the easy way he spoke left Opal almost sure he knew nothing and couldn’t care less whether Opal lived there or someone new moved in. And that left her almost sure too that Zula’s funny little hints and odd little looks were summat or nowt, as her granddad used to say.

  “True,” Opal said. “But neighbors, you know. I don’t mean you!”

  “Ah yes, the Neighborhood Witch,” said Mr. Joshi, wiggling his eyebrows at Mrs. Pickess’s front door.

  “Mr. Joshi!” said Opal.

  “She’s out,” he said. “She won’t hear me.”

  “Yeah, she’s at her book club. Mr. Kendal told me.”

  “Book club! How can you read a book on a broomstick?”

  “Stop it! She’s not that bad.” But Mr. Joshi, for once, had not a trace of a smile on his face.

  “I used to think she was harmless too,” he said. “But we went through a right bad time here while you were away, Opal love. And she showed her true colours then, I can tell you.”

  “You mean when Craig Southgate disappeared?” Opal said.

  “I never found out for sure,” Mr. Joshi said, “but who else would have told the police that Pep and Fish were the type to hurt a little boy? Filth like that when we’d known them for years.”

  Opal said nothing. Zula was right: if Mr. Joshi had found out it was his own son who poured that little drop of poison into a policeman’s ear, he would skin the boy alive.

  “It must have been a terrible time,” she said.

  Mr. Joshi cleared his throat. “Long ago,” he said. He cleared his throat again. “I shouldn’t be talking to you about old troubles anyway. I should be saying sorry about your mum.”

  “Yeah,” said Opal. She never knew what to say when people said that to her. It wasn’t their fault. Why were they sorry?

  “If there’s ever anything we can do.” That was another thing. What could anyone do? Then she remembered why she’d come over and saw a way in.

  “I know,” she said. “Zula told me. But”—she took a deep breath and decided to go for it—“she’s done enough, really, hasn’t she?”

  “Zul?” said Mr. Joshi. “Likes of what?”

  “Oh, I just mean taking such good care of my mum. I mean, they got quite close towards the end.”

  “Did they?” said Mr. Joshi.

  That’s genuine surprise, Opal thought.

  “And you’re all right, are you?”

/>   “How d’you mean?” Opal asked. “Oh, you mean getting jobs done in the house and all that. Yeah, Zula already told me to ask, but really I’m not planning anything.”

  “Eh?” said Mr. Joshi. “What jobs?”

  “DIY, like I told Zula. Can’t afford it and wouldn’t know what to do anyway.”

  “What are you on about?” said Mr. Joshi. Opal could have hugged him. He didn’t have a clue about any of those so-called niggles, knots, and shadows. Not a single clue. Maybe she had just imagined all the sideways looks that day. Maybe she could cross off the whole Joshi family. Solid alibis, nothing to hide.

  “Zula told me that you and the boys would help me out if I needed any work doing,” she said.

  “Did she?” said Mr. Joshi, and he looked a tiny bit ruffled now. “Well that’s my dear wife for you. If she’s not buying stuff we don’t need, she’s giving away stuff we do.” Then he turned and looked over the rooftops in the direction of the main road. “Here she comes, talk of the devil,” he said.

  “How can you tell it’s her?” Opal said. She could hear a car, but it could have been anyone.

  “That is the mating call of a two-year-old Mondeo driven in the wrong gear and weighed down by … ooh … a hundred and fifty quid’s worth of stuff we’ll never find a use for, and another hundred quid’s worth of food we won’t fit in the freezer that’s still full from last time.”

  And right enough, Zula’s Mondeo was turning up at the bottom of the street. She waved when she saw Opal.

  “Good to see you!” she called through the open window as she drew in beside them. “Stay and have some supper with us, Opal love. I’ve got three hot chickens off the rotisserie and they won’t keep. Sunil, go and sit down. There’s sandals for you try on.”

  “Maniac,” said Mr. Joshi to Opal under his breath. “Pop the boot, crazy woman, and I’ll start bringing it in.” He handed two bags to Opal and told her to take them to the kitchen.