The Missing Witness

by Jo Smedley

  I glanced up now and again into the kitchen. Irene and Fiona seemed in full flow. The cup of tea entirely forgotten. I wondered what they were talking about. Whether Irene had got Fiona into discussing what we needed to know, namely who had the children while Geoff disappeared.

  Janice was still mid flow into her experiences with ventouse, the saga of the dwindling heartbeat, her mother as birthing partner because Sean couldn’t cope with hospitals, the student doctor, a mistake with the gas and air, when a familiar face peaked over the wall: Lou.

  “Hello Janice! Is this Nicholas? Goodness he’s grown! I’ve not seen him in a few months and look at him! He’s walking and everything!”

  “Just! How was Thailand?” Janice called back.

  “Oh, great. They have the most fantastic people, and the architecture is amazing, and…oh! Hello!” She smiled at me. “Didn’t I bump into you at the crem?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I caught your tissue.” I smiled. Joe didn’t remember me, but clearly Lou did. Women looked at the faces. We’d reacted to each other. The face had gone in.

  “I thought I recognised you. I live next door. Well, I don’t now, but I did. It’s just Mum and Pete now. Look at him standing!” she gushed to Janice’s clear delight.

  Lou obviously loved children as much as Lesley was supposed to have done.

  “We grew up together,” Janice told me, proud mother smile stretched across her face. “Lou’s almost family.”

  “Come on over!” She called to her. “Mum’s got a cuppa on. Though I think we’ve missed out on the first brew. Come and tell me all about Thailand.”

  The head ducked back over the wall and I could hear rustling as Lou walked around the fence and towards the front of the house. Very shortly there was a squeak from a side gate and Lou walked into the back garden.

  She was wearing a pair of skinny jeans. The sort I never even fitted into even before I had Lillian. For lack of a better description, she was all stick and hair today. She had a tight top on, tucked into her jeans, which just went to emphasise how petite her little waist actually was. Joe would be able to stretch his arms right round it and meet himself at the shoulders again. Adding to my jealousy was her non-fake tan, which I hadn’t noticed before due to her crying. Her face had been redder and tear streaked the last time we had met. Altogether she was a picture of health and vitality. I dreaded to think what sort of impression I was making on her.

  She crouched down next to Nicholas, who in typical baby fashion totally ignored her. He was currently more interested in throwing sand onto the patio.

  “Wow, Janice. He’s so like his dad.”

  I looked at Nicholas. Having never met Mr Janice, I had always thought Nicholas looked a lot like her. He did have several features the same. But Lou clearly knew Janice’s other half to spot the similarities.

  “Lou? Lou! Is that you hopped over wall?” Fiona called out from the kitchen.

  Lou straightened up. “Walked round, Auntie Fi. Couldn’t hop over in these.” She stroked her jeans. I wouldn’t be able to walk or squat in them let alone jump, but Lou had seemed to manage the first two activities fine.

  Fiona came out, Irene in her wake. She waggled her eyebrows at me. Waggle good? Waggle bad? It was hard to tell. I gave up trying. If I was here on a baby group play date, whether Irene had finished her interrogations, or still had a way to go, it was irrelevant. We would be here for a good hour yet. Besides I hadn’t had my promised cup of tea yet.

  Fiona and Lou hugged like old friends.

  “I’ll pop the kettle on dahlin’. We’re about due another brew.”

  Janice coughed. “Erm… We haven’t even had a first one yet mum.”

  “Oh… did I not? I’m sure I did… yes, it’s sitting there on the kitchen table.”

  “And we are?”

  “Outside. Yeah yeah. I remember what looking after babies is like. I’ll make you another.”

  Fiona wandered back inside, but Irene stayed with us.

  “So you’re Lou from next door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fiona has been telling me all about you. I’m so sorry about your sister.”

  Lou pulled that frown that we’d seen so often. The I’m-really-sad-about-it, but I’m not going to show you, instead you’ll get this turned down I’m-coping-with-it face. The one that says, ‘frown’ in much the same way text messages say ‘lol’ when all you’re really doing is smirking.

  I’d seen Lou when she was grieving. I knew this face really meant ‘We aren’t talking about that. If we don’t talk about it, I don’t break.’

  “Are you cousins then?” I asked, trying a different subject. Irene’s comment had cut the conversation dead and she didn’t appear to have any recovery plan, which was unlike her. I wasn’t sure whether this was her “in character” or just a mistake on her part. It was hard to tell the difference.

  “No,” Janice giggled. “Lou just calls mum Auntie because we’ve lived next door for years. Mum used to sit for the girls when Gill went out and they were always in and out when we were younger. Paul and Lou are nearly the same age. Lou’s the older sister I never had.”

  She walked over and gave Lou a ‘best friend’ hug, a stand alongside you shoulder squeeze. Lou looked grateful for the contact. The talk of Lesley had clearly upskittled her brave face. She looked on the verge of tears. Janice had probably noticed too, as she abruptly changed the subject.

  “So then. Tell us all about Thailand. What’s it like? Meet any hunky men?”

  “I’m still with Joe.”

  “Only because you’ve not found that hunky water sports instructor yet. Come on… you’ll dump him the minute you can upgrade. He’s lovely and all, but he’s not exactly Thailand.”

  Janice really was a girlie girl. You could tell from the way she spoke to Lou that there was a whole girlie camaraderie there. Something I’d never experienced with any of my female friends. I didn’t do ‘Girlie chats’. They weren’t my thing at all. The whole gossip, boys, fashion, beauty thing had passed me by entirely. I just lacked interest. I was more into current affairs, DIY, catering supplies (don’t even get me started on Lakeland Plastics) and cooking. Truth be told, I probably did fit better with the WI set than the nightclubbing girls, but I loved dancing too – it was Lucus that had two left feet.

  I listened to Lou and Janice chat. They seemed to know each other backwards. It was lovely seeing such a close relationship and in a way, in Janice, Lou was being reminded she still had a sister. Lesley might have gone, but Janice, friendship thicker than blood, was still just over the wall.

  Fiona came outside with a tea tray and sat down with us. She handed each of us a mug.

  “Found yours at the back of the cupboard,” she said, as she handed one to Lou. The mug boasted a picture of a dog poo. Lou smiled as it was passed over.

  “Lou rhymes with poo,” she said. “I remember this one.”

  “You can blame Paul for that,” Fiona said, explaining the joke to us newbies. “Paul’s my eldest. Janice’s brother.”

  “He’s in Doncaster now,” Janice said. “Three children of his own. THREE! Can you believe it?” She raised her eyebrows at me. I couldn’t. Three? Lucus was struggling with the concept of number two.

  “I think they’ll go for four,” Fiona said.

  “Why stop there? Once you’ve had to buy a people carrier, you might as well fill it up. And Alison always said she wanted a big family.”

  Janice and Fiona laughed together and we all joined in. It was lovely to see the freedom and openness of their mother and daughter relationship. My own mother was hundreds of miles away. When we got together, it was like speed catch up, we didn’t stop talking. We were close too, but in a totally different way. There was a deep, deep bond between us, and it was forged on our life experiences, some shared trials that we had held each other through. We knew each other, we knew everything about each other, and there wasn’t a topic we skirted around, but we saw each other so infrequent
ly that we didn’t have time for this jokey family time with friends. Our time together was almost too precious to share.

  I’m sure there were lots of other families like ours. The turn of the century had seen the explosion of the family units; everyone travelled now, few people stayed near home, whole generations were split up. Grandparents, parents, children and grandchildren all living in different locations in the UK, or even abroad. Fiona and Janice were the exception. Even her elder brother Paul lived away.

  Irene looked at me pointedly. I raised my eyebrows. What ?

  Irene tapped her ring finger.

  Who ? I mouthed.

  I followed her eye jerk to Fiona and shrugged. I had no idea. Janice was married, or at least, in a long term relationship. No. Married. I could see the rings from here. But Fiona had her hands between her legs at the moment and I couldn’t see. Not that it would have helped. Fiona hadn’t spoken of her husband. So either she was widowed, married or divorced. The absence of rings didn’t necessarily prove anything either way.

  “I suppose you and your husband get down as often as you can?” Irene asked. Clearly deciding to take the matter into her own hands.

  “Yes. We try. But Colin still works shifts at the port so we don’t get away all that often.”

  Married then. Good on her. So many of my parent’s generation were divorced, it was nice to see some marriages still made it.

  I slurped on my tea and sat back on the patio furniture as Lillian and Nicholas made their way over to us. She held up her hands and I picked her up, but she wasn’t after a cuddle. Instead, she was craning to see what was on the table with the tea things.

  “She knows. Look at her. She knows,” Fiona said. “I’ll go and get you both a biscuit and a cup of juice.”

  She set off for the kitchen, and Nicholas followed after her like a dog. Lillian started jiffling so I let her down to follow after Nicholas and the woman who provided biscuits. The pair were rewarded with two spouted cups and a rich tea each as they crested the door. Fiona cupped both their heads and steered them both back towards us, chuckling.

  “Barely a year old the pair of them and they’ve already worked out where the biscuits come from.”

  Lillian was faster than Nicholas, having been on her feet a good few months earlier. She came careering back along the path in excitement and not entirely unexpectedly, fell over with a big clatter. The cup went one way, the biscuit fractured in three and Lillian cracked her head off the stone effect concrete, resulting in an immediate wail.

  I leapt up even as Fiona reached her and scooped her into her arms.

  “There, there,” Fiona said, holding her close, but Lillian was already reaching out for me. When the chips were down, mummy was the best. Biscuits could come from anyone, but hurts could only be healed by mother.

  I took her into my arms and rubbed at her head. She’d walloped it quite hard and a red bruise was already showing on her forehead. She was often bumping and scraping herself. This wasn’t the worst accident.

  “I’ll get her a cold cloth,” Fiona said, walking back inside.

  Nicholas started to cry behind me and I span around. He was fine. Just reacting to Lillian and the sudden changes of direction. He looked lost, bereft.

  Janice called him over to her, but when that didn’t work, she got up and picked him up in a big “Whoosh” – a method which immediately stopped his crying and turned his frown to a grin.

  “You’re fine aren’t you? Silly little thing. Do you want to go to Auntie Lou?”

  Lou held out her arms, but he didn’t want to go, so in the end Janice sat back down with Nicholas on her lap. “Silly thing.”

  Fiona came back out with a damp cloth and I held it to Lillian’s head. At home I’d never have bothered. I didn’t hold with the whole “cold compress” thing. At baby group damp paper towels were issued for any bump or scrape. The miracle healing properties of damp paper towels were entirely lost on me. If everything could be fixed so easily, surely the NHS would simply issue them as part of triage in A&E?

  Lillian snuggled her hot snotty face into my neck and I could feel it getting sticky with mucus. This surely was what motherly love was all about… the willingness to get utterly covered in bodily fluids without flinching.

  I rocked her in my chair and eventually she stopped sobbing and started to look around her again. The first thing she spotted of course was Nicholas and his biscuit. She reached out her hand in grasping motion.

  “Uh! Uh!”

  “I’ll go and get her another one,” Fiona stood up.

  “I’ll come with you. I need to… uh… use the bathroom.” It was easier than explaining I had a string of sticky ooze running down the inside of my top that was making my skin crawl.

  “Second on the right,” she said as we entered through the patio doors.

  I took Lillian with me. No one expected anything less. Janice must have been to the toilet balancing Nicholas on her lap more than once. Multi-tasking even extended to bathroom activities when you had a child. Babies couldn’t be left alone for one second once they started moving, and as she’d just taken a tumble, there was no way she was going to let me out of her sight with strangers in a strange house.

  The carpet up the stairs was as plush as the one inside the door. Not surprising really as it was the same carpet that extended up the stairs and into the upstairs hall. The underlay was obviously of better quality than our own. It felt like I was walking on sponges.

  I counted the doors and entered the right one. The bathroom suite was fresh and clean, the taps sparkled. The suite was the new modern style, smooth curved edges on either end of the bath, with a tap in the middle. I was immediately envious. The whole bathroom oozed luxury. Whatever Colin did, he must be paid quite well at the Port. Probably not your general labourer.

  I turned on the taps, grabbed some toilet roll and started dabbing at the worst of the goop running down the inside of my top while Lillian explored the area under my watchful gaze, just in case there was something toxic within reach. Even the toilet roll was plush. Some sort of quilted affair. Not the shop’s own brand basics we used at home.

  “All done,” I sang-songed to Lillian, and we made our way back down the stairs. Fiona met us in the hall with another biscuit which she proffered to Lillian, who all but fell out of my arms in her attempt to grab it.

  “Is that Paul?” I asked. Looking at a young family photo in the hallway. The blond teenager was definitely Janice; the older boy must have been Paul by elimination. He had Fiona’s eyes, but that was about it. Janice on the other hand took after her father completely. It was funny the way genetics passed down like that. Lillian looked like Lucus in so many ways. Same round face. Same way of looking at things. She had his fair skin and hairline, but the eyes were mine, sparkling blue. I hoped she had the best of both of us.

  “Yes. I think he was about nineteen there.”

  “Quite the looker,” I said. I could voice appreciation now I was married and with a baby. It wouldn’t be taken the wrong way. I was a mother too – the fact Paul was probably around my age didn’t matter anymore. He had a long term girlfriend, I was married. This was a mother talk. Our relative age difference didn’t matter now. I was praising her offspring, mother to mother.

  “Yes. He always was a heart breaker.”

  “I bet. Your eyes.”

  “Yes. Everyone says that. Colin is happy enough owning up to the rest though.”

  I was sure he was, but there must have been some second generation genetics involved. He probably took after one of the grandparents. I saw quite a bit of my brother in Lillian, the way she smiled, the way she went at things. My brother’s personality was definitely hidden in there somewhere. Sadly, Michael had pushed a lot of my buttons growing up, and I had a horrible feeling Lillian was going to do the same. Time would tell.

  We went back out to the garden. Lou was busy recounting some story from Thailand and Irene and Janice were both listening with smiles on their
faces. I lowered Lillian back to the ground and joined the circle.

  I hoped Irene had found out what she needed to in that first forty minutes with Fiona in the kitchen, because it seemed her best laid plans had been hijacked by the arrival of Lesley’s sister, and given her reluctance to discuss her sister right now, I doubted we would find out anything more.

  Chapter Thirty One

  The next day we were back in Irene’s kitchen staring at the boards. To all intents and purposes nothing had changed with our suspect list since those first few days of our investigation. Our top suspects were still the same and we still had no way of eliminating or proving it was any of them.

  “I can’t see any other way around it,” Irene said, swinging her now empty mug around. “We’re just going to HAVE to question Gill directly.”

  “Surely we should go to the police?”

  “The police? With what? We don’t know anything. Fiona was minding the children the night Geoff disappeared. Gill was out, probably with Pete. Geoff was out. Colin was working. No one saw anything. The only person who saw anything was Lesley and she’s dead.”

  I understood her frustration. But turning up at the door of the person we were convinced was a murderer and asking her outright to confess didn’t seem like a sensible plan either.

  “Gill was out with Pete when Lesley was killed. At least, that’s what they’ve told the police.”

  “That’s what we THINK they’ve told the police,” I corrected. “We don’t know for sure.”

  “No, but that seems sensible.”

  “So what do you propose exactly? Just turning up and going all “Miss Marple” on them? I don’t think it’ll wash. You aren’t going to trick them into a confession. If they’ve kept Geoff’s death hidden so long they’re hardly going to admit to it now.”

  “Perhaps not. But the fact is, Gill is the only person we haven’t spoken to, and she’s a key suspect.”