Close to Home

by Peter Robinson

  “Yes.” Robin Armitage tried to smile, but it came out like the twentieth take of a commercial shoot. “Look, I’ll have Josie bring us some tea—or coffee, if you’d prefer it?”

  “Tea would be fine, thanks,” said Annie, perching carefully on the edge of an antique armchair. One of the most civilized things about being a policewoman, she thought, especially working in plainclothes, was that the people you visited—witnesses, victims and villains alike—invariably offered you some sort of refreshment. Usually tea. It was as English as fish and chips. From what she had read, or seen on television, she couldn’t imagine anything like it happening anywhere else in the world. But for all she knew, perhaps the French offered wine when a gendarme came to call.

  “I know how upsetting something like this can be,” Annie began, “but in ninety-nine percent of cases there’s absolutely nothing to worry about.”

  Robin raised a finely plucked eyebrow. “Do you mean that? You’re not just saying it to make us feel better?”

  “It’s true. You’d be surprised how many mispers we get—sorry, that’s police talk for missing persons—and most of them turn up none the worse for wear.”

  “Most of them?” echoed Martin Armitage.

  “I’m just telling you that statistically he’s likely—”

  “Statistically? What kind of—”

  “Martin! Calm down. She’s only trying to help.” Robin turned to Annie. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but neither of us has had much sleep. Luke’s never done anything like this before, and we really are quite frantic with worry. Nothing short of seeing Luke back here safe and sound will change that. Please, tell us where you think he is.”

  “I wish I could answer that, I really do,” said Annie. She took out her notebook. “Can I just get some information from you?”

  Martin Armitage ran his hand over his head, sighed and flopped down on the sofa again. “Yes, of course,” he said. “And I apologize. My nerves are a bit frazzled, that’s all.” When he looked right at her, she could see the concern in his eyes, and she could also see the steely gaze of a man who usually got what he wanted. Josie came in with tea, which she served on a silver tray. Annie felt a bit embarrassed, the way she always did around servants.

  Martin Armitage’s lip curled in a smile, as if he had noticed her discomfort. “A bit pretentious, isn’t it?” he said. “I suppose you’re wondering why a dyed-in-the-wool socialist like me employs a maid? It’s not as if I don’t know how to make a cup of tea. I grew up with six brothers in a West Yorkshire mining town so small nobody even noticed when Maggie Thatcher wiped it off the face of the earth. Bread and dripping for breakfast, if you were lucky. That sort of thing. Robin here grew up on a small farm in Devon.”

  And how many millions of pounds ago was that? Annie wondered, but she wasn’t here to discuss their lifestyle. “It’s none of my business,” she said. “I should imagine you’re both very busy, you can use the help.” She paused. “Just as long as you don’t expect me to stick my little finger in the air while I drink my tea.”

  Martin managed a weak laugh. “I always like to dunk digestive biscuits in mine.” Then he leaned forward and became serious again. “But you’re not going to make me feel better by distracting me. What can we do? Where do we look? Where do we begin?”

  “We’ll do the looking. That’s what we’re here for. When did you first start to believe something was wrong?”

  Martin looked at his wife. “When was it, love? After tea, early evening?”

  Robin nodded. “He’s always home for tea. When he wasn’t back by after seven o’clock and we hadn’t heard from him, we started to get worried.”

  “What did you do?”

  “We tried to call him on his mobile,” Martin said.

  “And what happened?”

  “It was turned off.”

  “Then what?”

  “Well, about eight o’clock,” Robin said, “Martin went looking for him.”

  “Where did you look, Mr. Armitage?”

  “I just drove around Eastvale. A bit aimless, really. But I had to do something. Robin stayed home in case he rang or turned up.”

  “How long were you gone?”

  “Not long. I was back, oh, around ten.”

  Robin nodded in agreement.

  “Do you have a recent photograph of Luke?” Annie asked. “Something we can circulate.”

  Robin went over to one of the low polished tables and picked up a package of prints. She thumbed through them and handed one to Annie. “This was taken at Easter. We took Luke to Paris for the holidays. Will it do?” Annie looked at the photograph. It showed a tall, thin young man, dark hair curling around his ears and brow, who looked older than his fifteen years, even to the point of having the fluffy beginnings of a goatee. He was standing by a grave in an old cemetery looking moody and contemplative, but his face was out of the shadows, and close enough to the camera to be useful for identification purposes.

  “He insisted on visiting the Père Lachaise cemetery,” Robin explained. “That’s where all the famous people are buried. Chopin. Balzac. Proust. Edith Piaf. Colette. Luke’s standing by Jim Morrison’s grave there. Have you heard of Jim Morrison?”

  “I’ve heard of him,” said Annie, who remembered friends of her father’s playing loud Doors records even years after Morrison’s death. “Light My Fire” and “The End” in particular had lodged themselves somewhere in her memories of those days.

  “It’s funny,” said Robin, “but most of the people making pilgrimages to that grave weren’t even born when he was at the height of his popularity. Even I was just a little girl when the Doors were first big.”

  That placed her in her early forties, Annie guessed, and still a striking figure. Robin Armitage’s golden tresses hung over her narrow shoulders and shone every bit as much in real life as they did in her magazine adverts for shampoo. Despite the signs of strain and worry, hardly a line marred her smooth, pale complexion. Though Robin was shorter than Annie had imagined, her figure looked as slender as it had been in all the posters Annie had ever seen of her, and those lips, which had so tantalizingly sucked the low-fat ice cream off the spoon in a famous television commercial some years ago, were still as full and pink as ever. Even the beauty spot Annie had always imagined was fake was still there, at the corner of her mouth, and close up it looked real.

  Yes, Robin Armitage looked as good as she had twenty years ago. Annie thought she ought to hate the woman on sight, but she couldn’t. It wasn’t just because of the missing boy, either, she told herself, but she sensed something very human, very vulnerable behind the exquisitely packaged model’s facade.

  “This’ll do fine,” said Annie, slipping the photograph into her briefcase. “I’ll get it circulated as soon as I get back. What was he wearing?”

  “The usual,” said Robin. “Black T-shirt and black jeans.”

  “You say ‘the usual.’ Do you mean he always wears black?”

  “It’s a phase,” said Martin Armitage. “Or at least that’s what his mother tells me.”

  “It is, Martin. You wait; he’ll grow out of it. If we ever see him again.”

  “Don’t worry, Mrs. Armitage. He’ll turn up. In the meantime, I’d like more information about Luke himself, anything you know about his friends, interests or acquaintances that could help us work out where he may be. First of all, was everything all right between you? Had there been any arguments recently?”

  “Not that I can think of,” Robin answered. “I mean, nothing serious. Everything was fine between us. Luke had everything he wanted.”

  “It’s been my experience,” said Annie, “that nobody ever has everything they want, even if someone who loves them very dearly thinks they have. Human needs are so various and so hard to define at times.”

  “I didn’t only mean material things,” said Robin. “As a matter of fact, Luke isn’t much interested in the things money can buy, except for electronic gadgets and books.” Her lon
g-lashed blue eyes blurred with tears. “I meant that he has all the love we can give him.”

  “I don’t doubt it,” said Annie. “What I was thinking, though, was that maybe there was something he wanted to do that you wouldn’t let him?”

  “Like what?” asked Robin.

  “Something you didn’t approve of. A pop concert he wanted to go to. Friends you didn’t like him being with. That sort of thing.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean. But I can’t think of anything. Can you, darling?”

  Martin Armitage shook his head. “As parents go, I think we’re pretty liberal,” he said. “We realize kids grow up quickly these days. I grew up quickly myself. And Luke’s a smart lad. I can’t think of any films I wouldn’t want him to see, except for pornography, of course. He’s also a quiet, shy sort of boy, not much of a mixer. He keeps to himself.”

  “He’s very creative,” Robin added. “He loves to read and he writes stories and poems. When we were in France, it was all Rimbaud, Verlaine and Baudelaire.”

  Annie had heard of some of those poets through her father, had even read some of them. She thought they were a little advanced for a fifteen-year-old boy, then she remembered that Rimbaud started writing poetry at fifteen and gave it up at nineteen.

  “What about girlfriends?” Annie asked.

  “He never mentioned anyone,” said Robin.

  “He might be embarrassed to tell you,” Annie suggested.

  “I’m sure we’d have known.”

  Annie changed tack and made a note to look into Luke’s love life, or lack of it, later, if necessary. “I don’t know how to put this any more diplomatically,” she said, “but I understand you’re not Luke’s biological father, Mr. Armitage?”

  “True. He’s my stepson. But I’ve always thought of him as my own son. Robin and I have been married ten years now. Luke has our family name.”

  “Tell me about Luke’s father, Mrs. Armitage.”

  Robin glanced over at her husband

  “It’s all right, darling,” Martin Armitage said. “It doesn’t bother me if you talk about him, though I can’t quite see the point of all this.”

  Robin turned back to Annie. “Actually, I’m surprised you don’t know already, given the inordinate amount of interest the gutter press took in the whole affair at the time. It’s Neil Byrd. I thought most people knew about Neil and me.”

  “Oh, I know who he was and what happened. I just don’t remember the details. He was a pop singer, wasn’t he?”

  “A pop singer? He’d have been disgusted to hear himself called that. He thought of himself more as a sort of modern troubadour, more of a poet than anything else.”

  From singer-songwriter to footballer, Annie thought, the way Marilyn Monroe went from baseball player to playwright. There was clearly more to Robin Armitage than met the eye. “Please excuse my ignorance and refresh my memory,” she said.

  Robin glanced out of the window, where a large thrush had found a worm on the lawn, then sat down beside her husband. He took her hand as she spoke. “You’re probably thinking it seems like an odd combination,” she said. “But Neil was the first man not to treat me like a complete moron because of my looks. It’s difficult being…well, you know, looking like I did. Most men are either too scared to approach you or they think you must be an easy lay. With Neil, it was neither.”

  “How long were you together?”

  “About five years. Luke was only two when Neil walked out on us. Just like that. No warning. He said he needed his solitude and couldn’t afford to be burdened with a family any longer. That’s exactly the way he put it: Burdened.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Annie. “What happened? What about your career?”

  “I was twenty-five when we met, and I’d been modeling since I was fourteen. It was hard to get my figure back after Luke, of course, and I was never quite the same as before, but I still got work, mostly TV commercials, a small and very forgettable part in a slasher film, part fifteen of some series or other. But why do you need to know all this? It can’t have anything to do with Luke’s disappearance. Neil’s been dead for twelve years.”

  “I agree with my wife,” said Martin. “As I said earlier, I can’t see what relevance all this has.”

  “I’m just trying to get as much background as I can,” Annie explained. “You never know what might be important with missing persons, what might trigger them. Does Luke know who his father was?”

  “Oh, yes. He doesn’t remember Neil, of course, but I told him. I thought it important not to keep secrets from him.”

  “How long has he known?”

  “I told him when he was twelve.”

  “And before that?”

  “Martin is the only father he has known.”

  So for seven years, Annie calculated, Luke had accepted Martin Armitage as his true father, then his mother had dropped the bombshell about Neil Byrd. “How did he react to the news?” she asked.

  “He was confused, naturally,” said Robin. “And he asked a lot of questions. But other than that…I don’t know. He didn’t talk about it much afterward.”

  Annie made a couple of notes as she digested this. She thought there must be more to it than Robin let on, but perhaps not. Kids can be surprisingly resilient. And unexpectedly sensitive.

  “Do you still have any contact with any of Neil Byrd’s friends or relatives?” Annie asked.

  “Good Lord, no. Neil’s parents both died young—it was one of the things that haunted him—and I don’t move in those sort of circles anymore.”

  “May I see Luke’s room?”

  “Of course.” Robin led Annie out into the hall, up a flight of worn stone stairs to the upper floor, where she turned to the left and opened the heavy oak door of the second room along.

  Annie turned on the bedside light. It took her a few moments to register that the room was black except for the carpeted floor. It faced north, so it didn’t get a lot of sun, and even with the bedside light on—there was no ceiling light—it looked gloomy. It was tidier than she had expected, though, and almost Spartan in its contents.

  Luke, or someone, had painted a solar system and stars on the ceiling. One wall was covered with posters of rock stars, and moving closer, Annie noted the names: Kurt Cobain, Nick Drake, Jeff Buckley, Ian Curtis, Jim Morrison. Most of them were at least vaguely familiar to her, but she thought Banks might know more about them than she did. No sports personalities, she noticed. On the opposite wall, written in silver spray paint, were the words “Le Poëte se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.” The words rang a bell, but she couldn’t quite place them, and her French wasn’t good enough to provide her with a clear translation. “Do you know what this means?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” said Robin. “I never was any good at French in school.”

  Annie copied the words down in her notebook. An electric guitar stood propped against a small amplifier under the mullioned window, a computer sat on a desk, and next to the wardrobe were a mini stereo system and a stack of CDs. She opened the violin case on top of the dresser and saw that it did, indeed, contain a violin.

  Annie flipped through the CDs. Most of the bands she’d never heard of, such as Incubus, System of a Down and Slipknot, but she recognized some oldies like Nirvana and R.E.M. There was even some old Bob Dylan. Though Annie knew virtually nothing about the musical tastes of fifteen-year-old boys, she was certain they didn’t usually include Bob Dylan.

  There was nothing by Neil Byrd. Again, Annie wished Banks were here; he’d be able to read something into all this. The last CD she had bought consisted of chants by Tibetan monks, to help with her yoga and meditation.

  Annie glanced at the contents of the bookcase: A lot of novels, including Sons and Lovers, Catcher in the Rye and Le Grand Meaulnes, alongside the more traditional adolescent fare of Philip Pullman and short story collections by Ray Bradbury and H. P. Lovecraft, a number of poetry anthologies, an oversize b
ook on Pre-Raphaelite art, and that was about it.

  Other than that, the room revealed remarkably little. There was no address book, at least none that Annie could find, and not very much of anything except the books, clothes and CDs. Robin told her that Luke carried a battered leather shoulder bag around with him, wouldn’t go anywhere without it, and anything important to him would be in there, including his ultra-light laptop.

  Annie did find some printed manuscripts in a drawer, short stories and poems, the most recent of which was dated a year ago, and she asked if she could borrow them to look at later. She could tell that Robin wasn’t keen; mostly, it seemed, for the sake of Luke’s precious privacy, but again, a little prodding in the right direction worked wonders. She didn’t think the creative work would tell her much, anyway, but it might give her some insight into Luke’s character.

  There was nothing more to be gained from staying up there, and the black walls were beginning to oppress her, so she told Robin she had finished. They went back downstairs, where Martin Armitage was still sitting on the sofa.

  “I understand you sent Luke to Eastvale Comprehensive instead of a public school, like Braughtmore,” Annie said.

  “We don’t believe in public schools,” said Martin, his West Yorkshire accent getting thicker as he spoke. “They’re just breeding grounds for effete civil servants. There’s nothing wrong with a comprehensive-school education.” Then he paused and smiled. Annie got the impression it was a gesture that had worked for him often with the media, the sudden flow of charm turned on like an electric current. “Well, maybe there’s a lot wrong with it—at least that’s what I keep hearing—but it was good enough for me, and it’s good enough for most kids. Luke’s intelligent and hardworking. He’ll do fine.”

  Judging from her body language—the folded arms and lips pressed together—Annie surmised that Robin didn’t agree, that Luke’s education had been a matter of some heated discussion.

  “Is he happy at school?” she asked.

  “He’s never complained,” said Martin. “No more than any kid would. You know, he doesn’t like his geography teacher, doesn’t like games, and algebra’s too hard. That sort of thing.”