‘That last weekend,’ Slider asked, ‘had they had one of their rows recently?’
‘Oh, I can’t remember that long ago. They were all right at breakfast, I know that. He went off to work just like usual. I don’t remember any atmosphere.’
‘Was it normal for him to work on Saturdays?’ Atherton asked.
‘Course it was. Saturdays were the busiest, truth be told, because people were home from work and wanted things done while they were in. They’d have had him out Sundays as well, but I put my foot down. Not on Sunday. There’s got to be one day of rest.’
‘Were you churchgoers?’
‘No, not really. Pat and me were brought up to it, but Ron – well, his mum and his brother Ted were killed in the Blitz, and after that his father got very anti-God, and wouldn’t go near a church, so Ronnie grew up without the habit. We were married in church, and Amanda was christened, but aside from that we never went, only Christmas Day when we were over Pat and Brian’s, and then it was just Pat and me and Amanda. Ron and Brian would go down the golf club for drinks.’
‘So that Saturday he was working all day?’ Atherton asked mildly.
‘That’s right,’ she said, with a look of annoyance, ‘and the police checked every job he’d done, and he was accounted for every minute of the day. So you don’t need to start with the insinuations.’
‘Except for his lunch break,’ Atherton said, so bland now he’d make magnolia look fluorescent. ‘There was a gap of fifty minutes, I believe.’
‘Well, a person’s got to have his lunch, hasn’t he? Cheese sandwiches I put up for him, same as Amanda and me had, cheese was his favourite, only he had Branston with his, Amanda couldn’t abide pickle, and a piece of fruit cake, and his flask of tea. He sat in his van in a lay-by outside Chiswick House, because his last job had been Chiswick Mall and he’d got to go up Turnham Green next, this old lady with her leaky pipe, she ought to have had the whole house replumbed but she was too tight with her money, though living in this big house she must have had plenty. Ron was over there every couple of months, you never knew such a patient man as him, especially with old people. I told him it wasn’t worth his while but he said he couldn’t let her down. So what with the traffic, he must only have been sitting there twenty minutes, hardly enough to choke his lunch down and give himself indigestion.’ Her indignation was growing. ‘And then the police made all this fuss about how he’d got no witnesses – as if a person has to have a witness to eat his lunch! And how the old lady couldn’t remember if he’d been there or not because she was going a bit dotty. So he showed them the work he’d done, and then they said it could have been done any time in the last few days. Why would he want to make up a story like that?’ she demanded angrily. ‘If he said he’d been at Mrs Whittaker’s, that’s where he was. And then they made out there was something funny about him going to another job after his tea, but he’d promised the Morrises he’d come and he wasn’t one to break his promises. Their boiler was out of order, which is a hardship when you’ve got three kids and a baby. And then they tried to make something of it because he said he got there at quarter to seven and they said it was more like half past – well, with three kids running wild who ought to have been in bed that time of night, it’s a wonder if they knew which way was up, never mind the exact second someone arrives, who was actually doing them a favour, not that you expect any gratitude from people like that, they can afford to have a detached house and four children but they argue about the plumber’s bill when it’s after six o’clock on a Saturday, which ought by rights to be double time, never mind time and a half.’
At which point she had to stop for breath.
ELEVEN
Reason as a Way of Life
‘You didn’t call the police straight away,’ Slider said. ‘Why was that?’
‘Well …’ She looked puzzled. ‘I mean, you don’t, do you? You don’t want to be calling them for nothing, making a nuisance of yourself. We thought she’d gone off somewhere, and you don’t want to be setting the police on your own daughter, as if she’s a criminal, even if she shouldn’t have done it. It wasn’t like she was a toddler or anything. We thought she’d come back.’
The last sentence was unbearably pathetic.
‘Your husband told you not to call, when he came home for his evening meal?’
‘We didn’t think it was needed, not then.’
‘And then he went off to work again?’
‘He’d promised the Morrises.’
‘He didn’t think of searching for her?’
‘But where would he look?’ she said. ‘We didn’t know where she’d gone. But when he got back from the Morrises, and she was still not back, he said, Go on then, better call the police. Not that it did any good,’ she added bitterly. ‘They just said leave it till tomorrow. And when they did come, they didn’t do anything. Had a look round the house, as if we were hiding her somewhere, and that was it. That one in charge, that tall one, he just said she’d be bound to turn up again and not to worry. Didn’t seem like he cared one way or the other.’
‘Detective Inspector Kellington?’ Slider asked casually.
‘That was him. Acted like he had his mind on other things half the time. And that other one, who came later, Vickers his name was—’
‘Vickery?’
‘That was him. He was this other one’s boss, and if you ask me, he was telling him not to bother with us. Very contemptuous he was, the way he looked at us, as if we was beneath his notice. Kept saying to me, “Now, now, Mrs Knight, you mustn’t be imagining things.” Kept saying teenage girls went off all the time and came back all right. He didn’t know Amanda. He reckoned she’d gone off with some boyfriend, like some bad girl.’
‘Did he say that?’
‘No, but I could tell that’s what he thought. He didn’t know her. She would never have done anything like that. Kept talking behind his hand to that Kellington and looking at us like dirt. Of course, when days went by and she didn’t turn up, then they had to start searching for her.’ She looked bleak. ‘But I suppose it was too late then. As it turns out.’
Slider tried a different angle. ‘It was the summer holidays. What had she been doing with herself, with no school?’
Mrs Knight thought about it, but with a puzzled crease to her brow. ‘Well, I don’t know, really. What do girls do? Just hung around the house, I suppose. Listening to her pop music. She liked to read a lot,’ she added on an inspiration. ‘She might have gone down the library.’
‘You worked during the daytime, I believe,’ Slider said.
‘That’s right. At the Jiffy, down Uxbridge Road – the launderette.’ She seemed puzzled by this new direction.
‘So Amanda would have been at home alone during that time? Every day, during working hours?’
‘Well, yes,’ she said warily.
‘So, in fact, you wouldn’t know what she was doing at all during those summer holidays. Or where she was at any time?’
‘I suppose not,’ she said, offended. ‘But she could look after herself. She was a very sensible girl.’
‘Did you notice any difference in her that summer?’ The question seemed to need clarifying, and he added, ‘She was fourteen. She was growing up. Things can seem difficult to girls at that age, coping with the changes in their lives. Had she seemed different to you lately?’
‘What, you mean, like, moody?’ Mrs Knight asked, seeming eager to understand, to help. ‘I suppose all teenagers are, aren’t they?’
‘More withdrawn? Quiet? Keeping her thoughts to herself?’
‘She was always a quiet one,’ Mrs Knight said. She frowned in thought. ‘I suppose she was a bit more … mopey.’
‘Depressed?’
‘No, not that – sort of in a dream. In her own world. Some evenings she’d be up in her bedroom, instead of watching telly with her dad and me. Like, you’d say, What are you doing up there? And she’d say, Oh nothing. But as long as she wasn’t getting into tr
ouble …’ Her shrug said: what can you do?
Slider saw it: the parents, not very well educated, not having the sort of intimate, involved, all-talking relationship parents were supposed to have with their children these days; tired from work, happy just to sit quietly and have a daughter who did the same. It wasn’t that they didn’t understand her, but that they didn’t see there was anything to understand. Never trouble trouble till trouble troubles you.
While he was thinking, she remembered something. ‘She had this diary. We bought it for her for her last birthday. She was always writing in that.’
Slider felt Atherton glance at him. A diary! Now you’re talking.
‘Did you ever read any of it?’ Atherton asked casually.
‘It had a lock on it,’ she said simply. ‘That’s what she asked for, a diary that locked.’
‘What happened to it afterwards?’
Her brow furrowed. ‘Well, I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it since then. I suppose it was in her room with her things. I didn’t look – there was so much else to think about.’
‘What happened to her things?’ Slider asked, showing nothing in his voice, no exasperation, no hope.
‘We packed them all up in a box when we moved to Reading, in case she came back and wanted them. We took them with us.’ She wiped her mouth again, slowly, a gesture of pain. ‘When we went to Swindon, Ron said there’s no point keeping her clothes, they won’t fit her any more. So we got rid of them. But her books and bits and pieces we kept.’
‘Do you still have them?’
She nodded slowly, trying to think along with him. ‘You think she might have written something in her diary? I never even thought of that. But what …? I mean, she couldn’t have known what was going to happen.’
‘There might possibly be some clue as to where she went that day,’ Slider said. ‘Maybe it was somewhere she’d been going regularly. Or some new person she’d met. Would you mind if we had a look?’
She was gone a long time. Slider got up and went to look at the photographs. The brown one was obviously of the sisters Maggie and Pat, aged about five and ten, in very 1950s garb: cotton frock, Fair Isle cardigan, sandals and socks and hairslides. They were holding hands, standing with their parents behind them, with a seafront in the background – Brighton perhaps. The parents were smiling dutifully for the camera (one of those street photographers, probably – otherwise, who was holding the camera?) Little Pat was grinning gappily, Margaret self-conscious, with her head slightly lowered and her upper lip tucked in. A holiday snap, a memento of a happy day: how families should be. How Margaret must have expected her life would be. You didn’t think your only child would disappear, and turn up dead twenty-five years later.
She came in with a large cardboard box, big enough to have to hold with two hands, but obviously not very heavy. It was very dusty, sealed with sellotape that was browning and lifting with age, and it had ‘Amanda’ printed in uneven capitals on the side. She put it down on the small dining table, and stepped back from it, as if leaving it to them. ‘I’ve not opened it since we left Shepherd’s Bush,’ she said. ‘I’ve never looked in it.’ She gave them an apologetic glance, upward from a lowered face, and Slider saw the resemblance to the child in the photograph. ‘Couldn’t face it, somehow.’
The sellotape came off willingly, long tired of its task. Slider took out the objects reverently, laying them on the table, while she watched, chewing her lip, but otherwise controlled. There were books; a swimming certificate; a little box of childish jewellery – beads and bangles, hairslides, a ring evidently gleaned from a Christmas cracker. There was a scrapbook, mostly of pop stars, but including other pictures cut out of magazines that had appealed to her for some reason – cute animals, pretty scenes. There was a brown leather purse containing £3.47 in coins, some hairgrips, a white button that might have come off a school blouse, and a small, square, rather creased picture of David Essex. There was a collection of china and plastic animals, mostly dogs and horses. There was a tiny transistor radio. There were some seashells. There was a Royal Wedding Commemorative Coin in a blue velvet box. There was a single short white sock that had got tangled up with a hairbrush.
There was no diary. Slider packed the things away again.
‘I suppose it got lost,’ Mrs Knight said. ‘The diary. Or thrown away. I don’t remember much from the time straight after. It’s all a bit of a blur. People coming and going. The things in the paper. Waiting for her to come home.’
‘Quite understandable,’ Slider said. He pressed the sellotape back into place, hoping it would hold for a bit. He could see she was tiring, and said, ‘Just one last question, and we’ll leave you in peace.’ She looked up from her contemplation of the box, and seemed, absurdly, almost disappointed. Well, they were company; and she probably hadn’t talked about Amanda to anyone for years. ‘Amanda had a new friend, Melissa. Do you know her other name? Or where she lived?’
She shook her head slowly. ‘I don’t know any Melissa. Mind you, I didn’t really know much about her friends at school. She used to talk about Adrienne sometimes. And I think there may have been a Lisa?’ She looked hopeful.
‘This wasn’t a girl from her school, apparently.’
‘Oh. Well, I’m afraid I don’t know. I don’t think she ever mentioned her. Is it important?’
‘I don’t know. It may be. If you do happen to remember anything, please give me a ring.’
‘All right,’ she said, accepting his card. And she looked up at him sternly. ‘And you find out who did that to her. Because it wasn’t Ron.’ There was no answer to that. There was one more thing to do, and Slider was working up to it when she inadvertently gave him an opening. ‘I suppose I can’t see her?’ she said wistfully, and then answered herself. ‘I suppose there’s nothing to see. What happens now to her – to the …?’
‘As soon as all the tests have been done, I’ll let you know, and you can arrange for a funeral. But before a death certificate can be issued, there is just the question of formal identification. Obviously that can’t be done visually, so I would like to take a DNA sample from you for verification.’
‘How do you do that?’ She looked nervous.
‘It’s very simple, just a swab from the inside of your mouth. It doesn’t hurt. I have the kit here.’
When it was done, she followed them to the door to show them out, seeming reluctant to let them go. It was hardly surprising, Slider thought: their visit had raised as many questions as it had answered. Almost he didn’t like leaving her there, old and alone in the doorway of her meagre box, with nothing left to her but her wondering. ‘Thank you for coming,’ she said, as if remembering her manners. And then, suddenly: ‘In the garden?’
Slider turned back. He didn’t know what she wanted from him. ‘At the bottom,’ he said at last.
‘Oh my Lord,’ she said quietly, and they left her.
The Pepper Pot, in Portobello Road, was jumping, even though it was earlier in the evening than you would expect people to be out eating. The place had been decorated to look like a beach shack. The ceiling was covered in rattan, the walls in carefully rusted corrugated iron sheets, on which colourful graffiti were painted at artistic angles. Behind the bar was a promise of sixty-seven different rums, and posters for Afro music concerts. The tables were bare scrubbed pine, with wooden benches for seats, the floor was bare boards, and the piped music was skull-splitting. A six-foot carved wooden giraffe stood beside the door with an ‘open’ sign hanging round its neck, and Hart wondered mildly how many giraffes you saw ambling along the Caribbean beaches.
Most of the tables were occupied with trendy-looking young blacks, drinking coffees and cokes, with a few whites sprinkled among them, all talking at the top of their voices in the effort to be heard above the music. There were one or two older men, more working-class in appearance, who were eating with silent dedication, and the smell of jerk seasoning and fried chicken was in the air, plus a whiff that might
have been barbecue smoke and Hart hoped was not ganja.
She scanned the room casually, but didn’t see Shannon anywhere. The waitresses were wearing black miniskirts and multi-coloured shirts in the sort of patterns you get if you rub your eyes too hard. (Hawaiian shirts, her mind told her, but that was a confusion too far.) They were scurrying about serving, and it was a while before one came to her with a wide grin and said, ‘Help you? Table for one?’ She glanced back over her shoulder and said, ‘You might have to share.’
‘No, it’s all right, babe,’ Hart said. ‘I’m looking for Shannon. She on tonight?’ The girl looked puzzled. ‘Shannon Bailey. She works here.’
‘I don’t think so,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t know the name.’
‘Is the owner here? Can I have a word?’
‘The owner?’
‘Hallie, isn’t that her name?’
‘Oh, Mrs Labadee. She’s the manager. She’s in the back.’ The girl looked suddenly doubtful, examining Hart’s appearance for clues. ‘Is it important?’
‘Yeah, mate, dead important.’ She didn’t wait for an invitation. ‘Through here, is it?’
At the end of the bar was a doorway covered in a multi-coloured bead curtain, and Hart sidestepped the waitress and pushed through into a sort of hallway with boxes stacked along one side and a staff lavatory on the other. Ahead, through another doorway, she saw more stacked boxes and three steel beer barrels. A woman was stooped over changing the feeds from one to another. She straightened abruptly as Hart approached.
Old Bones Page 13