Off Minor

by John Harvey

  “Out there looking for her, that’s what we need to be doing.”

  “You said you’d done that already.”

  “And I didn’t bloody find her, did I?”

  His eyes were wild and his hands were beginning to shake. He surprised Lorraine by letting her lead him into the kitchen, though when she pulled out a stool and sat down, Michael remained, agitated, on his feet.

  “We should make a list,” Lorraine said, “places where she might be.”

  “What places, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Friends. Megan Patterson, for instance.”

  “That’s half a mile away.”

  “Not if you take the cut-through before the end of the crescent. She could easily have walked there in the time we were upstairs.”

  “Screwing,” Michael said.

  “That’s got nothing to do with it.”

  “Of course, it’s got something to fucking do with it! If we hadn’t been up there, leaving Emily alone, this wouldn’t have happened.” He was leaning forward, glaring at her. “Would it?”

  Lorraine got to her feet.

  “Where d’you think you’re going now?”

  “To phone Megan’s mother.”

  Val Patterson hadn’t seen anything of Emily, not since a few days ago, and besides, Megan was off at her riding lesson, her father had dropped her off there over an hour ago. Why didn’t Lorraine try Julie Neason, didn’t Emily and her Kim go to school together sometimes? Lorraine rang the Neasons’, but there was no answer. The front door slammed and she knew that Michael had gone back out to look for Emily again. While Lorraine was looking in the phone book, fingers sliding awkwardly over the pages, she heard the car being backed out of the garage, driving away.

  In the ten minutes that followed, Lorraine spoke to every one of the parents in the area that she knew and with whom Emily had any kind of contact. Clara Fisher’s dad had been driving past half an hour ago and seen Emily pushing her pram across the front lawn. No, he couldn’t be positive about the time, not to the minute, but he was sure it had been Emily.

  “Did you notice anybody else?” Lorraine asked. “Anyone close by? Another car?”

  “Sorry,” Ben Fisher said. “I didn’t notice a thing. But then, you wouldn’t expect to really. You know as well as I do what it’s like round here Sunday afternoons, quiet as the grave.”

  Outside, a car drew up, the door slammed and there was Michael, shoulders slumped forward, distraught. “Well?”

  Lorraine looked away.

  “I’ve been four times, up and down the crescent,” Michael said. “Checked everywhere between Derby Road and the hospital. Stopped anyone who was around and asked.”

  “We should look again,” Lorraine said. “Inside the house. I mean, really search. Cupboards, everywhere. She might have been hiding, a game, got too frightened to come out.”

  Michael shook his head. “I don’t think she just went wandering off.”

  “That’s what I say, she’s somewhere here …”

  “She’s gone off with someone,” Michael said. Even though he was standing close to her now, close in the carpeted square of hall, the telephone table they had bought from Hopewell’s to match the little chest Lorraine’s parents had given them as a wedding present, she could scarcely hear what it was he’d said. Not wanting to hear the words.

  “She’s gone off with someone,” Michael said again, taking hold of her arm below the elbow.

  Lorraine shook her head emphatically. “She wouldn’t do that.”

  “There’s nothing else, is there?”

  “But she wouldn’t.”

  Michael released her arm. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because we’ve told her, time and time again, both of us. It’s been drummed into her ever since she could walk. Don’t talk to people you don’t know, anyone who comes up to you in the park, in the street. Don’t take anything, no matter how nice it looks. Ice cream. Sweets. Michael, she just wouldn’t do that.”

  He reached out his hand towards her face, brushing back a few strands of hair. “Someone’s taken her,” he said.

  Lorraine’s stomach hollowed out and a first tightened inside her throat.

  Michael reached past her.

  “What are you going to do?”

  He looked at her, surprised. “Phone the police.”

  “But if she’s not been missing for an hour?”

  “Lorraine, how long does it take?”

  He was dialing the number when she started, a little breathlessly, gabbling her words together, to tell him about Diana.

  All the years that Michael and Diana had been married, they had lived on Mapperley Top, a three bedroomed end-terrace, all they had chosen to afford at the time, not wanting to sink everything into the deposit and the mortgage. Two holidays a year that had meant, not having to stint on going out; clubs, that’s where they went in those days, Diana liking to let her hair down, have a bit of a dance. Afterwards a curry at the Maharani, the Chand: sometimes, if they were feeling especially flush, the Laguna.

  After the trouble, the divorce, Michael had found his studio flat and Diana had stayed on in the house, a For Sale board outside, though not too many people bothered to come looking. Then, when Michael had wanted somewhere with Lorraine, of course, he’d had to insist that Diana leave; if the only way they could get shot of the place was dropping a few thousand, so be it.

  Diana had moved outside the city to Kimberley, a small town where once the men had mostly worked in the pits and the women in the hosiery factories, and now they were fortunate to be working anywhere.

  Diana’s house was little more than a two-up, two-down, open the front door and you were standing in the middle of the front room, another couple of paces and you were in the back. Michael turned right past the mini-roundabout, left again on to a narrow street running parallel to the main road. Three lads, ten or eleven years old, were chasing their second-rate mountain bikes up and down the curb, practicing wheelies. Michael stood for some moments outside the house, looking up at the lace curtains at all but one of the windows. Back across the street, someone was sharing this week’s Top Twenty with all but the clinically deaf.

  Michael walked past the overgrown privet hedge, through the gap where the gate was supposed to be. The bell didn’t appear to be working and there wasn’t a knocker, so he rattled the letter flap instead, hammered the side of a fist against the door.

  “She’s gone away,” called a neighbor two houses down, setting her milk bottles on the front step.

  “She can’t have.”

  “Suit yourself.”

  Several doors along there was an arched passageway, leading to the backs of the houses. Michael stepped around the dustbin and peered through the square of kitchen window, what looked like breakfast things stacked alongside the sink, that didn’t prove anything one way or another. He knocked on the back door, leaned his weight against it: bolted and locked.

  By clambering on to the narrow, sloping sill outside the back room window, he could see through a gap in the curtains. Scrubbed pine table and assorted chairs, a towel draped over the back of one; dried flowers stood in a wide-bellied vase in front of the tiled fireplace. On shelves in one of the alcoves, paperbacks jostled for space with cassettes and magazines, scrapbooks, photograph albums. On a table in the further alcove stood photographs of Emily, souvenirs, most of them, of her fortnightly visits to her mother. Emily reaching up to stroke a donkey, face uncertain; Emily in her costume beside an indoor pool; Emily and Diana on the steps of Wollaton Hall.

  There were no pictures of the three of them together, Michael, Diana and Emily, as they had been then, a family.

  “Hey-up! What the heck you doing up there?”

  Michael turned and jumped back down; the flush-faced man was standing by the fence of the house that backed on to the alley.

  “Seeing if there’s anyone in,” Michael said.

  “Aye, well, there’s not.”

  “D’y
ou know where she is, Diana?”

  “Who wants to know?”

  “I’m … I was her husband.”

  “Oh, aye.”

  “I need to see her, it’s urgent.”

  “Not been here all weekend, far as I know. Most likely off away.”

  “You don’t know where?”

  The man shook his head and turned back towards his own house. Michael hurried along to the archway, on through to the front of the house. The woman from two doors down was standing to admire her handiwork, step now spotless, rubber kneeling-pad in one hand, brush in the other.

  “Diana,” Michael said, trying to control the anxiety in his voice.

  “Away for the weekend.”

  “Know where?”

  “Can’t help, duck”

  “You sure she’s not been here at all?”

  “Far as I know.”

  “And a little girl? You haven’t seen Diana with a little girl, six, reddish hair?”

  “That’s Emily. Her daughter. Well, seen her, course I have, many a time, but, like I say, not these past couple of days.”

  Michael shook his head, turned away.

  “It’s what she does, you know. When the kiddie’s not with her. Take off for Sat’day, Sunday. Sad, if you ask me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Bloke she were married to, it’s him as stops her seeing the kid more often. Breaks her heart.”

  Michael phoned Lorraine from a call box, fumbling the coin into the slot. “She’s not here. Nobody’s here. You’ve not heard from her?”

  “Nothing. Oh, Michael …”

  “I’ll call on the police on the way home.”

  “Should I come too, meet you there?”

  “Someone’s got to be home in case.”

  “Michael?”

  “Yes?”

  “Be as quick as you can.”

  He broke the connection and ran to the car. Emily had been missing an hour and a half, maybe a little more. Pulling on to the main road, he had to brake sharply to avoid a builder’s lorry, heading down the hill towards Eastwood, its driver calling him all kinds of bastard through the glass. Slow down, he told himself, get a grip; you’re not going to help anything if you can’t hold yourself together now.

  Lorraine sat in the kitchen, gazing out through the front window, hands tight around tea which had long since gone cold. All the while she had been sitting there, the street lights had shone more and more strongly. Each time a car entered the crescent, the adrenaline coursed through her: someone had found Emily and was bringing her home. And each time the headlights of the car swept past. Whenever there were footsteps on the pavement, she craned forward, waiting for figures to turn into the path, the anxious running of feet, fevered knocking at the door.

  That little girl, the one who went missing, you remember?

  It was something you read about in the paper, saw on the television news, shocking, the faces of those parents, pictures of their child. The pleas for a safe return.

  They found her body.

  And Michael suddenly staring at her, so sure.

  Of course …

  As though there were no other possibility, no other end.

  What else did you think had happened?

  The cup slipped from her fingers on to her lap and shattered on the floor. Lorraine did nothing to pick it up, left the pieces where they lay.

  When Michael finally arrived, it was in convoy, a police car in front, white with a blue stripe, an unmarked saloon bringing up the rear. The two uniformed men were out of their vehicle quickly, moving briskly after Michael as he came, half-running, towards the house. A young woman wearing an anorak stepped from the third car and opened the rear door for a bulky man who stood for a moment on the pavement, pulling his raincoat around him.

  Lorraine, face close to the window, was aware of this man, whoever he was, looking back at her, hands thrust down into his pockets, bare-headed, there in the broken dark. Then it was Michael with his arms tight round her and long, raking sobs, his mouth pressed against her hair, repeating her name, softly, over and over, Lorraine, Lorraine.

  Seventeen

  The great thing about Sunday lunchtimes in the city, back when Resnick had still been walking the beat, the number of bands you could hear for the price of a pint. Often not too much variety, it was true: New Orleans and Chicago by way of Arnold and Bobbers Mill, but when you weren’t paying admission, it didn’t pay to be fussy either. Besides, after a tough Saturday night, the familiar strains of “Who’s Sorry Now?” or “Royal Garden Blues” had a lot to commend them. Two choruses of ensemble, solos all round, a couple more with everyone going for broke, finally four-bar breaks in the last of which the drummer would likely throw his sticks into the air, shout “Ooo-ya! Ooo-ya!” and miss them coming down.

  Resnick had persuaded his father to go along once, knowing that if he’d said anything about the music beforehand the older man would have refused. So they had arrived at the bar, Resnick expressing surprise when half a dozen men came wandering in with instrument cases in various shapes and sizes. His father, a Semprini man if anything, and whose idea of acceptable jazz had never extended beyond Winifred Atwell and Charlie Kunz, had lasted until the third number, a particularly clumping version of “Dippermouth Blues.” At the unison shout of “Oh, play that thing!”, Resnick senior had pushed his unfinished pint of mild aside, withered his son with a look of true scorn and left.

  Thereafter, it was referred to disparagingly as “That melodious ragtime!”, Resnick refraining from the satisfaction of informing his father he had both words wrong.

  Still, leaving the Bell this particular Sunday afternoon, some of the musicians he had been listening to the same as on that earlier occasion, it was his father Resnick found himself thinking of, rather than this solo or that. Never a man to encourage displays of affection, nor any excesses of emotion, there had been little physical contact, other than the occasional shaken hand, between the two of them for years. Crossing the broad edge of the square, Resnick remembered now leaving his father in hospital for the first time, an exploratory operation, braided wool dressing gown loose over new-bought paisley pajamas that buckled against his slippered feet. “Bye, son,” his father had said, and on whatever impulse, Resnick had clasped him in his arms and kissed his unshaven cheek. He could still hear, through the muted traffic, the gasped cry of surprise, see the tears welling in his father’s eyes.

  Walking home now, Resnick turned left through the everspreading polytechnic and entered the Arboretum, a few parents wheeling their kids past the aviary, holding them, pointing excitedly, close against the bars. He sat for a while on one of the wooden benches facing the cannon, weathered black and impressive, which the local regiment had captured in the Crimea. The daftness of it, a man not so far short of middle age, sitting alone on that early winter afternoon, rehearsing all of the things he wanted to say to his father and now never could.

  When he walked in through his front door, thirty minutes later, cats swirling round his feet, the telephone was already ringing.

  You couldn’t see them so well that time of an evening, but Resnick knew the houses well enough, two-story, detached, each with its own garage, gardens front and back; most of the front lawns with a cherry tree or something close, soft petals that drifted out onto the curve of pavement, purple or pink. Family homes that went up—what?—twenty years ago, twenty-five? Resnick would drive round there sometimes, using the crescent as a cut-through, and think it was like a movie set. The fifties’ Hollywood ideal. Crusty old pop, forever chewing on his pipe; mom with flour on her apron, a great line in advice and pies whose pastry rose just right; the daughter with a soft spot for dogs and crippled kids and the leading man, who was pretty much of a ne’er-do-well, but who saw the light in time to find his way to the altar. If Resnick could ever remember their names, he’d know her—round-faced, fair-haired, sort of catch in her voice she most likely developed when she was just another band singer, s
itting stage left near the piano, patiently waiting till she was called to the microphone. Dinah? Dolores? What was her name?

  Michael guided the young woman in from the kitchen towards them. “This is my wife, Lorraine.”

  Resnick guessed her to be early twenties, but the result of all the crying had been to render her younger, late teens.

  Resnick introduced Lynn Kellogg and himself, suggested they went somewhere and sat down; there were questions they had to ask.

  With Michael’s permission, the uniformed officers were already making a thorough search of the property, top to bottom. Police in another part of the country had recently gone to a hostel, looking for a kidnapped four-year-old boy, had checked the room in which he was being kept and driven away empty-handed, leaving the cupboard in which he was hidden undisturbed.

  “I don’t understand,” Lorraine said, “what you’re doing. She isn’t here.”

  “We have to check, Mrs. Morrison,” Resnick said.

  “They have to check, Lorraine,” Michael said.

  “Perhaps we can start,” said Resnick, “with the last time you saw her.”

  “Emily,” Lorraine said, twisting the ends of her hair around her fingers.

  Resnick nodded.

  “She’s got a name.”

  Yes, thought Resnick, they always have. Gloria. Emily.

  “My wife’s upset,” Michael said. He touched her arm and she stared at his hand as if it belonged to a stranger.

  Resnick’s eyes and Lynn’s met. “The last time you saw Emily,” Resnick said.

  “Lorraine saw her,” Michael said. “Didn’t you, love?”

  Lorraine nodded. “From the bedroom window.”

  “And where was she? Emily?”

  “In the garden. Playing.”

  “That would be at the front?”

  Michael shook his head. “The back. The main bedroom, it’s at the back.”

  “And what time would this have been?”

  Michael looked at Lorraine, who was still twisting her hair, staring at the floor. Heavy footsteps walked across above their heads. “Three, three-thirty.”

  “You can’t be more accurate than that?”

  “No, I …”