Off Minor

by John Harvey

  “Visiting?”

  “Walking.”

  “Just walking?”

  Vivien smiled. “I don’t suppose you know a writer named Ray Bradbury, Inspector?”

  Resnick shook his head. “Is he Canadian?”

  “American. From Illinois, I believe. And do …” as she moved to sip her tea “… start on your lunch.”

  Resnick opened the bag containing the chicken breast and Brie. He wondered how long she was going to take to get to the point but had already decided, within reason, he didn’t much care.

  “Anyway,” she was saying, “in one of his stories a man is arrested by a prowling police car for walking alone through this neighborhood. Meandering. Suspicious enough in itself to be considered a crime. When he attempts to argue back, make his case, he finds it’s impossible. The police car is fully automated, no human being inside.”

  “Is that what’s called a parable?” Resnick asked. Vivien Nathanson smiled. “More an extended metaphor, probably.”

  “And I’m the inhuman policeman?”

  “I hope not. How’s your sandwich?”

  “Terrific.” He gestured for her to take a piece, but she declined.

  “Too far into my pre-Christmas diet to stop now.”

  “What were you doing? While you were walking.”

  “Oh, thinking.”

  “Lectures and the like?”

  “Uh-huh. Among other things.”

  Resnick found himself wanting to ask which other things. “While you were passing through the crescent, did you see anyone of Emily Morrison’s description?”

  He passed a picture across his desk and she looked at it carefully before answering no.

  “And you didn’t see anything unusual going on around the Morrison house?”

  “I don’t know which one that is.”

  “The woman who was seen, some of the reports suggest she was showing a special interest in the house.”

  “But I don’t know …”

  “You said.”

  “I think,” Vivien Nathanson said, “unless lam very much mistaken, the tone of this conversation has changed.”

  “A girl gone missing: it’s a serious matter.”

  “And I’m under suspicion?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “But if I had a specific reason for being in that area at that time, if, for instance, I were calling on a friend at Number, oh, twenty-eight or thirty-two …” She stopped, seeing the reaction on Resnick’s face. “That’s the house, isn’t it? Thirty-two. Where they live? The Morrisons.”

  Resnick nodded.

  “I didn’t know.”

  He didn’t say a thing, but watched her; a hint of alarm undermining her manner, not a seminar any longer.

  “But you didn’t see the girl?”

  “No.”

  “Any girl?”

  “Not that I remember.”

  “And you would remember?”

  “Possibly. Probably.”

  “How about a Ford Sierra?”

  Vivien shook her head. “I’m afraid the only time I’d notice a car is if it ran over me.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “But I did see a man.”

  Jesus, thought Resnick, has she been playing with me all this time?

  “He might even be the one you’re looking for. On the radio, it mentioned someone who was running.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I was crossing over, you know, towards the footpath that leads through to the canal. He bumped right into me, almost knocked me down.”

  Like downstairs, Resnick thought, though he had been the one falling. “Your mind on other things?” he asked.

  “To a degree. But he was most at fault. Just wasn’t looking where he was going.”

  “Where had he been looking?”

  “Back over his shoulder.”

  Resnick could see the curve of the street clearly in his mind, the direction Vivien had been heading, the path the runner had been following. A man running with his head angled back the way he had come, back in the direction of Number 32.

  Resnick could feel tiny goose-pimples forming all along his arms, hear the shift of register in his voice when he spoke. “You could give us a description?”

  “I think so.”

  “Detailed?”

  “It was only for a moment.”

  “But close.”

  “Yes, close.”

  Resnick was already reaching for the phone. “What I’d like to do, as well as taking your statement, arrange for an artist to come to the station, make a drawing under your advice. See how close we can get. Okay?”

  “In that case,” smiling as she leaned forward, “if I’m going to be here all that time, I will have half of this sandwich.”

  Twenty-nine

  “I didn’t know you had that.”

  Michael shook his head. “Neither did I. Diana must have dropped it in with her things. I doubt she did it on purpose.”

  “Perhaps Emily took it.”

  “Could be.”

  The tag was clear plastic, snapped through at the end where it would have been fastened about the newborn leg or arm: the name written in black felt-tip, Emily, the name and the date.

  They had been in her room for almost an hour now, sorting through clothes, some of which, handed on from friends, bought dutifully by Lorraine’s parents, Emily had never worn. In a folder there were Instamatic pictures of the first holiday they had taken, the three of them, after their marriage, the divorce.

  “D’you remember that?”

  Emily on the back of a bored donkey, clutching Michael’s hand. Although neither of them would put it into words, each was thinking of Emily as though they would never see her again.

  “Who was that on the phone earlier?” Michael asked.

  “Just my mother.”

  Michael nodded, wondering by what twists of logic she would have laid the blame for what had happened squarely at his feet.

  “She sent you her love,” Lorraine said, both of them knowing it was a lie.

  “I thought it might have been the police.”

  “Michael, I would have told you.”

  Last night it had been Lorraine who had slept heavily, Michael who had turned and turned, his injured leg throbbing; sat finally in the electric light of the kitchen, drinking tea, glancing now and then towards the unopened whisky bottle on the shelf, the empty one on the floor beside the bin. This morning he’d woken Lorraine with grapefruit juice and toast, kissed her on the lids of both eyes, the first time he had done either of those things for longer than she liked to remember.

  “Will it always be like this?” she had asked in the heady days of their courtship—or, as her mother preferred to call it, their sordid little affair.

  “Absolutely,” Michael had said, touching the back of his hand to her breast. Kissing her: “Absolutely.”

  “Love fades,” says the passer-by in Annie Hall.

  “Love hurts,” sing the Everly Brothers on their TV-advertised CD Greatest Hits. “Love dies.”

  Their love, Lorraine’s and Michael’s, had slipped into limbo, fallen somewhere between the late nights and the early mornings, Lorraine forever rushing from her job at the bank to the supermarket to collect Emily from school; Michael turning the car into the drive, exhausted by the stubbornness of clients, the miniature of Scotch with which he chased the cans of beer bought on the swaying train.

  “I love Emily, Michael, you know I do, but even so, we will, you know, have a baby of our own?”

  “Of course we will, of course. We just have to wait until the time is right.”

  They had not had that conversation for months, more; as far as Michael was concerned, Lorraine doubted that the time ever would be right. She had even begun to live with it. And after what had happened with Diana, what had happened to his son, to James, Lorraine thought that perhaps she could accept, understand. After all, there was Emily.

  “What is it? Lorr
aine, what?”

  Michael reached for her as the tears suddenly sprang, but she twisted away from his hand and off the bed where they had been sitting, out through the partly open door and along the landing to the bathroom, leaving him alone. The clock on the chest read 13.22. Tomorrow, if nothing had happened, he would go back into work: anything was better than being here, breath catching each time a car slowed near the house, waiting for the inevitable walk towards the door, the ringing of the bell.

  As Resnick walked along the corridor, yet another conference in the super’s office, the door to one of the interview rooms opened and Vivien Nathanson stepped out followed by Millington, a rare smile, broad as Divine’s shoulders, lighting up the sergeant’s face. Resnick wondered what had passed between them, those moments before leaving the room, and was surprised by jealousy, sudden and sharp, between the ribs, below the heart.

  The paintings around the walls were boldly colored, figures all head and little body, trees whose foliage was a mass of leaves, purple and green, suns blazing so fiercely they threatened to send whole landscapes up in flames. In one corner of the room books were collected in plastic bins or stacked, face out, on shelves that were in the middle of reconstruction. Opposite, a Wendy house offered sanctuary, a place to rest, to act out the already half-mastered rituals of family. Small tables and matching chairs stood in clusters, facing inwards. Flowers. Shells. Fossils. Toy cars. Dolls. Hamsters with pouched cheeks asleep in a cocoon of straw.

  Naylor had arranged to meet Joan Shepperd before the start of afternoon school and she looked up from where she was pasting color supplement pictures on to card, two or three words of vocabulary clearly written below each one.

  She smiled readily as Naylor introduced himself, but then she hesitated, uneasy, uncertain what to do next, remnants of the smile stranded across her broad face.

  She was a large woman, motherly, Naylor supposed, brown hair tied back, though wisps folded towards her eyes at intervals and she brushed them automatically away. She was wearing a long cardigan over a print dress: surprisingly, to Naylor, new-looking trainers instead of shoes.

  “I still haven’t taken it in, not properly. None of us have.”

  Naylor mumbled something suggesting understanding, leafing through his notebook for the next blank page. The sounds of small children rose shrill through the building as someone opened a door to the outside.

  “How well did you know Emily Morrison?” Naylor asked.

  “Oh, just the term. She was here before that, of course, nursery, but, no, I’d not taught her before this term.”

  “But you would have seen her around? In the building?”

  Joan Shepperd shook her head. “No, you see, I only started myself at this school in September. Supply. I’m what’s called on supply.” Hammering started up somewhere beyond the classroom door. Joan Shepperd smiled. “Sit at home waiting for the phone to ring. Well, exaggeration I suppose. If you’re lucky it’s a term’s work at a time. Filling in, you know.” She glanced around. “Regular teacher taken sick, that’s the usual. Or time off to have a baby. That’s what I’m doing here, somebody having a baby.”

  “They could ask you to work anywhere then?” Naylor said.

  “They could. Inside the authority. Yes, they could. But I like, you know, I don’t like to go too far from home.” Another smile, more dimpled than the last. “I don’t drive. And, well, there are buses, but with a job like this there always seems to be so much to carry.”

  The hammering stopped and started again. A ball cannoned off one of the classroom windows; a child’s face pressed up against another pane until he was shouted away. Naylor went through his questions, never believing it to be any more than routine. At the point where she was asked about strangers waiting outside the school, anyone she might have seen talking to Emily, Joan Shepperd hesitated long enough to give Naylor some expectation, but it was nothing. Once or twice, I seem to remember she was one of the last to be collected. I think, yes, her mother had been held up, perhaps the traffic or she hadn’t been able to leave work dead on. But Emily was good about waiting, inside the cloakroom, I think. Or she would come back in here and help me tidy up. She would never go out on to the street.”

  The door opened and a man came in wearing brown overalls, a canvas tool bag over one shoulder. “Oh, sorry, Joan …”

  “That’s all right,” Joan Shepperd getting to her feet. “This is the policeman, come to talk to me about poor Emily.”

  “Ah, yes.”

  “Constable, this is my husband, Stephen.”

  Stephen Shepperd and Naylor nodded in each other’s direction.

  “Come around sometimes and lend a hand, odd jobs, you know. These shelves, got into a right state. Wait for council to come along and fix them be like waiting yourself into an early grave. Eh?”

  “I do believe the school had been waiting a long while,” Joan agreed.

  Stephen dropped his tool bag on to a group of tables. “Couple of afternoons and it’s all shipshape. Course, got to know what you’re doing in the first place.”

  “Stephen was a joiner,” Joan said.

  “Not so much of the was. Still am.”

  “He’s not working full time,” Joan said to Naylor.

  “Redundant,” Stephen explained. “Me and a few thousand others.” He pointed towards Naylor. “Nothing as’ll likely happen to you. Growth industry, to believe what you hear, crime.”

  “Don’t get on to one of your hobby horses, Stephen.”

  “If I did, this young man’d tell you I’m right, don’t mind betting he would. But I’ll not. I’ll just leave this lot here and come back when you’re through.”

  “I think we’re that already,” Naylor said. “Unless there’s anything else you’ve thought of, Mrs. Sheppard?”

  Joan Shepperd shook her head. “I only wish there were.”

  “All right, then. Thanks for your help. Mr. Shepperd, you can get on with your shelves.”

  In the playground a whistle blew and the clamor of voices stilled.

  “Look,” Stephen said as Naylor was almost at the door, “I don’t want to be pushy, but if there’s ever any work you need doing at home, you could do worse than give me a call.”

  “Thanks,” Naylor said, “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Walking between the lines of children coming back into the school, thinking it would take a lot more than a few nails and a strip of four by two to put his home back together again.

  Lynn Kellogg called round at the Morrisons’ late in the afternoon and told them of the day’s developments. The waste land adjacent to the canal had been searched a second time, as had the railway sidings where Gloria Summers had eventually been found, neither with any success. One sighting of a youngster said to resemble Emily in Skegness had proved incorrect, as had another on the South Coast. There had been three reports as to the probable owner of the black Sierra that had been left for several hours in the crescent on Sunday, but none had checked out. The good news was that a woman had come forward with a description of the jogger observed by the Morrisons’ neighbors and this would be released to the media at any time.

  Lynn thought that Lorraine looked the more fragile of the two today, as if maybe she had been letting Michael shelter behind her strength and now it was going to have to be reversed. They were to appear on national TV news that evening to make an appeal for Emily’s return; Lorraine had tried and discarded five outfits already and was about to do the same to a sixth.

  “For heaven’s sake!” snapped Michael. “It’s perfectly fine.”

  A cream trouser suit with a pale pink blouse and white, low heel shoes; it contrasted with Michael’s navy jacket and dark gray trousers, highly polished black brogues. To Lynn they looked more like the kind of clothes you would wear to a christening, but she wasn’t about to make them any more nervous than they already were. Besides, what exactly was the dress etiquette for occasions like this? She remembered her father turning up at a family funeral
tieless and in grubby brown boots, dark speckles of chicken shit unmistakable on his trouser legs. Had it meant that he cared any the less?

  Lynn volunteered to accompany them to the television studio and they seemed truly grateful.

  Make-up did what they could with the shadows around their eyes, teased some life back into Lorraine’s hair. After a few minutes with the producer, they were shown the settee where they would be filmed, side by side. The news report opened with the artist’s impression of the runner who had collided with Vivien Nathanson close to the Morrisons’ home. Then it was Michael and Lorraine, a photograph of Emily inset over Lorraine’s shoulder. “Whoever has taken my daughter and is holding her against her will,” Michael said, blinking at the camera, “I’m begging you not to harm her. Whoever you are, please, please, let her go, let her come back home.”

  Sweat ran visibly down Michael’s face, the producer worried that a blob was going to fall from his nose in close shot, not the effect he wanted at all. The moment Michael finished talking, Lorraine put one of her hands over his and squeezed. Pulling back fast, adjusting focus, the camera operator just got it in frame.

  “Right!” said the editor, smiling. “There’s our out.”

  Thirty

  All day they had been getting after Raymond, chasing him from loading bay to loading bay with their shouts, from cutting room to cutting room, pillar to post.

  “Raymond! Here, catch a hold of this, will you?”

  “Raymond, why don’t you learn to move your bloody self!”

  “Raymond, ‘en’t you got that order ready yet?”

  “Raymond!”

  “Ray!”

  “Ray-o, damn you!”

  “Ray!”

  Hathersage caught him by the neck of his overalls and spun him round, Raymond’s boots slithering on the blood-strewn floor, legs going under him, only Hathersage’s hand, like a ham, holding him aloft. “The Good Lord alone knows what you’re thinking about half the time, you Godforsaken excuse for a human being, but on my old mum’s life I know one thing that it ain’t and that’s what I’m sodding paying you to sodding do. Here. See here!”