by John Harvey
“That’s all right,” Resnick said. “It’s probably good for me to be on the other side of an interrogation for a change.”
“Is that really what it was?”
“Why don’t we just forget about it?” he said, leaving Vivien standing there, a coffee cup and saucer in either hand.
Forty
“I went to see the Morrisons yesterday afternoon.”
Stephen’s spoon hovered short of his mouth, Joan behind him, close to his right shoulder, still warm from her bath, wearing her dressing gown.
“After school. The father wasn’t there, but the mother, I talked to the mother, told her how upset I was, we all were, at the school. Not her mother, really, stepmother, but even so.” She passed in front of Stephen, reaching for the cereal packet on the shelf. “The dreadful time that young woman’s been going through. She didn’t seem to be able to stop crying. Terrible.”
Stephen, head bowed, carried on chewing his prunes.
“I’m surprised you haven’t been, Stephen …”
“Me? Why should I …?”
“It’s not as though you didn’t know Emily …”
“I suppose I knew who she was …”
“I always thought she was one of your favorites.”
Stephen staring at her now, not eating, breakfast forgotten.
“One of the ones you always made a point of talking to. Well, she was certainly a pretty girl, everyone said. I mean, you weren’t alone in noticing that.”
Stephen twisted round on his chair. What did she think she was playing at, sitting there with her bowl of Fruit and Fiber, chattering on, matter-of-fact?
“You should go, Stephen. Why not this morning? I’ve got one or two little bits of shopping to do, you could go then. Walk over, if you didn’t want to take the car. It’s not far, the other side of Gregory Street; but I keep forgetting, you know that.”
Without his meaning it to, one of Stephen’s hands jerked out, overturning his bowl, prune stones and juice across the Formica-covered table, spoon skittering to the linoleum-covered floor.
“A nice house, where the Morrisons live, garden front and back. Quite a view of the rear garden from the road, lawn mostly; I suppose with both of the parents working they don’t have a great deal of time to do much else. And besides, it must make a lovely space for Emily to play.” She dabbed at the corners of her mouth with a paper napkin. “Don’t you think so, Stephen?”
Stephen was running water at the sink, fidgeting cutlery through his hands, spoons, forks, knives. A dribble of sweat ran from his eyebrow into the corner of his eye.
“So much nicer for Emily than anywhere that other poor little soul had to play. Aside from the rec, of course. I always wonder, don’t you, Stephen, what they can get up to, cooped up in one of those tall flats with only a balcony to run along? Balcony and, I suppose, the stairs.”
A spiral of blood ribboned up from where the tine of the fork had pierced Stephen’s thumb, staining the water pink.
“What was her name, Stephen? You remember, that pretty blond child? The one you were so taken with.”
But Stephen was no longer there to answer. Door slam after door slam and finally the bolt inside the cellar work room being drawn across. Joan Shepperd drained the soiled water from the sink and ran new, never liking to get on with the rest of the day before the breakfast things were washed and stacked away. Gloria, that was right, Gloria Summers. She had known all along.
Since the new greengrocer’s had opened where the butcher’s used to be, Joan Shepperd seldom bothered to shop further afield in the week. With three Asian shops, each staying open late into the evening, it was always possible to pop back out for anything she might have forgotten. This morning it was tomatoes, a pound of apples, easier now it was all right to buy South African, orange juice, a book of stamps from the post office, second class. She couldn’t believe that she was feeling this calm. Lying awake in the night, listening to Stephen, his even breathing beside her, undisturbed, sleeping the sleep of the just. Lorraine Morrison’s face, her tears. She had to wait for the telephone, two kiosks but only one of them functioning, nothing new. “Hello,” she said, connected, “I’d like to speak to a Detective Constable Kellogg. Yes, that’s right, Lynn.”
“You sure it was her? Shepperd’s wife?”
“She didn’t say. Like I said, wouldn’t leave a name. But, yes, I’m pretty sure. Though I only spoke to her the once.”
“Well,” Resnick brushing crumbs from his front as he stood, a toasted ham and cheese that was filling the gap between breakfast and lunch, “for now that’s not the most important thing. The most important thing is the information right?”
Lynn nodded. “I called the education office and checked. You’d have thought I was asking them to divulge state secrets, but finally we got there: Joan Shepperd was at Gloria Summers’s school for most of the summer term before she disappeared. On supply. Gloria’s regular teacher went abseiling in Derbyshire and broke her leg in three places.”
“Joan Shepperd stepped into the breach.”
“She’d worked there before, two years previously. Seems they were pleased to have her back. Experienced, reliable.”
“An otherwise unemployed husband, who’s got a way with a hammer and nails.” Resnick looked at Lynn sharply. “I wonder if he drove her to work there, too? Collected her?”
“I could check.”
“Do it now.”
Resnick followed Lynn into the main office. “Kevin,” he called. “Downstairs with a car, five minutes.”
At first, they couldn’t get anyone to come to the door, though the intermittent whine of an electrical motor told them someone was in the house. When Stephen Shepperd finally appeared, he was wearing his old white coveralls, a bandage taped around the end of his left thumb.
“Thought that was the thing separated out you professionals from amateurs like me,” Resnick said, nodding towards Shepperd’s hand, “never hit themselves with a hammer.”
Shepperd looked from Resnick to Naylor and back again, saying nothing.
“Maybe you should nip back down,” Resnick said, “make sure everything’s switched off. If she’s not here, you might want to leave your wife a note.”
“Are you arresting me?” Shepperd asked.
“Should we be?”
A nerve began ticking at the far corner of Stephen Shepperd’s eye.
“What we’d like you to do,” Resnick said, “is come with us to the station, answer some more questions.”
“Why can’t I do that here?”
“You’re not frightened of us, Mr. Shepperd? Nothing about the way you were treated yesterday?”
“No, but …”
“No special call to be worried about anything we might ask?”
“No, of course not, but …”
“Then we’ll just wait here while you do whatever it is you need to do.”
Shepperd hesitated beyond the moment when he might have refused; he turned back into the house, hand reaching out to close the door behind him, but Naylor got there first.
“No need to shut that, Mr. Shepperd,” Naylor said. “I’m sure you won’t be that long.”
Lynn Kellogg intercepted Resnick on the stairs, drew him off to one side while Naylor escorted Shepperd towards the interview room. “Drove her there every day, there and back, regular as clockwork. The staff used to remark on it, tease her a little, the head said, how she had her husband so well trained. ‘Lend him to me for the weekend, Joan, so’s he can do a few odd jobs for me.’ That kind of thing.”
“And did he do a few odd jobs for the school?”
“Wonderful, the head teacher reckons. Repaired equipment, all sorts. Got so she started to feel quite guilty about it, wanted to give him something out of the school fund. Wouldn’t accept a penny. Said helping them out, that was reward enough.”
“Right,” Resnick nodded. “But maybe not quite enough.” He made to move on, but Lynn detained him with a touch on t
he arm. “Seems there was this one occasion, sir. Mrs. Shepperd got held up, talking to a parent in her classroom after school. Head happened to pass through the cloakroom and there were three or four children still hanging around. Shepperd was there, talking to them. No suggestion of anything, you know, at all funny. Wrong. But she does think Gloria Summers was one of them.”
“She thinks?”
“She can’t remember for certain.”
“Did she say anything about this at the time?”
“No, sir. Didn’t seem important, I suppose. Relevant.”
“Fax that drawing out to Mablethorpe. Wherever the nearest station is with a fax machine. Get someone to take it round to Mrs. Summers, see if she can remember him hanging around the school, talking to Gloria.”
Lynn nodded and was on her way. By the time Resnick got to the interview room, Stephen Shepperd was sitting at the table, staring at the burn marks left by a score of cigarettes. Naylor was slipping a pair of fresh tapes into the machine.
“Do we have to use that?” Shepperd asked, looking towards the recorder. “I hate those things.”
“Keeps an accurate record of what’s said,” Resnick explained. “More reliable than struggling to get it all written down. Quicker, too. In your interests, I’d say.”
Shepperd wiped the palms of his hands along the legs of his trousers and, for a moment, closed his eyes. When he opened them again, Resnick was standing immediately before him, directly across the table. “We’re going to ask you some questions relating to the disappearance of Emily Morrison, Mr. Shepperd, also to the murder of Gloria Summers.”
Shepperd’s hands ceased to move, gripped his thighs.
“As I told you before, you are not under arrest at this time. Which means you have the right to leave at any time you choose. It also means if you wish to have a solicitor present or want to obtain legal advice, you’re free to do so. Do you understand all of that?”
Drawing in air through his mouth, Stephen Shepperd nodded.
“In that case,” Resnick continued, “I am cautioning you that you do not have to say anything in relation to these matters unless you wish to do so, but what you do say may, at some later stage, be given in evidence. All right, Mr. Shepperd? Stephen?”
Using his fingers to still the nerve that had begun to beat again alongside his head, Stephen Shepperd murmured, “All right.”
Joan put the tomatoes and the orange juice in the fridge, the apples into a bowl. She took one of the stamps from the book and stuck it to the corner of the envelope that was addressed and waiting, a letter to her friend in Redruth, just about the only friend from college with whom she still kept in touch. Stephen’s note was on the table, held down by a jar of basil he had taken from the shelf. She read it with neither surprise nor passion. She knew that she had let things slide for far too long, taken assurances at face value, looked the other way, she could acknowledge that. Well, now matters must take their course. The tranquilizers her doctor had prescribed that autumn she had never taken, not until last night, and she thought she might take another now, swill it down with some water before her mid-morning cup of tea. One: maybe even two.
Forty-one
“Michael!” Lorraine had called. “Michael! Michael!” From the foot of the stairs, the landing, finally a foot inside the bedroom door. Michael Morrison broke from his heavy, sweated sleep thinking that the urgency and the clamor were due to news about Emily, but one look at Lorraine’s face was sufficient to give a lie to that. He groaned and slumped back down, hauling the covers over his head.
“Michael, you’ll be late for work.”
From beneath the duvet came sounds she deciphered as, “That’s because I’m not going to bloody work!”
The cup of tea she’d brought him up half an hour earlier sat beside the bed, untouched and close to cold. The room smelled of drink and cigarettes: Michael sitting up till past twelve watching videos he’d fetched from the corner store, one after another, end to end. Finally, he’d insisted on hooking up the VCR to the portable set they kept in the bedroom, sitting propped against the pillows with the umpteenth bottle of wine by his side, an ashtray in between his legs, watching something loud and dreadful with Eddie Murphy.
Lorraine had lain with her back to him, telling herself over and over to remember what had happened, that we all dealt with trauma in our different ways; telling herself why it was she had married him. Trying to remember.
She had slept fitfully, disturbed by the sound of punches being faked, by Michael’s occasional laughter and later his trips to the bathroom; by dreams in which Emily was on a train pulling away from the station and she, Lorraine, somehow trapped outside, screaming, banging her fists against her stepdaughter’s bewildered face at the other side of the glass. In the morning there were ash and cigarette butts on the carpet, wine stains on the bed. Michael’s hair lay flattened like tar across his head. Emily’s picture smiled down at them from the top of the chest of drawers: soon it would be a week.
When Michael finally appeared it was ten minutes short of eleven. Lorraine was sitting in the living room at the back of the house, scissoring recipes she intended to make from magazines. On the low table was the scrapbook she had bought to put them in, the paste.
“My mouth feels like a toilet,” Michael said.
“Serves you right,” said Lorraine, deciding to pass over Cod Mornay.
“Bitch,” Michael said, heading for the kitchen.
Diplomatically, Lorraine decided she hadn’t heard him. When the doorbell sounded, she was spreading her recipes out along the table, considering the order; Michael was drinking instant coffee with sugar, waiting for the sliced bread to pop up from the toaster. Both arrived at the front door at roughly the same time.
“Hello,” said the woman in green duffle coat and glasses, “you don’t know me, but I’m Jacqueline Verdon. Jackie. I’m a friend of Diana’s.”
“My Diana?” said Michael, surprised.
“Well,” Jackie Verdon said, “not any more.”
“She’s not …?”
“Oh, no. She’s all right. I didn’t mean … I just meant it was a funny way to describe her. Yours.”
“Won’t you come in?” said Lorraine, stepping back.
“Yes. Yes, I would like to. Thanks very much. Thanks.”
“Live round here, do you?” Michael asked. Something inside his head seemed to reverberate each time he spoke.
Jackie shook her head. “West Yorkshire. Hebden Bridge. I’ve a bookshop there. You know, secondhand.”
“Oh, I thought when you said you were a friend of Diana’s …”
“We met up on a walking holiday. Not a holiday, really. A weekend. In the Lakes. B & B, guided tours, that kind of thing.”
“I never knew Diana was much interested in walking.”
“No, well, I daresay there’s quite a lot you don’t know about Diana. Oh, I’m sorry, that sounds dreadful. I didn’t mean to be so … I didn’t intend to be rude.”
“’S fine,” Michael said huffily.
“It’s just that over the last six months or so, Diana’s gone through a lot of changes. Started to take some control of her life.”
“Which is why she’s back in hospital, I suppose?”
“Maybe she pushed a little too fast too soon; maybe I tried pushing her too fast, I don’t know. But what’s happening now, I think it’s temporary. Not even a step back: one to the side. I think Diana’s going to be fine.”
“You do?”
“I’ve seen her recently. Today. Have you?”
“I’ve had other things on my mind.”
“I know. And I’m sorry. But Emily is Diana’s child, too.” Lorraine came through with coffee and two kinds of biscuits, chocolate digestives and lemon creams. There were some polite inquiries about milk and sugar, some discussion of the onset of Christmas, how it seemed to start earlier each year, a little non-conversation about the weather.
“Does Diana know?” Michael asked.
“About Emily? No. And it’s important that she doesn’t. Not yet. Not now. That’s the principal reason I’m here. The hospital have been very good about keeping her sheltered from the newspapers, anything like that. Of course, they can’t do that for ever and when Diana herself is feeling stronger, well, it simply wouldn’t be possible.” Jackie Verdon looked at them and smiled. “By that time, of course, Emily might well be safe and sound.” She breathed out deeply. “If she’s not, I think I should be the one to break it to her.”
Michael glanced at Lorraine, began to say something but couldn’t choose the words.
“I think it’s fair to say I’m the closest to her now. Aside from Emily herself. I want you to agree that it’s all right for me to tell her, that you won’t go in and do it yourself. Afterwards, of course, if that’s what Diana wants, it’s only natural that it’s something you should share.”
“Look,” Michael snorted, “you’ve got a hell of a nerve. Waltzing in here, laying down the law about what I can and can’t say to someone you’ve known less than six months.”
“How long were you married to Diana?”
“Never mind.”
“And you think you knew her? In that time, you think you spent a lot of time and energy getting to know Diana?”
“Of course I bloody did!”
“When it was all over I doubt if you knew the size of her shoes or the color of her eyes, never mind anything that really mattered.”
The way Michael got to his feet, Jackie Verdon was convinced he was going to hit her; she rocked back in her chair, arms thrown up to protect her face. By the time she had lowered them, Michael was on his way from the room.
Jackie and Lorraine looked at one another across the overlapping circle of digestives and lemon creams.
“I’m really sorry,” Jackie said. “I don’t know what got into me. I should never, ever have said that.”
“Michael’s been under a lot of strain.”
“Of course. It’s just, with Diana, I get so protective. You know?”