‘Don’t be ridiculous, Sarah, no one is keeping you locked up, for heaven’s sake. When does term at that place in Leeds actually finish?’
‘Mummy, I need to go in every day for the next week. If I don’t, I won’t pass my foundation course. I know you’re not going to let me go off to Paris now after what I’ve done to you and Daddy, but please don’t stop me now when I’ve worked so hard.’
‘Sarah, as you say, you are an adult—although for the life in me I don’t know why you don’t act like one. There are some lovely young men in the county just waiting to be snapped up. So, I suggest you get off to that art place, finish your course and then we’ll sit down with Daddy and decide what you should do next… perhaps a secretarial course at the North of England like Selena did once she came back from Switzerland?’
Sarah breathed a secret sigh of relief and smiled at her mother. ‘That might be a good idea, Mummy. Selena hasn’t looked back since doing that, has she? Now, I’m going to catch the ten o’clock train and I’ll be back for supper. If I can work hard every day this week, the lecturers should let me through, I think.’
Sarah kissed her mother’s Max-Factored cheek, inhaling the Estee Lauder ‘Youth Dew’ Anne Sykes had insisted on wearing ever since it made its debut in the 1950s and which always made Sarah feel slightly nauseous. ‘Thanks, Mummy and I am sorry I’ve caused you and Daddy so much upset.’
Sarah escaped, running for the bus that would take her to the station, abandoning her skirt and blouse for the Levi’s, T-shirt and Doc Martens that she managed to change into in the Leeds train’s malodorous toilet cubicle and, once in the city, ran the three-quarters of a mile to Johnny’s flat.
He was asleep and it took a good three minutes’ hammering for Sarah to waken him and bring him, naked except for a pair of ‘Ban the Bomb’ underpants, to the door. He squinted against the bright sunshine, rubbing his eyes and yawning loudly, peering at whoever it was mad enough to be up at so early an hour.
‘Fuck, Sarah. Where’s the fire?’
‘Oh, Johnny, you’re OK?’
‘OK? Yes, I’m fine, apart from some idiot waking me up in the middle of the night.’ He took in her pretty face, red from running in the warm sunshine; the large breasts and long legs encased in denim; her huge brown eyes, her full mouth just waiting to be kissed. ‘Christ, you’re gorgeous,’ he said, burying his face in her long dark hair and pulling her into the flat. ‘Where’ve you been the last two days?’
*
‘I searched all over for you, Sarah,’ Johnny said as she lay, sated with sex and love for this beautiful man who was now in the middle of meticulously rolling a joint for them both.
‘I’m really sorry I lost you but, that poor horse… Didn’t you see it? It was hit on the nose with a brick and it was so brave, it just stood there. I had to go and help it, and then someone, or something, hit me in the back of the legs.’ Sarah turned to show him the huge bruises, yellowing now and in hues of purple and ochre. ‘I just sort of fell forwards and lost consciousness for a while.’
‘Bloody hell,’ Johnny said, squinting through the pungent smoke of the joint, ‘I hate horses—they’re huge big things. One stood on my toe once and it’s never recovered.’ He lifted a grubby-looking foot from the sheet, examining it for proof of the horse’s clumsiness. ‘And I’m totally allergic to them; I sneeze if I even see one—that’s why I kept well away when you ran off towards them.’
‘Didn’t you come back to find me?’ Sarah asked sharply. ‘Didn’t you see what happened?’
‘No, no, I didn’t,’ Johnny said too quickly, pinning her arms back against the pillow so he had unhindered access to both delicious, full breasts and could continue from there to kiss up the inside of her arms. ‘I kept running all the way down to the village and assumed you were behind me. When I realised you weren’t there, I ran back but couldn’t get past the cordon of police that had turned really nasty by then.’
‘But didn’t you look for me? Didn’t you wonder what had happened to me? Didn’t you… care?’ Sarah’s lip trembled and she tried not to cry.
‘Sarah, lovely Sarah, I’ve been searching everywhere for you for the last couple of days. You’ve never allowed me to have your phone number so I couldn’t ring your house. I sometimes wonder if you aren’t a bit ashamed of me. I mean you’ve never asked me back to meet your parents.’
Sarah flung her arms round him. ‘No, no, it’s not that. No, you mustn’t think that. It’s just that Mummy and Daddy are a bit old-fashioned… They’re a bit protective of me.’
‘That’s all right then,’ Johnny said comfortably, kissing her nipple so lightly Sarah thought she’d go mad with longing for him. He didn’t say anything for a while but then suddenly smiled. ‘Tell you what, Sarah, I’d love to take you away for a couple of days. Have you ever been to Amsterdam?’
*
‘So what did you tell Mummy and Daddy?’ Johnny asked as Sarah strapped herself into the cheap afternoon flight from Manchester airport to Amsterdam. He seemed distracted, nervous even, and Sarah assumed it was because she’d been really late getting to the airport, arriving just as the gate had been about to close.
‘Suzy Sinclair,’ Sarah muttered, so rigid with nerves her teeth were actually chattering. She took a deep breath and tried to speak slowly. ‘I was at school with Suzy—she was one of the naughty ones, but for some reason she always seemed to like me.’ Sarah shook her head as if still unable to believe that any girl as enigmatic as Suzy Sinclair could have elected to have her as one of her buddies. ‘I think she liked the idea of hanging around with “an honourable’” more than anything else.’
‘An honourable? An honourable what?’ Johnny stared at her, puzzled.
Sarah blushed. ‘Oh, because Daddy is a life peer, it means I’m allowed the title. I never use it, but Suzy seemed to think it was something special.’
Johnny looked at her and whistled. ‘So my girlfriend is The Honourable Sarah?’ He grinned. ‘Well, what do you know?’
‘As I said, I don’t use it, it doesn’t mean anything,’ Sarah said hurriedly, embarrassed. ‘Anyway, Suzy had invited me ages ago to some party of hers down at her parents’ house in Lincolnshire and I said I wasn’t going, but then I told Mummy I’d changed my mind. Mummy was delighted that I was back seeing friends from school rather than the scruffy lefties she assumes I’m mixing with in Leeds…’
Johnny laughed out loud at that. ‘Scruffy lefty? Well, I think I’ve been called everything now.’
‘Anyway, I couldn’t think of any other way of coming away with you, so told Suzy everything and asked her to cover for me. She loves any sort of intrigue and even spoke to Mummy the other night when she rang and Mummy answered. Mummy said she was so pleased I was going down for a few days because she felt I’d been mixing with some very strange characters and it would do me good to mix with my own sort once more. I do feel horribly guilty—Mummy gave me some money to buy Suzy a present and dropped me at Leeds station so I could catch the London train to Peterborough. Suzy’s mother is supposed to be picking me up from there. Well, I mean, obviously she isn’t because she doesn’t know anything about it. Oh Johnny, I feel so nervous. Mummy insisted on waiting with me at Leeds until the London train came and then I had to dash to the other platform to get the Manchester train and then I just missed one and…’
Johnny patted her hand, but still seemed distracted. It must be her own nerves that were catching, she thought, and again tried to relax by taking deep breaths.
‘Christ, I need a drink,’ Johnny said, once they were airborne. ‘Where’s the drinks trolley?’
‘Where are we staying?’ Sarah asked. ‘Is it somewhere you’ve stayed before?’
‘Well, I think I need to introduce you to the pleasures of the coffee bars in the red-light districts before we think of finding somewhere to kip for the night.’
‘Coffee? I thought you’d have preferred the bars.’
‘The Amsterdam bars are not a pat
ch on their coffee bars,’ Johnny grinned. ‘Just you wait and see.’
*
They spent the rest of that day and the next in the coffee bars, getting so high Sarah couldn’t imagine any other world except this one cocooned in the smoky, overcrowded, almost subterranean world of music and pot, immersed in Limahl, Howard Jones and the Thompson Twins, while giggling uproariously at anything remotely funny that Johnny said.
‘I’m supposed to be going to the Burghley Horse Trials with Mummy sometime in September,’ Sarah was telling Johnny, suddenly feeling emotional about the lovely chestnut horse that had been hit on the nose. ‘I wish you could come but you’d hate it, wouldn’t you?’
‘Not if the horses were all found guilty,’ Johnny said with a straight face. ‘That would be fun.’
Sarah was giggling so much, hiccupping at the thought of horses parading in front of judge and jury, she didn’t acknowledge, for a couple of seconds, the tall, Middle-Eastern looking man who had joined them, sliding into the spare seat and shaking Johnny’s hand.
‘Sarah, this is Felix, an old friend of mine.’
‘Oh, fancy bumping into someone you know,’ Sarah exclaimed, still tittering. ‘Excuse me, Felix, must find a loo,’ and she was off, floating through the crowd, laughing to herself.
When she got back, Felix had disappeared. ‘Oh, has your friend gone?’ Sarah asked, surprised.
‘He’s not really a friend. Just someone I knew years ago.’
‘I wish we could stay here forever,’ Sarah sighed. ‘Do we have to get the plane back tonight?’ She looked at her watch. She’d been determined to visit the Van Gogh museum on Paulus Potterstraat 7, a good twenty minutes’ walk away from the rather seedy hotel in which they’d stayed the night, excited about seeing some of the artist’s earlier, lesser-known work. But, as she’d tentatively made to rise from the bed, head woolly from an overindulgence of weed and Jenever, the city’s infamous liqueur, Johnny’s hand had snaked out to catch her wrist and tumble her back into bed. Now there was no time to make the visit.
‘Oh, Johnny,’ Sarah suddenly exclaimed, ‘my overnight case—it’s gone.’ She scrabbled around the table and chairs, searching through myriad feet and other people’s bags and jackets. ‘Where is it?’
‘What have you done with it? Did you take it to the loo?’
‘No, I wouldn’t take my case for a wee. Or did I? Golly, I’m so floaty, maybe I did.’ Sarah giggled and once more made her way through the crowd to the bathroom three floors up.
‘No, it’s not there,’ she sighed, ten minutes later. ‘Oh bugger, have I lost it or has someone stolen it?’
‘You didn’t have much in it, did you?’
‘No, not really: a couple of pairs of knickers, my Thomas Hardy and my toilet bag. Oh and my best jeans—damn, I love those jeans. Do you think we should go and tell the police?’
‘Not in the state you’re in,’ Johnny said. ‘It might be legal to smoke in these coffee bars, but you’re pretty much off your head, you know. Wait there and I’ll go and have a good look round.’
More than fifteen minutes had gone, and Sarah was beginning to think he must have passed out somewhere, when Johnny returned, triumphant.
‘This is it, isn’t it? I checked inside and your book is still there. I don’t think anything’s gone. I reckon all these people have just kicked it around, like a football. We’re going to have to get a move on to the airport if we don’t want to miss the plane. Come on. Don’t bother checking it, everything’s OK. I looked.’
*
Sarah slept most of the way back to Manchester, exhausted by the excitement and guilt of telling lies in order to spend a night away with Johnny. The last thirty-six hours or so had only reiterated how much she wanted to be with him, and she couldn’t bear the thought of leaving him back in Leeds in order to return to Harrogate. Her parents were out for dinner at some charity do in Wetherby that evening and her mother, really pleased at Sarah’s decision to go to the party in Lincolnshire, had given her money—unfortunately blown on Jenever—in order to get a taxi back to Harrogate once the return London train arrived back in Leeds.
‘I wish I could come back to the flat with you tonight,’ Sarah said, clutching at his hand as they queued at passport control. She was feeling hungover and depressed at the thought of leaving Johnny, as well as anxious at the thought of having to be jolly in front of her mother who would order a full inquest, wanting to know everything about the party: what the other girls were wearing, who had actually been there, which young men had talked to her.
‘I’m just going to nip to the toilet, Sarah,’ Johnny was saying as he scanned the queue up ahead. ‘Don’t worry about waiting for me. I could do with a coffee though. Once you go through customs there’s a café on the other side. Order me a black one, would you, and I’ll catch up with you?’
As the queue inched forward, Sarah opened her handbag to check how much money she had left in her purse. Her allowance, together with the money her mother had given her, seemed to have been spent, but she was relieved to see she had a couple of pounds left that would buy them a coffee apiece. Once through passport control, she turned left, aiming for the green Nothing to Declare symbol, at which juncture a hand was placed on her arm.
‘That was quick,’ she began to say, at the same time as the owner of the hand, a tall, blue-shirt-clad man said, ‘Would you come with me, Madam? We’d just like a quick look in your bag.’
*
Sentencing Sarah Sykes to two years and six months for Fraudulent Evasion of a Prohibition by bringing almost three kilos of heroin into the country, His Honour Judge Bernard Linford, said at Leeds Crown Court that this was obviously the case of a young woman determined to rebel against her excellent upbringing, her caring parents, her privileged and elevated place in Society. Only the week before blatantly smuggling drugs with a street value of a hundred thousand pounds into the country, he told the packed court, she’d been arrested at ‘The Battle of Orgreave’, thinking it great fun to throw bricks at innocent police and their horses in the course of their duty. He had no alternative, he said, but to impose the maximum sentence open to him.
As she was taken, frightened and weeping, back down to the cells to wait for the transport to take her to HMP Styal, the cub reporter on The Yorkshire Post triumphantly came up with the headline that had been evading him throughout the days of the trial.
NOT SO HONOURABLE NOW!
the newspaper proclaimed next morning to the good people of Yorkshire over their bowls of muesli and plates of scrambled eggs. It was debatable whether the readers of this venerable rag would have been more sympathetic or, conversely, more outraged, had they known that not only was the local MP’s daughter a leftie police basher and drug smuggler but would also, in the months to come, become even more of a burden on the state when she became a single mother of twins.
22
‘OK, George, you win.’ I knew I should really be replying to the many letters of condolence; throwing out the over-the-top bouquets of flowers that were drooping and, in some cases, beginning to smell, their greenery rotting to a putrid slime in the weeks-old water; putting a load of washing on and tackling the basket of ironing that was threatening to topple.
And that, I knew, was absolutely nothing compared to all Peter’s stuff I had to do something about: his wardrobe upon wardrobe of designer suits, his cashmere jumpers, his hand-made Italian leather brogues. Mrs Atkinson, Peter’s cleaning lady, was due in later but I was going to have to tell her I could no longer keep her on, that the house was being put up for sale and that I had no money to pay her for future work.
‘Bother,’ I mimicked in what I hoped was an accurate impersonation of Mole in Wind in The Willows. ‘Oh blow. Hang spring cleaning…’ I grabbed George’s lead. ‘Come on, George, let’s run away together.’
The early morning mist of the October morning was beginning to dissipate, a watery sun taking its place as I strode out across the fields, trampling wet
grass, breathing in the smells of autumn. The leaves on the giant oaks in the wood to my right, although a long way from dropping, were turning crimson, yellow and brown—harbingers of the winter ahead. I ignored the overripe, deeply purple blackberries begging to be picked in the hedgerows—it was pointless cluttering the house with jars of homemade bramble jelly when in a few weeks I’d have to be throwing stuff out, but then I relented, searching in my pocket for the poo-bag I always carried when walking George. Filling the pantry with serried rows of jars of jam might not be a good idea at the moment, but we could at least have an apple and blackberry pie for supper that evening.
‘Do not crap anywhere now, George,’ I warned, filling the small black plastic bag with the luscious fruit. ‘Or at least, if you do, go under a hedge where no one can see you.’ I filled the bag, my fingers, lips and teeth soon a lividly imperial purple as I picked and tasted the pulpy berries.
Wiping my hands on my jeans, I whistled for George who, I soon realised, was delightedly absorbed, rolling in fox crap. ‘Oh God, George, not again. Get out of there, you disgusting beast. Oh God, you stink.’
Keeping a good distance from the now fetidly reeking dog, I set off at a cracking pace, hoping that the speed might help to block out all the thoughts and images that were crowding, Piccadilly-Circus like, into my head. Max’s face, drained of all colour when I’d told him as gently as possible that we would probably have to put the house up for sale; the phone call that I still had to make to Sophie’s headteacher in order to tell her the financial position the family was now in; Allegra’s repeated questions as to why Peter had died and where he was now; and Lucy. My plan to concentrate my efforts on looking for Lucy in Leeds had been scuppered for the time being with so much else suddenly and unexpectedly to sort out.
Leaving the fields and approaching a lane I’d not come across before on my previous walks with George, I turned to put him on the lead.
Looking For Lucy Page 21