Stone Cold Red Hot

by Cath Staincliffe

  I usually pride myself on being punctual, part of the professionalism I want to bring to the job but I knew I’d be late. Not that Caroline Cunningham was going anywhere with an infection like that.

  Towards the end of the journey I joined the motorway and was soon negotiating my way along the dual carriageways and ring-roads of the city. There was still plenty of evidence of Sheffield’s history as the steel-making capital of the nation. Tracts of derelict factories and warehouses, evidence of re-building and demolition and the great water towers which I assumed were previously used by the smelting works.

  I got lost twice but finally made it to my destination. Caroline Cunningham lived in a row of terraced houses banked up on a long, incredibly steep hill. We’re not used to hills in Manchester nor the vistas they provide. I could see the panorama of the city and beyond the jumble of buildings, chimneys and roads to the surrounding hills.

  Caroline Cunningham bore little resemblance to the pictures I’d seen at Lisa’s, even accounting for her bleary eyes and washed out complexion. The long red hair was long gone replaced by a short bobbed hairstyle in rich brown. She wore gold rimmed glasses, dangly black earrings, a fleecy grey top and black leggings.

  A cat wound its way around my legs as I tried to get along the narrow hallway.

  “Jasper!” she scooped the cat up. “He’s been trodden on so much he ought to look like a doormat by now. Come in here.”

  The rooms were small, two up-two down as far as I could tell with a minute kitchen. The decor suited the original features; a richly tiled fireplace with cast iron surround and a brass coal scuttle matched dark patterned wallpaper and the jade green of the picture rail. The net curtains were heavy cream lace patterned with birds of paradise and there were pictures of Old Sheffield on the walls and an embroidered sampler. “Be good sweet maid and let who will be clever.” Girls’ education circa 1900.

  I accepted the offer of a cup of tea and fussed with the cats while Caroline brewed up.

  “So you’ve seen Lisa, she still in Chester?”

  “Yes.”

  “She working, yet?”

  I didn’t grasp the ‘yet’. “I don’t know, we just talked about Jennifer.”

  Caroline handed me tea, a skeptical look on her face. I wasn’t sure why.

  “Lisa hadn’t heard from her, nothing since seventy-six.”

  “Neither have I.”

  “It seems that she left her course at Keele that first term.”

  Caroline settled herself on the chintz sofa. “Yeah.”

  “Have you any idea where she might have gone?”

  “No,” she coughed violently and blew her nose on a tissue.

  It was a dead end. I had a wave of despondency. Why had I bothered coming all this way? Just to have confirmed what I already knew? I could have done it over the phone. But a phone call is rarely as good as face to face contact for getting people to open up, or for spotting discrepancies between what they say and what their body language reveals. I was there at Caroline’s to do my job as well as I could. Just get on with it.

  “Did you know she was pregnant?”

  “Lisa told me,” she sounded a bit miffed about that. “I was away most of the summer. My parents had a place in Brittany. I missed all the action. When I came back Lisa told me about Jenny and I felt really sorry for her, she should have been on the pill. I’ve often wondered what she did about it. If I’d been in her shoes I’d have had an abortion, especially you know, with the father...”

  “What?”

  She flushed slightly, blew her nose again. “He was black, wasn’t he. It wasn’t like it is now. And her father would have gone mad if he knew. We never could work out if she’d told them. Lisa said she hadn’t. But when Jennifer never went back I thought she probably had told them and they’d just cut her off. He had a breakdown as well didn’t he, Mr Pickering, had to give up work, that could have been why.” There was a triumphant smile on her lips. “Especially if Jenny insisted on keeping the child.”

  “You say her father would have been very upset, was he closer to her than her mother?” I tried to picture Jennifer as a Daddy’s Girl and failed.

  “No,” she shuffled on the sofa, “but he had very strong opinions. He wouldn’t approve of people intermarrying. Stick to your own. Of course he was the leader at that Church as well so it’d have been awful for him that way too.”

  And for Jennifer? Caroline seemed to have little compassion.

  “He had a point really,” she sipped her drink, “it wasn’t so bad back then but it’s all gone too far really. I mean, I go to the shops round here and I’m the only person speaking English. Little Pakistan. And no-one dares to say anything about it. Everything’s so softly softly. What about the right to free speech?”

  “So her father was a racist?” I asked coldly. “What about her mother?”

  She shrugged. “Went along with his principles I suppose. She was very old-fashioned.”

  “How did Jennifer get along with her parents?”

  “Not well,” she wheezed a little and cleared her throat. “They were very strict. She couldn’t wait to leave home.”

  “Were you and Jennifer close?”

  “Seemed like it then, the four of us went around together, Lisa, Jenny, Frances and me. But once we’d all left school, we made new friends. I came here, Lisa had a place at Crewe. I went to Frances’s wedding,” she added, “and Lisa’s - that was a right farce.”

  “Why?”

  “Lisa getting married.” She jerked her head as if I needed reminding about something. “Thank God they never had kids.”

  My incomprehension must have shown.

  “You know,” she prompted.

  I didn’t.

  “She’s gay, isn’t she, a lesbian. There was all that stuff in the papers, last year, that was her.”

  I shook my head. I didn’t know what had been in the papers.

  Caroline’s eyes brightened with the gossip. “She was a teacher, further education college. Word got out she was a lesbian, right, she was seeing one of her students,” she grimaced, “it was all over the papers, The Sun and everything. She had to leave her job. There was a lot of Muslim students - they won’t stand for it. Don’t you remember?”

  What, one rabid tabloid witch-hunt from among all the others? No. It did help explain Lisa’s caution when I’d got in touch and her hesitation when I’d asked her how close she had been to Jennifer.

  “I’d no idea she was like that,” Caroline continued, “if I’d known when we were at school.” She twisted her mouth with distaste. “We slept at each others houses and everything. I hadn’t a clue. It’s the husband I feel sorry for, getting married and then...what he must have been through.”

  I stared at her. How the hell did she know I wasn’t ‘like that’ too? I was more than eager to conclude my interview with Caroline Cunningham. She had rapidly become my least favourite of Jennifer’s friends. But I still had a few more questions to ask her.

  “When did you last see Jennifer?”

  “Before I went on holiday to Brittany.”

  “So you didn’t see her before she left for Keele?”

  “No. Should have done though. It was my birthday on the 14th. We were all going to go for a meal and then onto the Ritz in town. We’d been planning it for ages. Sort of last fling before we all went off to uni. She never came. I was a bit pissed off to be honest. But then when I heard about the baby I thought maybe she couldn’t face it. She could have sent a card or something though. It’s like she just gave up on everybody. Who needs friends like that?”

  “Perhaps she’d gone for an abortion, thought people would disapprove.”

  “Not us. Well, apart from Frances who was holier than thou about things like that. There were two girls in school had abortions in the sixth form, everyone knew. It was OK. People felt sorry for them.”

  “So why do you think Jennifer dropped all her friends? Never got in touch.”

  She sh
rugged. “Because we reminded her of home, of her parents? She wanted a new start? Who knows? We thought it was quite exciting at the time, once it turned out that she’d left the university and she wouldn’t tell anyone where she was living. Romantic. Jenny cutting herself off from her family. I think we imagined her swanning back when she’d made a success of her life, rubbing their noses in it, but she never did, did she? Sank without trace.”

  “Did Jennifer ever talk about wanting to live in a particular place, somewhere she’d go if she got the chance?”

  “No, not that I remember,” she fished for a tissue and wiped her nose.

  “Were there any friends or family you heard of in other places?”

  “No. I don’t think they had any other family. No aunties and uncles and that. Her mother had been an only child and she’d grown up on a farm miles from anywhere. Jennifer reckoned that’s partly why she was so strict because of her own upbringing.”

  “But they let her go off to Knebworth, didn’t they?” I recalled the snapshots of Jennifer and Lisa by their tent.

  “She never told them it was Knebworth. They thought the pair of them were camping in the Peak district. Girl Guide stuff.”

  I nodded. I checked back over my notes to see if I’d missed anything. “Well, I think that’s about it. Thanks for seeing me.” I got to my feet.

  “Have you seen Frances?”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “She never left Manchester, did her course there, got a job, then the wedding and started a family. Seems happy enough. And it’s Roger Pickering who wants you to find Jennifer?”

  “Yes.”

  “John and Roger were at school together,” she said, “he was always painfully shy. They say he’s doing quite well for himself now, in computers. Surprising really,” she blew her nose.

  I waited to see if there was going to be any further significance to her mean little observations but she didn’t add anything. I didn’t feel any compunction to give any more away to Caroline. More grist for her gossip mill. Besides which Roger was my client and I had a duty to respect confidentiality in my work.

  I said a brisk goodbye and she saw me out.

  I stood by my car for a minute, let my eyes wander over the view, breathed in the cold air to take away the dirty feeling I’d picked up during the encounter.

  Once I was back on the road heading for Snake Pass I felt as though I’d escaped from something. It was hard to imagine how Caroline and Lisa could have got along so well at school. Maybe Caroline’s insidious opinions hadn’t been formed back then, maybe she’d been corrupted at university, falling in with the wrong crowd, flirting with the fascists, learning to see everyone else as different, inferior, threatening. I wondered how she would judge the antics of the Brennans and the Whittakers. I thought she’d probably be appalled - not recognising that her own attitudes helped create a climate in which their violent racism could flourish.

  I was up on the hilltops when my mobile rang. I pulled into a passing place and stopped the car to take the call.

  “It’s Lisa MacNeice here, you said to ring if I thought of anything,” her voice was tinny on the phone.

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I remembered something, I’ve been thinking about it all since you came...I can’t see how it’ll help, though.”

  “Go on.”

  “It was on the phone, not long before Jenny went. She was upset, I thought it was about the pregnancy and everything but she kept calling her father a hypocrite, she wouldn’t say why. She was really angry.”

  It was hardly a big break.

  “Was it unusual, her calling him names, getting upset?”

  “Well, she called him all sorts, you know what teenagers are like. He was big on morals and what he called decent behaviour and all that and she hated his conservatism, his prejudice. But this felt different. She rang me up to tell me, for a start and at first I thought she’d told him about the baby and he’d been horrible about it and she was calling him a hypocrite because he wasn’t being a Christian and forgiving her. Mind you his particular Church never seemed very tolerant.”

  “Maybe he told her to get an abortion?” I suggested.

  “Yes, that would fit. But the thing is, I asked Jenny if she’d told them and she said no, not yet. She said it was something else.”

  “You got the impression something had happened, her father had said something or done something that she thought was hypocritical?”

  “Yes.”

  “But not connected to her pregnancy?”

  “No.”

  “And this was just before she left?”

  “Yes, it’s so hard to be sure after all these years but it was one of the last times we spoke, if not the last. At the time you’re just talking you don’t expect to be quizzed on it decades after, you don’t know it might be important.”

  “I know,” I reassured her, “you’ve done well to remember it at all. And if anything else comes up do call me.”

  There was no milk at the office so I called home for some and collected a cheese and vegetable pastie that had come of age. If I didn’t eat it for lunch I’d have to bin it. There was a bank statement and a wodge of junk mail for me in the Dobson’s hall-way. Somehow my name had reached a list in catalogue land and I was being bombarded with free gift offers, new customer bribes and the promise of 250,000 pounds in cash or 5,000 per year for life if I’d only take a catalogue and buy something. I dumped everything but the bank statement. I made a coffee before I opened it. I looked at it, closed my eyes and took a rallying breath then filed it. It wouldn’t seem so bad in a couple of days.

  I updated my notes and rang Roger Pickering. It was about time I told him what I’d found out about his sister. We arranged to meet the following day after I’d seen Frances Delaney. I wondered whether that would be a waste of time but unlike Caroline Cunningham she lived locally so it needn’t take me long to see her and then I’d have finished with Jennifer’s friends. I worked on a draft report for Roger so he could see what I’d been doing with his money. Would he want to retain me when I was getting nowhere fast? I’d have to be honest with him about my fading hopes. Even if Keele did give me Jennifer’s forwarding address there would be twenty odd years of moving house to trace and pursue. It would be time-consuming and there’d be no guarantee of success.

  The phone rang. “Sal, it’s Mandy. Thank you for the tape.”

  “Can you use it?”

  “They’re dithering. I’m not going to have an answer till later this week. I get the impression there’s some uncertainty between the two solicitors who’ve seen it and they want to discuss it with the boss.”

  “But it’s clear enough isn’t it? You can make out who’s involved and...”

  “Yes. That’s not the issue. They won’t go to court unless they’re ninety-nine percent certain of winning. It’s out of my hands now until I get word from them, so hang onto the camera in the meantime.”

  “What is it that they’re not sure about?” I demanded. “It’s obviously harassment, you can hear most of what they’re shouting, all the racist abuse. And they attack the property, too - all the kicking the door...”

  “Yes, it’s awful,” she agreed, “but sometimes they need to prove the violence is sustained, that it’s an ongoing problem.”

  “There’s all the police call-outs.”

  “Sal, it’s not up to me. I wish it were.”

  “I’m sorry, I know.”

  “I’ll get back to you, as soon as I hear one way or the other. I hope it’ll be later in the week but I can’t promise.”

  I paced about a bit after that, seriously pissed off. I couldn’t settle to my report for Roger Pickering or any other paperwork. It was just after two. I locked up and went home. The house was a mess after the weekend. I tidied and hoovered the lounge and swept the stairs and the kitchen floor. I’d worked up a sweat by the time I’d done and created a bit of order to make up for the fact that out there everything was crazy and out
of control.

  At nine thirty that evening Mr Poole rang me. “Can you come,” he said urgently, “there’s trouble brewing.”

  Chapter ten

  My stomach tightened. I told him I’d be there as soon as possible. I slapped on the wig and glasses and the long mac, got the sports bag from my room and told Ray where I was going. He looked at me for a while and for an awful moment I thought he was going to ask me if I’d changed anything but he finally figured it out.

  “Is it fancy dress?”

  “Undercover, reduces the risk of any dodgy types coming after me,” I tried to make it sound jokey.

  “Good,” he said. His face closed down. There wasn’t any warmth in the comment. I knew he was thinking about previous occasions when my work had come far too close to home. It was an area we skirted round now. I had a rush of irritation with him. The past was over and done with. How long was he going to cradle his disapproval? We needed to talk about it, but not then. I was in a hurry.

  Traffic was light and I reached Canterbury Close in fifteen minutes. It was drizzling, the soft, steady veil of damp that Manchester does so well, creating balls of diffuse orange light around the street lamps.

  I could see a huddle of people outside the Ibrahims’. There was a van parked outside Mr Poole’s house so I drove on and found a space further down the Close. The fine rain made it hard to see clearly what was going. I fiddled with my rear-view mirror and pretended to mess with my hair. Though there’s not a lot to do with a plain grey wig. I could see the Brennan twins and Micky Whittaker, no sign of the two adults or Darren. A fourth boy was bouncing a football from one knee to the other.

  I got out of the car and locked up. I felt the attention swivel my way and a silence stretched the seconds. My shoulders tensed up and my stomach contracted. The football slammed against the far side of my car.

  “Hey,” I shouted, “pack it in.”