‘Well, maybe not there, you know … because of what happened.’
‘I don’t think we’d go back there, would we, Suze?’ Ed said, looking at Sue. ‘Not because of the girl or anything, I just think next time we’d want somewhere a bit more upmarket.’
There were a few seconds of silence before Barry said, ‘You what?’
‘With a better class of guest, you mean?’ Marina asked. She wasn’t quite as far gone as Ed, but the look on her face made it obvious that she was happy to take him on. ‘Where there weren’t people like us lowering the tone.’
‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ Ed said, a little too loudly. ‘I just meant that if we go again, we might treat ourselves to somewhere a bit more expensive. A hotel or whatever.’
‘Somewhere where there weren’t retarded kids running about making too much noise,’ Barry said. ‘Spoiling the view.’ He picked up a plate, added it to the pile he was already carrying. ‘That what you meant?’
‘Now you’re just being ridiculous,’ Ed said.
‘Come on,’ Angie said.
Barry turned and walked back into the kitchen.
‘I don’t get it.’ Ed shook his head and held out his arms. ‘It just came out wrong, that’s all, and now you’re all looking at me like I’ve shagged your mum or something.’
Marina laughed and sat back. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean to sound quite so aggressive.’
‘Remind me not to get on the wrong side of you,’ Angie said, laughing.
‘I think we’re all feeling a bit weird about everything,’ Dave said. ‘The holiday and all that, because of what happened to that girl.’ He put his hand over Marina’s and leaned across towards Ed. ‘Everyone’s just that bit more sensitive than they might normally be, that’s all.’
‘Why though?’ Ed asked. ‘There’s worse things than that happening every day of the week. Serial killers and terrorists killing hundreds of people at a time. Jesus, you’ve only got to turn on the television.’
‘Yes, but we were there.’
‘We should think about making a move,’ Sue said.
‘It’s early yet,’ Angie said. ‘Isn’t anyone up for a brandy or something?’
‘Brandy sounds nice,’ Marina said.
Dave said he was fine and Sue said nothing. Ed said it would be bad manners to let Marina drink on her own. Angie called Barry in and asked him if they had any brandy in the cupboard. He shook his head, and said, ‘There might be some Baileys.’
‘Even better,’ Marina said.
‘It’s not quite a piña colada,’ Angie said. ‘But it’ll have to do.’ She watched Barry go back into the kitchen, then said, ‘I was thinking that it might just have been the best thing, that girl being … the way she was. It might actually have been a blessing.’ She spoke slowly, taking care to avoid slurring her words, as though keen to elucidate something that she had been considering for some time. She looked across the table at Marina and Dave, then round to Sue and Ed. ‘If you can’t understand what someone’s going to do, if you don’t know what those horrible things are … then maybe you aren’t afraid.’
SIXTEEN
Marina’s head was back and her eyes were closed. She had kicked off her shoes and her bare feet were braced against the glove compartment.
‘You asleep?’
‘Nearly.’ Her voice was thick with sleep and booze. ‘Where are we?’
‘Croydon,’ Dave said. ‘Probably best to keep your eyes closed.’
She laughed. ‘That was fun, wasn’t it?’
‘It had its moments.’ He glanced at the speedometer, eased his foot off the accelerator. Keen as he was to get home, there were a lot of speed cameras on the road. ‘Last half an hour was … interesting.’
‘She had tears in her eyes,’ Marina said. ‘Angie did, did you see that? When she was talking about the girl, about whether or not she would know what was happening to her. She was really emotional.’
‘She was pissed,’ Dave said. ‘So was Ed.’
Marina lowered her feet to the floor. She rolled down the window an inch and leaned towards it to get some air. ‘Terrible,’ she muttered.
‘What?’
‘They should be ashamed of themselves, losing control like that.’
‘This is exactly what I was talking about,’ Dave said. ‘People having a few too many and then saying stuff they don’t mean.’ He glanced across, smiled at her. ‘It’s the only time you’re ever bitchy.’
‘Is it, babe?’
He reached across and rubbed her leg, but she did not react. ‘I did like it when you had a go at Ed, though. He can be such a knob …’
‘Guess what?’ she said, leaning her head back again. ‘I know more Manchester United players than you.’
Dave laughed, but not loudly. ‘So what?’
‘Lightweight,’ she said.
He slowed as the car approached a speed camera, stayed at thirty across the lines on the road and then put his foot down. ‘I mean, I’m bloody sure you don’t, but still, so what?’
Marina closed her eyes again and slowly began naming footballers.
Most of the tableware had been cleared away and there were just a few napkins and unused items of cutlery scattered about on the table. Red wine rings and a couple of candles all but burned out. Angie wandered across to where Barry was busy at the sink. The dishwasher was already full up and running and now he was starting to wash the remaining pots and pans by hand.
Amy Winehouse was singing ‘Back to Black’ for the second time.
Angie held up one of her souvenir placemats. ‘Look, somebody forgot to take theirs home with them.’ She tossed it on to the worktop and sat down at the island. ‘Now I’ll have to post the bloody thing.’
‘You don’t have to do anything,’ Barry said, his back to her.
‘Course not, I can give it to them next time.’ She sang along for a few bars, humming when she didn’t know the words. ‘Forgot it, or left it on purpose, what do you think? The placemat.’
Barry said nothing, choosing to ignore the question, or else not hearing it above the music and the dishwasher’s hum and the clatter of pans beneath the suds.
‘It was good tonight, wasn’t it?’ Angie asked. ‘You think it was good?’
‘Went well,’ Barry said.
‘I think it was good.’ She hummed along with the song for a few seconds, then said, ‘Sue told me to send those pictures to the police. She said she agreed with me about whoever took that girl being in the photos. That there was a chance, you know.’ She picked at a few crisps that were left in a bowl on the central island. She laughed. ‘She said Ed was being a wanker … and he was … all that “Amber-Marie” stuff, taking the piss.’
‘He just wants to be the centre of attention.’
‘Poor thing can’t help what her name is, can she?’ She emptied the last few crumbs into her palm and poured them into her mouth. ‘It’s funny that, isn’t it?’
‘What?’
‘I still say “is” and not “was”, like she’s still alive.’
‘We don’t know she isn’t,’ Barry said.
Angie sang along with the chorus, then stood and walked across to the sink. She moved up behind Barry. ‘Why don’t we leave it until the morning?’
‘Best to get it done,’ he said.
She wrapped her arms around his chest and leaned into him. ‘Come on, leave it and let’s get up to bed.’
He pushed back just hard enough to make her step away and reached for a tea towel to wipe his hands.
‘Don’t be like that.’ She stretched out an arm, but he walked past it. ‘I only wanted to cuddle up, that’s all.’
Barry picked up his cigarettes on the way out into the garden.
‘Well, there was a disappointing lack of garden gnomes … as far as I could see, anyway.’ Ed let out a small belch. ‘Maybe they were hiding. There was no sign outside saying Bazza ‘n’ Angie’s Place and I was wrong about Simply Red.’ He raised a pointed
finger with a theatrical flourish. ‘But there was a fluffy toilet-roll cover in the shape of a poodle.’
‘I think Angie’s nice,’ Sue said.
‘I’m not arguing.’
‘They both are.’
‘I never said they weren’t.’
‘You’re taking the piss.’
‘Didn’t seem to bother you earlier.’
They had made the journey from north London to Crawley in Ed’s Volvo estate. There was a little more room than in the battered old VW that Sue drove and Ed would be able to claim the mileage on expenses. It smelled faintly of the Armani aftershave that Ed favoured, but mostly of something that was supposed to be ‘good, old-fashioned English leather’, thanks to an air freshener that dangled from the indicator stalk. When the car cornered, cardboard boxes filled with Ed’s samples moved around in the boot and CD cases slid about in the passenger footwell. Nothing by Simply Red of course. Ed preferred music that had a little more ‘edge’, which meant that the most recent albums by Coldplay and Keane were currently on heavy rotation.
‘I’m wiped out,’ Sue said. ‘We should have left an hour earlier.’
Ed grunted, thought. ‘She really wanted us to stay longer, did you notice that? She didn’t want people to go. You ask me, I don’t reckon she’s got a lot of friends. Either of them.’
‘I don’t think she’s got very much to do.’ Sue flicked on the car’s main beam. They were on a short stretch of the M25 without lighting and there were no other cars in sight. ‘That’s all. Kids are old enough to look after themselves, she’s a bit … lost.’
‘He’s hardly the best company in the world, is he?’
‘I just think she’s one of these people that needs to be busy. That needs something to get hold of.’
‘Maybe that’s why she’s got this thing about the girl,’ Ed said, turning to look at her. ‘That business with the photos.’
‘Actually, I encouraged her,’ Sue said. ‘I told her she should contact the police.’
‘What the hell did you do that for?’
‘I felt sorry for her.’ A car on the opposite carriageway flashed, so she dipped her lights. ‘Look, they won’t take it seriously, or else they’ll waste a couple of days trying to trace a few blokes by a swimming pool in the back of some holiday snaps. Not going to do any harm, is it?’
Ed said, ‘I suppose not,’ and they drove on in silence until the sign for Cobham services.
‘I’m going to come off here for a bit,’ Sue said.
Ed sniffed and smiled. ‘See if you can find a quiet corner of the car park.’
She indicated and drifted across towards the slip road.
‘Somewhere nice and dark,’ he said. ‘Then I can tell you just how sexy that expensive new hairstyle is.’
She looked at him. There was a thin sheen of sweat above his eyebrows, yellowish for a few seconds as they passed beneath a row of lights. ‘I just want some coffee,’ she said.
SEVENTEEN
Jeff Gardner walked downstairs and into the kitchen, where his wife was at the counter throwing a salad together. He watched her for a few seconds, enjoying the view, until she turned and saw him in the doorway.
‘She gone down?’
‘Finally,’ he said.
‘Dinner in five minutes, so make yourself useful.’
‘Want me to set the table?’
‘I was thinking about a good-sized glass of wine.’
‘Coming up,’ he said.
He walked to the fridge and took out the bottle, reached up for two glasses and started to pour. Truth be told, he needed one himself, at least good-sized, after a day during which the only time he had sat down was that twenty minutes by the pool at the Pelican Palms.
‘Same story?’
‘Excuse me?’
Michelle nodded up, towards their daughter’s bedroom. ‘She want the usual story?’
Gardner rolled his eyes. ‘Yep. Stupid talking tiger.’ One more reason he wanted that drink. His daughter was going through a phase of needing to hear the same bedtime story every night, read to her in exactly the same way, with nothing skipped and with the same voices for each character. If Gardner tried to change so much as a word – for no other reason than to keep himself interested – he was chastised in the comically severe tones that only a five-year-old princess can summon. He had mentioned it to his sergeant a few days before and the man, who had a daughter a few years older than Gardner’s, had told him to grin and bear it. The time will come, he had said to Gardner, when she doesn’t want to hear that story any more. When you want to read it to her, but she thinks it’s stupid and babyish. It’ll come sooner than you think and that’s when you’ll miss it.
Gardner saw the sense in that, so he kept on reading the story.
He took a sip of wine then handed a glass to his wife. She leaned forward to kiss him, glass in one hand, knife in the other, and said, ‘Now you can set the table.’
They ate outside, beneath the lanai. The fan overhead was jacked up to the maximum, but even at eight o’clock in the evening the temperature was in the mid-seventies. Gardner had changed out of his work clothes within minutes of walking through the door, had felt the stresses of the day begin to recede just a little as he climbed into baggy shorts and put on an old Tampa Bay Rays T-shirt. There were inflatables floating in the small pool: a green dragon; a multi-coloured ring; a ride-on turtle. There were wet towels draped across one of the loungers and the deck was still slick with water.
‘I swear she was in there nearly all day,’ Michelle said. ‘Didn’t want to come out. I couldn’t get anything done because I had to watch her all the time, you know? Rushing whenever I had to go to the bathroom.’
‘You left her in the water when you went to the bathroom?’
She set her fork down. ‘I was inside for like, one minute and she had her swim-bands on, plus I can see her with the bathroom door open.’
‘OK, just …’
‘Just what? Listen, I’m the one that’s with her all day.’
His wife had not raised her voice and when he glanced up he could see that she was smiling, but still Gardner knew his wife well enough to see that he was better off leaving it alone. He said, ‘Good to know she’s going to be a swimmer.’
When they had finished eating, he carried the plates inside and Michelle took their wine glasses through into the living room. She turned on the television and a few minutes later he joined her on the couch. He said how much he’d enjoyed the meal and she asked if he’d had enough to eat.
‘I had a big lunch.’
‘Let me guess …’
‘The place is convenient.’
‘You’re going to look like a stupid sub,’ she said.
The local news anchor announced that there were still no leads in the hunt for the killers of two elderly French tourists. He talked over clips of SPD officers – a couple of whom Gardner knew – interviewing people at the murder scene. Then, in an oddly upbeat voice, the female co-presenter introduced footage of the murdered couple’s grown-up children arriving in the city. A pair of grim-faced young men shook hands with the Chief of Police, who kept his best side to the cameras and, in a tone of voice reserved for stupid people and foreigners, assured his visitors that everything possible was being done to apprehend their parents’ killers.
When they switched to a story about a local fruit festival, Michelle began channel-surfing. She reached for her wine and said, ‘So, is she going home? Patti Lee Wilson?’
‘I think so,’ Gardner said. ‘She told me she’d think about it.’
‘She’s basically in denial, right?’
‘I guess so.’
‘That’s not good. You have to face up to these things.’
‘I guess.’
‘Listen, don’t get me wrong, I have sympathy for her. I mean how could anyone not? But, you know …’
Gardner nodded, but he was thinking that the manager of the Pelican Palms had said more or less the same th
ing. He tried to remember the man’s exact words.
Some shit about passing the hat.
Michelle was a sucker for old-fashioned British mysteries, and they settled for an episode of Poirot. The one on the fancy train. After fifteen minutes or so, she turned to him and asked what the matter was.
‘Amber-Marie Wilson would have had a story that she wanted to hear over and over again,’ Gardner said. ‘Same as any other kid, right? She had a favourite story and a favourite toy and a TV show she loved. God willing, we’ll have all those things to remember and laugh about or whatever and we’ll still have our girl. But now, all Patti has is those memories. How can that ever be enough?’
Michelle put her head on his shoulder, rubbed his arm.
‘I don’t want to let her down, that’s all.’
‘How could you let her down?’
‘I made a promise to her today,’ he said.
She raised her head. ‘What did you do that for?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Michelle nodded towards the TV. ‘You want to leave that kind of thing to your boss. He’s the politician.’
‘This wasn’t about trying to say the right thing or whatever,’ he said. ‘I meant it.’ He thought about those French boys whose parents had been murdered. It was terrible, but it was the right way round.
How the hell did you bury a child?
He’d thought about that a great deal, not just since he’d been working on the Wilson case but since the first time he’d ever investigated the death of a young person. It was a question he’d asked himself a good many times after that. Once, sitting up late with a bottle in front of him, he’d typed it into Google. Wasn’t that how everyone found the answers to tough questions these days? All he found were a lot of adverts for ‘quality urns and caskets’ and for ‘memorial jewellery’ companies offering to turn your loved one’s ashes into diamonds.
He’d begun to feel queasy and had closed the website down.
‘Jeff …?’
He took his wife’s hand. On the television, the fat detective with the silly moustache was questioning a suspect. Gardner knew that in an hour or so he’d have the crime solved and the killer put away, that justice would be done.
Rush of Blood Page 10