by Penny Kline
‘What kind of demands? Is that what Luke told you?’
‘Not in so many words. I tried to talk to him but it only made things worse. Anyway, I just wanted you to know what a strain he was under. He couldn’t take it. It was all too much.’
If I hadn’t been watching her closely I would have missed the vein that started throbbing in her neck. What was she afraid of? Perhaps she thought Luke had killed Paula and she was sounding me out to see if I thought the same. She could be working out some far-fetched scheme that involved the two of us covering up for him. But somehow I got the impression she was less concerned about Luke’s welfare than she was about finding out what I knew about Paula. It was strange.
I was tired of talking to her back. I stood up and walked over to where she was attending to a deep pink rose, with a label that said its name was Jacques Cartier.
‘When was the last time you saw Luke?’ I asked.
‘I forget. Three weeks ago. Longer.’
‘Did you talk to him on the phone?’
‘No, never. He didn’t like the telephone. Nervous people don’t. If you can’t see someone’s face they could be trying to deceive you in some way.’
‘You said the police came to see you.’
‘Sergeant something or other,’ she said irritably. ‘I forget his name. I gave him a photo, not a very good one, taken more than three years ago.’
‘You haven’t got another, have you?’
She stiffened. ‘I don’t know. I suppose so.’
‘The reason I’m asking — Janos — he lives opposite me in the house where Luke once had a room — he’s been having a look round, asking people who might have seen anyone answering Luke’s description.’
It was a lie. I wanted the photo myself. I’ve no idea why. Maybe it was because I was having trouble remembering Luke’s face. If someone had asked me to say how he looked my description would have been no use to anybody. Tall, thin, fair hair.
Brigid Jesty put the secateurs on the table and started walking towards the house.
‘Come inside, I’ve an album in my desk. There may be a snapshot that would do you.’
I followed her into the living-room and waited as she wrenched open the heavy bottom drawer of a large mahogany desk.
‘Luke’s done this before, you know,’ she said, ‘after he left Oxford.’
‘Disappeared?’
‘I wouldn’t put it that strongly. But we thought he was still at his college and the college assumed he’d come back home.’
‘Where was he?’
‘He never told us. I suppose he went to stay with friends, or to a hotel. Ah, here we are.’ She sat on one of the green sofas and placed two leather-bound albums in front of me. ‘The first one won’t be much use to you. Pictures of the children as babies.’ She pushed it aside. ‘But this one goes up to three or four years ago.’
Turning to the penultimate page, she pointed to a wedding photo in a white and silver mount.
‘Luke’s cousin,’ she explained. ‘She married a solicitor from Stratford-on-Avon.’
I leaned forward to get a better view. It was the usual family group. A bride in cream satin, a groom in morning dress. In front of them, sitting on the grass, a couple of page boys in blue velvet knee breeches pulled silly faces, a solitary bridesmaid looked as though she wanted to go home.
‘There’s Luke,’ said Brigid. ‘They always make him stand at the back because he’s so tall.’
‘Oh, yes.’ My eyes travelled along the row of over-dressed guests. ‘He looks different.’
‘He was wearing a suit. You know how he hates dressing up. Michael’s just the opposite. He couldn’t go to the wedding. I forget why. He was up in London attending a meeting, I expect, something to do with his housing trust thing.’
She lifted up the album and shook it. Two photos fell out on the table. One of a little girl. The other of Luke, aged about fifteen.
‘My daughter,’ she said, pushing the first photo in my direction. ‘She must have been five. That was her first school uniform.’
‘She’s sweet.’ My hand shook a little. I was talking about her as though she was still alive.
‘Yes.’ Brigid showed no emotion. ‘And this is Luke just before he went to university.’
So he was eighteen in the photo, not fifteen. I lifted it up to the light.
‘Would it be all right if I borrowed this one? I’ll make sure you have it back when Luke … ’
‘If it’ll be any help,’ she said vaguely. ‘You think I’m hard-hearted, don’t you? Yes, you do, I can tell. Years ago I was on the stage. Actresses are supposed to be temperamental but in my case it taught me self-control. After all whatever else was happening in your life the show still had to go on.’
She looked at me but her face remained expressionless.
‘Of course, I gave it all up when the children came along. It was what Peter wanted, a secure family life. That’s what children need, isn’t it? Do you have children?’
I shook my head.
‘I had Michael when I was only twenty-one. In those days you didn’t really plan your family, just waited to see what came along. Then after Michael nothing. I don’t know why. Peter said I drank too much coffee but the doctor said it was just one of those things. We’d more or less adjusted to having an only child, then along came Luke.’
‘That must have been wonderful.’
‘Yes.’ She paused. ‘I expected Michael to be jealous but he wasn’t at all.’ Her eyes widened. Beautiful, but oddly expressionless eyes. ‘I suppose with five years between … Luke cried all the time, especially during the evening, and Michael used to come downstairs bringing some of his toys for the baby. Peter said the crying was my fault. I wasn’t firm enough.’ She glanced at me. ‘Oh, don’t judge Peter too harshly. We’re a good combination, we balance each other out.’
It was a strange way of describing their relationship but when the children were young perhaps they had been happy together.
‘Peter says I was over-anxious when I was carrying Luke and it affected the foetus. That’s why he’s the way he is.’
‘That’s rubbish.’
‘You know that for a fact, do you? Of course, Peter’s a worrier too but in his case it means he’s been extremely successful.’
She closed the photograph album. I wanted to see the baby book but it seemed like an intrusion to ask.
‘It’s a tragedy,’ she said. ‘Your children mean everything to you but to them you’re just their boring old mother. Perhaps when they have children of their own … ’
I tried to picture her changing nappies, preparing bottles, measuring out small portions of sieved prunes and baby rice. It was difficult.
She sighed. ‘You do your best — in my case that meant looking after children for over twenty years — then they’re gone and you’re expected to make a life for yourself, take up new interests you never had time for, except you don’t want any new interests. They all seem rather pointless.’
Her voice was cold, angry. I glanced at her, expecting her to tell me it would be better if I left. Suddenly she buried her face in her hands and her body heaved with sobs.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I didn’t mean to upset you.’
‘Oh, it’s not you.’ She searched in her pocket for a tissue. ‘I’m often like this.’
I wondered why she had wanted to see me. To let me know she cared about Luke? To cover herself in some way in case I thought she had been a bad mother?
I felt genuinely sorry for her, I really did. There was only a tiny part of me that wondered if she was making up for her lost career on the stage.
*
Quite late in the evening Michael phoned to ask if I was alone and, if so, could he call round.
‘What’s happened?’
‘Nothing, I just wanted to see you.’
‘I don’t think that’s a very good idea.’
He laughed. ‘I was afraid you’d say that. What’s the probl
em? You disapprove of mixing business with pleasure?’
‘Something like that.’
‘All right then, fair enough, but you won’t get rid of me that easily. No news your end?’
‘No, nothing.’
I heard him draw in breath then sigh deeply. ‘By the way, that girl who went to the police, how much did they tell you about her?’
‘Next to nothing. Why?’
‘Oh, no reason, I just wondered why someone would do a thing like that.’
‘Your mother,’ I said, ‘she doesn’t know about the witness, does she?’
‘Christ, no, you haven’t — ’
‘No, of course not.’
‘That’s all right then.’ And he rang off leaving me with a twinge of regret that he wasn’t coming round.
13
My first client was not due until ten fifteen. I phoned Heather to say I had someone to see but would be in by ten at the latest.
‘Oh, by the way, Heather, how well d’you know the Hargreaves?’
‘Elaine and Doug?’ She was eating a sweet, or it might have been one of her indigestion tablets. ‘Hardly at all really.’ She spoke between chews. ‘Doug collects for Christian Aid, that’s how we met. They seem a very devoted couple.’
‘Yes. I just wondered. See you later.’
I picked up an old raincoat and left the flat. The sky was overcast but there was no likelihood of even a shower. I was wearing the raincoat as a kind of disguise, a protection. Against the travellers? What did it matter to them how I was dressed?
As I crossed the road that led up to the old railway bridge, I started rehearsing in my mind what I was going to ask. ‘D’you know a girl called Rhiannon? Rhiannon Pascoe. She’s about sixteen, quite small and thin.’ Was she small and thin? Howard Fry had said she seemed a bit pathetic, under-nourished, but he hadn’t actually described the way she looked.
On the wall of one of the empty warehouses down by the river someone had sprayed a new set of messages to the world. Kill the Medics. Gimmee a Job. Stopping halfway across the bridge I leaned over the parapet to look at a pair of ducks. I noticed a man coming towards me, leading two dogs on lengths of rope. Filthy white trousers showed through the tears in his jeans. His denim jacket was so encrusted with dirt that it stood stiffly away from his body. He walked straight past, shouting at one of the dogs. I turned right on to the path that led across the rough grass beneath the underpass. With every step I felt less like talking to the travellers. It was extremely unlikely that Rhiannon would be living with this particular group and in any case the last thing I wanted was to come face to face with her. A few words, however innocuous the conversation, could be construed by Howard Fry as trying to influence a witness. All I wanted was to find someone who knew her, or knew of her. I suppose I hoped to hear she was ‘a bit of a nutcase’, ‘a born trouble-maker’, anything that would convince me she had made up the story about Luke and Paula.
All the vans except one had their doors firmly closed. Just inside the open door a child, dressed in pale pink pyjamas, was sitting cross-legged, holding a doll with yellow hair and scarlet lips. I smiled at her and she stood up and disappeared back inside. A golden-brown lurcher that had been lying under the van crawled out, growling and wagging its tail. I put out my hand and it sniffed my fingers, then moved away as far as its tether would allow.
My visit had been a mistake. It was too early in the morning. One look at me and they would think I was some official come to check up on their benefits or hand them a court order telling them to move to another site.
A woman appeared, holding the child by the hand.
‘Did you want something?’ Her voice was quiet and she looked curious rather than hostile.
‘I’m sorry to bother you,’ I said, ‘but I’m looking for someone called Rhiannon.’
‘Rhiannon who?’
‘Pascoe. Her other name’s Pascoe.’
‘Why d’you want her?’
‘You know her then?’
The woman twisted her hair round her finger. ‘What made you think she’d be living here? Friend of yours, is she?’
‘Not exactly.’
She looked me up and down. ‘Rhiannon don’t live here. Don’t know where she is these days. There was someone else after her a day or two ago. You a social worker?’
‘No. This person, what did they look like?’
She thought for a moment, looking over my shoulder at the build up of traffic on Rownham Hill. ‘Couldn’t tell you,’ she said, ‘didn’t look that closely.’
‘Well, was it a man or a woman?’
But already she was disappearing back into the van, pulling the child in after her.
*
At ten past one Nick and I left the office and started walking to the pub. Martin was to join us later on. Nick chatted away as usual — about the hopelessness of being overworked and under-appreciated, starved of resources, forced to work in a run-down building which was enough to make the most optimistic person abandon hope, when the aim of our job was to make the clients feel better about the state of the world.
We were waiting to cross the road. A delivery van came round the corner much too fast and I pulled Nick back on to the pavement.
‘Anyway,’ he said, opening his large brown eyes as wide as possible to acknowledge the fact that he could have been flattened but here he still was, alive and well, ‘how are you? Tuesday lunch-time and you look like you’ve done a whole week’s work.’
‘I’m all right,’ I said.
‘Lived it up over the weekend?’
‘No.’
‘Me neither. I had to visit my mother and let her stuff me full of unwanted food while she made unsubtle hints about how nice it would be to have grandchildren. She knows I’m gay. I told her when I was nineteen but she prefers to live in a fantasy world.’
He gave me a hug. He was wearing grey jeans and a red and grey shirt. He felt warm, comforting.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Why is it you have such a soothing effect? Must be something to do with your metabolism.’
‘Like leaning against a cow? They say it’s better than a whole bottle of tranquillizers.’
I smiled.
‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘What is it — the Jesty boy? Old Stringer been giving you a hard time?’
‘No, he was really quite helpful.’
Nick raised his eyebrows. ‘Must have mellowed in his old age. So what’s the verdict?’
‘Luke was only in a few days. Once he’d given up the schizoid babble they decided to discharge him.’
‘And now?’
‘He’s disappeared.’
‘Disappeared? Sounds a bit dramatic.’
‘He was staying in my flat. His landlord wouldn’t have him back and I couldn’t think where else he could go. You won’t tell Martin.’
‘Wouldn’t dream of it.’ He pulled open the door of the pub.
Coming in out of the bright sunlight made the place seem unnaturally dark. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust — and my ears to the loud beat of the music. Nick offered to buy the usual and I looked for a table as far away from the jukebox as possible.
On the wall above me a large poster advertised the forthcoming Balloon Festival. It was something I looked forward to. I would be able to see most of the balloons just by leaning out of my bedroom window, and if I wanted to watch them taking off I could walk over to the other side of the river, near where the travellers had parked.
‘Balloons,’ said Nick, placing the drinks on the table and sitting down opposite me. ‘Ever been up in one?’
‘No thanks, I’m terrified of heights.’
‘Me too, but if you drink enough champagne I dare say it dampens the fear.’
A man was standing at the bar. I might not have recognized him from the back of his head but when he spoke to the landlord I knew at once who it was. He turned round, still talking, then saw me and lifted an arm.
‘Oh God,’ I said. ‘I’ve just
seen someone I know.’
‘A client?’
‘No. Well, not exactly. He’s an actor. Carl Redfern. He was in that series about a psychiatrist.’
I expected Carl to join us. He would ask if we minded. We would say, no, of course not. Then he would monopolize the conversation, telling jokes and anecdotes, and referring to us as ‘shrinks’ or ‘trick-cyclists’. But I was wrong. He stayed leaning against the bar, glancing in our direction now and again but then I must have been watching him too or I wouldn’t have noticed.
Then Martin came through the door. His eyes were shining and he was breathing hard. He could hardly wait to tell us how he had spent the morning with Social Services and how he and a woman called Fran had disputed the regulations about having clients admitted to psychiatric hospital.
‘I was right all along,’ he said, pulling his sweater over his head and tossing it on to a chair. ‘The silly cow had to admit she was totally wrong.’
‘That must have been gratifying,’ I said. ‘Getting the better of a woman always makes your day.’
He grinned. ‘There’s a friend of yours at the bar. Either that or he’s a total stranger who just happens to fancy you like crazy.’
I explained all over again.
‘Really?’ said Martin. ‘He doesn’t look much like your average doctor but I suppose they can do wonders with make-up and wigs.’
‘He played the senior consultant’s husband,’ I said. ‘He wasn’t a doctor.’
‘Sorry! My mistake.’ He walked over to the bar to order some food.
Nick announced that he had to make a phone call and asked if I had any change. I searched in my pockets and found a couple of coins. I knew what would happen next. As soon as Martin and Nick were out of earshot Carl strolled across and pulled up a chair from the neighbouring table.