Off Minor (13 page)

By clambering on to the narrow, sloping sill outside the back room window, he could see through a gap in the curtains. Scrubbed pine table and assorted chairs, a towel draped over the back of one; dried flowers stood in a wide-bellied vase in front of the tiled fireplace. On shelves in one of the alcoves, paperbacks jostled for space with cassettes and magazines, scrapbooks, photograph albums. On a table in the further alcove stood photographs of Emily, souvenirs, most of them, of her fortnightly visits to her mother. Emily reaching up to stroke a donkey, face uncertain; Emily in her costume beside an indoor pool; Emily and Diana on the steps of Wollaton Hall.

There were no pictures of the three of them together, Michael, Diana and Emily, as they had been then, a family.

“Hey-up! What the heck you doing up there?”

Michael turned and jumped back down; the flush-faced man was standing by the fence of the house that backed on to the alley.

“Seeing if there’s anyone in,” Michael said.

“Aye, well, there’s not.”

“D’you know where she is, Diana?”

“Who wants to know?”

“I’m … I was her husband.”

“Oh, aye.”

“I need to see her, it’s urgent.”

“Not been here all weekend, far as I know. Most likely off away.”

“You don’t know where?”

The man shook his head and turned back towards his own house. Michael hurried along to the archway, on through to the front of the house. The woman from two doors down was standing to admire her handiwork, step now spotless, rubber kneeling-pad in one hand, brush in the other.

“Diana,” Michael said, trying to control the anxiety in his voice.

“Away for the weekend.”

“Know where?”

“Can’t help, duck”

“You sure she’s not been here at all?”

“Far as I know.”

“And a little girl? You haven’t seen Diana with a little girl, six, reddish hair?”

“That’s Emily. Her daughter. Well, seen her, course I have, many a time, but, like I say, not these past couple of days.”

Michael shook his head, turned away.

“It’s what she does, you know. When the kiddie’s not with her. Take off for Sat’day, Sunday. Sad, if you ask me.”

“How’s that?”

“Bloke she were married to, it’s him as stops her seeing the kid more often. Breaks her heart.”

Michael phoned Lorraine from a call box, fumbling the coin into the slot. “She’s not here. Nobody’s here. You’ve not heard from her?”

“Nothing. Oh, Michael …”

“I’ll call on the police on the way home.”

“Should I come too, meet you there?”

“Someone’s got to be home in case.”

“Michael?”

“Yes?”

“Be as quick as you can.”

He broke the connection and ran to the car. Emily had been missing an hour and a half, maybe a little more. Pulling on to the main road, he had to brake sharply to avoid a builder’s lorry, heading down the hill towards Eastwood, its driver calling him all kinds of bastard through the glass. Slow down, he told himself, get a grip; you’re not going to help anything if you can’t hold yourself together now.

Lorraine sat in the kitchen, gazing out through the front window, hands tight around tea which had long since gone cold. All the while she had been sitting there, the street lights had shone more and more strongly. Each time a car entered the crescent, the adrenaline coursed through her: someone had found Emily and was bringing her home. And each time the headlights of the car swept past. Whenever there were footsteps on the pavement, she craned forward, waiting for figures to turn into the path, the anxious running of feet, fevered knocking at the door.

That little girl, the one who went missing, you remember?

It was something you read about in the paper, saw on the television news, shocking, the faces of those parents, pictures of their child. The pleas for a safe return.

They found her body.

And Michael suddenly staring at her, so sure.

Of course …

As though there were no other possibility, no other end.

What else did you think had happened?

The cup slipped from her fingers on to her lap and shattered on the floor. Lorraine did nothing to pick it up, left the pieces where they lay.

When Michael finally arrived, it was in convoy, a police car in front, white with a blue stripe, an unmarked saloon bringing up the rear. The two uniformed men were out of their vehicle quickly, moving briskly after Michael as he came, half-running, towards the house. A young woman wearing an anorak stepped from the third car and opened the rear door for a bulky man who stood for a moment on the pavement, pulling his raincoat around him.

Lorraine, face close to the window, was aware of this man, whoever he was, looking back at her, hands thrust down into his pockets, bare-headed, there in the broken dark. Then it was Michael with his arms tight round her and long, raking sobs, his mouth pressed against her hair, repeating her name, softly, over and over, Lorraine, Lorraine.

Seventeen

The great thing about Sunday lunchtimes in the city, back when Resnick had still been walking the beat, the number of bands you could hear for the price of a pint. Often not too much variety, it was true: New Orleans and Chicago by way of Arnold and Bobbers Mill, but when you weren’t paying admission, it didn’t pay to be fussy either. Besides, after a tough Saturday night, the familiar strains of “Who’s Sorry Now?” or “Royal Garden Blues” had a lot to commend them. Two choruses of ensemble, solos all round, a couple more with everyone going for broke, finally four-bar breaks in the last of which the drummer would likely throw his sticks into the air, shout “Ooo-ya! Ooo-ya!” and miss them coming down.

Resnick had persuaded his father to go along once, knowing that if he’d said anything about the music beforehand the older man would have refused. So they had arrived at the bar, Resnick expressing surprise when half a dozen men came wandering in with instrument cases in various shapes and sizes. His father, a Semprini man if anything, and whose idea of acceptable jazz had never extended beyond Winifred Atwell and Charlie Kunz, had lasted until the third number, a particularly clumping version of “Dippermouth Blues.” At the unison shout of “Oh, play that thing!”, Resnick senior had pushed his unfinished pint of mild aside, withered his son with a look of true scorn and left.

Thereafter, it was referred to disparagingly as “That melodious ragtime!”, Resnick refraining from the satisfaction of informing his father he had both words wrong.

Still, leaving the Bell this particular Sunday afternoon, some of the musicians he had been listening to the same as on that earlier occasion, it was his father Resnick found himself thinking of, rather than this solo or that. Never a man to encourage displays of affection, nor any excesses of emotion, there had been little physical contact, other than the occasional shaken hand, between the two of them for years. Crossing the broad edge of the square, Resnick remembered now leaving his father in hospital for the first time, an exploratory operation, braided wool dressing gown loose over new-bought paisley pajamas that buckled against his slippered feet. “Bye, son,” his father had said, and on whatever impulse, Resnick had clasped him in his arms and kissed his unshaven cheek. He could still hear, through the muted traffic, the gasped cry of surprise, see the tears welling in his father’s eyes.

Walking home now, Resnick turned left through the everspreading polytechnic and entered the Arboretum, a few parents wheeling their kids past the aviary, holding them, pointing excitedly, close against the bars. He sat for a while on one of the wooden benches facing the cannon, weathered black and impressive, which the local regiment had captured in the Crimea. The daftness of it, a man not so far short of middle age, sitting alone on that early winter afternoon, rehearsing all of the things he wanted to say to his father and now never could.

When he walked in through his front door, thirty minutes later, cats swirling round his feet, the telephone was already ringing.

You couldn’t see them so well that time of an evening, but Resnick knew the houses well enough, two-story, detached, each with its own garage, gardens front and back; most of the front lawns with a cherry tree or something close, soft petals that drifted out onto the curve of pavement, purple or pink. Family homes that went up—what?—twenty years ago, twenty-five? Resnick would drive round there sometimes, using the crescent as a cut-through, and think it was like a movie set. The fifties’ Hollywood ideal. Crusty old pop, forever chewing on his pipe; mom with flour on her apron, a great line in advice and pies whose pastry rose just right; the daughter with a soft spot for dogs and crippled kids and the leading man, who was pretty much of a ne’er-do-well, but who saw the light in time to find his way to the altar. If Resnick could ever remember their names, he’d know her—round-faced, fair-haired, sort of catch in her voice she most likely developed when she was just another band singer, sitting stage left near the piano, patiently waiting till she was called to the microphone. Dinah? Dolores? What was her name?

Michael guided the young woman in from the kitchen towards them. “This is my wife, Lorraine.”

Resnick guessed her to be early twenties, but the result of all the crying had been to render her younger, late teens.

Resnick introduced Lynn Kellogg and himself, suggested they went somewhere and sat down; there were questions they had to ask.

With Michael’s permission, the uniformed officers were already making a thorough search of the property, top to bottom. Police in another part of the country had recently gone to a hostel, looking for a kidnapped four-year-old boy, had checked the room in which he was being kept and driven away empty-handed, leaving the cupboard in which he was hidden undisturbed.

“I don’t understand,” Lorraine said, “what you’re doing. She isn’t here.”

“We have to check, Mrs. Morrison,” Resnick said.

“They have to check, Lorraine,” Michael said.

“Perhaps we can start,” said Resnick, “with the last time you saw her.”

“Emily,” Lorraine said, twisting the ends of her hair around her fingers.

Resnick nodded.

“She’s got a name.”

Yes, thought Resnick, they always have. Gloria. Emily.

“My wife’s upset,” Michael said. He touched her arm and she stared at his hand as if it belonged to a stranger.

Resnick’s eyes and Lynn’s met. “The last time you saw Emily,” Resnick said.

“Lorraine saw her,” Michael said. “Didn’t you, love?”

Lorraine nodded. “From the bedroom window.”

“And where was she? Emily?”

“In the garden. Playing.”

“That would be at the front?”

Michael shook his head. “The back. The main bedroom, it’s at the back.”

“And what time would this have been?”

Michael looked at Lorraine, who was still twisting her hair, staring at the floor. Heavy footsteps walked across above their heads. “Three, three-thirty.”

“You can’t be more accurate than that?”

“No, I …”

“Five past three,” Lorraine said with sudden sharpness.

“You’re sure?”

“Look,” Lorraine suddenly on her feet. “It was three o’clock when Michael said why didn’t we go to bed. I know because I looked at the clock. I went straight up to the bathroom, then into the bedroom and that’s when I saw Emily. Five minutes, okay? Six. Seven. What does it matter?”

Michael tried to grab her, prevent her running out of the room. “I’m sorry,” he said.

“It’s all right,” said Resnick. “I understand.”

Lynn Kellogg looked over at Resnick and when he nodded she went to look for Lorraine.

“We’ll need a detailed description,” Resnick said, “a photograph, recent, head and shoulders. The sooner we get it circulated the better. A list of Emily’s friends, those she’d be most likely to play with, visit. Relatives—we know of course about her mother, there’s an officer at the house now, waiting for her return. Anything else you think is relevant.”

Resnick smiled reassuringly, “She’ll be all right, Mr. Morrison. We’ll find her.” But Michael was not reassured.

Lynn Kellogg tried the kitchen, the bedrooms; standing to one side on the narrow landing as the constable went by, she asked him a question with her eyes and was answered by a setting of the mouth, a quick shake of the head. Finally, Lynn found Lorraine in the rear garden, cardigan around her shoulders, one of Emily’s dolls tight within her arms. Lights showed, orange and yellow, in most of the adjoining houses; silhouettes of people proceeding, undisturbed, with their lives.
The Antiques Road Show. Songs of Praise. Mastermind.
What remained of the chicken, the roast, covered with foil and placed in the fridge. Tomorrow saw the start of another week.

“She’s not mine, you know. Emily.”

“I know.”

No tears now: all cried out. “We were … we went … we were making love.”

“Yes.

“Oh, God!”

Fingers pressing deep into her palms, she turned towards Lynn and Lynn held her in her arms. At either side of them, officers with torches were making their slow search among the shrubs, along the borders.

Back inside the house, Michael, with some hesitation, was telling Resnick about Diana, his first wife.

Eighteen

“Should have called me sooner, Charlie.”

“Chances were, found her first couple of hours.”

“Yes. But we didn’t, did we?”

Skelton set his overcoat on the hanger behind the door, running his hands outwards along the shoulders to ensure it hung smoothly. He had been settling into a book when Resnick had got through: Alexander Kent, naval yarns that knocked Forester and Hornblower into a cocked hat.

“Dad, for you.” His daughter, Kate, leaning round the door, black T-shirt and lipstick to match. Six months now she’d been going around with what Skelton had been informed was a Goth: a first-year physics student at the university with a taste in loud music and necromancy. Weekends it was down to London and Kensington Market, clubs like Slimelight. More than likely drop out next year and take Kate on a tour of Transylvania.