The Missing Person's Guide to Love (20 page)

‘
But you didn’t want to. If you’d wanted to go, you’d have gone. We make these choices for ourselves, even if later we wonder how.
’

‘
No. I’m glad I stayed here and I’m glad I met you but, still, it’s a life I could have had that I didn
’t.’

‘
I’m not sure I need to hear about your ex-lovers, especially while we’re lying in bed together.
’

‘
No. You don’t. I was just thinking. One of my girls ended up with a Turkish lover, and all because of me and mine. She found her passion with him. I found mine with you. When I was young I thought I was destined for a life circumnavigating the globe, but actually I think I was never suited to going far away. It was a fantasy.
’

‘
You always call them
“yourgirls”
but they’re not yours. Why do you do that?
’

‘
Well, they always came to me when they needed help. I was important to them. I was younger in spirit than any of their parents, and I’m not saying that I had any magical powers but I think they
wanted to be a little bit like me. I gave them the confidence to be unlimited. Small-town life tried to teach them otherwise.
’

‘
I can’t stop thinking about your Turkish lover now that you’ve brought him up. It’s as if he’s sitting on the end of the bed, watching me. And he thinks I’m a dull, bespectacled old man.
’

She saw him too. He was peeling an orange.
‘
You bring your old lovers in sometimes. I don’t mind hearing about them. I don’t mind at all. Brenda, she’s my favourite. Tell me about Brenda again.
’

‘
Ah, now, Brenda. She was as different from you as a woman could be.
’

Maggie liked to have the company of their ghosts. She had been alone all day. She wanted a full house.

I drag the man’s coat and the duvet to the bed and pull them over me. I reach up to the top shelf of the bookcase and take down
Goose Island.
Two of Maggie’s other books slip to the floor. For now I leave them there. In a moment I shall look at those too.
Goose Island
has a photograph of a bigger reservoir than ours. It is more beautiful and yet more sure of itself. Perhaps it is a real lake. It looks as if it never changes. I run my fingers up and down the cover. Not yet. I am becoming nervous of what Maggie has written. I can’t help but associate Julia with the title of the book, yet I know that Maggie would never have written about her, even if it were known that she had been anywhere near Goose Island that day. Maggie always says that she is not interested in writing about real people. More than that, Julia’s story is not the kind she likes.

It was a patch of grass the size of a large living room, usually empty during the day but in the evenings it belonged to teenagers. As children, we saw them leaning against the high breeze-block wall of the bingo hall, even in winter, apparently doing nothing. I wondered how they could sit there, night after night, not interested in doing anything, not laughing or playing games. Later we took over the land for ourselves and were just the same. The patch was shielded from the wind, and when Annie, John and I entered the space from the road, it was almost like stepping indoors.

We separated and walked around. There was no particular point to this but we could think of nothing else to do. The ground was bumpy and gnarled, slightly tacky with mud. After a couple of minutes the three of us were standing in a row, reading the graffiti on the bingo-hall wall, as if we had reached a particularly interesting exhibit in a museum. The scrawls reached from the ground to just above eye-level. Mostly they were names, Kelly, Katy, Callum, the authors too lazy to announce love, to abuse their enemies, to give any date beyond the hints at age in their names.

‘I suppose these are the teenage offspring of the teenagers who came here in the eighties, of our lot,’ said Annie. ‘If I’d known back then that nothing ever changes, I don’t think I could have faced the rest of my life.’

‘There’s broken glass on the ground. Watch out.’

I put out my arm to stop Annie walking onto the smashed bottle.

‘That’s why I never liked it much here. If you came at night you’d get cut by some old cider bottle. There were always a couple of stray dogs around too, an old brown mongrel that we used to pet. Spastic. That was what we called it, poor old mutt. I guess we were horrible back then.’

‘The glass might explain the blood on Owen’s clothes, if he was sitting down here somewhere.’ John was prodding at the broken pieces with his toe. ‘Or, at least, it reminds us that there are ways of getting a bit of blood on your sleeve without having to murder someone.’

‘Good point.’ I knew that John wanted to convince us that Owen was innocent. I was not going to argue with him yet.

‘It wasn’t dark, though.’ Annie was muttering, to herself, not us. ‘It was summer so it would have been light and he ought to have been able to see. I guess he could still have cut himself. It’s not so likely but I suppose he could have done. Would it look like this on a summer evening? How would it look? Prettier, of course. There would be more leaves on the trees, thicker green in the gardens. Not that pretty makes any difference.’

Annie sat down by the wall, hunched forward over her knees. She looked as she had when I saw her in Owen’s bedroom. She pressed her fingers into her temples and continued to mumble.

I walked away from her, took an angry swing at the breeze-block wall with my leg. My shoe fell off.

‘That hurt.’ I tottered on one leg as I put the shoe on again. My skirt tightened around my legs and I wished I was wearing more suitable clothes. ‘Well, we’re here now. What do we do?

There’s nothing on the wall that says, “RIP Julia, 1982,” or “Owen Carr woz a killer here.” There’s nothing to help us. It’s hopeless.’

‘But what were you expecting? Of course there’s nothing here. What could there be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Her body?’

‘Yes. I know it’s silly but maybe that’s what I was hoping for. Or some sign that it was once here.’

‘Even if you murdered someone in this spot, what would you do with the body? There’s nowhere to hide something so big. You couldn’t just dig a hole in the middle of the grass and cover it up again.’

John took a tube of wrapped sweets from his pocket and popped one into his mouth without offering them around. It smelled of blackcurrant, of colds and winter days. It rattled around his mouth as he spoke.

‘You could carry or drag a body into one of the gardens, if you knew that the owners were out. But you’d have to be strong to get it over the fence and you’d need to bury it quickly when you got there.’

‘Has anything about the gardens changed since those days?’

‘Not that I’ve noticed. The trees would have been lower so it would have been easier to see from the houses. It was a good spot for a smoke or a drink because it felt fairly secret. But half the school was in on the secret so it wouldn’t have been an ideal place to get stuck with a corpse.’

Annie stood, brushed dirt from her skirt. ‘They could have been involved. You know, if there was a gang of people and they took against Julia for some reason or were in the mood to bully her. Look at all those names on the wall. Imagine what might have happened if they’d wanted it to.’

I could see her point. How often had a crowd at the bus-stop grown into a mob at the sight of some minor spat that could not be allowed to lie? Kids had their clothes pulled off in the park and thrown into trees. Schoolbags got chucked into the reservoir. When groups formed, things happened that no one had meant to happen. I turned a full circle, absorbing the atmosphere. Silhouettes of boys and girls seeped from the wall, from the black-pen names, the broken bottles on the grass. Not Kelly and Callum and Katy now, but Wayne, Kerry, Gary, Hayley. Thick voices bayed and taunted. The damp air had a tang of blood. I concentrated hard until I could find Julia’s face at the centre of the group, hard and pretty, clean. And then the others fell away and the voices quietened. A dog barked, and a couple of motorbikes sped past. I felt safe again.

‘Owen didn’t have many friends,’ I said. ‘But everyone loved Julia. People didn’t pick on her. She was too strong. It wouldn’t have happened like that.’

Annie nodded and turned back to the road. ‘You knew her better than I did. Even so, I want to get away from here now. It’s hard to breathe, isn’t it? The air isn’t getting in properly. I don’t know why.’

John and I followed and the three of us set off back uphill towards the market-place. Annie was right: there was more air out here on the road. Although we had learned nothing useful yet, I felt that we were making progress. We were closer to the past and we had eliminated certain theories. We were almost thinking like detectives.

‘Has it jogged any memories, Annie?’ I asked. ‘Anything that might help?’

‘I don’t know. Lots of things are bubbling around in my head, things I’d forgotten. Owen threw away loads of stuff when he split up with Julia. He chucked out all his schoolwork from the previous months, most of his records and lots of diaries. He just left them in the front garden in plastic bags and didn’t tell us what he was doing. Dad tried to persuade him to keep some of it but in the end they drove off to the tip together and dumped it all. Then, after Julia went, Mum decorated his room.’

Annie fell quiet. She bent down, gathered a handful of grass and scattered it, a few blades at a time, as she walked. I thought she had forgotten that she’d been speaking. Then she continued: ‘None of us knew what she was doing but suddenly Owen’s room had to be spring-cleaned and repainted, in exactly the same colour, though. Mum was always watching us, but especially Owen after that. She’d finish his sentences for him. We didn’t have people round so much, you know. We’d always been a sociable kind of family, with friends visiting in the evenings and staying at weekends. There was just a very clear change but I didn’t understand what it was. I was leaving home anyway that summer and was only here in the holidays after that so I wasn’t very involved. Owen went along with whatever Mum wanted, most of the time. Occasionally he blew his top about some stupid thing, like Mum talking to him when he was tired, but he’d calm down again. I don’t remember what Dad was doing or thinking. I have no idea if he was in on the secret too. I don’t think so. Mum encouraged Owen to leave school at sixteen. He could have stayed on but I think she wanted him to get away from school and all the people his age who had known Julia. Dad wanted him to go to college, I think, but it was obvious Owen was never going to be much of a student.’

I nodded. It all made sense. ‘Are you sure he never mentioned the bingo hall when he was in prison, John?’

‘Never. He didn’t talk about specific areas of the village. Had no reason to. He only vaguely mentioned the place at all, sometimes the moors. Why don’t we go up there? We could follow the route from here and see where on the hill it would have brought them out, had they come this way. It’d be a nice walk anyway. I prefer the countryside to streets and pavements.’

We stopped in the market-place and bought bags of chips from Bobby’s. I’d forgotten how hungry I was and how cold. I cupped both hands around the warm paper until the heat seeped through and burned my fingers. We ate our chips as we walked, hardly speaking. We followed the road that led to the nearest hill beyond the village. On the open road, with the wind blasting our hair across our faces, I felt less exposed than I had in the market-place.

‘The clue could be anywhere,’ Annie said. ‘Even in chips.’

‘In chips?’

‘What clue, though?’

‘I don’t know. I’m just saying, I don’t know what to look at or what to think but I seem to be in a situation where I need an answer. It might as well be chips as anything else. I must have been starving. This is the first time in my life I’ve managed to eat a whole bag.’ She screwed up the wrapper and crammed it into her coat pocket. Then it began to rain, a whitish mizzle that thickened up the sky.

We left the road and climbed the stony path up the hill. A few metres up, the track widened out to a viewing-point with a bench and a litter bin. We stood in the wind and gazed down the grassy slopes, wiping water from our faces every now and again. We were not far enough away for the village to be picturesque in miniature but the buildings had shrunk a little and we could see their tops in silhouette, the streets zigzagging among them. Stone walls mapped the land from the village to our green spot and sketched lines across distant dips and hills.

‘If he had already killed her, he couldn’t have brought her here, could he? It would be impossible.’

‘Not without a car,’ said John. ‘Even then it would have been hard getting her away from the road. He’d have had to bury her nearby.’

‘Can’t you remember anything? My brother was sixteen. He couldn’t drive.’ Annie clutched the brandy against her abdomen as if it were a hot-water bottle.

‘Did he know how to drive, though, Annie? Could he have stolen a car, or used your parents’?’

‘It could have been him in the light blue car that was seen by witnesses.’

I pushed my chip-wrapper into the bin. There was still a trace of warmth in the paper. I licked a few grains of salt from my finger.

‘That’s ridiculous. There’s no way he would have known how to drive, or had the balls to take someone else’s car even if he did. But he could have lured her up here while she was still alive, suggested taking her for a walk, maybe.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘She wouldn’t have come all this way in the middle of doing her paper round. The Grimshaws always kept an eye on our time-keeping. She would have waited till the end. And she would never have dumped her bag on the ground and left it like that. Besides, they would have been seen, walking all the way through the village and out here. There would have been plenty of witnesses. I don’t think she ever got far from the reservoir, not while she was alive.’

‘Annie.’ John put his arm on Annie’s shoulder. It was a tender gesture. ‘What colour was your parents’ car?’

‘For God’s sake.’ She stumbled away from him on the pale, uneven grass. ‘It was white.’