You Don't Have to be Good (30 page)

There was a silence. Jim said he was sorry if this was a bolt out of the blue and Frank took that as permission to turn grief and fear to rage. These bastards had left him to rot for weeks and now they wanted to talk.

‘Don’t you normally just come and kick the door down?’

There was another silence. They were probably recording this call, he thought.

‘We’re not CID, Frank.’

‘Yeah, well . . .’

‘I’m sorry if—’

‘Does her sister know?’

‘She’s away at the moment.’

‘What are you saying? Have you found my wife? When was this?’

‘No, we haven’t found her, Frank. But we would like you to have a look at some film from a security camera. It’s a few weeks old unfortunately, but . . . Would it be convenient if we dropped by in the next hour or so?’

I
T WAS
raining when Jim and Pete arrived. Both men were gazing round at the newly planted front garden. Jim smiled at Frank as he came in while the small one, Pete, said, ‘Lovely day for it,’ and gave him a half wave, half salute as he hopped into the house after Pete.

The three men hesitated in the hall and noted the transformation in the house. Frank told them to go through to the kitchen.

Jim was businesslike and brisk. He sat at the table and opened his laptop.

‘We’ve made a DVD for you,’ he said as the screen lit up. ‘The quality is not what we would wish, but as you know, we follow up every lead, and other than this one there have been none at all.’

Frank peered at the screen while Pete did his weird wallflower number.

A snowstorm fizzed and then a series of frames of the station platform appeared. It wasn’t even black and white, which would give some definition, it was just grey and white. Jim paused the disc.

‘There,’ he said.

Frank bent closer. It didn’t help that he had lost his glasses and really he could make out precious little on the small screen. Jim was pointing at a woman standing at the far end of the platform. She was looking away from the camera, up the track, towards the approaching train. The next frame had skipped several moments and when it showed the platform again, the train was standing there but the woman had vanished.

‘Is that it?’ asked Frank.

‘As I say,’ said Jim. ‘Hollywood it ain’t. Let’s look at it again.’

‘Well, did she get on it?’

‘That’s our problem. We don’t know. That is the London train, heading for Waterloo. We’ve checked Waterloo cameras for when that train arrived but come up with nothing. We also checked Southampton station’s ticket office to see whether we could catch this individual either buying a ticket or leaving the station. The camera in the ticket office wasn’t working.’

‘Can I borrow your specs?’

Jim handed them to him and Frank sat ready, head forward, shoulders hunched. ‘OK,’ he said.

It was recorded in the early afternoon of the day she had gone. But he knew straight away it wasn’t her. She didn’t know anyone in Southampton. The woman was holding her head strangely, as if it was too heavy and something about her clothes was wrong. Frank had the feeling that whoever the woman was who had taken herself to the far end of the platform, he was watching a stranger. For a start she wasn’t behaving like a normal person. When the train appeared in the frame and she didn’t step back from the edge, he wondered whether she was deaf or blind or something, because she didn’t respond like the rest of the crowd. She just stood her ground, too close to the edge. The coat looked similar to one he thought he’d seen Bea wearing, he’d give them that. And maybe the bag, although Bea had so many bags he couldn’t be definite.

‘Anything?’ asked Jim.

Frank took the glasses off and handed them back. For the first time he felt that he had the upper hand with these two men. He could feel the tension in the air, the hope that they might have hit on something. They probably got commission for every Misper that they found. They weren’t very good at this and he had been treated like shit. The whole police investigation had an amateurish air to it. He shook his head.

‘It’s not her,’ he said. ‘I’m pretty sure it’s not her.’

L
AURA KNEW
immediately it was Bea when she saw the footage. They knelt in the dusk in the empty sitting room, crouched around Jim’s laptop. Katharine’s suitcase stood unpacked in the hall.

‘It’s her.’ Laura got up and walked away, knowing she would not be believed.

‘I think it might be her,’ said Adrian, nodding. ‘That way of standing. When she’s tired. She used to say her head got too heavy.’

Katharine peered at the screen and asked to see it again.

‘It’s terrible quality. I’ve seen ultrasounds clearer than this. I don’t see how we can make a positive identification . . .’ She stopped and studied the time-lapsed frames, the snowy blur of a woman with her back to the camera like a slowed-down silent movie. She creased her brow in an effort to make the strange jerky movements familiar. We have reached this point, she told herself. We are searching closed circuit television footage for my sister. She knew what this meant. They all did. Always, with CCTV, the gritty, grim association of death.

They watched the meagre few seconds again and again, leaning closer into the screen until they could hear one another’s breathing.

‘I don’t know . . .’ said Katharine. Her joints cracked as she straightened up.

‘It’s impossible with this quality,’ said Richard. ‘She could be anyone.’

‘We can just enlarge the image a bit . . .’ Adrian pressed some keys on the laptop and the screen went blank. ‘Oh.’

‘Classic,’ chuckled Pete.

‘It’s her,’ said Laura again. ‘It’s her Happy Coat.’ She picked up the cat and forced it into an embrace it did not want. ‘She bought it to cheer herself up. It’s got a pink lining and everything.’

Katharine looked at Jim in exasperation. ‘Laura is supposed to wear glasses.’ He surely wasn’t going to take the word of a child?

‘What could she possibly be doing in Southampton, though?’ asked Richard.

Pete started to pack away the laptop while Jim led Richard down the other end of the room. ‘Nine times out of ten in a case like this,’ he murmured in a man-to-man kind of a way, ‘someone else is involved. We had a married man the other day, respectable type, lawyer in the city, et cetera. Goes to work one morning, never comes back. Family at their wits’ end. Turns out he’s met a barmaid called Betty in a pub in the Cotswolds. Packed up and gone to live with her. More often than not, with these older types, there’s bound to be a Betty the Barmaid there somewhere. Betty or Bernie . . . someone she met on the internet perhaps—’

‘It’s her,’ said Laura, glaring up at them and leaving the room.

T
HEIR BEDROOM
was empty now. Katharine had put an ad in the paper and a man with a van came round and bought the lot. She preferred the house empty because it was like the way she felt. Stripped down and featureless. She lay on the mattress on the floor and looked up at the curtainless windows. Richard turned the light off and got undressed. She thought of Patrick doing the same in Ithaca, peeling off the lies of his life while his wife lay on the bed and watched him. Richard climbed under the duvet with her and she waited for his embrace, for his words of gentle enquiry and reassurance. They didn’t come. He lay silently beside her for a while and then asked how long they were going to live in limbo. They had done what they could to find Bea, but what if she didn’t want to be found? He asked her whether, in some dim recess of her mind, it had ever occurred to her that Bea might just have had enough – of Frank, of work, of her. He wondered whether Katharine might possibly consider that the lives of her own family – him, the children – were perhaps in need of some attention. That, in case she hadn’t noticed, they weren’t much of a family at all any longer, if indeed they ever really had been. He said that Adrian stood a good chance of flunking his exams because the school had no science teachers and Laura seemed to have a permanent period pain or an upset stomach or sore throat and barely attended school at all. He told her that Claudia had suggested that they hire a private detective because she had heard of a woman in Scotland who had seven children and went to empty the bin one night but never came back until three years later, when she was discovered living half a mile away with the woman who ran the hospice. A private detective had found her. Then he accused Katharine of hypocrisy. He told her she had exploited Bea for years and never given a second thought to the woman until she suddenly wasn’t there any longer. He said it was a bit bloody late to be throwing money at Bea’s house and garden, that perhaps she might have thought of that before, but that this was typical of Katharine, she never gave anyone a second thought; just look at Margaret.

Katharine lay in the dark and didn’t speak. She waited as the words removed the layers of her self and her marriage. She waited patiently for the flaying to stop. She listened to everything he said, ears straining to catch each word, which she took and folded carefully away in glass tissue inside her. Then she got up from the bed, picked up her eye mask and earplugs and left the room.

Out on the landing she waited for Richard to come and get her. He didn’t. She couldn’t go to the spare room, the bed had been dismantled. She would rather not go downstairs and sleep on the sofa. For one thing there was no duvet there, and for another, it was too much of a Frankish thing to do. She climbed the stairs to the top floor and stood outside the children’s rooms. The floorboards creaked. She looked at Laura’s door. Laura’s door was always shut. Laura’s door had been firmly shut for the last two years. It was a very long time since Katharine had been in there. She put her hand on the doorknob and turned it slowly.

A night light was glowing from a plug in the wall and she saw that Laura had unpacked some of her things. Fluffy toys sat lined up on the shelf beneath the window, a pile of children’s books from long ago stacked on the floor below. Laura lay on her back, sleep-sprawled in the position that hadn’t changed in her since she was an infant. A small toy monkey nestled beside her, its hand up tenderly at her chin. Soundlessly, Katharine put down her eye mask and earplugs and lifted the edge of the duvet. Limb by limb she slid herself in to the narrow space at the edge of the bed. Laura shifted in her sleep and turned on to her side away from her. Katharine hesitated, then slid one arm slowly into the gap beneath Laura’s neck and rested her other arm gently around her daughter’s body. She pressed her face into the nape of her neck and filled her lungs with the sweet, warm scent of her. Laura stirred again. Katharine, afraid she would wake, tried to lift her arm away. With a tight, fierce grip, Laura held it firmly where it was.

J
ANUARY WAS
unseasonably mild. Daffodils and blossom budded early; blackbirds and thrushes, still thin from the winter, searched for places to nest. Wanda was in a hurry, her blonde hair bouncing and jerking, her mouth a thin line. She found Urban working in the cemetery. He had stripped off to a vest and he bent at his work, spade slicing the earth with powerful downward strokes. She let the gate clang shut behind her, walked over to him with quick, angry strides and gave him a push. He turned his head to her and half smiled without stopping the digging.

‘Give me the passport.’ She pushed him again, and this time he straightened up and grasped her wrist tight so that it hurt. ‘You said you hadn’t got it. I think you have.’

He let her go and stabbed the spade into the earth. ‘So, how’s Hastings?’

‘It’s not right, Urban. They need to know. They need to know she’s not using her passport.’

Urban took off his gloves and raised his eyebrows at her. ‘She doesn’t need her passport to get abroad.’

‘Don’t, Urban. Have you got it?’

‘I don’t know. The police search that place so many times I think maybe they have it. I haven’t checked.’

‘Come on.’ She pulled at his sleeve. ‘It’s important.’

Urban stayed where he was. ‘What’s it worth?’

‘Shut up.’

T
HEY ROUNDED
the corner of Oyster Row.

Wanda rang the bell and then unlocked the door, calling Frank’s name. The house was empty and it smelt of paint. Urban pulled on his gloves and went out into the garden, disappearing behind the shed. Wanda followed. She heard him pulling up the roofing felt before emerging with a plastic bag folded flat. He handed it to her. ‘Take your pick,’ he said.

Wanda looked through the brown, the turquoise, the maroon and the black, each worth £500. It reminded her of the monopoly game she had played in her first au pair job here in Cambridge. She checked the photos of two British passports and handed one back to Urban.

‘Perhaps I’ll keep Frank’s,’ he said, putting it back with the others and going round to the far side of the shed again. ‘Terrible photo anyway.’

Wanda didn’t argue. She studied Bea’s photograph. An unremarkable middle-aged woman looked back at her. Beatrice Pamplin. Next of kin: Frank Pamplin. She shook her head. ‘That’s not Bea,’ she said, putting it in her pocket. ‘I’ll post it. Come on, let’s go.’

‘Hang on,’ said Urban, winding a strand of Wanda’s hair round his fingers. ‘I want a bath.’

W
HEN
B
EA’S
passport dropped through Frank’s letter box he held it in his hand and wondered whether this was a good sign or a bad one. He rang Katharine. Katharine told him not to touch it, to stay where he was and do nothing. Frank was still standing in the hallway when CID turned up to search the house again. He gave them the passport, walked out of the open front door and turned right, up the road and away from the river. These days he avoided the river walks. There was something oppressive to him now about its familiarity and dank odour, something crushing in its sluggish leaden flow. These days he wandered through the hushed terraced streets, avoiding the main roads, the town centre and the common. He walked to try and find a way out, a way out of the hollow, sour sense of remorse that shackled him here in this flat, squat town.