Eoin Miller 02 - Old Gold (13 page)

“Michael stopped drinking a few years ago. It got in the way of his ambitions. You know how it is.”

“Where would you two go out, back when he was drinking? Local? The city?”

She paused and then turned the tables on me. “Why?”

“No reason. My parents used to run a pub just down the road, the Wagons Rest. Did you know it?”

“Oh, yes, we went in there quite a lot.” Then her eyes widened a little as she put two and two together. “Oh, you’re one of the boys, Erica’s children, right?”

“That’s me. Us.”

“You were such wild kids, I remember. How’s your brother doing? And your sister?”

“Honestly, I have no idea.” I didn’t like talking about my family, so I changed back to the subject at hand. “How are you holding up?”

She relaxed at this, leaning back into the chair and finally letting the mask drop away. I felt as if it was really the first time I’d met her, and she looked tired.

“It’s hard,” she said. “It’s so hard. My baby’s out there somewhere. I don’t even know if he’s still out there or if—”

The words failed her, and I saw the tears welling. I felt a very male indecision, to comfort the crying woman or to leave her alone.

I chose the safe option and sipped my coffee.

“How about your husband? How’s he handling it?”

“Mike? I—He’s hurt, I suppose, yes. He doesn’t show it enough, but it’s there.”

I felt something nagging at the back of my mind again, the way it had when I met them in the pub.

“Is it affecting your relationship? The two of you?”

She laughed, and the tears were gone in an instant. The defensive wall had appeared again.

“No, it’s not going to split us up.”

“Mrs. Perry—”

“Steph.”

“Steph. Is there anything you didn’t want to tell me in front of your husband yesterday? I sensed tension between you two.”

“Isn’t there always tension between parents?”

I let it go at that.

“And you really can’t think of anything that would make Chris run away? Anything he’d be particularly upset about?”

“He’d seemed happier lately, more sure of himself. I can’t think of anyone less likely to run away.”

“He had an appointment with his university mentor last Thursday. Do you have any idea what it could have been about?”

“No. Aren’t you going to ask his mentor?”

“Yes, I’ll be seeing him again to go over the details.”

“Again? So you’ve already talked to him? Is he the one who said I was lying?”

“No, nobody questioned what you’ve said. I didn’t mean to imply they had. It’s just different people’s impressions of your son seem to be different.”

“Sorry.”

“What time will your husband be home from work?”

“Oh, I don’t know. He could be a while yet.”

“Well, I can catch him another time. I’ll call ahead next time so that you both know I’m coming.” I smiled. “Have you got the details of Chris’s friends?”

“Yes.” She beamed. “I wrote it all down.”

She rummaged in her bag and handed me a sheet of paper with names and phone numbers.

“This will be a great help,” I assured her. “Honestly, I think Chris is OK. And I’m going to find him.”

I felt sorry for her, trying not to show how upset she was, but there was still something that didn’t sit right.

Something I couldn’t place.

I don’t really follow a logical progression for finding people. I just nag away at it the way you work a Magic Eye puzzle. Stare at the problem long enough, and the answer pops out. Another piece of the puzzle that was nagging at me was something I caught her with just before I left.

“How about Michael’s political stuff? Is that causing any problems?”

She didn’t answer, just shrugged. That seemed to convey a lot more than any white lie or platitude would have done. There was something there, and I knew I was looking right at it.

I parked outside my mother’s house. I didn’t go in straightaway. Something kept me in the car for a long time. Her cat, Rollo, sat on the wall beside the car and stared at me. It became a brief battle of wills. He didn’t invite me in and I didn’t run him over. I climbed out of the car and rang the front doorbell. Mum answered pretty much straightaway. She tried to hide the surprise on her face, covering it with happiness. She pulled me into a hug as I stepped through the door and did that thing where you get kissed on the cheek whether you like it or not.

I followed her into the living room, and she motioned for me to sit on the sofa after she cleared away some newspaper. She disappeared into the kitchen, and I heard the kettle boiling. I sat alone, staring at the photographs on the wall.

Me, my brother, and sister.

Family memories.

Strangers.

There was a photo of me and my father in front of a
vardo
, a traditional Gypsy wagon, grinning like fools. I’d never actually seen anyone living in one of those, but some families had them as showpieces. The smiles in the photo held my attention, the same grin on faces separated by age. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen that smile on either
of us, but it just drifted into the last time I’d seen him, the time he’d called me a failure. I thought of the last time I’d seen my brother, his arm pressed into my throat, his mouth saying he was going to kill me.

Mum handed me a mug of warm tea and sat opposite me. Born and raised in the area, she still carried the warmth of her Irish grandparents. It made her open and caring, always seeming full of love and life. She was all the things I was not.

“How long’s it been, Eoin?”

I shrugged. “Don’t know.”

Her eyes dimmed a little, and that made the lines around them show up. My mum was in her fifties, and healthy for it, but she looked old when she worried.

She peered at me over her cup. “Are you feeling any better?”

“Better? What do you mean?”

“Well, have you spoken to, what’s his name, that Scottish psychia—”

“Dr. Guthrie, no.”

She paused, then shrugged, as everyone did when they hit my brick wall. “Good to see you, anyway.”

“Do you remember a local couple, used to drink in the pub, the Perrys?”

It took a second to register, and then the dimness in her eyes turned to something hard and cold.

“Oh,” she said, “you’re running one of your errands. Who’s it for this time, those Asian guys?”

“It’s not like that.”

She just shook her head and looked at me as though I’d killed the cat.

“Sorry,
Mei
. It’s just something important I’m working on, that’s all. I need to find out what they were like, what they
are
like.”

She nodded and played along, but the warmth didn’t come back to her voice.

“The Perrys, you said? Name rings a bell.”

I described them, and she nodded.

“Yes. I know who you mean now. Steph and, what was his name, Mick? Mark? The copper, that’s what I remember. Your dad never trusted him. Well, you know what he thought of the police.”

Only too well.

“They were regulars for a while. Strange couple. She was always really nice, got involved, you know? Always asking if she could help arrange quizzes and things like that. But him? Not a bit of it. Always seemed uncomfortable.”

“Why, was there anything about him that stood out, anything to make you worry about him?”

“Worry? No. We just wrote him off as a cop, you know? He thought he was above us or something. But then, most of the town did too. Nothing strange about him that way.”

“When did they stop coming in?”

“Well, I think he started drinking somewhere else. The Spring Tavern or something, if I remember what your dad said. She kept coming in for a while after that, but they had a son to look after, and I guess she drew the short straw.”

“The Spring? Isn’t that the Coley pub?”

The Coley family were another with a bad reputation like ours. I don’t know if theirs was any more or less earned. They’d been a family of Gypsies who’d settled down between the world wars, so they were firmly established as locals by the time I was born. They had the usual rumors that followed them around—criminal activities like theft and poaching. My dad had always told me never to believe any of it, that it was racist bullshit. But he’d still always told me not to associate with them. My brother had fallen in with
them for a time before he left town, one of the many cracks in our family’s relationships.

What did it mean if Perry had fallen in with them too? Was that one of the things he wanted to keep locked away in the closet?

“Did he seem honest? I mean, would he have been on the take from the Coleys?”

“All cops are on the take, right?”

The look in her eyes bored into my soul. I left it at that. I gave her a frosty hug at the front door. She didn’t say it had been wonderful. She didn’t tell me to come again soon. The cat came to laugh me away at the car.

I drove back to my house through habit.

I stood in the driveway. I lost track of how long I was there, staring in through the windows of my own house. I just kept picturing the photographs on my mum’s wall. Family life. The past. A lie.

I got back in the car and drove to the flat. I sat down in the darkness broken by the television. I felt alone, but it didn’t feel bad. The bottle of whiskey I’d bought a few nights ago was still mostly full, and I sat with it keeping me warm. An old black-and-white film was playing on the TV, which got me thinking about the hooker I’d slept with and our conversation about the old femme fatales. My thoughts drifted to Bauser and Chris and then settled on Mary for a long time.

I watched a few repeated BBC comedies before making my way to the bedroom. The bottle was light in my hand, and I noticed just how much I’d drunk. The bottle had about a third left in it, sloshing about at the bottom, begging to be finished.

The drink can creep up on you if you’re not careful. I slipped off my clothes and climbed into bed. Lying there in
the dark, I was haunted by a strange feeling, a cold rush up my spine. I switched the bedside lamp on.

Mary was sitting on the bed next to me. Not saying a word.

I looked away.

“Go away,” I said. “You’re not really here. I’m drunk.”

When I steeled myself to look again, she had gone.

Dreams.

Dreams don’t like me.

My dreams were full of Mary, as I had met her, drunk and moody, as I had imagined her last night, angry with me, lonely. Chris Perry kept finding his way into the narratives. All I had to form him were a photograph and other people’s opinions. Other people’s lies. Then I was in either the Myvod or Posada, being laughed at by the locals. They pointed and called me names; they asked where my caravan was. And Bauser kept sitting next to me, getting in the way, asking for drinks and attention. Freud would have had a field day, I suppose.

Then the scene shifted again, and I was in my police uniform. I woke covered in sweat, feeling groggy.

It was eight o’clock in the morning. The bottle of whiskey was on my bedside table. I put it in the drawer, unable to face it. I decided drink wasn’t worth the dreams it gave me. A low buzzing nagged at me, as if my headache was actually producing noise. It took me over a minute to figure out that the buzzing was actually my new phone, lost in the pile of my clothes. I fished it out and answered it.

“Get up,” said Becker.

“How did you get this number?”

“You called me from it, remember? Phones can do this remarkable thing where they remember numbers.”

I rubbed the bridge of my nose. The hangover was fighting at the edges of my vision, deciding whether to go for it full blast or slink away in defeat.

“Yeah, OK. I remember.”

“You sound a little rusty. Rough night?”

“Strange dreams.”

“OK, well, listen, get a shower and a suit. I’ll be round in an hour.”

“Wait, wha—?”

“Bauser’s funeral today. I thought I should go, and I know you should.”

I didn’t know if I had the courage to face it. But he was right. I got the kid killed; the least I could do was show my face at his send-off. Bauser had a big family. I remembered them from years ago. Could I face them?

“You’re at home, right?”