Flesh And Blood (23 page)

‘So if he was having it off with her, no reason he’s going to come forward, jeopardise his career.’

‘Maybe not.’

‘He just sits tight, hopes it will all blow over without he becomes involved. Must have thought he’d managed it till you came nosing around. And even now, you don’t know it for a fact. I mean, suppose he did take her back to that – what? – cottage of his. Five or six hours with an attractive girl. For all you know they could have been reading all the damned play they’d missing seeing. That and drinking cups of tea.’

‘It’s possible,’ Elder agreed.

‘Any damned thing’s possible, Frank. One thing this job teaches you. Any damned thing at all.’

The lamb was tender, not too heavily spiced, the rogan josh slippery with tomato and rich.

‘Even if he was shagging her,’ Maureen said, ‘it doesn’t mean he had anything to do with her disappearance.’

‘I know that.’

‘But you’ve got a feeling.’

‘Something like that.’

Maureen grinned. ‘You’ve been wrong before.’

‘Thank you very much.’

‘Seriously,’ she said, ‘what are you going to do now?’

Elder shrugged. ‘Take the photograph up to Yorkshire, tout it around. See if it rings any bells.’

Maureen put down her fork. ‘Maybe you should have done that before you confronted him.’

‘I dare say.’

They were quiet for a time, concentrating on the food. The restaurant was filling up now, approaching closing time. Elder asked Maureen about work. A father of three who had killed his wife and children, then tried to kill himself and failed. A suspicious death where the body had been exhumed. A shooting, probably drugs related, in St Ann’s. The kidnapping of a five-year-old boy in the north of the county, a ransom demand the parents had complied with before contacting the police, their money taken and the boy not yet returned. It was clear from the way Maureen recounted the story she suspected one of the parents of being somehow involved.

‘Busy then,’ Elder observed.

‘Overstretched not the word,’ Maureen said.

Elder leaned back as the waiter reached down to clear away their plates. ‘Coffee?’

‘Go on then.’

It had just arrived, together with several foil-wrapped mints and the bill, when the phone started to ring.

‘Yours or mine?’ Maureen asked with a smile as she reached inside her bag. Somehow the idea of Elder with his own mobile phone amused her.

She listened for several moments, face becoming grave.

‘Right,’ she said into the phone. ‘I’ll be in.’

And then to Elder, as, rising, she fished for her wallet and some money to pay the bill. ‘A girl’s gone missing. Just sixteen. Last seen at Rufford Country Park just before four this afternoon.’

Emma Harrison had left her home in Beeston, on the outskirts of Nottingham, at a little after nine fifteen that early June morning. Her mother had driven her and her younger sister, Paula, into the city centre, the express purpose being to buy Paula some new shoes. Emma she was dropping off near the Friar Lane roundabout, close to the Old Market Square where she was meeting her friends Alison and Ashley. Emma, her mother had thought, not always at her best before noon on a Saturday, had been in a particularly good mood that morning, polite and cheerful. At one point in their relatively short journey, as they were passing along University Boulevard, Mrs Harrison had asked Paula to please stop kicking the back of her seat, to which Paula had replied that she was not and had promptly done it again. It had been Emma who had smoothed the situation over, bringing a smile to her mother’s face at the same time as preventing her younger sister from descending into the kind of ten-year-old sulk that could have jeopardised the whole expedition. She’s growing up, Mrs Harrison had thought, maturing, accepting responsibility.

‘You won’t be late back?’ Mrs Harrison said, leaning across from behind the wheel. She had pulled over on a double yellow line, partly blocking the inside lane.

Emma ducked her head back down towards the open car window. ‘Mum, we’ve been through all this. Alison’s dad’s meeting us and then dropping me off, okay?’

‘All right. But don’t forget your father and I have got tickets for the theatre. You’re looking after your sister.’

From the back seat, Paula let out a mock groan of anguish.

‘Okay, Mum. Don’t worry.’

‘Bye then. Have a lovely time.’

For a few moments, as she eased back out into the traffic, Mrs Harrison glimpsed her elder daughter in the rear-view mirror, before losing sight of her, intent upon manoeuvring into the lane that would take her to the car park off Derby Road.

Emma walked back towards the underpass, glancing at her reflection in the glass shop front to her right, denim skirt and a flowered halter top, her fair hair fastened in a high pony-tail, pink sandals, a small beaded bag from Accessorize over one shoulder.

Alison and Ashley were already waiting, swinging their legs near the fountain, Ashley with a rucksack full almost to overflowing with provisions her mother had insisted she take with her: sandwiches and crisps, bottled water, sun cream, an extra cardigan and a plastic waterproof that folded away inside a book-size bag.

‘For heaven’s sake, Mum,’ Ashley had complained. ‘We’re catching a bus, not crossing the Atlantic. Besides, there’s a perfectly good café there.’

‘Save your pocket money,’ her mother had replied, shooing her out of the house. ‘Spend it on better things.’

On weekends and bank holidays through the summer there were special buses that went out to Rufford Park, then on to Clumber Park and Newstead Abbey. At Rufford that day, besides a sculpture trail that went down through the gardens and towards the lake, there were four local bands playing live in the grounds. Alison had assured them the singer with one of them was the spitting image of Robbie Williams. Robbie Williams before he got too old. It was going to be a great day out.

They spent the first half an hour or so mooching around the shop in the old stable block, nearly but never quite buying bangles and rings and hand-painted cards and other arty things; then Alison wanted to go the café because she’d seen these boys heading in that direction; but when they got there, she’d decided she didn’t like them at all, also very Alison, so they sat on stools by the far wall laughing and joking and teasing Alison so much that in the end she stormed off to the toilet in a temper.

Once Alison had calmed down and they’d all made up, Emma suggested following the sculpture trail down through the gardens but the others had outvoted her and they’d walked off in the direction of the lake instead, sitting on a bench to eat Ashley’s sandwiches and feeding the crusts to a growing crowd of noisy geese and ducks.

‘C’mon,’ Alison had said, jumping up. ‘The music’s starting.’

The first band were awful, Emma thought, dead folky, the kind of thing her parents listened to when they’d had people to dinner and were sitting round afterwards pretending not to be smoking dope. After that it was a real boy band, Boyzone with acne, and all the little eight- and nine-year-olds and their grannies were going crazy and loving it and Ashley said let’s go back to the café, but Alison had staked out a good place and didn’t want to lose it, so they split up for a while, Emma borrowing Ashley’s spare cardigan because it was clouding over and she was getting goose-pimples with only her halter top.

The queue to get served in the café took for ever and so did the one for the loo and by the time the two of them had pushed their way back to where Alison was sitting, the third group were already into their second number. ‘See what I mean?’ Alison shouted above the volume. The singer, Emma thought, looked more like Gareth Gates than a young Robbie Williams, and she supposed he didn’t sound too bad, but it was the bass player with dyed white hair and tight snake-skin jeans who was sexy, seriously sexy, and she nudged the others and they all laughed, knowing what she meant and before long they were jumping up and down and dancing on the spot and it was as great as they’d hoped it would be. Truly great.

As the band came to the end of their final number, the drummer throwing his sticks out over the crowd while the singer milked the applause and the bass player stood to one side looking beautifully cool, Emma decided she had to go to the loo again and Ashley said, looking at her watch, they ought to hurry, the bus left in twenty minutes, so they agreed to meet up at the bus stand on the far side of the car park to catch the four o’clock. By Ashley’s watch it was three forty-one.

Neither Alison nor Ashley saw Emma again.

When she hadn’t turned up with ten minutes to go, the two girls ran back and checked the toilets and the café and the shop but there was no sign. Back at the bus-stop they begged the driver to wait and he did so for a couple of minutes, Alison and Ashley hoping against hope that Emma would suddenly appear.

The driver told them he had to go.

‘What are we going to do?’ Ashley asked.

‘We’ll have to get on,’ Alison said. ‘This is the last one.’

As soon as the bus had pulled in at the Victoria bus station they told Alison’s father what had happened. Tight-lipped, he drove them to Emma’s house and immediately Emma’s parents took her younger sister, Paula, across to a neighbour and drove out to Rufford themselves to look for their daughter.

At a little after nine thirty that evening, they went into Nottingham Central police station and reported Emma missing.

♦

That night the dream returned with a vengeance. Soft flesh that pressed and slithered against his own, something alive that twisted beneath his feet and broke as he climbed the stairs. Threadbare, the blanket thrown across the bed, his hand gripping its greasy hem, eyes averted, breath held against the stench; at the moment of jerking it back to reveal what lay beneath, thank God, he woke.

The scream that faded on the air was Elder’s own.

The T-shirt in which he slept was clammy with sweat; his skin burned hot and cold.

In the bathroom he stripped off and towelled down, splashed cold water on his face; the features that looked back at him from the mirror were older than he recognised and knew too much.

Below, Willie Bell was sitting at the kitchen table, whisky bottle open, Elder’s glass already poured.

‘The lassie out at Rufford Park?’ Willie said.

‘I dare say.’

‘Perhaps she’ll be home this morning, draggin’ her tail behind her.’ Willie said.

‘Perhaps.’

Neither of them believed it to be true.

The sun broke through the clouds at the exact moment Elder crested the hill, lighting up the ribbon of road that curved sharply downwards before climbing again in a straight Roman line between heather and gorse. He had phoned Helen Blackwood before leaving Nottingham, quick to assure her that he had discovered nothing new, nothing major, but he would like to talk to her nevertheless; if she were free that evening, maybe he could buy her dinner.

‘Come here,’ she said, ‘why don’t you? Long as you’re prepared to risk my cooking. I’m off work at six, give me time to pick up a few things on the way home – say eight o’clock?’

‘Okay.’

‘That’s not too late for you?’

‘No, it’ll suit me fine.’

Now he would have the bulk of the afternoon to see what memories, if any, his Polaroid of Paul Latham might unlock. As outside chances went, he realised, this was further afield than most.

♦

‘Tell you what,’ Kelly Todd said, ‘why don’t you let me do your hands? Then we can talk at the same time.’

Elder was not immediately taken with the idea, she could see.

‘It’s not poofy, you know. There’s all kinds of blokes have it done now. All sorts, you’d be surprised. Come in here to pick up their wives and while they’re waiting I slip them down into the chair. Besides, I’ve had two cancellations this afternoon and I’m dead bored. Go on, just get shot of that jacket. That’s it.’

Elder sat down and unbuttoned his shirt cuffs and began to roll back his sleeves.

Wearing pink today, bright lipstick in a similar shade and with her hair piled high and clipped in place, Kelly rolled the trolley holding her paraphernalia into position and took a seat facing him.

‘Look there, you see,’ she said, taking hold of one of Elder’s hands, ‘these nails, they’re in a right state. Bite them, don’t you? Some of them. Well, most men do.’ When she smiled, she looked younger by years, almost carefree. ‘There’s no law against using a nail-file, you know. In the privacy of your own bathroom, of course.’ She laughed and her laugh was surprisingly light. Elder could smell the mixture of tobacco and mint on her breath.

‘Just let me have that hand again. There.’ She slid his fingers down into a bowl of lukewarm, soapy water. ‘You’ve not found anything then? Susan?’

‘Nothing definite, no.’

‘No, I doubt you’d be back here if you had. Besides, there’d have been something in the paper. If there’d been a body, I mean.’

Elder nodded.

‘I’ll be honest, after all this time I’m surprised you’re still looking.’ Removing his hand, she began to pat it dry. ‘That girl who’s just gone missing, Nottingham way, it was on the news this morning, that’s nothing to do with you, is it?’

‘No, not really.’

‘Poor kid. Sixteen, isn’t she?’ Kelly shook her head. ‘Crying shame.’

‘She could still turn up, it’s early days.’

She stopped what she was doing to look at him. ‘You have to believe that, don’t you? At first, anyway. Bit like the parents, I suppose.’

‘Kids go missing all the time, youngsters. All right, they might be sleeping rough somewhere, but mostly they’re not… something terrible hasn’t happened to them, they’re alive.’

He knew the figures, knew that statistically, no matter how far the media lined its pockets fermenting things, serious offences against children and young people were decreasing. Between 1988 and 1999, in England and Wales, the annual number of five- to sixteen-year-olds murdered dropped from four per million to three. The number of under-fives murdered fell from twelve per million to nine. In the same period incidents of gross indecency with a child were down by over twenty per cent. And most child deaths, he knew, took place inside the home rather than outside it. Rarely on the edge of a cliff or the shrubbery of a park. Most of those who abused or attacked children were members of the child’s own family, a fact too highly charged for most people to entertain or comprehend.