Vera Stanhope 06 - Harbour Street (34 page)

A quiet interview room, just him and the fat woman. Plain painted walls. Nothing to jar the senses. Suddenly that seemed the most attractive thing in the world.

Then the group of young people ahead of him shifted, parted by six jostling youths coming in the opposite direction. It was early afternoon, but they were drinking cans of cheap cider and swearing. Malcolm felt a stab of anger. He wanted to teach them some manners. But he’d been a yob in his time. Worse than a yob. In the following confusion the louts moved on and a single figure was left, uncertain and isolated. The sky darkened. Shards of sleet blew up the street, sharp arrows sending the shoppers into the mall. This was Malcolm’s moment of decision. He could give himself up or he could give himself a chance to put things right.

Hesitating, he thought suddenly of the vicar, Father Gruskin. Gruskin had turned up at his house the day after Deborah had left him, offering sympathy and advice. Malcolm thought that Margaret had sent the vicar, because she was worried that Malcolm might do something daft. That he’d kill himself, or kill Deborah’s new man. Gruskin had sat in Malcolm’s front room and hadn’t known what to say. He’d only called because Margaret had asked him to. Another man who would do whatever Margaret wanted him to. He’d muttered a few words and then he’d gone. Vicars should be good men, shouldn’t they? They’d make the right decisions. What would Gruskin do now, in his position?

Then Malcolm remembered the way Gruskin had stared at Margaret, watching her longingly as she walked down Harbour Street away from the church. She’d been old enough to be his mother. Older than that even. But still the man had stared with hungry and lonely eyes. Were there no good men in Mardle, then? Did the place only breed liars and thugs?

I’m going mad. My father always said that I should be locked up.

The sleet was heavier now, filling the sky with pieces of ice, and Northumberland Street was almost empty.

What would Margaret want me to do?

Malcolm looked down the road and saw that there were two people on the opposite pavement now. They walked away from him, one after the other. He hesitated for a moment and then he followed.

Joe Ashworth drove home. Sal was almost hysterical and he couldn’t get any sense out of her on the phone. All the way there he wanted to yell at someone. At Sal for being so bloody daft as to let their daughter into town, especially with a gang of older kids that he’d never met. At the mother of the kids who’d said she’d keep an eye on them. And at Jessie, who’d pestered them for months to get her own mobile phone and then had left it behind, the one time that she really needed it.

Mostly he was furious at himself. He drove through the empty country roads and began to imagine scenarios. Vera would call them stories. Margaret Krukowski had been killed in the Metro. Dee Robson had been in the same Metro and she’d been killed, possibly because she’d seen the murder or guessed what had happened. And now he realized what hadn’t clicked before: that Jessie might have been a witness to Margaret’s murder too. Jessie, who was sharp as a knife, with a memory like an elephant’s. She’d gone missing and so had their prime suspect, whose car had been found at Partington Metro station. Maybe that was a coincidence, but Joe was so wound up with worry that he couldn’t believe in coincidence any more. He pictured his Jessie, in the train with her mates, chatting and laughing because it was nearly Christmas and she was getting her first taste of freedom. He saw Jessie glancing across the train and seeing someone she recognized through the crowd. Someone who’d been on the Metro when Margaret was stabbed. He imagined a flash of contact between them. Then the killer, threatened, following his daughter, and so desperate to escape that he might feel he had to kill her too.

Their estate was on the edge of an ex-pit village and a skein of geese flew overhead from a subsidence pond as he walked up the path. He looked up to watch them, before opening the door. The younger children were in the front room watching a DVD, so he and Sal stood in the small kitchen, communicating in hissed whispers.

‘So what happened?’ He tried to tell himself that really it wasn’t Sal’s fault and she’d be feeling even more wretched than him, but he couldn’t quite keep the hint of accusation from his voice.

‘Sarah’s mother didn’t realize Jessie was missing until they met up in Blake’s for lunch.’ Sal was crying now. She’d held herself together for the younger kids, but now she started sobbing.

He took her in his arms and held her tight. ‘She’ll be fine. You know our Jessie. Sense of direction of a gnat. Remember how she got lost in Boots in Morpeth. Just tell me what happened. Didn’t her friends see her wander off?’ His voice light and calm – he could be on the stage.

‘Apparently they split up into two groups, and each thought she was with the other. It was only when they met up for their lunch that they saw she wasn’t there. A couple of the older ones went back to look for her, but they couldn’t see her.’ Sal reached behind her for a tea towel and dried her eyes with it. ‘Sarah’s mother thought Jess had just headed home. She phoned, expecting her to be here.’

He didn’t say anything, but fumed silently at the irresponsibility of the woman who was supposed to be looking after Jess, and at the carelessness of her friends.

‘Your boss phoned,’ Sal said. For some reason she never used Vera’s name. ‘She asked me to email her a photo of Jess. She said they were checking the CCTV in town anyway, and she’d get her people to keep an eye out for Jess.’

Joe thought that Vera’s mind must be working the same way as his. She’d already been looking for Malcolm’s picture on the CCTV in town. Now she’d get the watchers looking for Malcolm and Jessie together.

‘There you are, then,’ Joe said. ‘They’re doing all they can. They’ll have her home in no time.’ Even as he spoke he wondered if he was really being kind. Perhaps he should prepare Sal for the possibility that their daughter had been abducted. She’d hear soon enough in the media that they’d allowed the suspect in the murder investigation to escape, and then she’d be furious with him for keeping her in the dark. But he couldn’t face telling her the truth now. ‘Look, I’ve got to go back to work. I can do more there anyway. I’ll call you if I hear anything.’ Knowing that he was a coward.

He opened the door into the living room and shouted hello and goodbye to the kids there. They smiled and waved before their eyes returned to the screen. He drove down the road and parked round the corner, where Sal couldn’t see him, then phoned Vera’s mobile.

‘Where are you?’ she said. ‘Your Sal needs you with her. She’s falling to bits.’

‘I’ve just come from home.’ He couldn’t say that he couldn’t bear lying to his wife any more. But he certainly couldn’t bear telling her the truth. ‘Any news on Malcolm Kerr?’

‘I’ve got men watching his car at Partington,’ she said. He wondered where Vera was. He thought he could hear gulls in the background. ‘I doubt he’d be daft enough to turn up for it, but I don’t suppose he’ll be thinking straight now.’

‘Do you need me back at the station?’ When there was no immediate answer Joe continued, ‘I might go into town, see if I can find our Jessie.’ He could tell he sounded pathetic, but he couldn’t stand hanging around the station, not able to concentrate, jumping every time his phone went, his head full of images of knives and blood.

‘Aye, why don’t you do that?’ Vera said. He thought she just wanted him out of the way. She believed that he wouldn’t function properly with his mind on his daughter.

‘Don’t you care about her?’ A bellow. ‘A possible witness to a murder, and the suspect on the loose?’ As soon as he’d spoken he knew that was unforgivable. The one thing they all knew about Vera Stanhope was that she cared. And she probably had the same pictures in her head as he did.

He thought she was going to let rip with a fury that would tear him apart, but there was such a long silence on the other end of the phone that he imagined she’d hung up on him in disgust.

‘You do what you think best, pet. I’ll let you know as soon as I hear anything.’ Her voice quiet with pity. And guilt.

He drove back to Mardle, pulled back there by a kind of magnetic field. He had a vague plan to get on the Metro at the end of the line, because perhaps Kerr was fooling them all and was just riding the trains. In the crowds it would be a good place to hide. And the Metro would take him into town, and that was the last place that Jessie had been seen.

His phone rang. It was Sal. His pulsed raced. Jess would be home, safe and well. But Sal only had the same question. ‘Any news?’ Her voice hoarse and desperate.

‘I’m on my way into town,’ he said. ‘I’ll find her. Don’t worry.’ Before she spoke again, he cut off her call because he didn’t need her misery as well as his own, and he didn’t think he could pretend any longer that everything was okay.

The Metro car park was full and he ended up stopping in Harbour Street, just across the road from the church.

Passing St Bartholomew’s, he tried the door and found it was open. He’d been brought up to believe in a Methodist God of social justice and respectable hard work. His dad had been a lay preacher and had seen evil as exploitation and poverty and the flamboyant decadence of people in the south. Now, Joe couldn’t contemplate evil as an almost inevitable result of poor housing or family breakdown. There could be no excuse for a man who planned harm to his daughter. He slipped into the back pew and tried to pray.

Bring our Jessie back safely and I’ll do anything you want of me.
He tried to think what pact he could make with the Lord, but nothing seemed sufficiently important to set against Jessie’s life. There was a deep silence in the church. He was leaning forward with his forehead on his arms, and it was only when he straightened that he realized he wasn’t alone. Peter Gruskin was standing in front of the altar looking at him. Joe couldn’t face explaining his presence to the man. He stood up and hurried outside.

A shower blew in from the sea. Stinging rain flecked with ice. Further inland there would be snow. The street was almost dark, although it was still early afternoon, but there were no lights in the Harbour Guest House. It seemed like months since he and Vera had first visited there. He remembered walking down the basement stairs, and meeting the woman whose song had been the background music to his romance with Sal. ‘White Moon Summer’ played in his head again. He realized suddenly that his ignorance had made him responsible for a murder. He wondered if a lifetime of guilt was enough to barter against his daughter’s safe return.

When Joe phoned Vera – ostensibly to ask for news of Malcolm Kerr, but really hoping to be told that his daughter had been found safe and well – the inspector was standing outside the Haven. A flock of black-headed gulls picked over a freshly ploughed field beyond the hawthorn hedge. Vera had ideas of her own about where the investigation might lead.

She knocked at the door of the big house and then went in, too impatient to wait for anyone to answer. Laurie and Susan were in the kitchen as usual and the dog was lolling against the bottom oven of the Aga.

‘Where’s Jane?’ Vera wanted this ended and was in too much of a hurry to be polite.
No more killing
, she thought. It seemed to her that the recent deaths had been a sickening waste. There had been no real reason for them. No adequate explanation. But she knew now who had killed Margaret and Dee, and who had killed the young man in Kerr’s yard forty years ago. Joe could have confirmed it for her, but he was caught up with his own anxieties and he wasn’t in the mood to think clearly.
No more killing.

‘She’s gone into town to catch up with some mates.’ Laurie had her standard
I don’t cooperate with the pigs
voice.

Vera thought about this. Perhaps she didn’t need to talk to Jane now. ‘The winter fair,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it.’

‘It was a fund-raiser and a kind of social too. Jane invited lots of the ex-residents back. Kids. A friend of Margaret’s dressed up as Santa.’ Laurie made it clear she thought this was a waste of time.

‘George Enderby?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. He must have spent a fortune on the stalls. Besides the books he gave away. He’d wrapped them all up in Christmas paper, and we found him a sack so that he could play the part properly.’ Her voice softened.

Vera nodded. She could imagine Enderby playing Father Christmas, all jovial and generous.

Laurie continued talking. ‘It was sunny and we set stalls out in the barn as well as the house. Invited people from Holypool. They turned out to gawp at us. We had a barbecue, did mulled wine. Susan had been knitting kids’ clothes for months and we sold them all. It was cool. Until Em had one of her panic attacks.’

‘What happened?’ Vera wasn’t sure that she had time for this, but thought it might be relevant.

‘She just went all weird on us. Said she couldn’t cope and she needed to go back to hospital. Jane talked her round in the end.’

‘Do you have Emily’s address?’ This was what Vera had come for. ‘She went back to her mother’s home for Christmas, didn’t she?’

Laurie stared at her, suddenly bristling with antagonism again. ‘What do you want with Em? She’s not well.’

‘I want to stop another murder!’ Vera shouted the words so loud that she could feel the painful rasp in the back of her throat. ‘So if you don’t mind, lady, I’ll ask her a few questions. Quietly and kindly, but needing to get some answers.’

Laurie continued to stare, this time with a little more respect. ‘She lives in Tynemouth somewhere. The address will be in the office,’ she said. ‘On Jane’s computer. But it’ll be password-protected.’

‘Shit!’ They looked at each other, a moment of shared communication. If Susan was following the conversation, she gave no sign of it. She was sitting in a low chair close to the Aga, knitting something small and pink. The wool lay in a basket at her feet.

‘I can probably find it for you,’ Laurie said. ‘Not sure it’s entirely legal, though, poking around in the system. Hacking into social services.’