When the Music's Over (20 page)

Thornton waved his cigarette. “Nay, nay. I'm all right, hen. Just give me a minute for it to sink in, like. Our Mimsy. Murdered. What happened? Who did it?”

“Somebody gave her a beating. We don't know who.”

Johnny still hadn't reacted at all, and Annie doubted that he had
even heard what she had said. She decided against trying to involve him for the time being. He was Mimsy's uncle, and he was certainly weird, but there was no more reason to expect him to move out of his chair now than Thornton said he had in the last ten years. Johnny could wait.

“When did you last see Mimsy, Mr. Thornton?” Annie pressed on.

“I can't remember.”

“Come on, Mr. Thornton. Try a bit harder. Please.”

Thornton furrowed his brow. “Few days ago, I suppose,” he said finally.

“She does live here, doesn't she?”

“When it suits her. She comes and goes. You know what they're like.” He let his head rest in his hands for a moment and rubbed his whiskered face. “Sorry, hen. I'll miss her. She was a breath of fresh air around here, you know, when she was home.” Then he got to his feet, knocking the Carlsberg Special Brew can off the arm of the chair as he did so. Beer spilled over the threadbare carpet. “I need something a bit stronger than that,” he said, taking a bottle of Johnnie Walker out of the cupboard and pouring himself a large glass before he returned to his armchair and took a gulp. Annie noticed that his hand was shaking.

“Technically, she's your stepdaughter, Lenny?”

“Technically, me and Sinead aren't actually married.”

“How long have you been living here together?”

“Six years.”

“Common law, then. As good as. How old was Mimsy?”

“Fifteen. And her brother Albert's eighteen. Christ. Albert. He'll be gutted. They're both Sinead's by her first husband. Les Moffat.” He nodded toward the window. “The two wee 'uns out there are mine and Sinead's.”

“How many children altogether?”

“Just the four.”

“Where is Albert?”

“He said he was off to go clubbing with some mates in Manchester. That were last Thursday.”

“Do you know who these mates are? An address?”

“Just mates of his.”

“Where's Les Moffat these days?”

“No idea. Down south, somewhere, I think.”

“So she stopped out a lot, Mimsy?”

“Aye. I suppose you could say that.”

“Nights as well?”

“It were all the same to her.”

“Where did she go?”

“Search me. She never said. Mates. And asking Mimsy anything she didn't want to tell you was like banging your head against a brick wall.”

“Did she have a boyfriend?”

“Not as far as I know. She might have had. I honestly don't know what she got up to.”

“Didn't you worry about her?”

“No sense worrying, is there?
Que sera, sera
.”

“What about friends? Who did she hang out with?”

“Just her mates, as far as I know. That's what she said if you ever asked her owt.” He tried to mimic a young girl's voice. “‘I've been with my mates,' ‘I'm going out with my mates.'”

“Know any of their names?”

“Nah. Just, you know, they're local kids.”

“From school?”

Thornton reached for his cigarettes. “I suppose so. Where else do kids meet other kids?”

Gerry seemed uncomfortable, and Annie remembered that she came from a nice, clean, comfortable middle-class home and went to a posh school. She wasn't used to this rough-and-ready way of life, the smells, the untidiness, the laissez-faire attitudes, the lack of discipline, the poverty. Annie had grown up in a messy and poor artists' commune and lost her mother at an early age, but her childhood had not been without love, care and comfort. This, she thought, looking at Lenny and Johnny, is what becomes of certain people when they feel disenfranchised, get put down and ignored all the time and come to feel there's no useful way through life for them, that nobody cares and nothing's going to change for the better. The most extreme do what
Johnny was doing and sit catatonic in their chairs, day in, day out. For the rest, there are drugs, drink, violence, crime or just simple apathy broken up by the distraction of video games, sex and mobile phones. Life is something to be got through. Days are hurdles, weeks are rivers to cross, months lakes and years oceans. Annie wondered if life had been like that for Mimsy, too.

“Do you know where any of Mimsy's friends live?” she asked, without much hope.

“No. Just here and there, around the estate, you know.”

“Is there somewhere they hang out, some place in particular?”

“Probably at the shopping mall or down on the Strip,” said Thornton.

“The Strip?”

“Used to be the old Wytherton Town Street. It's got a few shops and cafes, couple of pubs, little parks, places to hang out. The name's a joke, like. The Strip. Las Vegas. There's a bookie's, but that's as close to a casino as you'll get down there. But it's changed a lot. Too many Pakis for my liking. It's like they've taken over everything. You might find some of her mates there if they don't mind too much who they hang out with. It doesn't really come alive until after dark. In daytime you'll most likely find them at the shopping mall, hanging around the fountain, or painting each other's toenails in someone's house.”

“How far away is this Strip?”

“Mile or so. It's the old Town Street. There's a bus goes from the next street over.”

Annie made a note. They could check out the shopping mall first, then come back later and see what they could find out on the Strip. In the meantime, their priority was to find Sinead Moffat. “So you've no idea where Mimsy's mother is, Mr. Thornton?”

Thornton drank some more whisky and took a deep drag on his cigarette. “You might as well know,” he said. “You'd find out, anyway. Sinead's a junkie. She goes off with her junkie friends and they spend all day on cloud fucking nine I don't know where.”

“Do you know their names?”

“No. They never come here.”

“You don't share this life with her?”

“No.”

Annie could see from his arms that he didn't inject heroin, at any rate. “So Sinead is a heroin addict? That's what you're telling me?”

“That's right. Oh, she's all official. Registered and all. And right now she's on methadone and going for counseling at the treatment center, so. For all the good it does.”

“What do you mean?”

“Tried it all before, hasn't she? She always goes back.”

“But she shouldn't be shooting up with the others at the moment, not if she's on methadone?”

“She shouldn't be, no. When she's clean, when she's . . . oh, Christ, she can be the sweetest thing. She tries. My god, she tries. It just breaks your heart. I'm sorry. I really don't know where she is. She went to the clinic for her dose. Then she was supposed to go for counseling. If she was feeling all right, she might have gone shopping in the town center. Middlesbrough, like.” Lenny Thornton had tears in his eyes. They had welled up so much that Annie was sure they would start to flow down his whiskery cheeks, but they didn't; they just clung there stubbornly, moist and heavy, on the bottom rims of his eyelids.

Annie handed him a card. “I'm really sorry for your loss, Mr. Thornton. You should be with your wife at a time like this. Will you try and get in touch with her and phone me when she comes back? And keep her here until I can get here?”

“Aye, pet. I'll try. This'll do her head in.”

“Did you know that Mimsy cut herself?” Annie said, raising her arm and pointing. “Her wrist.”

“Aye, that were a couple of years back. Nowt serious, like.”

Annie assumed he was speaking of the physical injuries, not the psychological problems behind them. She nodded and stood up. Gerry needed no bidding to follow suit. “Did Mimsy have her own room here?” Annie asked.

“That she did.”

“Mind if we have a look? Just to see if there's anything.”

“Top of the stairs on the left,” said Thornton.

Annie led the way upstairs and saw the door was half open. They
both slipped on their latex gloves, and Gerry pushed on the door. The hinges creaked as it opened. The first thing Annie noticed was that Mimsy had been tidy for a teenager. Much more so than Annie herself had ever been. She didn't know about Gerry. Gerry probably sat all her dolls in a neat row on a bookshelf and arranged the books according to the Dewey Decimal System. Or perhaps it was simply that Mimsy wasn't here very often. The striped wallpaper was peeling up there, just as it was in the living room.

Mimsy Moffat didn't have much to keep tidy. The bed, a narrow single, was made, and there were clothes in the laundry hamper. Annie had been expecting the usual teenage posters on the walls—One Direction, Justin Bieber—but the only one was a poster advertising
Swan Lake
showing a beautiful ballerina appearing to float in midair above the water. The small chest of drawers was filled with underwear, makeup, socks, tights and a few pieces of cheap jewelry—earrings, a heart pendant with no photos inside, a charm bracelet with only a tiny pair of shoes on it. There were also a few T-shirts, clean and neatly folded. In her bedside drawer were a hairbrush, a box of Kleenex, a packet of acetaminophen and a box of tampons. Nothing out of the ordinary.

A small desk stood under the window, which looked out on the backyard and the other backyards across the alley. On it lay a flat oblong tin of Lakeland coloring pencils and an 8 x 11 WHSmith sketchbook. Lenny Thornton had said that Mimsy liked to draw. Annie riffled through the pages, stopping here and there to admire a composition. Some were sketches of the uninspiring view from the window, others clearly more subjects from the imagination: magical creatures, half-deer, half-woman, flitting through forests at night, a stormy sea with tall-masted wooden ships tossing in the waves, a far-off mountain peak beyond a barren, red and orange landscape under a gray and purple sky, very
Lord of the Rings
, with a halo of fire at the summit. There were also some copies of the John Tenniel illustrations to the Alice books. The one thing they all had in common was that they were very good. Perhaps a bit primitive in technique, but lacking nothing that couldn't be learned by someone with the basic talent in a few months. If Mimsy Moffat were the artist, she had been talented
indeed. Annie put down the sketchbook and wandered over to the small bookcase.

There were few books, mostly Mills & Boon romances, Martina Cole and bulky collections of illustrated fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm, along with children's books like
The Water-Babies, Tales of Beatrix Potter, The Wind in the Willows
and not surprisingly, a reproduction of
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
and
Through the Looking-Glass
with the Tenniel illustrations. The wardrobe held a couple of denim jackets, a winter coat with a fake fur collar, various leggings, distressed shorts and jeans, some miniskirts and cheap print dresses, along with a few pairs of shoes, including sandals, no-name trainers and two pairs of pumps. There was no mobile phone or computer. No stereo system, CDs, iPods or the like. No purse or handbag. No TV. In many ways, it was a spartan room, and Annie was hardly surprised Mimsy didn't spend much time there. Though no doubt it was spartan exactly
because
she hadn't spent much time there. But where had she spent her time, and what were the attractions there?

“Gerry, would you go ask Mr. Thornton for a bin bag and permission to take the contents of Mimsy's laundry basket? Who knows, we might find something in her pockets, or stains with DNA to match the samples Jazz took from her body.”

Gerry went out and after a few moments came back with a black bin bag. “He says he doesn't care what we take,” she told Annie. “The level in that whisky bottle's gone down a fair bit, too.”

“People deal with bad news in their own way,” said Annie. “Any word from Johnny?”

“Nothing. I think there's something seriously wrong with him.”

“You're probably right about that. Brain damage would be my guess.” She glanced around the room again. “Anything else you think we should take?”

“Maybe the hairbrush?” said Gerry. “Just to make sure about the DNA.”

“Good point.” Annie put the hairbrush in one of the smaller plastic bags she carried in her shoulder bag, then put Mimsy's dirty laundry in the bin bag and labeled both.

Downstairs everything seemed much the same except, as Gerry had noted, the level in the whisky bottle. The football game was still on, fast approaching extra time, Johnny hadn't moved, and Thornton was lighting another cigarette. “We'll be off now,” Annie said. “Are you sure there's nothing we can do for you before we leave, Mr. Thornton?”

“Nay, pet. Just leave me be. I'll be all right. Johnny and me, we'll be all right.”

“Are you sure you don't want us to call someone?”

“I don't know as I want to talk to anyone right now,” said Thornton. “But thanks, hen. You'd best be on your way now, all right? Find out what happened to our Mimsy.”

“You will give me a ring when Sinead comes back, won't you? We'll arrange to have her brought to Eastvale and back home again.”

“I'll ring,” Thornton said. His voice sounded throaty. He turned just as they opened the door. “Would you minding sending the wee ones in as you leave?” he said. “You never know what's going to happen to them out there.”

It was the first thought he'd shown for his own children, Annie realized, taken aback by the request. Grief affects us all in different ways, she told herself, and who was she to judge Lenny Thornton? She knew next to nothing about his life. She shielded her eyes from the onslaught of sunlight and watched as the children actually obeyed her instructions and went inside. Maybe they thought there was a treat in store for them.