Ash & Bone

by John Harvey

'Husband. Terry.'

  'And how did she react?'

  'She didn't say anything at first, not to me. But you could tell, yes, she was surprised. Thinking she'd seen him.'

  'They weren't in touch?'

  'No. Not at all. Quite a while, at least. He'd moved away. North Wales, I think she said.'

  'And when she saw him, her reaction, was it just surprise?'

  Vanessa took her time, wanting to be clear. 'No. I think it was more than that. More as if she was afraid, you know?'

  Mugs of tea sat on a metal tray, untouched. Paper squares of sugar and plastic spoons. Karen noticed the low background hum from the central heating for the first time. Mike Ramsden was up in Lincolnshire talking to Maddy's mother. Where was it? Louth? Surname Birch, she remembered. Maddy must have resumed her own name after the divorce.

  'When she told you about her flat being broken into, she didn't say she thought it might have been him? Terry?'

  'No. And by then she was saying it probably hadn't been him at all. Just someone who looked a bit like him, that's all.'

  'Enough like him to make her afraid.'

  'Yes. Yes, I suppose so.'

  Karen could feel her nerve ends tightening, a scenario beginning to play out in her mind, and had to will herself not to let it race too far ahead.

  'That night, after the pub, you didn't notice anyone hanging around, acting suspiciously at all? Anyone who might have been him?'

  'No. I've been thinking about it, but no.' Vanessa looked bereft, on the verge of tears.

  'Here.' Karen tore open two packets of sugar and emptied them into one of the mugs of tea. 'Drink some of that.'

  'Do I have to?' Vanessa smiling despite everything.

  'God, no.' Leaning forward, she switched off the tape. 'Where's the nearest pub?'

  'End of the street.'

  'How long will it take you to get out of that uniform?'

  Pocketing the recorder, Karen got to her feet. 'Paul, get through to the office, have somebody check on Maddy Birch's file. Her married name might be somewhere there and I missed it. And see if you can raise Mike, tell him to give me a call.'

  * * *

  Karen bought a vodka and orange for Vanessa, Coke with ice and lemon for herself, tonic water for Denison.

  'Paul here's not old enough to drink, anyway,' she said.

  Denison blushed.

  When Vanessa asked how the investigation was going, Karen shrugged and shook her head. 'Ask me in a couple of days.'

  The television over the bar seemed to be showing a rerun of some soccer game or other; at least it wasn't the news. At the far end of the room a number of gaudy machines were vying with one another for the most annoying electronic jingle. Most of the tables were taken by solitary drinkers, men nursing pints of whatever bitter was on special offer.

  'You liked her, didn't you? Maddy.'

  'She was great. A laugh, you know. But not silly, like some. Sensible. And straight, no side to her, you know what I mean? Said what she felt. She…' Vanessa's face wobbled and she fumbled for a tissue in her bag. 'It was all getting to her, you know? That's why…' She gulped air and brought her hands to her mouth. 'That's why I suggested yoga. I thought it would help, make her less stressed out.' She was unable now to hold back the tears. 'That bloody place. If it hadn't been for me, she'd never have gone. Never have been there. Never have got herself bloody killed.'

  Karen leaned closer and put her arm around the other woman's shoulders.

  Denison looked more embarrassed than usual.

  'Listen,' Karen said. 'Vanessa. If she was right, if someone was following her, intending to do her harm, it would have happened anyway. And if it was something else, pure chance, there's nothing you or anyone else could have done. Okay?'

  'Yes. Yes, I suppose so.'

  'Good.'

  Vanessa blew her nose loudly.

  'Here,' Karen said. 'Drink up.'

  At which moment Karen's mobile started to ring and she stepped out on to the street.

  Mike Ramsden's voice was indistinct.

  'Is this a crap line or are you whispering?'

  'It's a crap line.'

  'Listen, Mike. I want to know the name of Maddy Birch's ex. Address too, if you can get one. Anything else about him. How things were between them. Threats. Animosity. Anything. All right?'

  'Do what I can.'

  'Okay, soon as you get a name, call me back.'

  Karen broke the connection.

  * * *

  In the hallway of the small terraced house in Louth, Mike Ramsden slipped his phone back down into his pocket and looked for a moment at the photograph, framed and hanging on the wall, of a young Maddy Birch at her passing-out parade. Behind him, in the living room, there were more photographs, a scrapbook full to overflowing, open on the low table beside Carol Birch's chair. For the best part of an hour he had been sitting opposite her, balancing an empty cup and saucer in the palm of one hand, pretending to listen. 'I only moved up here to be near her and then she up and moved to London.'

  Ramsden sighed and turned back into the room. 'What about boyfriends?' Karen was asking Vanessa. 'Good-looking woman, not old, there must have been someone?'

  'I don't think so. No one special. I mean, if we were out, blokes would try it on, you know, giving her the chat, but she didn't seem interested. It was more like, if anything was going to happen, she wanted it to be more than just a one-night stand, you know?'

  Karen knew: only too well.

  'So, no one at all?'

  'Oh, one guy maybe. This roofer she met.'

  'Roofer?'

  'Yes, you know.' Vanessa gestured vaguely upwards. 'One of those blokes always up scaffolding, doing a lot of shouting, replacing tiles. Steve was his name. Steve Kennet.'

  'How long ago was this?'

  'Few months back, maybe more.'

  'And this was serious?'

  'Not really.'

  'You know where he lives, this Steve?'

  Vanessa shook her head. 'Archway somewhere.'

  Karen made a note of the name; if it came to it, he shouldn't be all that difficult to find.

  Less than ten minutes later Ramsden rang her back. 'Name's Patrick. Terence Patrick. I've got an address in Prestatyn: 15 Sea View Terrace.'

  'Current?'

  'I'm not sure.'

  'Shouldn't be too hard to check. Listen, Mike, if I don't get back to you inside the hour, I want you to meet me there tomorrow morning. Prestatyn. Eight. Eight thirty. I'll catch an early flight to Liverpool or Manchester and drive over.'

  'And how am I supposed to get there from the wilds of fucking Lincolnshire?'

  'Leave early.'

  Karen pressed 'disconnect' and looked at her watch. She needed to get back to the office, make some calls. She thought they'd got as much out of Vanessa Taylor as they were going to get for now. They could always talk to her again. She was thinking about Terry Patrick, how he might have heard the news of his ex-wife's death. If and when and what he'd felt. If he hadn't known already.

  Thinking about Maddy's mother, trying to imagine how you began to come to terms with what had happened. If you ever did. Children were supposed to outlive their parents, wasn't that the way it was supposed to be?

  11

  Whoever had named Sea View Terrace was either possessed of an ironic sense of humour or a very tall ladder. It wasn't even a terrace any more, but a street of seventies semi-detacheds, each with its own garage, right or left. The pebble-dash frontage of number 15, once white, was now a sour, yellowing cream. Wooden planks and sundry pieces of scaffolding littered the front yard. The garage door was partly open.

  Karen drove slowly past in the hire car she'd picked up at the airport, reversed into a three-point turn and stopped several doors down. Mike Ramsden's Ford Sierra, showing every sign of having battered along a succession of minor roads in heavy rain, was parked further along on the opposite side, Ramsden catnapping behind the wheel.

  Karen got out of the
car, wearing a sort of faded green today, almost certainly a mistake, popped a mint into her mouth and turned up the collar of her coat; the rain had dwindled to a steady drizzle, grey out of a grey sky.

  She rapped the keys against the Sierra's window and Ramsden was instantly awake. Several lidded coffee cups and an empty Burger King box were on the passenger seat alongside him, an orange juice carton on the floor.

  'I thought you said eight?' he said, winding down the window. 'Eight thirty?'

  'I did.'

  Ramsden looked at his watch and grunted. It was coming round to twenty past the hour.

  'What time did you get here?' Karen asked.

  ''Round seven.'

  Karen nodded in the direction of the house. 'Anything happening?'

  'Patrick's been in and out the garage a couple of times, fiddling with stuff in his van. Had on his white overalls second time, off to work soon I don't doubt.'

  'Anyone else around?'

  'Face at the window. Wife, girlfriend, someone.'

  'Well,' Karen said, 'let's go and introduce ourselves.'

  The woman who came to the door was plumpish, shortish, a smoker's mouth and mid-length straw-coloured hair, breasts that, underneath a pale cotton top, seemed to have a life of their own.

  'Mrs Patrick…?'

  Her glance moved from one face to the other and back again. 'Sorry, I'm afraid I don't have time…'

  But Karen was holding up her warrant card. 'We're police officers,' she said.

  The woman looked past them to the empty street outside. 'Terry,' she called over her shoulder. Then, stepping back into the hallway, 'You'd best come in.'

  The central heating was turned up high. A radio was playing in another room, the cajoling voice of some near-desperate DJ. Terry Patrick appeared at the end of the hall. His fair, almost sandy hair was in need of a comb, dried patches of plaster and specks of old paint clung to his overalls and the work boots on his feet. Fifty, Karen thought, if he was a day. Around the same height as herself. One of those men who become more wiry with age, rather than gaining weight.

  'What's all this then?'

  But from his eyes he already knew.

  'It's about Maddy, isn't it?'

  'Just a few things,' Karen said. 'Routine, really.'

  'Come on through,' he said. And then, 'Tina, get kettle on, will you?'

  The sigh was practised, automatic. 'Tea?'

  'If there's any chance of coffee?' Karen said.

  'It'll be instant.'

  'That's fine,' Karen said.

  'That'll be for the both of you, then?'

  Ramsden nodded.

  'Suit yourselves.'

  The living room was overburdened by furniture and dark. Wherever the radio was playing it wasn't here. The kitchen, probably. Karen could just recognise the Delfonics' 'Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?' Going back.

  'Sit yourselves down,' Patrick said.

  Karen sat at one end of a settee that had seen better days, Ramsden on a high-backed chair near the window. Patrick settled himself into what was obviously his chair, creased leather opposite a large-screen TV.

  'It must have come as a shock,' Karen said, 'what happened.'

  'Course it bloody did. All over the news, like. Couldn't believe it at first.' He made a small derisive sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh. 'What they say, isn't it? When something happens. Couldn't believe it. But it's true. Someone gets, you know, killed — accident, whatever — you never expect it to be someone you know.'

  Leaning back, he lifted his feet on to a low wooden table that seemed to have been put there for the purpose. Keeping his boots off the shag carpet.

  'Poor silly cow,' he said. 'Out jogging, that's what they said.' He shook his head. 'London. Late at night, some park or other. You'd've thought she'd have known better.'

  Coffee and tea were carried in on a metal tray, sugar still in its packet, a solitary spoon.

  'Thanks, Tina, love.'

  Patrick's hands, Karen thought, watching him stir two sugars into his tea, were broad across the knuckles, lightly etched with paint.

  'Maddy,' Karen said. 'When did you last see her?'

  Patrick smiled a quick, lopsided smile and, for the first time, Karen caught a sense of how he might have been an attractive man, fifteen or more years before.

  'Been thinking about that, haven't I? Tina asked me same thing. Eighty-six, it must have been. The divorce. Year after it all, you know, went pear-shaped.' He picked a small circle of paint from the leg of his overalls and flicked it towards the empty fireplace. 'Seventeen years.'

  His wife was still standing in the doorway, watching him, her face impossible to read.

  'You've not seen her in all that time?' Karen said.

  'Not the once.'

  'But you'd kept in touch?'

  'Not really, no. Her folks, they were always pretty decent, sent a card at Christmas, that kind of thing. Leastways, till her father died. Four or five years back now, that'd be. Maybe more.'

  'And you didn't see Maddy, no communication, nothing?'

  'I said, didn't I?'

  'Mr Patrick, you're sure?'

  'Tell them, Terry,' his wife said. 'For Christ's sake, tell them.' Stepping back into the hall, she closed the door slowly but firmly behind her.

  Patrick picked up his mug, held it in both hands for a moment without drinking, then set it back down.

  'Seven or eight years back…'

  'Which?'

  'Seven, seven. Me and Tina, we were going through a bad patch. It happens. Things get out of hand, slip gear.' He looked quickly across at Ramsden, as if for affirmation. 'I moved out for a while, bunked up with a pal. After a bit, I got in touch with Maddy. Tried to. I don't know, I suppose I had this daft idea we might get back together. Got her address and that from her mum. Phoned and it was like talking to the speaking bloody clock. Just didn't want to know, did she? I wrote a few times after that, asking, you know, couldn't we meet? Stupid, really. Plain bloody stupid. She never replied, of course, not a bloody word.' He lifted his head and gave a sour little smile. 'Tina and I, we got things sorted.' He shrugged. 'Maybe it's not perfect, but then you tell me, what is?'

  The radio, already indistinct, was lost to the sound of a vacuum cleaner, as it banged against the skirting board in the hall.

  'This was all seven years ago,' Karen said.

  Patrick nodded.

  'And there was no contact between you after that?'

  A shake of the head.

  'Nothing. You'd not spoken, set eyes on her?'

  'No, I said.'

  'How about October?'

  'Sorry?'

  'October of this year.'

  Patrick leaned forward, leaned back, looked towards the door. The vacuuming stopped, then started up again. Karen watched as, fingers spread, his hands pushed hard along the tops of his thighs. His voice when he spoke was choked, deliberately low.

  'It was an accident, right? No. Coincidence. That's it, coincidence. I'd been down there on a job, London. Well, the money's good, better than you can expect up here and you can always doss down a couple of nights in the van. Anyway, this night, after working, right, we go out for a few beers, just the three of us, me and these two other blokes, one pub and then another and all of a sudden there she is, her and this other bird, up on stage singing some bloody song.' Patrick wiped the back of his hand across his mouth before carrying on. 'Couldn't believe it. Just stood and fucking stared. "What's up?" one of these blokes said. "Fancy it, do you?" I wanted to thump him, didn't I? Bury my fist in his fucking face. Just turned round and left instead. Couldn't wait to get out of there. Walked for fucking miles, must have done. Fucking miles. Don't ask me why.' Another glance towards the door. 'I don't want her to know.'

  Karen waited, watching his face, the spots of anger slow to fade from his cheeks.

  'Why didn't you wait, go and talk to her, say hello?'

  'I don't know.'

  'All the effort you'd made
before ...'

  'I know, I know. It was just — I don't know — the surprise, I suppose. The shock. Pathetic, isn't it? And now …' He looked into Karen's face. 'You don't know who it was? Who killed her?'

  'Not yet,' Karen said. 'Not for definite.'

  His eyes were a pale greeny-grey and they scarcely wavered under her gaze.

  'The bastard,' Patrick said. 'Hanging's not good enough for him, whoever he is.'

  'Where were you two nights ago?' Karen asked, much as she might have asked for a refill for her coffee.

  Patrick blinked. 'Here, why?' And then, 'Oh, yes, of course. I suppose you have to ask.'

  'Here at home with your wife?' Karen said.

  'More or less. Knocked off work around four thirty, five. New development the other side of town, been there a couple of weeks now, plastering, helping out. Anyway, left there, stopped off at the bookie's, quick pint across the street from there, back here no later than seven. Bit of supper, watched the box. Don't ask me what. Early night. Tina, she likes to read a bit in bed but not me. Spark out before eleven, I shouldn't wonder.'

  'Apart from your wife,' Ramsden said, speaking for the first time, 'there are people who'd back this up?'

  'I dare say, yes. Bookmaker's for certain, one or two in the pub.'

  'You can give us the details?'

  'Yes, of course.'

  Ten minutes later, they were back out in the street, standing alongside Mike Ramsden's car, Ramsden smoking a rare cigarette and Karen standing close enough to inhale the smoke.

  'What do you think?' he asked.

  'When he started talking about her, the way she ignored him when he tried to get in touch, you could see the veins standing out in his wrists.'

  Ramsden nodded. 'You think he's telling the truth?'

  'Here and there.'

  'You want me to check out some of these names?'

  'Do that. I think I'll wait around till he's gone off to work, go back and have a word with the wife.'

  'None too crazy about the idea of him and Maddy, is she?'

  'Maybe she's got good reason.'

  'My missus thought I had the hots for somebody else, she'd help pack my bag, give me her blessing.'

  Karen laughed. 'Mike, there's exceptions to everything.'

  * * *

  'He hit me once,' Tina said. 'Few years ago now. I can't even remember what over, most likely nothing, nothing important, but I can remember it happening. Crack, hard round the side of the face. Somewhere between a punch and a slap. This come up all black, didn't it? Black, purple, yellow.'