by Danuta Reah
Neave decided to go back to Debbie’s. She’d put on a brave face earlier, but she’d looked pale and sick. She’d probably be feeling lousy after the events of the day. He knew what came with the territory of violent death. He’d need to make sure she wasn’t on her own tonight – he could take her round to a friend’s, something like that. His mind wouldn’t focus on the problem, so he thought instead about the death of the student, and the intruder on the stairs. Was he adding one and one and one and coming up with six and a half? Had Lynne been right in her analysis of his motives? He still felt angry about that conversation, so maybe she’d struck a nerve. He just didn’t know any more. He called in at his flat for a shave and to change his clothes. He was on his way out when he stopped, went back and put some overnight things into a bag. Just in case, just for an emergency.
It was getting dark by the time he knocked on her door. Debbie seemed pleased to see him. She looked better than she had last night, but she didn’t look well. She was pale and red-eyed; her hair, normally so meticulously constrained, was pulled off her face in a tangled mass and held with a band twisted round it. He followed her into the middle room. The phone was unplugged and there was a wallet of photographs spilled across the table. ‘They were here for ages,’ she said, referring to the police who had arrived as he was leaving earlier in the day. ‘And the phone has been ringing and ringing.’ She twisted her neck back against her hand, trying to relieve the tension.
‘Who’s been phoning?’ He was alert.
‘Mum’s friends. The local paper. My friends. I got fed up in the end.’ She looked at the photographs on the table. ‘I was just …’ Her voice tailed off.
He picked them up and looked at them. A woman with Debbie’s gypsy curls, holding the hand of a little girl. They were both squinting in the sunlight. A young man with the same little girl, more recognizably a young Debbie in this picture. Here she was again, held between both adults, all smiling at the camera. He didn’t understand about families. He’d had one for such a short time. He looked at the photo of Debbie and her father again, a young man looking at his daughter with delighted pride. Would he have been like that with Flora? She had been such a mystery to him. He felt the familiar ache of loss again, not for Angie this time, but for the daughter he’d never really had a chance to know, and should have known. He looked up. Debbie was watching him. He reached for a topic. ‘Have you had something to eat?’
She shook her head. ‘I’m not hungry.’
He looked at her. ‘I’ll get you something. You’ll feel better if you have something to eat.’ She didn’t object, so he went into the kitchen. He wanted to be away from her until the moment passed. He looked in the fridge, in the cupboards. ‘There isn’t much,’ he called. ‘I’ll make you a sandwich to be going on with, OK?’ He gently fielded the insistent cat that had materialized under his feet, and looked at the bread. It was fresh enough for a sandwich, and there was some cheese. That would do for the moment.
Debbie came and stood in the door of the kitchen, watching him. The cat stood on its back legs and patted her knee. She picked it up and held it against her shoulder. ‘Thank you for coming back,’ she said, tentatively. She picked up some cheese from the worktop and fed it to the cat. ‘She likes cheese,’ she said.
He kept his eyes on what he was doing. He wasn’t surprised she hadn’t eaten. He could remember how quickly appetite could sicken – he’d thrown out more food, almost untouched, in the weeks after Angie died … It was probably the alcohol that had kept him alive. He thought about the doorstep specials that Lynne liked to make at the end of an evening – crisp bacon, melting brie, lettuce, barely contained in a hot roll. Something like that would do Debbie good. She had lost weight recently. He’d been shocked at her thinness as he’d half carried her up the stairs last night. He looked across at her, registering late what she had said. ‘It’s OK,’ he said, keeping his voice neutral.
She put the cat down, and absently picked hairs off her shirt. ‘You didn’t have to.’
‘I wanted to.’ He cut the sandwich in half, put it on a plate, pulled a stool out from under the worktop and sat Debbie down on it. ‘Now eat that.’
‘Aren’t you having anything?’ She pulled a bit of bread off the sandwich and put it in her mouth.
‘I’ve eaten. I’ll get something later.’ He watched her as she toyed with the sandwich, clearly not hungry, but not wanting to offend him by leaving it. A couple of times she started to say something, then stopped. He took pity on her after she’d eaten half, and said, ‘Leave it if you’re not hungry. Have something more a bit later on.’
She dropped her pretence of trying to eat. ‘You know how it feels, don’t you?’ she said.
‘None better.’ He meant it to be light, but it came out with some bitterness.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘I didn’t mean to …’
He tried to think of something to say to smooth the moment over, to get back on to the impersonal, the practical, but his mind was blank. She stood up. ‘Are you planning on staying here tonight?’ She wasn’t looking at his face, but down at her hands where she was twisting a ring round and round her finger.
He had to make a decision. ‘I don’t think you should be on your own.’ His voice sounded OK to him, practical, helpful. ‘I could take you over to a friend’s.’
‘No, I want to stay here. I want you to stay here.’ Debbie took a deep breath. ‘What I mean is, you don’t have to sleep in that chair, you know. There’s plenty of room in my bed. If you want.’
She forced the decision on to him. The trouble was, he knew what he wanted to do, had known since he packed that bag. He looked at her in silence for a moment. She still didn’t meet his eyes but kept on twisting the ring on her finger. ‘I’m a bad bet,’ he said. He put his hand out towards her and lifted a strand of hair, tucking it behind her ear. ‘Deborah …’ he began. She caught his hand and held it against her face.
She did look at him now. ‘Just for now,’ she said. ‘Just for the moment. Let’s not think about the rest.’ She needed the comfort, like he did. A great wash of fatigue flooded over him. He put his arms round her and buried his face in the soft mass of her hair. He thought about the cliffs at St Abbs Head, the two-hundred-foot drop to the waves foaming on the rocks, and wondered if this wasn’t another kind of forgetting.
The mother smiles and smiles. He smoothes the picture with his hand. The moon through the window turns her face into light and shadows. He waits, quiet, still as the searching eyes drift past him, pause, waver … and are gone.
Quiet and still. He stares at the picture through thick lenses, his large frame stooped over. The night wind rattles the trees, and a hunter’s moon fills his window with its cold light.
Debbie lay in bed and floated in and out of sleep, tired, wanting to drift away, wanting to hold on to the last hours for a bit longer. Beside her, Rob was asleep. She could feel his breathing, slow and regular. She felt warm, languorous, and though her grief was still there, the sharp edge of it was blunted. She could let it float deeper in her mind without having to push it down and struggle until it burst painfully out. She turned over and he slipped his arm round her waist, pulling her close into his warmth, murmuring something in her ear, slow and relaxed now as he had been urgent and insistent before.
He had held her on the bed, stroking her, kissing her, touching her with his hands and with his mouth, asking her to tell him, no, insisting that she tell him, what felt good, how it felt, if she liked it. ‘Tell me,’ he whispered, and, ‘That’s good, isn’t it, you like that,’ and she did, and she told him that she did until she couldn’t speak any more. She wondered if she should feel guilty, but she thought that Gina would understand, would probably approve. Such moments were for the living, and Debbie knew, for the first time in her life, that she would surely die.
14
Debbie woke early. She slipped out of bed carefully, not wanting to wake Rob, and went downstairs. She made herself a cup of te
a and fed Buttercup who, with a cat’s facility for recognizing an opportunity, had materialized under her feet, mewing and twining. She sat in the kitchen, pulling her dressing gown round her for warmth, and drank the tea, blowing on it to cool it. It was just six, and still dark. She turned on the radio and listened to the early news. She felt strangely blank. It was as if she was inside a cocoon. There was a pressing sense of urgency, but it was outside of her, close to her but not touching her. She stared at the tiles on the kitchen wall. White, plain ceramic, the grouting starting to stain a bit. They needed cleaning. Plain white is best for tiles, Gina used to say. The tiles in the kitchen at Goldthorpe were white. The tiles in the old house, the one Debbie had lived in for most of her life, had been blue. She could remember them. Deep blue, and every now and then a yellow flower. Debbie used to think the flower was a fire, blue tiles with fires in, the glaze crazing with age. Her father kept saying he would put on new tiles. He never did. Gina had put the tiles in at Goldthorpe. She’d shown Debbie how to do it. Get the tiles straight, she said, don’t worry about the wall. That’ll never be straight. She’d been right, too. Debbie smiled, then shook herself. She’d almost dropped off, and now her tea was cold.
She looked at the clock. Quarter to seven. She made a fresh pot, put it on a tray with cups and a jug of milk, and took it upstairs.
Rob was still asleep. She stood in the doorway for a moment, watching him. Strangely, he looked older when he was sleeping, as though the persona he presented to the world was a younger man, maybe a younger version of himself. Maybe he went back, or tried to go back, to the attractive, careless young man Louise had described, who was Rob Neave before he met – her mind tripped on the name – before he met Angie.
She put the tray down beside the bed, and he woke up. He looked blank for a moment, then seemed to take everything in, the room, Debbie sitting on the bed. He looked at his watch, muttered, ‘Christ!’ and rubbed a hand across his eyes. ‘You’ve finished me, Sykes,’ he said. ‘I’m normally up and off by this time.’ He grinned at her and she felt her face grow warm. He sat up, leaning against the pillows, and took the cup she was holding out to him. He put his arm round her and she leant back against the pillows beside him. It felt comfortable, companionable. They lay there in silence for a few minutes, then he looked at her, and this time his face was serious. ‘Listen, Debs, there’s something I’ve got to talk to you about.’
Debbie felt something cold clutch at her stomach, and told herself angrily not to be so stupid. They’d had an agreement. He was still looking at her. ‘Think carefully,’ he said. ‘The past few weeks. Have you noticed anyone following you, any strange phone calls, anyone hanging around? Anything?’ This was unexpected, and Debbie just stared at him for a moment. He waited, still watching. He was serious, he wanted an answer.
‘No …’ She thought about it. Was that strictly true? She remembered the feeling of menace that had haunted her the last few weeks of term – but that was just a feeling and it had gone, vanished with the new term. ‘No,’ she said again, more positively. ‘Why?’ She remembered the policewoman who had come round, who had asked her similar questions, and felt herself going cold.
‘That Thursday,’ he said. ‘You thought you heard someone on the stairs. I began to wonder, when I got back, what was going on that night. That person you saw at the station – he’s never been accounted for. And that newspaper article – whoever was there may have seen that. I talked to the senior officer – Berryman – and to someone else I know …’
‘Detective Sergeant Jordan?’ Debbie asked.
‘Yes.’ He looked at his cup and put it down. ‘No one could see a connection. I thought they were right, so I left it. Then that student was killed, and now …’
‘How does Sarah fit in?’ But Debbie could remember that sense of a pattern that she had felt, drunk on whisky, alone, after her mother had died.
‘She was there that night, in the IT workshop. She might have seen someone going on to the stairs. Berryman was planning to interview her.’ He ran his hand over his face. ‘I just don’t know,’ he said again.
Debbie closed her eyes. ‘She came looking for me, at the end of term.’ The sense of dread, the chill, gnawing anxiety, began to break through the cocoon. ‘Do you think …?’ She felt overcome with weariness. I don’t want to talk about this! She tried again. ‘And you think, my mother …?’
‘I don’t know what to think,’ Rob said after a moment, watching her. ‘There’s nothing concrete to make the links. Sarah’s boyfriend – everything points to him. Your mother – at the moment, it looks just like what it seems – an accident.’ He tightened his arm round her shoulders and ran his hand over her hair. ‘But there’s no harm in playing safe. Just – be a bit careful. Until it’s over, one way or another, don’t travel on your own when the trains are empty. Don’t wait at the station unless it’s busy. Try to have someone with you. Don’t follow a pattern – change your times and your ways of travelling.’
‘But if you’re right,’ Debbie said, the cold feeling settling more heavily on her, ‘it’s my fault what happened. If it hadn’t been for me …’
He sighed. ‘Look, it’s not unusual to feel like that,’ he said. ‘I know, I’ve heard it before, but it’s just a distraction. It keeps you from thinking about the real things. Whatever happened, you didn’t do it. Don’t be stupid, Debs.’
She was quiet for a minute. She could see what he meant, but it didn’t entirely change the way she felt. She did feel responsible for Gina’s accident. Sarah had wanted to talk to her and she hadn’t been there. Logic and feelings … they weren’t always compatible. Maybe he thought they were.
The next few days she drifted. There were things to be done, and she did them. She went out to Goldthorpe to check her mother’s house for the investigating officers. They asked her if anything was missing, if anything was out of place. She checked Gina’s few valuables, her jewellery, her china, her television – everything was there. There was really very little. Gina had disposed of so much when she left the home she’d shared with her husband. She talked them through Gina’s nightly routine, her daily routine, her friends, her work. There didn’t seem to be anything that contradicted the obvious facts – Gina had drunk too much and had fallen downstairs. She had obviously gone to bed – her empty cup had been on the bedside table, her book – her Christmas present from Debbie – on the floor beside the bed, the bed covers thrown back. The only slight variation from her routine was that the bolts on the back door were open, though the door had been locked – double locked, which argued strongly against a break-in. DI Cave asked Debbie if anyone apart from herself had keys to the house. No one did. He gently reminded Debbie, largely by the questions he asked, that she wasn’t really familiar with her mother’s routine any more. Debbie’s insistence that Gina didn’t drink – and she knew her mother didn’t drink – was clearly contradicted by the evidence. The postmortem analysis showed a blood alcohol level that was equivalent to about five single measures. Not enough to make her roaring drunk, but more than enough to make her tipsy, unsteady.
Rob stayed. Each morning when he left, he asked her if he should come back that night, and she always said, ‘Yes.’ They didn’t talk about anything beyond that day. It was as if they were both taking literally Debbie’s original restriction – just for now. She was living, she knew, in a cocoon of unreality. Real life – work, friends, grieving for her mother – lurked a few days away, but she shut it out of her mind.
Lynne Jordan was aware of the man’s eyes on her legs. He wasn’t trying to conceal it, in fact, he seemed to want Lynne to notice, he was so blatant. She assumed it wasn’t an inept pick-up technique. He had been arrogant – the word insolent slipped into her mind – from the beginning of the interview. She made herself a mental picture of him in nappies, sitting in a playpen. ‘So this delivery takes place every month?’ she asked.
‘No, love,’ he said, with exaggerated patience. ‘At the end of the months
they order. That’s not every month.’
‘I see.’ He was looking at her legs again. Well, she was damned if she was going to pull her skirt down, or show him she was embarrassed in any way. Pathetic creep. ‘But these orders go in some way ahead?’
‘It’s a contract,’ he said, in that same tone. ‘It’s all arranged in advance.’
Lynne made a note to look at the contracts, deliberately uncrossed her legs then crossed them again high up so that her skirt pulled tight against her thigh. She flashed a brilliant smile at the man, patent in its insincerity, leant forward and said, ‘Tell me about the delivery on the fifth.’ The night that Julie died. He looked a bit uncomfortable. She waited for a moment then flashed the smile again. ‘Is there a problem, Mr …’ She made a point of looking at her notes, though in fact she could remember his name. ‘Mr Glenn.’
‘I took the train down, we unloaded, I came back.’ He was trying to win back the initiative.
Lynne gave him his own tone of exaggerated patience. ‘I meant in a little more detail, Mr … Glenn. I need your route, and I need to know if you saw anything unusual, out of the ordinary that night.’ She felt tired.
‘Well, what kind of thing?’ She told herself he wasn’t being deliberately obstructive. He was just stupid.
‘Did you see anyone on the line or by the line? Did you stop anywhere? Did anything happen that didn’t usually happen, that you remember?’
‘Look, love,’ he said. ‘You don’t just stop a freight train, you know. You don’t pick up passengers, you don’t stop at stations. You only stop if the signal’s against you.’
‘And was it?’ Lynne wondered if there was any reason she could justify fingering him to Berryman as a suspect, arrange for a very unpleasant twenty-four hours for him. Probably not.
