by John Harvey
Jennie’s cup rattled against its saucer, the small noise loud in the otherwise silent room.
‘You’ve heard nothing from him?’ Kiley said.
‘Nothing.’
‘Not since Thursday?’
‘Not a thing.’
‘And you’ve no idea…?’
She was already shaking her head.
‘His family…’ Kiley began, a nod towards the photographs.
‘They separated, split up, eighteen months ago. Just after young Keiron’s fifth birthday. That’s him there. And Billie. I always thought it a funny name for a girl, not quite right, but she insisted …’
‘Could he have gone there? To see them?’
‘Him and Rebecca, they’ve scarce spoken. Not since it happened.’
‘Even so…’
‘He’s not allowed. Not allowed. It makes my blood boil. His own children and the only time he gets to see them it’s an hour in some poky little room with Social Services outside the bloody door.’ Her voice wobbled and Kiley thought she was going to break down and surrender to tears, but she rallied and her fingers tightened into fists, clenched in her lap.
‘You’ve been in touch all the same?’ Kiley said. ‘With Rebecca, is it? To be certain.’
‘I have not.’
‘But-’
‘Terry’d not have gone there. Not to her. A clean break, that’s what she said. Better for the children. Easier all round.’ She sniffed. ‘Better for the children. Cutting them off from their own father. It’s not natural.’
She looked at him sternly, as if defying him to say she was wrong.
‘How about the children?’ Kiley asked. ‘Do you get to see them at all?’
‘Just once since she moved away. This Christmas past. They were staying with her parents, Hertfordshire somewhere. Her parents, that’s different. That’s all right.’ Anger made her voice tremble. ‘“We can’t stop long,” she said, Rebecca, almost before I could close the door. And then she sat there where you are now, going on and on about how her parents were helping her with the rent on a new house and how they were all making a fresh start and she’d be going back to college now that she’d arranged day care. And the children sitting on the floor all the time, too scared to speak, poor lambs. Threatened with the Lord know what, I dare say, if they weren’t on their best behaviour. Little Billie, she came up to me just as they were going, and whispered, “I love you, Gran,” and I hugged her and said, “I love you, too. Both of you.” And then she hustled them out the door.’
Kiley reached his cup from the floor. ‘Terry, he knows where her parents live? Hertfordshire, you said.’
‘I suppose he might.’
‘You don’t think Rebecca and the children might still be there?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘All the same, if you had an address…’
‘I should have it somewhere.’
‘Later will do.’
‘No trouble, I’ll get it now.’
‘Let me,’ Jennie said.
With a small sigh, Mary pushed herself up from the chair. ‘I’m not an invalid yet, you know.’
She came back with a small diary, a number of addresses pencilled into the back in a shaky hand. ‘There, that’s them. Harpenden.’
Kiley nodded. ‘And this,’ he said, pointing, ‘that’s where Rebecca lives now?’
A brief nod. West Bridgford, Nottingham. He doubted if Rebecca had joined the ranks of disheartened County supporters, all the same.
‘Thanks,’ he said, finishing copying the details into his notebook and passing back the diary.
‘A waste of time, though,’ Mary said, defiantly. ‘That’s not where he’ll be.’
Kiley nodded. Why was it mothers insisted on knowing their sons better than anyone, evidence to the contrary? He remembered his own mother — ‘Jack, I know you better than you know yourself.’ Occasionally, she’d been right; more often than not so wide of the mark it had driven him into a frenzy.
His gaze turned to the pictures on the wall. ‘Terry’s father…’
‘Cancer,’ Mary said. ‘Four years ago this March.’ She gave a slow shake of the head. ‘At least he didn’t live to see this.’
After a moment, Jennie got to her feet. ‘I’ll make a fresh pot of tea.’
Further along the balcony a door slammed, followed by the sounds of a small dog, excited, yelping, and children’s high-pitched voices; from somewhere else the whine of a drill, someone’s television, voices raised in anger.
Kiley leaned forward, the movement focusing Mary’s attention. ‘Jennie said your son had been acting, well, a bit strangely…’
He waited. The older woman plaited her fingers slowly in and out, while, out of sight, Jennie busied herself in the kitchen.
‘He couldn’t sleep,’ she said eventually. ‘All the time he was here, I don’t think he had one decent night’s sleep. I’d get up sometimes to go to the lavatory, it didn’t matter what time, and he’d be sitting there, in the dark, or standing over by the window, staring down. And then once, the one time he wasn’t here, I was, well, surprised. Pleased. That he was sleeping at last. I tiptoed over and eased open the door to his room, just a crack. Wanted to see him, peaceful.’ Her fingers stilled, then tightened. ‘He was cross-legged on top of the bed, stark naked, staring. Staring right at me. As if, somehow he’d been waiting. And that gun of his, his rifle, he had it right there with him. Pointing. I shut the door as fast as I could. I might have screamed or shouted, I don’t know. I just stood there, leaning back, my eyes shut tight. I couldn’t move. And my heart, I could feel my heart, here, thumping hard against my chest.’
Slowly, she released her hands and smoothed her apron along her lap. Jennie was standing in the doorway, silent, listening.
‘I don’t know how long I stayed there. Ages it seemed. Then I went back to my room. I didn’t know what else to do. I lay down but, of course, I couldn’t sleep, just tossing and turning. And when I asked him, in the morning, what kind of a night he’d had, he just smiled and said, “All right, Mum, you know. Not too bad. Not too bad at all.” And drank his tea.’
Jennie stepped forward and rested her hands on the older woman’s shoulders.
‘You will find him, won’t you?’ Mary said. ‘You’ll try. Before he does something. Before something happens.’
What was he supposed to say?
‘I can’t pay very much, you know. But I will, what I can.’ She rummaged round in her bag. ‘Here. Here’s twenty pounds left over from my pension. I can give you more later, of course.’
Kiley took ten and gave her the other ten back.
‘You’re sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘Bless you.’
‘Terry,’ Jenny said. ‘What do you think?’
They were walking along the disused railway line that ran east from Crouch Hill towards Finsbury Park, grassed over now to make an urban footpath, the grass itself giving way to mud and gravel, the sides a dumping ground for broken bicycles and bundles of free newspapers no one could be bothered to deliver.
‘I think he’s taken a lot of stress,’ Kiley said. ‘Seen things most of us wouldn’t even like to consider. But if he stays away there’s always the risk of arrest, dishonourable discharge. Even prison. My best guess, he’ll get himself to a doctor before it’s too late, take whatever time he needs, report back with a medical certificate and a cartload of pills. That way, with any luck he might even hang on to his pension.’
‘And if none of that happens?’
A blackbird startled up from the undergrowth to their left and settled again on the branches of a bush a little further along.
‘People go missing all the time.’
‘People with guns?’
Kiley shortened his stride. ‘I’ll go out to Harpenden first, make sure they’re not still there. Terry could have been in touch, doing the same thing.’
‘I met her once,’ Jennie said. ‘Rebecca.’ She made a f
ace. ‘Sour as four-day-old milk.’
Kiley grinned. They walked on, saying little, just comfortable enough in each other’s company without feeling really at ease, uncertain how far to keep walking, when to stop and turn back.
The house was to the north of the town, take a left past the golf club and keep on going; find yourself in Batford, you’ve gone too far. Of course, he could have done the whole thing on the phone, but in these days of so much cold calling, conversations out of the blue were less than welcome. And Kiley was attuned to sniffing around; accustomed, where possible, to seeing the whites of their eyes. How else could you hope to tell if people were lying?
The house sat back, smug, behind a few straggly poplars and a lawn with too much moss in it for its own good. A mud-splashed four-wheel drive sat off to one side, the space in front of the double garage taken up by a fair-sized boat secured to a trailer. How far in God’s name, Kiley wondered, were they from the sea?
The doorbell played something that sounded to Kiley as if it might be by Puccini, but if he were expecting the door itself to be opened by a Filipino maid in a starched uniform or even a grim-faced au pair he was mistaken. The woman appraising him was clearly the lady of the house herself, a fit-looking fiftyish with a fine tan and her hair swept up into what Kiley thought might be called a French roll — or was that twist? She was wearing cream trousers, snug at the hips, and a grey marl sweater with a high collar. There were rings on most of her fingers.
‘Mr Kiley?’
Kiley nodded.
‘You’re very prompt.’
If he were a dog, Kiley thought, she would be offering him a little treat for being good. Instead she held out her hand.
‘Christina Hadfield.’
Beneath the smoothness of her skin, her grip was sure and firm.
‘Please come in. I’m afraid my husband’s not here. Some business or other.’
As he followed her through a square hallway busy with Barbour jackets, green Wellingtons and walking boots, the lines from one of his favourite Mose Allison songs came to mind, something about telling a woman’s wealth from the way she walks.
The room they went into sported two oversized settees and a small convention of easy chairs and you could have slotted in most of Mary Anderson’s flat with space to spare. High windows looked out into the garden, where someone, out of sight, was whistling softly as he — or she — tidied away the leaves. Presumably not Mr H.
Photographs of the two grandchildren, more recent than those on Mary Anderson’s wall, stood, silver-framed, on the closed lid of a small piano.
‘They’re adorable,’ she said, following his stare. ‘Perfectly sweet. And well behaved. Which is more than you can say for the majority of children nowadays.’ She pursed her lips together. ‘Discipline in our society, I’m afraid, has become a dirty word.’
‘How long did they stay?’ Kiley asked.
‘A little over a week. Long enough to help undress the tree, take down the decorations.’ Christina Hadfield smiled. ‘Twelfth Night. Another old tradition gone begging.’
‘Terry, their father, he was home on leave while they were here.’
‘If you say so.’
‘He didn’t make any kind of contact?’
‘Certainly not.’
‘No phone calls, no-’
‘He knows better than to do that after what happened.’
‘What did happen?’
‘When Rebecca first said she was leaving him he refused to believe her. And then when he did, he became violent.’
‘He hit her?’
‘He threatened to. Threatened her and the children with all manner of things. She called in the police.’
‘He was back in England then, when she told him?’
‘My daughter is not a coward, Mr Kiley, whatever else. Foolish, I grant you. Slow to acknowledge her mistakes.’ Reaching down towards the low table beside her chair, she offered Kiley a cigarette and when he shook his head, lit one for herself, holding down the smoke before letting it drift up towards the ceiling. ‘What possessed her to marry that man I was always at a loss to understand, and unfortunately, circumstances proved my reservations correct. It was a mismatch from the start. And a shame it took the best part of four years in non-commissioned quarters — bad plumbing and condensation streaming down the walls — to bring her to her senses.’
That’s why she left him? For a better class of accommodation?’
Christina Hadfield’s mouth tightened. ‘She left him because she wanted a better life for her children. As any mother would.’
‘His children, too, surely?’
‘Is that what you’re here for? To be his apologist? To plead his cause?’
‘I explained when I called-’
‘What you gave me to understand on the telephone was that the unfortunate man was having some kind of a breakdown. To the extent that he might do himself some harm.’
‘I think it’s possible. I’d like to find him before anything like that happens.’
‘In this, you’re acting for his mother?’
‘Yes.’
‘Poor woman.’ Smoke drifted from the corners of her mouth. ‘After speaking to you, I telephoned Rebecca. As I suspected she’s heard nothing from him. Certainly not recently.’
‘I see.’ Kiley got to his feet. Whoever had been whistling while they worked outside had fallen silent. Christina Hadfield’s gaze was unwavering. What must it be like, Kiley thought, to entertain so little doubt? He took a card from his pocket and set it on the table. ‘Should Terry get in touch or should your daughter hear from him… Unlikely as that might be.’
No call to shake hands again at the door. She stood for a few moments, arms folded, watching him go, making good and sure he left the premises.
Was it the fact that his grandfather — his father’s father — had been an engine driver that left Kiley so susceptible to trains? The old man — that was how he had always seemed to Kiley, though he could not have been a good deal older than Kiley himself was now — had worked on the old London and Midland Railway, the LMS, and, later, the LNER. Express trains to Leeds and Newcastle, smuts forever blackening his face and hair. Kiley could see him, home at the end of a lengthy shift, standing by the range in their small kitchen, sipping Camp coffee from the saucer. Rarely speaking.
Now, Kiley, who didn’t own a car, and hired one from the local pay-as-you-go schemes when necessary, travelled by train whenever possible. A window seat in the quiet coach, a book to read, his CD Walkman turned low.
His relationship with Kate, a freelance journalist whom he had met when working security at an Iranian Film Festival on the South Bank and who, after some eighteen months, had cast him aside in favour of an earnest video installation artist, had left him, a sore heart and a taste for wine beyond his income aside, with a thing for reading. Some of the stuff that Kate had offloaded on him he couldn’t handle — Philip Roth, Zadie Smith, Ian McEwan while others — Graham Greene, the Chandlers she’d given him as a half-assed joke about his profession, Annie Proulx he’d taken to easily. Jim Harrison, he’d found on his own. The charity shop below his office, where he’d also discovered Hemingway — a dog-eared Penguin paperback of To Have and Have Not with the cover half torn away. Thomas McGuane.
What he was reading now was The Man Who Liked Slow Tomatoes, which, when he’d been scanning the shelves in Kentish Town Oxfam, he’d first taken for yet another celebrity cookery book, but which had turned out to be an odd kind of crime novel about Mario Balzic, an ageing cop trying to hold things together in a dying industrial town in Pennsylvania. So far, more than half the book was in dialogue, a lot of which Kiley didn’t fully understand, but somehow that didn’t seem to matter.
For a few moments, he set the book aside and gazed out of the window. They were just north of Bedford, he guessed, the train gathering speed, and most of the low mist that had earlier been clinging to the hedgerows and rolling out across the sloping fields had disappeared. Off
to the east, beyond a bank of threadbare trees, the sun was slowly breaking through. Turning down the Walkman a touch more, Mose Allison’s trumpet quietly essaying ‘Trouble in Mind’, he reopened his book and began chapter thirteen.
Nottingham station, when they arrived, was moderately busy, anonymous and slightly scruffy. The young Asian taxi driver seemed to know where Kiley wanted to go.
Travelling along London Road, he saw the floodlights of the County ground where he had once played. Had it been just the once? He thought it was. Then they were crossing the River Trent with the Forest pitch away to their left — the Brian Clough stand facing towards him — and, almost immediately, passing the high rows of white seats at one end of Trent Bridge, where, in a rare moment of recent glory, the English cricket team had sent the Australians packing.
It was a short street of smallish houses off the Melton Road, the number he was looking for at the far end on the left, a flat-fronted two-storey terraced house with only flaking paintwork to distinguish it from those on either side.
The bell didn’t seem to be working and after a couple of tries he knocked instead. A flyer for the local pizza parlour was half-in half-out of the letter-box and, pulling it clear, he bent down and peered through. Nothing moved. When he called, ‘Hello!’ his voice echoed tinnily back. Crouching there, eyes growing accustomed to the lack of light inside, he could just make out a toy dog, left stranded, splay-legged, in the middle of the narrow hall.
‘I think they’re away,’ a woman’s voice said.
She was standing at the open doorway of the house alongside. Sixties, possibly older, spectacles, yellow duster in hand. The floral apron, Kiley thought, must be making a comeback.
‘Most often I can hear the kiddies of a morning.’ She shook her head. ‘Not today. Quiet as the grave.’
‘You don’t know where they might have gone?’
‘No idea, duck. You here for the meter or what?’
Kiley shook his head. ‘Friend of a friend. Just called round on the off chance, really.’
The woman nodded.
‘She didn’t say anything to you?’ Kiley asked. ‘About going away?’
