Off Minor

by John Harvey

  A stone clinked against the window.

  “Mr. Morrison! Wakey-wakey! Rise and shine!”

  Twenty

  There’s a statue of J. B. Priestley in the heart of Bradford, an imposing figure in a loose raincoat, not unlike Resnick, Patel had thought on more than one occasion. He had never read a word of Priestley, knew little enough about him, but he had, fifteen, been taken by the school to an afternoon performance of one of his plays. At the Alhambra: When We Are Married. A kind of sitcom, Patel remembered it, bluff-talking folk who smoked cigars and talked of brass, a maid in uniform, adultery—except it wasn’t really that—endless high teas. He had tried to tell his parents about it later, but his mother, unable to follow Patel’s tenuous grasp of the plot, had kept asking him to go back to the beginning; his father had queried what it had to do with education, suspected it of preaching values that were decadent, immoral.

  One thing you could do if you were standing alongside the statue: lift up your head and see, above the furthest ridge of housing, the green of hills. Patel had grown up with this, woolen towns built in a valley, the power of water, streaming down. Even though that industry had largely gone, changed, the towns lived on. Bradford. Wakefield. Halifax.

  Patel had been swept past the police station in the swell of traffic that sped around the broad ring road. His apology had been on his lips before Chief Inspector Dunstan looked ostentatiously at his watch.

  A thin-lipped constable drove them out along the valley road towards Hebden Bridge, past stone walls and blackened stone chapels, tiny chippies that seemed to have been built into the front rooms of people’s houses, factories that sold sheepskin coats and clogs, fishermen in green plastic, glimpsed here and there along the canal.

  Dunstan sat alongside Patel in the back of the car, gazing through the window and saying next to nothing. Sheep stared back at him, bedraggled, from steeply sloping fields.

  “That photo you faxed up,” Dunstan offered, passing through Mytholmroyd, “next to bloody useless.”

  It had been a color snap, eight or nine years old, just about the only picture of his former wife Michael Morrison had kept.

  “I were your boss, I’d be beating a path through the woods with sticks, dredging the local reservoir, the canals.”

  Patel nodded politely, said nothing.

  “Another kiddie, weren’t there? Not so long back?”

  “Sir.”

  “Where was it they found her?”

  “Old railway sidings.”

  “That’s it then. That’s the place to be looking. Not having us chasing us tails with a needle and haystack job up here.”

  Hebden Bridge, the sign read, the Pennines center.

  Elsewhere, the day began well. One of the Morrisons’ neighbors, eight doors along, called the station and told the duty sergeant about the transit van that had been parked outside their house. A couple of men had been doing some decorating; on the Saturday they had stripped the wallpaper from the living room and prepared it for a fresh coat of paint. They left the van through Sunday, prior to returning on Monday morning.

  Divine found the pair through a contact number, the two of them moonlighting from their regular jobs with a large building firm, currently engaged in transforming one of the Victorian factories in the old Lace Market area into exclusive flats and offices. Where the original owner had installed a chapel in the basement and paid his workers to attend between seven and seven-thirty each morning, the new entrepreneur was thinking along the lines of a squash court and sauna.

  “Yes,” conceded one man, “old green van. That’s ours. Not a problem, is there? Not the tax? In the post.”

  “Doing a little job out there,” the second man said, “more a favor than anything else. Friend of a friend, you know? Look, you don’t have to say anything about this to Inland Revenue, do you? VAT?”

  Graham Millington had been half-way to his car, heading off towards the house-to-house, crack the whip a little, when the constable called him back. A Mrs. McLoughlin, sounded quite distressed, wanted to talk to somebody working on the investigation. Not just anybody.

  Moira McLoughlin was waiting behind the door as Millington drew up, a house not unlike the Morrisons’, just two short streets away. She opened the front door and drew Millington swiftly inside. She was a small woman with swollen ankles, with soft permed hair and a beige dress that fastened all the way up to the neck.

  “This is about the missing girl?” Millington asked.

  “Please,” she said, anxiety wobbling her voice between registers, “come through to the other room.”

  They sat in a Dralon dream lounge with the standard lamp burning, curtains drawn, not yet eleven in the morning.

  “It’s the car,” Moira McLoughlin said.

  “Car?”

  “The car that was parked in the crescent. You were asking about it on the news.”

  “The hatchback? Nova?”

  She nodded, a forward dart, like a bird at a feeder.

  “What about it?”

  The woman’s fingers steepled momentarily then crumpled into one another, a movement of swelling knuckles and rings. “You see,” she said, not looking at Millington, looking anywhere but at him, “we parked it instead of outside here …”

  “We?”

  “He. My … friend.”

  Sweet Jesus, Millington thought, that’s what this is all about. She’s having an affair.

  “It wasn’t often that he came to the house and when he did, he always parked the car in different places, so as not to attract suspicion.” Her mouth was dry and the pale pink of her tongue kept sliding across it. It didn’t make any difference, Millington was thinking, not age, not appearance, not a damned thing. There they were, half the population, shedding their marriage vows as easily as they can shuck off their knickers. Even women like this, wouldn’t guess she’d had a sexy thought in her life, wouldn’t think another man would look at her twice. For a moment, as Moira McLoughlin continued talking, Millington realized he was thinking about his own wife, all those evenings in stuffy classrooms learning about Russian verbs or Barbara Hepworth’s bronzes, the chatter afterwards over coffee, articulate young men with degrees and aspirations who weren’t compelled to work strange hours then come home smelling of beer and other people’s cigarettes.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything at all, you see, but I knew that Alan never would, and you did say, the police report on the news, it did say it was important.” She touched her fingers to the loose skin bunching at her throat. “That poor child.”

  Millington uncapped his pen. “The gentleman in question, er, Alan, how long would you say he was here?”

  “I don’t know, I suppose, until five. It must have been until five. My husband, his mother is in a nursing home you see, all the way down in Hereford, and he travels down to see her. Sundays. Some Sundays. After lunch.”

  Soon that’s where we’ll all be, Millington thought, tucked up in wheelchairs up and down the country, slobbering over our Sunday mashed potato and trying to remember who it was we committed adultery with and why.

  “You won’t have to contact him, sergeant? You see, I thought if I told you myself that would be all right.”

  “I’ll just take a note of his name, and address. It shouldn’t be necessary to speak to the gentleman himself, but if it is I assure you we’ll use the utmost discretion.”

  A job for Divine, Millington thought: Oi, which of you’s been humping the dwarf with the swollen legs? He wrote the details carefully into his book and rose to his feet. “We’re very grateful that you came forward. Now we can forget about the car, at least.”

  “Do you think you’ll find her?” Moira McLoughlin asked at the door. “I mean before …”

  “I don’t know,” Millington replied, a slow shake of the head. “I honestly don’t know.”

  Twenty-one

  “Are you married?”

  Lynn Kellogg shook her head. “No.”

  “Must be di
fficult, a job like yours. If you were, I mean. Shift work, things like that.”

  “Yes,” Lynn said, “I suppose so.”

  “Still,” Lorraine Morrison tried for a smile and missed, “plenty of time yet.”

  Tell that to my mother, Lynn thought.

  They were sitting at the back of the house, the living room, French windows out on to the garden towards which Lorraine’s eyes kept returning: as if Emily would be miraculously there, the same old game continuing, dolls and babies and mummies and prams, happy, happy families.

  “I was nineteen,” Lorraine said, “when I met Michael. We were in this restaurant. Mama Mia. I’d gone there with a bunch of girls from where I worked. The bank. Somebody’s leaving do, you know?”

  Lynn nodded. The traffic noise from the main road nearby was ever-present, dull, cushioned by double glazing. They had been sitting there long enough for their too-weak coffee to grow cold, for Lynn to marvel at the correctness of everything in its place, the vases, the cushions with their bright floral blues and greens, the print of pink ballet dancers on the wall. Earlier that day, when Lynn had first arrived, she had found Lorraine lifting ornaments and picture frames and dusting underneath. She imagined Lorraine as a child, following her mother from room to room with the Hoover, watching, cleaning, falling into step. Here she was, younger than Lynn by a good six years, already married, a husband, a house, a missing child …

  “I suppose we must have been making a lot of noise,” Lorraine was saying, “the way people do, evenings like that. Michael was there with this other man, business. After a while he came over, tapped me, you know, on the shoulder. He and his friend had been having a bet on what it was we all did. I told him and he laughed and called out that he’d won. Next day, I looked up from the counter and there he was, half-way down the queue. ‘You didn’t tell me which branch,’ he said, when he got to the window. ‘I’ve been walking my feet off all over the city center.’ The cashiers either side of me were listening, one of them laughed and I could feel myself going red. He pushed a check through to me and it wasn’t even the right bank. I asked him what he was doing. ‘I thought you could endorse it,’ he said. ‘Address and telephone number on the back.’ As much to get rid of him as anything else, I did.

  “‘You’re asking for trouble,’ one of the other girls said. ‘Married man. He is good looking though, nice clothes.’

  “‘How d’you know he’s married?’ I said. He hadn’t been wearing a ring, I had noticed that.

  “First time I went out with him I asked him and he laughed and said, ‘No, what kind of a bloke do you think I am?’ After we’d been seeing one another for maybe a month, he told me that he was. I went mad, really screaming at him, calling him a liar, all sorts. ‘Steady, steady,’ he said, catching hold of my hands. ‘I didn’t tell you before ’cause there wasn’t any point.’

  “What do you mean?’ I said.

  “‘I wasn’t in love with you then,’ he said.”

  Michael had phoned in and asked for time off, compassionate leave. When Lynn had arrived at the house, he had been on the point of going outside, running the gauntlet of the news photographers, the video cameramen. She had persuaded him it was not, perhaps, the best idea, since when he had stayed in the kitchen, blinds closed, chain-smoking and working his way through a bottle of Bulgarian wine.

  “Fifteen years older than me, Michael. It’s all my mum could think about, that and the fact that he’d been divorced. Fifteen years.” She glanced at Lynn. “I don’t think that’s a lot, do you?”

  Lynn shook her head. “Not necessarily.”

  “‘By the time you’re thirty,’ my mum used to say ‘he’ll be forty-five. Middle-aged. Have you thought of that?’ “Lorraine was on her feet by the French window: a robin was squatting near the edge of the lawn, so still that it could have been a plastic toy. “It’s not as if,” Lorraine said, “he acts his age. Not, you know, old. Only since he lost his job, had to take another miles away, all the traveling, well, he gets tired. I mean, he’s bound to. Anybody would. His age, that’s got nothing to do with it.”

  Lynn stood up, smoothing down her skirt. She didn’t know about Michael, but being around Lorraine somehow made her feel young and old at the same time. Lorraine was the kind of girl Lynn hated sharing a communal changing room with whenever she was buying something to wear; there she’d be, struggling into a size twelve, glance up and there’s this kid with a model-girl figure sliding down into a ten with inches to spare. Remember Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys? The scene where they take her out for new clothes and one of the Baker Boys, one of the Bridges brothers, says to her, “What are you? A ten?” and she just looks at him and says, “An eight.”

  Lynn loved the film, had seen it three times, but that really got to her. An eight!

  Lorraine had time and money to spend on herself as well; hair done each week and more than the occasional hour on the sun bed. Where else was she going to get that tan, that shine on her skin?

  “If I could use your phone,” Lynn said, “I’ll check in with the station.”

  Raymond had been fifteen minutes late for work and Hathersage had given him a proper bollocking in front of half a dozen others, enough to bring tears to the corners of Raymond’s eyes as he stood there, head down, smarting. An inch away from chucking it all in, asking for his cards, walk right out of there and go into town, maybe Sara was on early lunch. But he stuck it out, as much afraid of what his father would say when he found out, his dad and his uncle Terry, organizing his life for him between rounds at the pub.

  Raymond kept his head down and kept on working: the day hadn’t been invented that lasted for ever.

  All around radios crackled about him as he moved, none quite tuned to 96.3, their sounds all but drowned beneath the loud, mechanical swearing of the men, the high whine of electric saws, the thump of cleavers hammering down. Offloading a fork-lift truck, Raymond missed Emily Morrison’s name on the news report, but registered what had happened, a young girl missing from home.

  “Look at you now! Clumsy young bugger!” bawled Hathersage, passing through. “Want to keep your mind on what you’re sodding doing!”

  Raymond’s mumbled apology went unheard, scrabbling as he was, down on his hands and knees among ox livers, deep dark red.

  Twenty-two

  Hebden Bridge seemed to be tea rooms closed for refurbishment and antique shops presided over by damp little men with grubby hands and sunken faces. Perhaps things brightened up in the summer when the walkers came in from Manchester and Leeds, greedy for barm cakes and fresh air. What Patel did find, close by the canal, was a record shop that stocked the devotional Sufi songs of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan and he left there happily with two CDs in a recycled Pricerite plastic bag. Chief Inspector Dunstan had long since departed for Halifax, leaving Patel the services of two uniformed constables and an ominous, “Good luck, Sunshine. Catch anything here aside of a stinking cold and sore feet, you’re going to need it.”

  Passers-by barely stopped to glance at the blurred picture of Diana Wills before shaking their heads and moving on. In the pubs, provision shops, the chemists staffed by pleasant-faced women in sensible shoes and spotless pink uniforms, it was the same. Even the caretaker of the Calder Valley Spiritualist Church could offer no hope of a sighting. It was only when Patel, weary of the omnipresent drizzle that came down from the hills in waves, ducked into a café for shelter that he struck lucky. At the counter he ordered a pot of tea and two slices of toast, then took a seat to wait. The only other customer was a woman in a duffle coat, mechanically rocking the handle of her pram as she forked her way through a large piece of passion cake.

  A second woman, the one behind the counter, carried over Patel’s order on a tray. She was setting the teapot on the circular table when her hand stilled in mid-air.

  “What’s this, then?”

  She was looking at the slim sheaf of pictures near Patel’s arm.

  While Patel explained, s
he continued to unload her tray. “Oh, yes,” she said, finished. “Regular, comes in all the time.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Weekends.”

  “Every weekend?”

  “No,” picking at a loose cotton on her apron. “Not every. Every other, maybe.”

  “She was here this weekend, just gone?”

  “Let me see, I … No. No, I’m certain I’d remember. Pot of tea, like yours, but weak, extra water. Always takes out the tea bag as soon as pot’s on table. Paying over good money for something tastes of nothing’s not my way of doing things, but there’s some you get in here, worse habits than her, so I never say a thing. Good morning, hello, maybe a few words about the weather. Yes, pot of tea and a slice of carrot cake.”

  “Diana Wills,” Patel said.

  “Is that her name? It’s not often I know people’s names.”

  “But you are sure this is the woman you know?”

  She picked up one of the sheets and looked at it carefully. “Terrible likeness, but it’s her right enough.”

  “And when she’s here,” Patel said, “weekends, I don’t suppose you would have any idea where she stays?”

  “What’s she done, then, this—what did you say?—Diana Willis?”

  “Wills.”

  “Wills.”

  “Nothing.”

  “Seems an awful lot of fuss to go to about nothing.”

  “We want to get in touch with her, the police, something we have to tell her. It is important.”

  “I used to like hearing those messages on the radio,” the woman said, taking a chair opposite Patel. “After the news. We have an urgent message for so-and-so, so-and-so, at present on a caravanning holiday in so-and-so, so-and-so, will she please get in touch with so-and-so hospital, where her mother, Mrs. so-and-so, so-and-so is seriously ill. You don’t get them so much any more. Wonder why that is?”

  Patel took a deep breath. “You have no idea, then, where she stays?”

  “Don’t say I said so,” the woman said, rising, “but why don’t you ask at that bookshop back down on the main road? That’s where her friend is, the one she comes to see.”