Something Might Happen

by Julie Myerson

  Livvy’s lying on her mat on the floor, gazing at the back of the sofa. I kick off my shoes, pull her onto my lap. Kiss her four times on the soft, wide moon of her forehead—four fast kisses to make her laugh.

  She does. She squeaks.

  In the quick pocket of silence that follows, I can feel Lacey watching her, the way people watch babies when they’re embarrassed or tired or don’t know what to say. I don’t look at him. I hold her away from me, hold her up under her sweet, fat arms, and then zoom her back for another four kisses. Up and in, up and back. She does her cartoon giggle. He watches her, watches me.

  Mick grabs a handful of crisps.

  So, he goes, how was work?

  Oh, I reply, OK.

  You sound fed up.

  No, I say, I don’t think so. Not fed up. Just tired.

  I look at Lacey and he smiles at me. I think what a nice smile he has—expectant, careful, kind. And then the kids come down.

  What’s for tea? asks Jordan, sniffing the air.

  Rosa eyes the crisps while holding her kitten nuzzled against her shoulder.

  Maria peed on the beanbag, she says. It wasn’t her fault.

  Get everyone to wash their hands, Mick says.

  Can I have a crisp? says Rosa.

  No, says Mick. Wash your hands.

  From now on, Nat says, the little ones are banned from PlayStation. I mean it.

  I wish he wouldn’t say that! We’re not little! screams Rosa.

  The kitten wriggles away and jumps to the floor. The cat flap bangs and before anyone can grab his collar, Fletcher rushes at it with a great long skid across the floor, barking loudly.

  Why can’t I? says Rosa, back on the crisps. Can’t I even have one?

  Crisps are for grown-ups, I tell her.

  Oh great! she says. I get it—and kids are just minor beings, right?

  Rosa slams out of the room. Mick yells at her to come right back. Nat hits Jordan and he bursts into tears.

  Mick throws a tea towel onto the table.

  Still glad you came? he says to Lacey.

  After supper, the kids go to bed and we sit and watch the news. Lennie isn’t on it any more. Now it’s just about the government and war and tax. Mick seems to have run out of talking. He half does the crossword, half throws a tennis ball for Fletch. Each time he chucks it, the dog bounces off to fetch it, drops it at his feet, then sinks down, chin on paws, eyes on Mick’s face. If Mick doesn’t throw it again within five seconds, he barks.

  That dog doesn’t give up, does he? Lacey remarks at one point and I think Mick laughs.

  When Lacey yawns and excuses himself, I go upstairs with him to show him where to go and give him towels and stuff. The landing is dark and messy, with Mick’s papers strewn on the floor and washing hanging on the airer. The sound of breathing comes from Jordan’s room.

  He doesn’t exactly snore, I tell Lacey, but he’s a bit of a heavy breather. I hope he doesn’t keep you awake.

  Lacey smiles.

  I can sleep through anything, he says.

  Lucky you.

  I know. It’s a skill I was born with.

  I laugh and so does he.

  We stand on the landing together in the half-darkness and I hand him a big towel and a small one, both fat and crunchy from the outside washing line.

  There’s hot water, I tell him, if you want a bath.

  Thanks, he says, but I’m OK. All I want to do is sleep.

  He looks at me. We stand there a moment, with only the mess and the darkness between us.

  It’s very good of you, he says.

  Don’t be silly, I say.

  Well, it is.

  He hesitates.

  What? I say.

  Mick told me, he says. About Al—what he did.

  I feel the heat rush to my face.

  He did?

  You shouldn’t worry about it, you know.

  I’m not—I mean, I’m not worried about that. It’s just, I’m worried about him.

  He doesn’t know what he’s doing, Lacey says, not just now.

  I say nothing.

  He’s barely able to think straight.

  OK, I say. You’re right, I know.

  I smile.

  What?

  Mick wasn’t supposed to tell you—

  Oh? I’m sorry.

  It’s OK.

  We stand there a moment on the landing and then we say goodnight.

  Rosa asked me something, I say suddenly.

  Oh?

  Yes. She asked me if you had kids.

  He looks at me.

  And I didn’t know the answer. We hardly know anything about you.

  He looks at me and my heart thumps.

  Or—your life, I say.

  My life?

  Yes, I say in a whisper.

  There’s nothing to know, he says.

  Oh?

  I mean, I don’t. No kids, no wife—

  Nobody?

  Just a girlfriend.

  I blink.

  Natasha, he says.

  Ah, I say. In London?

  In London, yes.

  Oh, I say.

  Tess, he says softly, look—

  Yes?

  I’d like to talk to you—about all of this—about Alex. Are you around? Maybe tomorrow? Or the day after?

  I almost laugh.

  I’m around, I say, all the time. You know I am.

  He smiles.

  I’ll find you then?

  Yes, I tell him. Find me.

  Chapter 8

  BUT IT’S NOT JUST LACEY WHO WANTS TO TALK. MAWHINney wants to interview me again. Alone, he says, without Mick.

  An incident room has been set up in the back of the Dolphin Diner on the pier, in the storerooms, where catering boxes of ketchup and salad cream, and bumper-sized tins of peeled plum tomatoes and baked beans, are piled to the ceiling. Orange plastic stacking chairs and Formica tables have been borrowed from the school and the murder squad have brought in filing cabinets and phones and a couple of computers. Each window contains a smooth grey square of sea. When the weather’s bad, the walls moan and shudder and waves heave and smash against the windows.

  Mick’s already been in there. He says that even with the big doors shut, you can still smell the frying and hear the clatter of cups and hiss of steam from the Ramirez brothers in the Dolphin Diner. Normally the brothers would be thinking of shutting down now for the winter, but not this year. It’s their busiest October ever. They’ve never taken so much out of season.

  Taped to the wall of the incident room is a map of the town blown up big, with yellow Post-it notes all over it and the car park and pier area outlined in pink DayGlo marker. Other significant spots such as Alex and Lennie’s cottage and the area around the school are also marked in colours.

  Looking at this map, I can’t believe how the distance between all those familiar places is skewed and unlikely. The detailed hugeness of it turns our neat and cosy town into this great big alarming place full of alleyways and twisty streets and endless nooks and crannies. Places where a murder could happen. Places where a murderer could quite easily slink away and hide.

  Mawhinney asks me to go in and see him at two, but at five past he’s still not there.

  It’s lunch, says a man sitting at a desk eating a burger. He said he had some stuff to do.

  When I tell him Mawhinney was expecting me, he shrugs.

  I can call him on his mobile if you like?

  He picks up a biro and uses it to stir his coffee.

  No, I say, it’s OK. I’ll go for a walk, shall I?

  Ten minutes, says the man. Give him at least ten.

  * * *

  I have Liv in her sling, so I decide to go down on the beach, something I can’t easily do with the buggy. The wide concrete steps are gritty with sand, the public toilets are shut for the winter. So is the coastguard’s red and yellow hut, padlocked up.

  The tide is right in and brown water crashes against the
groynes and against the pairs of legs of the pier which stretch a long way out to sea. Rosa always says it looks like a big long creature, crawling slowly away from the shore.

  I shut my eyes for a second, feel sun squeezing through the clouds and onto my face. The wind blows my hair and ruffles Livvy’s too, but she’s deep asleep, head wedged against the strap of the sling. A seagull swoops down over us and for a second its shadow wobbles on the sand. Then away. When the sun goes in, all the shingle turns dark blue.

  Far off there’s a young man with fair hair walking along the beach with a carrier bag. If I look the other way, I can just see the car park, but I won’t look, not today. Sometimes, in a bad winter, that part of the prom is sandbagged up and the beach huts beyond the pier are dragged into the car park and stood there on bricks, since on a rough night the sea can come crashing over the low wall. If that had been the case this year, then Lennie couldn’t have parked there.

  I walk a little bit further along, away from the pier, but the sling is killing my shoulders and anyway when I turn around I see someone I think is Mawhinney going in, so I go back.

  * * *

  He says he’s sorry, that he got waylaid. He seems more tired than when I last saw him. His clothes smell of smoke, his jacket’s creased, his tie’s pulled undone.

  How’s that baby of yours, then? he asks me, peering at Liv’s dark head in the sling. Got the feeding sorted yet?

  Not really, I say.

  Our first was the worst, he says. The second was a dream after that.

  Better that way round, I tell him.

  But we stopped there, he says. And you’ve got four? I don’t know how you do it, how you manage.

  We don’t always, I tell him, though I know it’s not true, not really. And also that Mick would never tell anyone that. Mick would never even feel it. He may not have wanted Livvy, not really, but once the deed is done, he’s loyal. That’s Mick for you.

  OK, Mawhinney says and he pulls out a bunch of files from behind him then puts them down again. What I wanted to ask you is, do you know a boy named Darren Sims?

  Yes, I tell him, surprised. Of course. Everyone knows Darren. Why?

  Mawhinney looks at me and hesitates.

  Works at the farm shop in Blythford?

  That’s right, I say. Now and then he does, anyway. I think he just helps out. Why?

  He’s been in already, of course, to talk to us—all those young blokes have—funny lad is he?

  He has a few problems, I tell Mawhinney carefully. Educationally, I mean. But he’s OK. He means well.

  Yes, Mawhinney says slowly. That’s about what I thought.

  Why do you want to know about him? I ask.

  Mawhinney hesitates.

  Despite the dumpy warmth of Livvy against me, I shiver. Outside you can hear the sea slamming at the creeping legs of the pier. I wait for him to answer. Instead he goes off on another tack.

  You and Mrs Daniels—Lennie—were good friends? he says. Close friends, you know, intimate?

  Yes, I tell him, slightly impatient. Yes, you know we were.

  Mawhinney spreads his fingers out on the table. He takes a breath and looks at them as if they were something interesting and new.

  The thing is, he says, and this is very difficult, you must forgive me, I know how this must sound—would she have told you if she was involved with Darren in any way?

  I stare at him.

  What? Lennie?

  He nods.

  With Darren? What do you mean involved?

  He looks me in the eye this time. Well—I mean sexually.

  I can’t help it—I laugh.

  I’m sorry, I tell him, shaking my head. I mean, no way.

  Mawhinney gives me a cool look.

  You’re surprised by the idea?

  Yes of course. Totally. Well, it’s not true—she wasn’t.

  You can’t believe that would have been the case?

  No, I say again. No way.

  I run my fingers over the top of Liv’s head and Mawhinney folds his big arms and tilts his chair back. He waits a second or two before saying, Well, Darren has implied to us that it was.

  I laugh again. Liv stirs against me, makes a snaffly sound with her lips.

  Implied?

  He’s said as much.

  Well then, I say, he’s having you on. He’s making it up.

  Pretty sick thing to do, Mawhinney comments.

  I shrug.

  He has problems. I mean, I’m not standing up for him or anything. I’m just saying he has.

  Mawhinney seems to think about this.

  You think he’d say such a thing to get attention?

  Quite possibly, I say.

  Even though it made him—possibly—a murder suspect?

  I shrug.

  I thought people confessed all the time to things they’d never done—disturbed people, I mean—I thought the police were used to that?

  You think he’s disturbed? Mawhinney says quickly.

  No, I begin, and then another thought creeps in.

  You’re not thinking Darren did it, I say. You don’t think he killed her?

  Mawhinney smiles.

  I’ll be honest with you, he says. It’s really impossible to know anything at this stage. Time is passing.

  Darren wouldn’t hurt anyone, I tell him, I just know he wouldn’t.

  Mawhinney says nothing. He has the face of someone who’s heard it all before.

  As we go through the next room I try to glance again at the map, but Mawhinney seems eager to move me on. The Post-it notes have what look like phone numbers on them. I wonder if these are leads the police are chasing—or whether that’s just the way it is on TV.

  I’d be most grateful, he says, if you’d keep this conversation just between ourselves.

  What about Lacey? I say and feel my colour rise as I say it.

  What about him?

  Does he know, about Darren?

  Mawhinney holds the door open and I catch a whiff of deodorant as his arm goes up.

  Oh, he says, Lacey knows.

  He reaches in his trouser pocket and tears the foil down on a packet of Trebor Mints and offers me one. I shake my head.

  Darren didn’t even know Lennie, I say. Or she didn’t know him. Not any more than I do anyway. They may well have spoken at the farm shop but that’s it.

  Mawhinney considers this.

  Trouble is, he says, you think you know someone—you could swear you knew what they were capable of—and then they go and surprise you. Human nature.

  He smiles at me.

  Happens all the time in this business.

  * * *

  Darren is one of a small gang of lads—Dave Munro, Roger Farmiloe and Brian Whittle, too—who spend a lot of the day in The Red Lion doing nothing much except watch TV.

  The day after Lennie dies, Darren very nearly makes the six o’clock local TV news. But in the end they plump for his mate Brian, who’s employed by Waveney District Council to sweep the area between North Parade and the pier and therefore has a closer connection to the scene of the crime.

  Meanwhile reporters have spoken to just about everyone in town: hotel people, shopkeepers, chambermaids, the staff at the brewery, the woman who cleans the toilets at The Anchor.

  Ellen Hasborough, who runs the Whole Loaf Organic Deli on the corner of East Street and Pinkney’s Lane, tells the local radio station that, Our rustic idyll is shattered. People used to come from miles around for a peaceful day here, for our famous coastal-path walks. I can’t see it happening any more.

  And a local councillor is reported as saying, They are lovely people here and it’s a shocking business. The whole community is taking it very badly.

  With no funeral in sight, the town creates its own small marks of respect. The flag which normally flies from the mast in the middle of St James’s Green is lowered for a week and the bakers and the fish shop draw down their shades even though business goes on as usual behind them. Even
the Ramirez brothers go so far as to place an old-fashioned black-edged notice in the window of the Dolphin Diner next to the dusty fisherman’s netting and dried starfishes, expressing their Deepest Sympathy for the family of Lennie Daniels who was so close to our hearts. Which, as Mick notes, is rich, considering that for two years running Lennie begged them to donate a fish and chip supper for the school summer raffle, only to be met both times with a flat and charmless refusal.

  Next day, Saturday, Lacey finds me on the promenade.

  A thunderstorm during the night has left the air soft and silky, the crackle washed out of it. The tide’s far out, the groynes exposed, the brown beach laced with hundreds of glistening creeks.

  The drama class Rosa and Jordan go to on Saturday mornings has been cancelled, so we’re on the beach instead, chucking a Frisbee on the driest band of shingle. Fletcher is straining on his lead, desperate to go down and join them, but he’s not allowed. There are places where dogs have to be on a lead, even out of season.

  It’s chilly but there’s no wind. One or two brave, elderly people have opened up their beach huts and put kettles on and started edging down to the sea, towels wrapped around their waists.

  Suddenly he’s behind me.

  They’re not really going in are they?

  Oh, I say, blushing furiously.

  Sorry, he says, I could see you were in a dream.

  Well, I say. Hi.

  It’s freezing, he says. Do they really swim in this?

  I shrug.

  It’s warm enough, once you get in.

  Lacey shivers.

  I was looking for you, he says as Fletcher wags and wiggles.

  I try to turn Liv’s buggy round so it doesn’t face into the wind.

  Oh? I say. Really?

  It sounds ruder than I meant it to. I glance towards the kiosk. Estelle is watching us intently, cloth in hand.