He looked at his watch. It was too early yet to get a taxi into Newcastle but he wanted to be out of the house. Now he had decided on action he could sit for no longer. In the street he saw Ramsay hurrying through the fog, and felt smug and triumphant because he was sure the policeman was on the wrong track altogether. In the Northumberland Arms he drank a pint of beer, and it felt like a celebration.
Chapter Twelve
The news of Jack’s disappearance spread round the village and as time went on the rumours grew wilder and more unlikely. He had been seen by the customers of the Northumberland Arms to get into a taxi. Some claimed to have heard the destination. They had noted his suitcase and before Patty received his letter the following day the gossip had already started. He’d had to get away, some said, because he was so upset by Kitty’s death, but the men in the Northumberland Arms discounted that, he hadn’t looked upset to them. He was like his old self. He’d had a bit of a joke and he’d bought a round. No one listened to them for long. Rumour was more exciting than reality. Women in the bus queue, shopping bags at their feet, discussed it. One suggested that he intended to commit suicide too. Perhaps he could not face life without Kitty. The other women were enchanted. The idea brought romance to the grey, November day. It was like being at the pictures.
By the time Patty had dropped the children at school the gossip was more vicious. There was speculation that he was running away from the police. He had killed Paul Wilcox, people said, to prove Kitty’s innocence. They had been having an affair for years, since before Joan’s death. Kitty had killed Medburn to set herself free, then Jack had murdered Wilcox to throw suspicion elsewhere. Now he had run away. Patty heard the gossip in the schoolyard and the playground and wherever she went she felt their curiosity and sympathy. She was angry and worried, and wondered what on earth her father was doing.
Ramsay learned of Jack’s disappearance in the school. The teachers were grumbling because the caretaker had not arrived and no one else knew how to work the boiler. The cleaner, whose husband had been in the Northumberland Arms the night before, told of his suitcase and the taxi which had come to take him to Newcastle.
‘I saw him with his suitcase,’ Ramsay said casually. ‘ I thought he was going to stay at his daughter’s.’ Poor old bugger, he thought. I don’t blame him for wanting to get away.
He was back at the school, asking questions with a renewed energy, a nervous frenzy. He had been given to the end of the week to get a result. Then he would be moved to what his boss called a ‘ less sensitive assignment’. Patty’s confidence in him had provided a new determination to prove them all wrong. He stayed around the school through a kind of superstition, as if the answer to the case was in the stone walls if only he knew the magic to release it. By mid-morning he realized he was being foolish and knew he was in the way. He left the school and went out into the damp and gloomy village.
Patty saw Ramsay next at six o’clock that evening. Jim had come home from work and the children were watching television. She was in the kitchen peeling potatoes and it was Jim who opened the door to him.
‘Yes?’ she heard her husband say. ‘What do you want?’
‘Can I speak to Patty?’
‘Aye. I suppose you’d better come in.’
The three of them stood in the small kitchen and Jim looked at the policeman with obvious hostility.
‘Have you seen your father?’ Ramsay asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘You know as well as I do. You’ll have heard all the gossip. He’s gone away for a few days.’
‘No,’ Ramsay said. ‘He phoned me up this afternoon. It was a peculiar phone call. I wasn’t sure if he was quite sober. He said he knew who had killed Medburn and Wilcox and that he’d meet me at his house to tell me all about it as soon as he got back. He was expecting to be here by five. I’ve been hanging around for him.’
‘He hasn’t been in touch with me today.’ She was offended. Why hadn’t her father consulted her before disappearing? She had thought they were partners. ‘Where was he phoning from?’
‘He didn’t say. He didn’t say much. He was in a call box and his money had run out. Or perhaps he didn’t want to tell me any more. It was somewhere noisy. A bus station probably. There was the sound of engines and a crackly public address system.’ He looked at Patty. ‘You’ve no idea where he might be?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘ I don’t think I understand him at all any more.’
‘He’s no fool,’ Jim said. ‘Not Jack. He can look after himself.’
‘I’ll talk to the taxi driver who picked him up yesterday evening,’ Ramsay said, ‘ We’ll see if we can find out where he’s been.’ He found it a relief to have something concrete to do. He touched Patty on the shoulder. ‘Don’t worry!’ he said. ‘We’ll find him and get him back.’
Jack had arrived later than he had expected. There had been traffic jams on the A1, and the town was further south than he had realized. It was midnight when he climbed out of the coach, stiff and bleary-eyed. He had slept on and off. The place was strange to him and he felt he did not have sufficient courage to leave the bus station and go out into the town to find somewhere to stay. It was surely too late for that and bus stations were the same everywhere, so he felt safe where he was. The waiting room had not been locked. He found a chair there and, surrounded by overflowing rubbish bins and clutching the handle of his suitcase, he slept.
Early in the morning he was woken by cleaners and the noise of the first buses. He washed and shaved in the public lavatory and went out into the town. In a cobbled market square, stalls were being erected. He felt light-hearted and brave like a soldier in his first action. He might have been in a foreign country with the strange accents all around him, the different beer advertised on the hoardings, the unfamiliar people. He had never seen so many Asian people and the glittering saris and the exotic fruit and vegetables on the market stalls fascinated him. There were students carrying books and files and men in suits on their way to the office. He felt he had led a completely sheltered life. There had been the grime of the pit and the grey houses of Heppleburn, and he had missed out on all this colour. He understood why his elder daughter never came home.
He found an Italian café in a side street where a group of workmen were eating breakfast. They were speaking in Italian, very loudly, shouting jokes to the proprietors over the sound of the espresso machine and the jukebox. He was hungry and ate a fried breakfast and a pile of toast. He could have stayed there all morning, watching the customers, enjoying the warmth and the noise.
At nine o’clock he went into an estate agent’s office and asked if they had a map of the town. He was afraid they would not give him one unless they thought he was a serious purchaser, so he came out with an armful of property details too. He put the glossy brochures of alarmingly expensive houses into a bin and sat on a bench in a covered precinct to read the map.
Ashton Road was a pleasant, red-brick terrace opposite the park. There were trees in the gardens, with russet-coloured leaves, and the sun caught the latticed window panes. They were unpretentious houses, ordinary, but in his mood of discovery and new experience he thought they were beautiful. The warm brick and the tall chimneys enchanted him. He walked down the pavement, his head turned towards them like a tourist walking through London for the first time.