Emily lay upside down with one leg hanging over the side of the bed, the other beneath the pillow. Her head was pushed against the wooden base, strands of auburn hair trailing down. Her nightie had become nicked up in the tangle of sheet around her waist and Lorraine, careful not to wake her, eased it back over her legs.
Since Michael had been forced to take a job almost two hours away, his daughter was frequently in bed before he returned home; the only time he got to see her was forty-five minutes in the mornings and at weekends. It was Lorraine who fetched her from school, who made her tea and listened to her chatter; said, “Ooh! Yes, lovely!” at her paintings-great sploshes of red and purple on gray paper, which later were stuck to the fridge-freezer door.
It was Lorraine, more often now than not, who dropped Emily off at Diana’s house, her mother, Michael’s first wife; Lorraine who collected her, seven hours later, trying not to notice the older woman’s face, the dark and swollen eyes, the tears.
Lorraine wasn’t sure how long she stood there in the half-dark, looking down at her stepdaughter, while the images conjured up by the news report nibbled away at the edges of her mind.
Eleven
Patel had been out on the street for less than an hour: a dull, run-of-the-mill end-of-year day, the kind that promises nothing, other than sooner or later it will end, when someone spat in his face.
He was on his way to interview the assistant manager of a building society near the corner of Lister Gate and Low Pavement about a recent robbery; wondering if, while he was there, he might ask about applying for a loan, moving upscale to something a little quieter, less prone to woodworm and suspect drains.
On the descent past M amp; S, shaking his head politely, sorry, no, at the part-time market researchers who hovered hopefully with their clip boards and part-time smiles, Patel paused to look down at the painting a young man was reproducing in chalk on the flag stones, a Renaissance madonna and child. A little further on, close by the crossroads, a muscular black mime artist, in singlet and sweat pants despite the temperature, was making slow-motion moves to the taped accompaniment of what Patel understood to be electro-funk. Quite a crowd had gathered in a rough circle, mostly admiring. Patel walked around the outer edge, taking his time. The clock above the Council House had not long sounded the quarter hour and his appointment was for half past. He was reaching into his trouser pocket for a coin to throw down into the performer’s hat, when a blue van, descending Low Pavement towards the pedestrianized cross-street, braked sharply to avoid colliding with a pram.
The woman, thirties, black Lycra pants and a fake-fur coat, cigarette trailing from one hand, swerved the pram sharply round, its rear wheel finishing only a foot or so away from the offside wing of the van.
“Great daft bastard!” she shouted. “What the ’ell d’you think you’re doing? No right to be driving down here any rate. Not like that, you’re sodding not.”
“Lady …” tried the driver through his partly wound-down window.
“Nearly ran smack into me, you know that. Right into the effing pram.”
“Sweetheart …”
“If I’d not had me eyes about me, you’d have gone right sodding over it, baby an’ all. Then what would you be doing?”
“Darling …”
“Up in bloody court on bleeding manslaughter.”
“Look …”
“You effing look!”
Shaking his head, as if to suggest to the crowd deserting the mime show for this new drama that he wasn’t wasting any more of his breath, the driver wound up his window and engaged gear. The woman promptly stepped away from her pram and planted a kick low on the door, hard enough to dent the panel.
The driver rapidly wound his window back down. “Watch it!”
“You effing watch it! Who you telling to watch it? You’re the one, came down here, sixty miles an hour. Selfish bastard!” And she kicked the door a second time.
“Right!” The driver wrenched open the van door and climbed out.
The crowd fell quiet.
“Excuse me,” Patel said, stepping forward. “Excuse me,” setting himself between them, “madam, sir.”
“Fuck off, you!” shouted the woman. “Who asked you to butt your nose in?”
“Yeh,” said the driver, giving Patel a push in the back, “one thing we don’t need, advice from the likes of you.”
“All I am trying to do …” Patel tried.
“Look,” the driver said, moving round him. “Piss off!”
“I …” said Patel, reaching into his pocket for his identification.
“Piss off!” said the woman, and, with a quick backward arch of her head, she spat into Patel’s face.
“I am a police officer,” Patel finished, blinking away phlegm and saliva.
“Yeh,” said the woman. “And I’m the Queen of Sheba.” Patel let his fingers slide from his warrant card and reached for a tissue instead. The driver got back into his van and the woman reversed her pram around him. Within moments, they were on their respective ways and most of the crowd had gone back to watching the mime or were wandering off to continue window shopping. Only Lynn Kellogg stayed where she was, in the doorway of Wallis’s, doubtful if Patel had spotted her and wondering whether the tactful thing would be to slip away unnoticed.
It didn’t take her long to decide; he was still in the same position when she touched him lightly on the arm and smiled. “Wonderful, isn’t it?” Patel nodded, tried to smile back. “Try to help and that’s what happens.”
He screwed up the tissue and pushed it down into his pocket. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Got time for a coffee or something?”
Patel looked at his watch. “Not really, but …”
They walked through the ground floor of a small shop dedicated to the sale of pot-pourri, expensive wrapping paper and cardboard cutouts of benign-looking cats, upstairs into a small café largely patronized by women from Southwell or Burton Joyce wearing floral print dresses and good camel coats.
“Why didn’t you carry through with it?” Lynn asked, stirring sugar into her cup.
“Warrant card, you mean?”
Lynn nodded.
“Didn’t seem a great deal of point. Excuse me interrupting your little confrontation but I am a police officer. Not given their first reaction.” Patel tried the coffee and decided it tasted of very little. “Whatever I had showed them, if I had said I was in CID, a detective, I don’t think they would easily have believed me.”
Lynn allowed herself a wry smile. “Any consolation, Diptak, I doubt they’d have believed me either.”
The walk-through sweet store was full of small children tugging at their parents’ hands: “I want! I want! I want!” Lynn chose a small scoop of old-fashioned striped bull’s-eyes, some black liquorice with soft white centers, barley sugars, chocolate limes and a few strawberry fizzes filled with pink sherbet. She could always hand them round to the rest of the office; no law said she had to eat them all herself.
“How much for these?”
Sara Prine looked young in her uniform, more a fuchsia than a regular pink; a false apron, striped, at the front, meant to summon up some addled vision of bygone days, where everyone knew their place and kids’ treats weren’t squeezed from single-parent income support and excessive sugar didn’t rot your teeth.
“One pound forty-eight.”
Lynn raised an eyebrow, handed over a five-pound note. “Remember me?” she said.
Of course, she had; those tight little cheeks sucked in tighter still, slight tremor of the hand as she gave Lynn her change.
“I’d like to talk to you.”
“Not here.”
“You’d prefer to come back to the station?”
Sara’s shoulders tensed as she gave a quick, terse shake of the head.
“When do you get a break?”
“I’m on early lunch.”
“How early?”
“Eleven-thirty.”
Early enough to be late breakfast. “I’ll meet you outside. We can find somewhere to sit.”