Michael walked past the overgrown privet hedge, through the gap where the gate was supposed to be. The bell didn’t appear to be working and there wasn’t a knocker, so he rattled the letter flap instead, hammered the side of a fist against the door.
“She’s gone away,” called a neighbor two houses down, setting her milk bottles on the front step.
“She can’t have.”
“Suit yourself.”
Several doors along there was an arched passageway, leading to the backs of the houses. Michael stepped around the dustbin and peered through the square of kitchen window, what looked like breakfast things stacked alongside the sink, that didn’t prove anything one way or another. He knocked on the back door, leaned his weight against it: bolted and locked.
By clambering on to the narrow, sloping sill outside the back room window, he could see through a gap in the curtains. Scrubbed pine table and assorted chairs, a towel draped over the back of one; dried flowers stood in a wide-bellied vase in front of the tiled fireplace. On shelves in one of the alcoves, paperbacks jostled for space with cassettes and magazines, scrapbooks, photograph albums. On a table in the further alcove stood photographs of Emily, souvenirs, most of them, of her fortnightly visits to her mother. Emily reaching up to stroke a donkey, face uncertain; Emily in her costume beside an indoor pool; Emily and Diana on the steps of Wollaton Hall.
There were no pictures of the three of them together, Michael, Diana and Emily, as they had been then, a family.
“Hey-up! What the heck you doing up there?”
Michael turned and jumped back down; the flush-faced man was standing by the fence of the house that backed on to the alley.
“Seeing if there’s anyone in,” Michael said.
“Aye, well, there’s not.”
“D’you know where she is, Diana?”
“Who wants to know?”
“I’m … I was her husband.”
“Oh, aye.”
“I need to see her, it’s urgent.”
“Not been here all weekend, far as I know. Most likely off away.”
“You don’t know where?”
The man shook his head and turned back towards his own house. Michael hurried along to the archway, on through to the front of the house. The woman from two doors down was standing to admire her handiwork, step now spotless, rubber kneeling-pad in one hand, brush in the other.
“Diana,” Michael said, trying to control the anxiety in his voice.
“Away for the weekend.”
“Know where?”
“Can’t help, duck”
“You sure she’s not been here at all?”
“Far as I know.”
“And a little girl? You haven’t seen Diana with a little girl, six, reddish hair?”
“That’s Emily. Her daughter. Well, seen her, course I have, many a time, but, like I say, not these past couple of days.”
Michael shook his head, turned away.
“It’s what she does, you know. When the kiddie’s not with her. Take off for Sat’day, Sunday. Sad, if you ask me.”
“How’s that?”
“Bloke she were married to, it’s him as stops her seeing the kid more often. Breaks her heart.”
Michael phoned Lorraine from a call box, fumbling the coin into the slot. “She’s not here. Nobody’s here. You’ve not heard from her?”
“Nothing. Oh, Michael …”
“I’ll call on the police on the way home.”
“Should I come too, meet you there?”
“Someone’s got to be home in case.”
“Michael?”
“Yes?”
“Be as quick as you can.”
He broke the connection and ran to the car. Emily had been missing an hour and a half, maybe a little more. Pulling on to the main road, he had to brake sharply to avoid a builder’s lorry, heading down the hill towards Eastwood, its driver calling him all kinds of bastard through the glass. Slow down, he told himself, get a grip; you’re not going to help anything if you can’t hold yourself together now.
Lorraine sat in the kitchen, gazing out through the front window, hands tight around tea which had long since gone cold. All the while she had been sitting there, the street lights had shone more and more strongly. Each time a car entered the crescent, the adrenaline coursed through her: someone had found Emily and was bringing her home. And each time the headlights of the car swept past. Whenever there were footsteps on the pavement, she craned forward, waiting for figures to turn into the path, the anxious running of feet, fevered knocking at the door.
That little girl, the one who went missing, you remember?
It was something you read about in the paper, saw on the television news, shocking, the faces of those parents, pictures of their child. The pleas for a safe return.
They found her body.
And Michael suddenly staring at her, so sure.
Of course …
As though there were no other possibility, no other end.
What else did you think had happened?
The cup slipped from her fingers on to her lap and shattered on the floor. Lorraine did nothing to pick it up, left the pieces where they lay.
When Michael finally arrived, it was in convoy, a police car in front, white with a blue stripe, an unmarked saloon bringing up the rear. The two uniformed men were out of their vehicle quickly, moving briskly after Michael as he came, half-running, towards the house. A young woman wearing an anorak stepped from the third car and opened the rear door for a bulky man who stood for a moment on the pavement, pulling his raincoat around him.
Lorraine, face close to the window, was aware of this man, whoever he was, looking back at her, hands thrust down into his pockets, bare-headed, there in the broken dark. Then it was Michael with his arms tight round her and long, raking sobs, his mouth pressed against her hair, repeating her name, softly, over and over, Lorraine, Lorraine.
Seventeen
The great thing about Sunday lunchtimes in the city, back when Resnick had still been walking the beat, the number of bands you could hear for the price of a pint. Often not too much variety, it was true: New Orleans and Chicago by way of Arnold and Bobbers Mill, but when you weren’t paying admission, it didn’t pay to be fussy either. Besides, after a tough Saturday night, the familiar strains of “Who’s Sorry Now?” or “Royal Garden Blues” had a lot to commend them. Two choruses of ensemble, solos all round, a couple more with everyone going for broke, finally four-bar breaks in the last of which the drummer would likely throw his sticks into the air, shout “Ooo-ya! Ooo-ya!” and miss them coming down.
Resnick had persuaded his father to go along once, knowing that if he’d said anything about the music beforehand the older man would have refused. So they had arrived at the bar, Resnick expressing surprise when half a dozen men came wandering in with instrument cases in various shapes and sizes. His father, a Semprini man if anything, and whose idea of acceptable jazz had never extended beyond Winifred Atwell and Charlie Kunz, had lasted until the third number, a particularly clumping version of “Dippermouth Blues.” At the unison shout of “Oh, play that thing!”, Resnick senior had pushed his unfinished pint of mild aside, withered his son with a look of true scorn and left.
Thereafter, it was referred to disparagingly as “That melodious ragtime!”, Resnick refraining from the satisfaction of informing his father he had both words wrong.
Still, leaving the Bell this particular Sunday afternoon, some of the musicians he had been listening to the same as on that earlier occasion, it was his father Resnick found himself thinking of, rather than this solo or that. Never a man to encourage displays of affection, nor any excesses of emotion, there had been little physical contact, other than the occasional shaken hand, between the two of them for years. Crossing the broad edge of the square, Resnick remembered now leaving his father in hospital for the first time, an exploratory operation, braided wool dressing gown loose over new-bought paisley pajamas that buckled against his slippered feet. “Bye, son,” his father had said, and on whatever impulse, Resnick had clasped him in his arms and kissed his unshaven cheek. He could still hear, through the muted traffic, the gasped cry of surprise, see the tears welling in his father’s eyes.