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 difficult, 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 …