“You look as if you could sleep for a week,” Resnick said, inside the hall.
“I only wish I could,” she smiled wanly. “As it is, I doubt if I’d sleep a wink.”
Resnick followed her through the house. “How long is it since you had anything to eat?”
“I don’t remember.”
“Okay. Sit down somewhere. I’ll see what I can find.”
Again, she was about to argue and, again, the necessary energy deserted her. Resnick left her in the living room, legs tucked up beneath her. The kitchen looked like something from an advertisement for modern living. The kind, Resnick thought ruefully, that Elaine would have aspired to for the pair of them: except she had fostered other ambitions, altogether more affluent. Why else fall for a high-flying estate agent with a holiday home in Wales and a Volvo big enough to allow easy adultery on the rear seat? Jesus, Charlie! Resnick thought, cracking eggs into a bowl, you can be a self-righteous son-of-a-bitch at times!
When he went back into the living room, omelets and coffee on a tray, Lorraine was fast asleep. Smiling, he put his own plate and mug down on the floor and turned quietly towards the door. He was turning the handle when Lorraine spoke.
“Where are you going?”
“Put this in the oven to keep warm.”
“Were you looking at me? Just now, I mean.”
“Only for a second.”
“That’s funny. I thought someone was standing over me. Staring. It woke me up.”
“Come on,” Resnick said, “you might as well eat this while it’s hot.”
Lorraine regarded the omelet with suspicion, pushed at it with her fork listlessly. After a few mouthfuls her appetite revived.
“What’s in this?” she said, surprised.
“Oh, nothing much. Tomato, onion, a small turnip I found to grate. Garlic. I sliced up your last rasher of bacon, I’m afraid. Oh, and I finished the cream.”
“But what’s this on top?”
“Parmesan. I sprinkled a little on after adding the cream. If you cook it the last couple of minutes under the grill, it gets that sort of crust.”
Lorraine was looking at him as if she couldn’t believe him, quite. “Where did you learn all that?”
“Nowhere special,” Resnick shrugged. “Picked it up, I suppose.”
“I learned from my mother.”
“If I’d learned from mine, it would have been dill and barley with everything, so many dumplings I would’ve been twice the size I am now. If that’s possible.”
“You’re not fat,” said Lorraine politely.
“No,” Resnick smiled, “just overweight.”
“Anyway,” Lorraine returned his smile, “this omelet, I’ve never tasted anything like it. It’s wonderful.” And speaking through another helping, a habit of which her mother would most certainly have disapproved, added, “Thank you very much.”
For a few seconds, Resnick caught himself thinking maybe his life would be better if there were somebody else to provide for, look after, someone other than his cats.
Jacqueline Verdon had shut up shop. It had not taken her long to convince Patel that she and Diana Wills were close friends or that, at that particular time, she did not know where Diana was.
“She was to have been here this weekend. The arrangements were the same as usual. Except that when I went down to the station to meet the train, no Diana. I met every train until eleven o’clock. I tried to contact her, for her to ring. By midday Saturday, I’d managed to convince myself she wasn’t coming.” The eyes held Patel fast and he knew she was telling the truth. “I haven’t heard from Diana since she was here a little over a fortnight ago. I have no idea where she is. I wish I had.”
The truth or something very close.
The hospital rang to say they were sending Michael Morrison home in an ambulance within the next half-hour. Lorraine had fallen asleep almost as soon as the last mouthful had passed her lips. Resnick lifted the plate away before it slid from her fingers. At six, Michael still not returned, he switched on the TV news, volume set to a whisper. There was a photograph of Emily, some footage of the house and neighborhood, mention of a woman the police were anxious to interview. Outside in the hall he called the station, letting them know he would be there within the hour. He took a coat from the hall cupboard and spread it across Lorraine’s knees. If he and Elaine had had a child straight off, she wouldn’t have been a lot younger than her. As he clicked the living-room door gently closed, he heard the ambulance draw up outside.
Twenty-five
Naylor had been in and out of schools the entire day. Cups of tea with harassed secretaries while he waited to sit across the desk from even more hard-worked and harassed head teachers; more tea in the furthest corners of staff rooms, where he was regarded with deep suspicion and the Bourbon biscuits were shielded from his sight Although everyone was genuinely shocked by what had happened, they could offer very little that was helpful; some even seeming to begrudge the hasty conversations in cloakrooms that smelled faintly of urine and were constantly interrupted by a litany of “Miss! Miss! Miss! Sir! Sir! Sir!”
Emily had two class teachers, not a perfect state of affairs as the head teacher explained, but the authority was quite committed to maternity leave, whatever its drawbacks. So that morning Naylor talked to a probationer with skin problems and a voice that was designed for singing hymns and telling stories in the book corner. She could shed no light on Emily’s disappearance-a friendly girl, quite bright, not the sort, she thought, to go willingly to strangers. And no, she hadn’t seen anyone loitering around the school, nor Emily with anyone aside from her mother-by that she meant Lorraine. If Diana had been skulking by the gates, she had not been noticed. Naylor thanked her and arranged to return the following afternoon and speak to the supply teacher who took over after lunch.
In the hope that the more recent incident might have jogged something loose in their memories, he traveled the short distance to Gloria Summers’s school, there in the shadow of the high-rises where her brief life had been lived. But it had not.
By three-thirty Naylor was exhausted and thought he now knew why so many teachers had the appearance of marathon runners. Losers, at that. More than anything else, it had to be the kids, the sheer numbers, the noise of which they were capable. Racing across the playground or tumbling over the apparatus, sitting cross-legged close to the piano, heads thrown back and mouths wide open. Another thing Naylor had noticed: if there was one white face among every twenty Asian or black-every thirty in Gloria’s school-it was a surprise.
Naylor tried not to feel that it was wrong, remembering a film set in the States, the South, Mississippi Burning. The racist deputy looking at a black child in his wife’s arms, their maid’s child. Isn’t it amazing, he says, how they can look so cute when they’re little and grow into such animals. Naylor knew that wasn’t what he thought. Animals. Though there were those he worked with that did. Even so-leaving the single-story building with its copperplate signs in English and Urdu, crossing towards the gate where the mothers in richly colored saris waited for their children-was this the sort of school he would want his child to come to? His and Debbie’s? The only white girl in her class. He didn’t see how that could be right.
Not that, if things carried on the way they were, he was going to have a lot of say. Getting into the car, he made up his mind to phone Debbie once he’d finished his report. If it meant he had to speak to her cow of a mother, well and good.
“You mean she’s a lezzie,” Alison said with a laugh.
Patel gestured awkwardly. “Possibly.”
“Well, from what she said. And if this Diana’s been going up there every weekend, there’s obviously something going on.”