Jeanie being locked up all that time, for her desperation and suicide.
He got the bus into the town up the coast where Mantel had first made his money. He knew it had a decent-sized library. The high school was there too and he shared the bus with kids on their way in. He told himself this was a nuisance and indeed the noise of shrieking girls and boys locked in continual mock battle irritated him to distraction. He muttered under his breath about feckless parents and bringing back national service. But it had its compensations. The bus was full and he was squeezed on a bench seat which faced into the aisle. Beside him was a girl of fourteen or fifteen, with a white powdery face and narrow eyes lined in black. She seemed too dignified for the chaos surrounding her and was annoyed as he was by the shouting and chucking of missiles. She sat with her legs crossed at the knee and her bag on her lap. “Why don’t you just grow up?” she snapped at a lad with a face scarred with acne when a pencil sharpener missed its target and hit her arm. Then she turned to Michael and rolled her eyes conspiratorially, as if they were the only sane ones there.
When they got off in Crill, in the windswept square close to the se afront he was reluctant to let her go. He was tempted to follow her, just for the pleasure of watching her walk. She had a straight back, long legs, a’ haughty tilt to her head. But he told himself he had work to do. In the square, council workmen were erecting Christmas lights from a truck with a hydraulic lift. The library was a grand building with pillars in the front and wide stone steps leading to a double door. It was shut and wouldn’t open until nine thirty. His irritation returned. He ranted under his breath about the idleness of the staff. He could have walked with the girl as far as the school, after all. Then he told himself it wouldn’t do to get into a state. Peg had always warned him he would get into serious bother one day if he didn’t learn to calm down.
He asked one of the workmen where he could get a coffee and he was pointed down a narrow street. The place was called Val’s Diner and was full of noise and steam. It reminded him of the cafe on the Point. The bacon in his sandwich was just as he liked it crisp and brittle and his temper improved. These days, he thought, it took something that small to alter his mood. He wondered if he’d always been like that and if everyone was the same.
He knew the woman who ran the local history library. She was called Lesley and she was efficient and jolly with a loud voice, which made the readers in the reference section look up and tut in disapproval. He’d first met her just before he’d retired. He’d started to get nostalgic about what he was giving up. Lesley held the archive of the lifeboat station and the pilot office on the Point, and he’d come in to look up the history. There’dbeen one photo, he remembered, of the house where he’d lived all those years with Peg. It had been taken in the twenties, and the Point had been quite different then. The dunes had stretched further and the two cottages and the lighthouse had been the only buildings. Outside their cottage, a man with a large grey moustache had been leaning against the wall by the front door, glaring out at the camera.
Lesley was sitting at her desk and looked up when she saw him approaching. He could see from her face that she’d read about Jeanie in the papers, but she didn’t say anything. She didn’t even show that she recognized him, which he found upsetting, because when he’d been doing his research into the Point, he’d thought she liked him. He explained that he was interested in the back issues of the local paper going back twenty, even thirty years. “They are available?”
“Oh yes,” she said, and she smiled. “Are you after anything specific?” Because she was still sitting at her desk, she seemed to be squinting up at him.
“No! Nothing like that. Just general interest.” Immediately he was sorry that he’d been so sharp, but she hadn’t seemed to have noticed. She sat him in front of the microfiche machine and showed him how to use it, repeating the instructions patiently when he asked her to.
“If you need anything, just give me a shout.” Her voice carried across the large room and she could have been talking to any of the customers there.
He started at the time of Abigail’s murder and worked back. At first he found himself distracted by other stories. Not the murder. He moved quickly past that and when he came across a photo of Jeanie he shut his eyes. He couldn’t bear the thought of her captured in the machine where anyone could come and stare at her. It was the less dramatic stories which caught his attention. The largest container ship ever to come into the Humber. Cows wandering across the river at low tide and becoming stranded on a sandbank. A festival of tall ships in the estuary. When he looked up at the clock on the wall it was nearly eleven and he’d found nothing useful. He forced himself to move on more quickly and began to find mentions of
Keith Mantel. Flashes in words and photographs. Michael began tracking him back in time. It was like watching a jerky old film played in reverse.
The most recent reports, the ones he came to first, were positive and he had to stop himself from sneering out loud. There was a picture of Keith Mantel standing beside a giant cardboard cheque, Mantel Development’s donation to a charity which provided respite care for disabled children. A beaming girl reached out from her wheelchair to hold the other end of the cheque. Keith Mantel with a group of others, appointed as NHS trustees for the local hospital. Keith Mantel in Wellingtons, planting a tree in the wildlife garden of a junior school. Michael muttered under his breath about the gullibility of the public, but looking at the smiling, confident face, he thought if he hadn’t known any better, if he hadn’t tangled with Mantel in the village, he’d have fallen for it too. He’d have believed in Mantel, the entrepreneur with a social conscience.
As he followed Mantel’s story back, his memory was wakened. Occasional references triggered a recollection of incidents he’d investigated before, when his only reason for disliking Mantel was that the businessman was an arrogant sod who’d tried to undermine his position in the village. A brief report about the grand opening of a leisure centre took him back to a conversation with an old friend. They’d been to school together, but Lawrence Adams had been promoted within the family business and suddenly turned gentleman. He’d taken up golf and got himself elected as Tory councillor. A couple of big contracts had been awarded to Mantel and Michael had been sniffing around to find out why. They’d met, at Lawrence’s request, in a small, rundown pub near Hull prison. It had seemed a strange place for a rendezvous, not Lawrence’s usual sort of haunt.
“Why here?” Michael had asked.
“No one will recognize me here.”
And Michael had liked that. He’d realized that this was a kindred spirit, someone else to share his paranoia about Mantel.
“Mantel can’t get at you, can he?” He’d thought Lawrence had too much money to be corruptible.
“He can get at anyone. Just keep out of his way.”
And then he’d rambled about the leisure centre, not making too much sense, so Michael thought he’d been drinking before he’d arrived. “It should never have gone to him. We came to a decision at the planning committee. All sorted we thought. Then suddenly the preferred contractor withdrew. No reason given. So it went to Mantel in the end.” Lawrence had looked up from his beer. “You know how he started, don’t you? How he first made his money?” That was when Michael had heard the story of the old lady leaving Mantel her house, the story he’d passed on to Vera Stanhope when she’d knocked at his door. And he still wasn’t sure how true it was.