“You couldn’t find anything that you liked, then?”
“Sorry?”
“Books. You’ve not got any books with you.” She spoke very slowly, then looked pityingly at her neighbour.
“No. I wasn’t there to borrow. I wanted to look something up in the reference.”
“A shame,” she said. “It can be very healing, a good story.”
He was saved the necessity of replying because the bus arrived, spluttering and spewing out diesel fumes from the exhaust into the cold air. Michael had to pay full fare because he’d never bothered to get a pensioner’s pass and half the way home he had to put up with the Elvet women telling him how to go about applying for one. The bus dropped them all outside the church and Michael stood there for a moment to give the women time to move away.
He looked across the street at the Captain’s House. He could see there was a fire in the grate in the front room. Emma Bennett came out and closed the door behind her. She paused for a moment then walked up the street. She looked very smart in a long black coat, and he wondered where she could be going. She didn’t have the baby with her and he thought James must be inside. It was tempting just to knock at the door and confront him with the questions he had to ask. At least that way they wouldn’t still be inside his head. But James had always intimidated him, even when they’d worked together every day. He thought he’d have to find another way. He couldn’t face the bungalow and started walking out of the village, towards the sea.
When he’d been living on the Point with Peg, there’d been nights when he’d walked home from the Anchor. Not because he was scared of getting done for drunk driving once in a blue moon you’d see a cop in Elvet then. It wasn’t like now. Since this latest murder every other person you saw was a stranger and you could tell, even if they weren’t in uniform, that they were police. No, he’d walked then for the pleasure of it. A good night and a belly of beer, then the walk down the Point with the river on one side and the sea on the other, and knowing that Peg would be waiting for him in the big, soft bed. Just the starry sky and anticipation. That was how it had been, hadn’t it? He hated the thought that his memory might be playing tricks.
He’d started out on foot just because there was a relief in the exercise, though the walk seemed harder and longer than he remembered, with a stiff breeze from the south blowing into his face. But it helped him think more clearly too and he saw what he should do. He’d talk to Wendy, the coxswain of the pilot launch. She’d been friendly with James Bennett from the start, before he was so highly qualified, before he’d moved to Elvet. Before he’d married. Michael had even wondered if there’d been more between them than friendship, though he hadn’t been around to find out. He’d only worked with Wendy for a few weeks, a period of han dover before he’d retired. If James Bennett, usually so stiff and reserved, had confided in anyone about his past, it would have been Wendy.
It was mid afternoon before he reached the pilot station and the light was starting to go. Stan, the second coxswain, was on duty. He was sitting at the desk, his legs in front of him, reading the paper and drinking tea. When Michael walked in you’d have thought he’d seen a ghost. “Eh, lad, what are you doing here?”
Michael thought it had been a fair few years since he’d been called a lad.
“Just a bit of a constitutional,” he said. “You’re busy, I see.”
“Another half hour and I’ll be out to collect a pilot.”
“Which one?”
“A new man called Evans. You’ll not know him.”
“Do you know if Wendy’s around?”
“Her day off. She’ll be in the cottage if she’s not out gallivanting.”
“Does she do a lot of that these days?”
“More than she used to. I think there’s a new man in her life, but she’ll not let on.”
Michael went back outside before Stan could ask what he was after. The grey bulk of a tanker was moving up the river, approaching the mouth of the estuary. It had started to spit with rain.
It was odd to knock at the door of the cottage after so many years of just letting himself in. There was a light on upstairs and the sound of music so he knew she was there. He knocked again more loudly. At last there were noises inside water in a drain, someone clattering down the stairs and she opened the door to him. She was wearing a dressing gown and her hair was wrapped in a towel. She recognized him at once and was surprised. If it had been someone else, he thought, she’d have been angry about being disturbed. One good thing about being bereaved. People felt they had to be kind to you.
“Sorry,” she said. “I was in the bath.”
Her feet were bare and he couldn’t stop staring at them, at the feet and the smooth legs which disappeared into the to welling robe. He imagined her lying in the bath, shaving them. Her toenails were painted silver. Who was there to see them this time of year? It wasn’t the weather for sandals. He stared at the painted nails, couldn’t stop.
“Can I help you, Michael?” she said, trying to keep the impatience from her voice. He realized she’d been waiting for him to explain why he was there.
“Maybe I should come in. You’ll be catching your death standing there with the door open.”
She nodded, giving in to the inevitable. “Just give me a minute. I’ll get some clothes on.”
She let him into the kitchen and left him there. In Peg’s day he would have taken off his shoes before going in, but now there didn’t seem much point. He would never have recognized it. He could tell that underneath the mess nothing much had changed. They were the same cupboards and benches Peg had chosen from the MFI on the ring road. But everywhere there was clutter. Dirty washing spilling out from a basket, a pyramid of shoes and boots, mucky plates and pots, drying cat food on a purple plastic dish. He didn’t know what to make of it. He tried to work up some indignation, told himself Peg would have a fit if she could see it, then thought it didn’t really matter. When Wendy came back in, dressed in tracksuit bottoms and top, slippers too big for her, she cleared some clothes from a chair and sat down.
“Now then, Michael, what can I do for you?” Not unfriendly but brisk, making it clear she couldn’t give him much of her time. No offer of tea either, and after the walk he was gasping.
Now, he wasn’t sure how to start. On his way he should have planned how to go about it. He shouldn’t have let his mind wander back to the good times.
“It’s about James,” he said. “James Bennett. How well do you know him?”
“What are folk saying?” She narrowed her eyes, seemed to curl back in her chair like a cat ready to spring.
“Nothing. Nothing like that.”
“Only you know what it’s like, one woman working with men, people make up all sorts.”
“No,” he said. “But I thought he might have talked to you, that’s all.”
“What about?”
“His childhood, where he grew up. That sort of thing.”
“Why would you want to know?”
He felt the room swim around him as he grasped for an explanation which would satisfy her. “I thought I might have known him when he was a lad.”
“Oh.”
Again the spinning panic. “Did he go to the Trinity House School?”
“No, he’s not a Trinity House lad.”
“Local, though?”
“I don’t think he’s ever said. He’s not one for chatting. He doesn’t give much of himself away… Michael, what is all this about?”
“Like I said, I thought I knew him. Came across an old photo. It was the spitting image. But he wasn’t calling himself Bennett in those days. Shaw, that was his name. I wondered if he’d talked about it to you.” He realized he was gabbling. She was looking at him as if he was one of those mad old men let out into community care, who rant to themselves as they walk down the street. He wondered, as he had that day talking to Peg’in the cemetery, if that was what he’d come to in the end. Perhaps that was what he’d come to already.