And then she’d started in with the prophecies and the sure and certain hope and the life everlasting-which was why we’d been talking about it in the first place, her going on about how her mum died and who was to blame, and me asking why it was blame if death was the start of the good bit. Why not credit? If the Bible was true, then death was great and murder was a helping hand.
I blinked and peered through the dark to the faint gleam of the woman copper’s face.
And what about suicide? It wasn’t throwing away God’s greatest gift at all, was it? Not if the greatest gift came after. It was just kind of… impatient and sort of greedy. Except not even the happiest of the clappiest actually saw it that way. And those cults that off themselves by the thousands? Even the Brethren think they’re nutters as well as sinners. Which they shouldn’t, actually.
“So,” said the copper, “ask me.”
I blinked and refocussed on her. “Do pregnant women really kill themselves a lot?” She breathed in sharply. “My friend at work said yes, but it’s just so horrible.”
“Mrs. King wasn’t pregnant, was she?” said the cop. “Was she?” An actual question.
“Gus didn’t tell you?”
“I can’t discuss Mr. King’s statement with you,” she said, back in charge of herself again.
“Isn’t that a reason to do a full PM?”
“It’s Mr. King’s decision.”
But then what had they meant by her lifestyle? I thought they meant her running around and getting knocked up.
“Can I ask you another question?” I said.
“I really can’t discuss it with you.”
“No,” I said. “This is something completely else. You know Becky’s friend, who went away?”
“No.”
I kept my sigh really quiet. I didn’t want to piss her off; she wasn’t exactly helpful to begin with. “Gus didn’t mention her? Okay. Well, how do you try to find a missing person is what I wanted to ask.”
“Is she over twenty-one? Any reason to suspect foul play?”
Did wads of sequential notes and the most terrified person I’d ever seen in my life count as reasons? “As far as I know, she’s over twenty-one.”
“You don’t know her all that well then,” the cop informed me.
“I don’t know her at all,” I said. “Never met her. Gus does, though. Can a friend report a friend missing? It doesn’t have to be family?”
“Mr. King’s got enough on his plate,” she said. “He wants to get in touch with the hill walker that found his wife, you know. Say thank you. Not everyone would do that.” She sounded less cold and blank when she spoke about “Mr. King.” Could Gus have charmed her? Well, I suppose he’d charmed me.
“I just thought it would help if we could find Ros,” I said. “She could fill in the blanks. Closure, you know.”
“Blanks?” she said. “Mr. King has said very clearly he’s satisfied with what we’ve done. And there’s nothing like a funeral for closure, anyway.”
Which is total guff. The funeral keeps you busy and it’s basically a party, and it’s not till afterwards that you realise the guest of honour is really and truly dead. Or it’s afterwards, anyway, that you start to get that dead means gone, and gone means forever. And that’s when heaven and angels and life eternal count for nothing, and the holiest get just as sad as the rest of us, and that says a lot, if you ask me.
Maybe the copper was right, though. Gus was better after they’d gone away. He made pancakes for us, tossing them and catching nearly all of them, and he shut the bathroom door and got in the bath with the kids while I cleared it all away.
When he came back through in his dressing gown with his wet hair in a towel, he sat down in his armchair by the fire and stretched like a cat. “That’s that then,” he said. “Done and dusted. Just the funeral to go.”
“You didn’t tell the cops she was pregnant,” I said, just like that.
“Eh?” He sat forward and unwrapped his hair, started rubbing it hard. It would frizz like hell unless he had some pretty posh conditioner on it. Which didn’t seem likely.
“So why aren’t the police wondering why she did it?” I said. “What did they mean about her lifestyle?”
“Yeah,” he said. “No, that’s all fine. I told them about her and Ros.”
“You what?” I knew I was gaping at him, couldn’t help it. “That’s not-That was just Steve at work!”
He was raking his fingers through his wet hair. It stretched and snapped, and when he had finished there was a cat’s cradle of hairs caught in his fingers. So much hair, his scalp must be throbbing.
“I had to say something,” he said. “They knew it wasn’t an accident. They saw the note.” He rubbed his hands together and made a ball of hair, threw it in the fire. It hissed and there was sudden stink, like witchcraft. “You showed them the note, Jessie. They were never going to think it was an accident after that.”
And I dropped my eyes. That was true. It was my fault.
“Well, there’s one good thing then,” I said. “Surely if they think Ros leaving is why Becky… they’ll be willing to try to find her. I asked that Gail-outside-but it has to be someone who knows her. It would have to be you.”
His hair in the fire was still fizzing. I had to breathe through my mouth to stop smelling it and feeling sick.
“You asked the cops to look for Ros,” he said. And it was like he’d been taking lessons from Gail, because it wasn’t a question at all.
“Maybe I should go home for a bit.” I hadn’t planned to say it. It just formed in my mouth and was out before I knew.
“But they told you it would have to be me.” Like he hadn’t heard me.
“Or her sister, I suppose,” I said. Maybe he hadn’t heard me. “If she phones again, we could tell her. Or we could phone her back and tell her.”
“Please don’t go.” He had heard me, then. He leaned forward and picked up the poker, shoved the ball of hair deep into the heart of the fire. The crackling stopped and the smell faded away. “Please stay, Jessie. I’m sorry it’s so tough for you, but please stay.”
I nodded, relieved. I didn’t know what I’d done wrong, but I wanted to make up for it. Even though that felt like ten steps back. It felt like I was sixteen again, like a shitload of grunt work on Caroline’s couch had been blown completely away.
“They wouldn’t give me the hill walker’s address,” he was saying. “Can you believe that? They said I could write to him, and if he wanted to he could write back to me. A letter! Not even an e-mail.”
“Will you?” I said.
He nodded. “I really want to pay him back. Try to anyway. And one day,” he reached out towards me, “one day soon, I’ll find a way to pay you back for everything you’ve done too. Everything you’re doing. I’ll find a way.”
Seventeen
Monday, 10 October
I really needed space to think it through. To try to sort out Ros and the money and Kazek and Gus and the pregnancy and post-mortem and inquest and what anything meant. A long walk along the beach on Sunday would have done it, but Sunday was worse than Saturday for kids and caravans, so I held out for Monday and the prospect of shutting the office door. Dot, though, was in a talkative mood, like a budgie on my shoulder all morning.
“Father Tommy said there was something wrong right from the start,” she opened with. She had set up her ironing board across the doorway, trapping me in the office so she could talk it all out to me. The corruption poisoning the fairies at the bottom of the magic garden had got into the Scotsman.