Then Porteous tried again. He wanted to know if Mel had ever been pregnant. Not now, but at some time in the past. The question was so delicately put together that not even Joe was offended.
‘No,’ Joe said. ‘Of course not. She’d have told me.’
‘Would she?’
Joe didn’t answer that because there were lots of things Mel hadn’t liked to talk about.
Rosie though was certain. ‘It’s not possible. Mel would never get pregnant. She was paranoid about it, wasn’t she, Joe?’
Joe nodded sadly in agreement and Rosie continued.
‘She had to be in control of her body. Completely. That was what the food thing was all about. And if there was some accident, some mistake, she’d get rid of it immediately.’
‘Was there ever any accident?’
‘No,’ Joe said. ‘Not while she was with me.’
‘Are you sure?’ When there was no reply, he added. ‘No matter. The pathologist will be able to tell us.’
Rosie was daydreaming again. She and Mel had talked about children on one of their girlie nights together. She’d slept on the sofa bed in Mel’s room and they’d got through a bottle of wine each when they’d got back from the pub. Mel had got a bit soppy about the kid she used to babysit, but she’d made it clear a family wasn’t part of her future. ‘Your life’s not your own if you’re a mother,’ she’d said, shuddering. Though what could she know?
‘Eleanor seems to manage OK.’
‘That’s different. I’m old enough to look after myself. I don’t bother her any more. She wasn’t so keen when I was little.’ She’d paused. ‘I want to be someone. You can’t concentrate on what you want to do if you’re surrounded by screaming kids.’
And then, lying on top of her bed, propped up on one elbow, Mel had squinted across at Rosie. ‘What about you? I can see you as an earth mother. Married. A cottage in the country. Four or five kids, a goat and some hens scratching about in the garden.’ Rosie had laughed then, but something about the image still appealed.
She was brought back to the pub by a sudden blast from the jukebox, a couple of bikers laughing. Porteous gave her another pleading look but she ignored it. She told him she had nothing else to say and offered to look after the bar so they could talk to Frank.
Frank must have realized that Porteous would want to talk to him about the bloke who’d been in the Prom asking after Mel, but he didn’t seem very pleased about it.
‘Look, I don’t think I can be much help…’
‘Don’t be daft, Frank. No one else can remember him.’
And she gave him a playful little push, sending him out into the room. He looked shaky, panicky, walking towards the policeman as if he were already about to go into the witness box. From the bar she couldn’t hear exactly what the group in the corner were saying, but Frank was facing her and she saw him staring blankly, occasionally shaking his head. His eyes were unfocused, wandering. It was as if he wasn’t really thinking about the questions and the answers. He was just trying to survive the interview, waiting for it to be over.
The next day she tackled him about it. She’d been thinking about it all night. Frank had liked Mel, in the way that he seemed to like all the young people who came into the Prom. He’d joked with her, acted sometimes as father-confessor, standing at the bar for ages listening to all her troubles. So why had he been so reluctant to discuss her with the police?
She waited until about five o’clock when they had their meal break together and she could get him on his own. They sat in the little staff-room which led off the kitchen. They propped the outside door wide open and sat beside it on old bar stools, their plates on their knees, looking out at the pavement. Families were already trailing back from the beach, the children fractious and covered in sand, the parents loaded with towels and toys. There was the hot smell of drying seaweed and frying onions from the burger stall at the fair.
‘What was going on yesterday, Frank?’
‘What do you mean?’ He was defensive. He had the same unfocused look in his eyes as when he’d been talking to Porteous. She thought: But he can’t be scared of me. Frank had always been the boss. He knew everything there was to know about running a bar. She’d been the dippy teenager who couldn’t pour a decent pint, who couldn’t get up in the mornings, who turned into work with seconds to spare. He teased her and poked fun in a slightly flirty way which kept her wary. Something new was going on here which she didn’t quite understand. The power in the relationship had shifted.
‘Well, it didn’t look as if you were being particularly cooperative,’ she said, carefully keeping her voice neutral.
He wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.
‘Don’t you want to catch the bloke who killed Mel?’
‘I don’t think the chap that came in that night did kill her.’
‘How did you know that, Frank?’
He shook his head, a refusal to answer.
‘If you knew anything you should have told the police.’
An open-top bus rattled past. A party of kids on the top deck all held helium-filled balloons. Rosie imagined the bus rising slowly in the air, carried slowly out to sea. Frank took a mouthful of sandwich, muttered something which she couldn’t make out.
‘What was that?’ Sharply. Sounding like her mother trying to teach him table manners.
‘I said I’ve had dealings with the police. I know what they’re like. They’d set me up given half a chance. Best policy’s not to say anything.’
‘Nobody’s saying you’d ever harm Mel. Why would you?’
He turned to her. Grateful, sad puppy eyes were focused properly on hers for the first time. ‘I’ve got a record. That’d be enough for them.’
She hadn’t known about the record. Again she looked at him in a new light. She wondered what he’d been done for and if he’d ever been inside. She imagined him in Stavely asking her mother to find him books, then thought she couldn’t see him as the reading type.
‘But they’ll know you couldn’t have done it. You were working the night she disappeared.’
‘Only until closing time. I could have done anything after that. I live upstairs on my own, don’t I? Lisa won’t let the kids come to stay any more.’
Lisa was his ex. It was an old complaint. Rosie was irritated by the self-pity but she tried not to show it.
‘Did you go out?’ Rosie asked. She wanted to shake him. It was like speaking to a surly child.
He shook his head. ‘But if they make out I’m tied up in this case I’ll lose any chance I ever had of access.’
‘That’s ridiculous. The kids have nothing to do with this.’
Then she wondered if she’d been too hard on him. Frank doted on his children. Before Lisa started being awkward they’d come to stay at weekends. Rosie tried to understand what it must be like for him, how lonely he must feel. Perhaps that was why he was good at his job. He made an effort with the staff and the customers because without them he’d have no one to speak to. He ever talked about friends or other family.
‘Why did you say that about the bloke that came in here looking for Mel? I mean, how did you know he didn’t do it?’
‘He wasn’t the type.’
‘Come on, Frank. What is the type? You must listen to the news. Anyone can commit murder. Teachers, doctors, anyone. And if they find him, you’ll get the police off your back, won’t you? There won’t be anything to get in the way of the access application then.’
He put his empty plate on the floor. ‘You’re a good lass, Rosie. I’ll miss you when you go to college.’
Oh God, she thought. A revelation. He wants to get inside my knickers.
‘I’ve got a lot to lose,’ he said.
‘What are you talking about?’
‘This place. It’s all I’ve got.’
‘So?’