As She Left It (16 page)

“Little Craig,” Pep said. “About what really happened that night.” Then he stopped and turned right round in his seat to face her. “You’re a sensible girl, Opal, aren’t you? You’d not get any daft ideas?”

Opal stared at him.

“What night?” she said, because Craig disappeared on a Saturday morning, so far as anyone knew. But Mr. Kendal was back in the past, and he didn’t hear her.

TWENTY

O
PAL’S HEART WAS BANGING
in her chest again, and she wondered if the pulse in the soft part of her throat was showing.

“He used to hide in the van, see?” Pep said. “Not just the van—he’d hide anywhere he could—but the van was a big draw. Many’s the time we’d find him in there mucking about with our kit and have to drag him out by the scruff. And once he got locked in there on a hot day and he was like a little grease spot by the time we found him.” He gave a snort that might have been laughter. “Fishbo wanted to throw a bucket of water over him, but I talked him down to a wet flannel and
a suck of an ice cube. Margaret and Denny just laughed and gave him a clip round the ear.”

“But surely, that Saturday morning, you checked the van,” Opal said. “I don’t see what’s worrying you.”

“Well, see, once or twice we
didn’t
find him, that’s the trouble,” Pep said. “Once we didn’t find him until we’d got all the way to Bradford and started unloading. Margaret and Denny weren’t on the phone, and I didn’t want to get Mrs. Pickess involved and have her wagging her finger at Margaret forevermore, so we just drove him back again and dumped him out in the back lane. I brought him once—the Bradford time—and the boys just had to do without a piano till I was back again. And another time we were out at Pudsey, and it was a short set, just a spot at a festival, so we just bought him a coke and a bag of crisps and … ”

“What did Margaret say?” Opal asked.

“She didn’t know,” Pep said. “It was two hours all told he was gone. And when I took him back in the gate from the lane, she just seemed to think he’d been hanging around out of sight for a while.”

“You must have wondered why they were in such a state the morning he disappeared for good then,” Opal said.

“Yeah,” Pep said. “I was that. At first anyway. The thing is, we’d been away out to a gig in Shipley the night before.”

“The night before?” said Opal.

“And Craig had been in the van the night before. Sometime the afternoon before anyway.”

“How do you know?”

“A wrapper,” said Pep. “From an ice pop. You know those things? A blue one. It was tucked right down the side of the wheel arch.”

“Yeah, but you said he ducked into the van a lot. He could have left that anytime, couldn’t he?”

Pep shook his head.

“Margaret still had five more in a box in her freezer. And she’d never bought that kind before. The police made quite a thing out of that blue ice pop. They looked all over for the wrapper. Never found it.”

“They didn’t find it in the van?”

“I told them we’d been late back from Shipley Friday night and didn’t even unload the gear. Just locked it up tight and didn’t open it again until Karen came out shouting and wailing on the Saturday morning. No more than the truth. It was later, next day, when I found the wrapper.”

“But … ” Opal couldn’t see her way through this at all. “If Craig disappeared on Saturday morning, it’s no matter where he ate an ice pop on Friday night. The cops wouldn’t have been interested anyway.”

“True enough,” said Pep. “
If
he disappeared Saturday morning. But he didn’t, did he?”

Opal was sure she could hear the beat of her heart even over the rasping in and out of her breath. What was he saying? How did he know when Craig went missing? What exactly had Fishbo covered up for him?

“Why are you telling me this?” she said. She heard the old dining chair he was sitting on creak as he turned to look at her again, even more sharply this time.

“You okay?” he said. “I didn’t mean to upset you. Shouldn’t rake stuff over, I suppose.”

Of course she wasn’t
okay
. It was happening again. Zula knew when Craig went missing. She grudged her boys being questioned about Saturday morning when she
knew
little Craig had gone missing Friday night. And Vonnie Pickess knew too; she’d let it slip that Friday night parties might be part of the story some way. And now here was Pep Kendal saying it straight out. Craig had gone missing on Friday.

And how did they all know that if none of them had anything to do with where he’d gone?

“I’m fine,” she said.

“I thought you said Margaret told you all about it,” Pep said.

“She—She did.”

“Of course she did,” Pep said. He started a laugh that ended up as a sigh and shook his head. “She can’t help herself.”

“Oh!” Opal said, and she sat back against the living room window so hard she could hear the putty grating. “
That’s
how you know? Margaret told you?”

“What did you think?”

“Margaret told me it was a secret. She said she had to tell someone or she’d burst.”

“She probably says that every time,” Pep said. “Or maybe she’s lost track. She’s on six different pills for her nerves, you know. She told Fishbo first and you want to be sure she said it was a secret to him. Of course, he came straight out and told me. Said he’d sooner die than tell the cops Margaret’s secret and get me into trouble.”

“
Would
you have got into trouble?” Opal said.

“If I’d told the police he’d been in the van the night he went missing? I think that would be enough, don’t you? And if I told them I’d had him away to Bradford and out at Pudsey and never told his granny? Added to someone round here telling them I was … What do you think?”

“But he didn’t actually stow away with you that last night, did he?” Opal said. Pep sat forward and clasped his hands, staring at the pavement, where a short line of ants was rippling along a crack in the concrete, scaling a crown of dandelion and disappearing down its far side.

“I’ve gone over it and over it,” he said. “And there’s no way. The van was open when it was empty, but when it’s empty there’s nowhere to hide. As soon as we’d put the gear in we locked it up, and the next time we opened it was at Shipley in the function room car park, and I stood in the back the whole time while the boys were unloading. It’s a rough old place; I’d never leave a van open and no one watching.”

“So he couldn’t have been in there.”

“Couldn’t have been. And that’s what I told Fishbo. And that’s why he kept the ice pop quiet for me.”

At that moment, the coughing started again upstairs in the bedroom, and Opal and Pep listened to it in silence for a while. The retching was worse at the end of the bout this time, but eventually he quieted again.

“
Hoo-yah
!” he said. “Still down there, old friend?”

“You okay?” Pep called up to him.

“I’m okay,” the voice came back down. “Lost my damn lunch on my damn pee-jays, all the same.”

“Lovely!” said Pep, getting to his feet. He shook his head and laughed, looking down at Opal. “Can’t say I’m not repaying him.”

“No-o,” said Opal slowly. “But if you want to say thanks in a big way, I’ve thought of how.”

“Bigger than putting up with him for all these long years? Listening to his yakking on and acting like a nurse in a striped pinny?”

“Well, nicer,” Opal said. “A what do you call it—a grand gesture. Not just housework and stuff.”

“Yeah?” said Pep.

“He really wants to see his family again,” Opal said. “Or at least hear some news from them.”

But Pep was shaking his head, that same twisted smile on his face as the last time Opal had tried to talk to him about Fishbo going home. “You just keep out of it, Opal love,” he said. “Take it from me and don’t go meddling.”

“Pep?” came Fishbo’s voice, high and querulous.

“I’m coming, I’m coming,” Pep shouted. “Just having a word with Opal Jones.”

“Don’t you bring me any visitors up here.” Fishbo sounded panicked now. “I ain’t fit for comp’ny. You tell her to git gone. No visitors today.”

“Looks like you’re on your own changing the pajamas,” said Opal. She waited until he had gone inside and shut the door before she went over the road and in at her own.

It was cool in the living room—or as cool as anywhere would be tonight anyway—and it was pleasant to stand there halfway back where she could see all four houses across the way without any chance of being seen. Even more pleasant to let herself feel the relief of understanding.

Margaret had told them all.
That
was why Zula looked so shifty, and why Mrs. Pickess had tried to cover her slip. They knew, but they didn’t know Opal knew. She nodded to herself and turned towards the kitchen to go and make her tea.

She never got there. She stopped in the doorway and felt the relief drain out of her, could have sworn she could feel it literally pouring out through the soles of her feet, sucking her in to the carpet, leaving her heavy and soft like she’d never move again. Margaret told them to keep the secret, but why
had
they?

Pep Kendal was keeping his head down. Fishbo was being a good friend, keeping his down too. But why had Zula Joshi not told the police it was Friday instead of Saturday morning? Friday, when her boys were safely at school. And Mrs. Pickess! Mrs. Pickess, who tattled on Nicola for no reason at all. Would Vonnie Pickess ever have kept Margaret’s secret in a million years?

Opal put her two hands on the frame of the kitchen door and pulled herself forwards, setting her feet moving again, making herself stumble out onto the linoleum.
It’s the heat
, she told herself.
I’m light-headed from heat, that’s all. And I’ve drunk nothing since dinner break either. I’m dehydrated; that’s all that’s wrong with me.

But it wasn’t. It was this: if Margaret told Zula, Mrs. Pickess, and Fishbo—all her old neighbors of years and years—wouldn’t she have told Nicola too? And wouldn’t Nicola have blabbed a juicy story like that to a hundred different people on one of her wild Friday nights? Or down at the pub or sitting on a bus or any of the places she opened her mouth and let every single little bit of her business come dolloping out? Only she couldn’t have, could she? Because nobody knew. And so she must have had some really good reason for keeping her trap shut.

Opal stood at the sink, stared out into the yard, and tried to think of some way around it. There wasn’t one. If Zula choosing not to get her boys out from under suspicion was weird, if Mrs. Pickess not dropping her old friend right in it and calling it her Christian duty was weirder, Nicola Jones managing to keep something quiet for any other reason except to save her own neck was a million miles the weirdest idea of all.

TWENTY
-
ONE

O
N THE OTHER HAND,
though, the new discovery—finding out that everyone in Mote Street knew everything—meant that Opal wasn’t
special
after all. She hadn’t been chosen by Margaret, there was no golden thread. Which meant she could stop anytime she wanted. No harm no foul, whatever that meant.

Only that would be like saying she was too scared to go on. Scared of what she might find out. About her own mother. Like she was saying she thought her mum might really have hurt a child. Somewhere deep down inside her, like a pit dug under a tunnel that ran below the basement of her memories, something moved. She ignored it. And decided to carry on.

So she cleared off her kitchen table and sat down with a clean pad of paper. If she was going to keep her mind focused on the right questions—not let it drift off around a load of useless old junk that was nothing to do with anything (absolutely nothing at all)—she had to get organised about it. Pep was in the clear. Opal wrote his name at the top of the first sheet and drew a thick, deliberate tick beside it. He was no fiddler. She’d been in and out of his house from when she could toddle over and hold a cornet to her lips. And there were four others who would have seen Craig Southgate in the back of the van when they opened up at the function room in Shipley to take out their gear. She went over the tick again, even harder. Pep had a good innocent reason for keeping his head down and not telling the police how long the kid had been missing before his mum and granny knew.

But what about—Opal turned to a new page—Fishbo? He had heard Margaret’s confession—the first time she’d made it, Pep said—and he hadn’t breathed a word. Loyalty, Pep reckoned. He didn’t want to get his old friend hauled over the coals. But couldn’t his loyalty help Pep anyway? If Fish told the cops that Craig disappeared on Friday, he could also tell them there was no way the boy could have ended up locked inside the van. So was it loyalty to Margaret then? Was Fishbo particularly close to Margaret? Or Denny, maybe? Opal didn’t think so. Maybe he just didn’t want to get involved, or he didn’t think much of the law, or by the time Margaret told him it was too late to make any difference anyway and his kind heart didn’t want to see her shamed and hurting.

After all,
Opal
wasn’t about to tell on Margaret, was she? Why couldn’t Fishbo feel the same? She put her pen against the paper by his name, but instead of the big black tick she was planning, she found herself drawing a question mark there.

Because Opal knew why
she’d
never tell the police a single damn thing. She hated the bastards. Hated the way they looked at her mum and the way they spoke, all kind and calm on the surface with their little eyes like pebbles and nothing moving in their faces except their thin mouths. She had never seen a cop with big eyes or full lips. Not one. Asking all their questions, calling her
love
and
pet
and
darling
, and poke poke poking to get her to say what they wanted to hear. “Do you get to school every day, love?” “Do you get your breakfast, dinner, and tea every day, pet?” “Does anyone who comes to the house ever bother you, my darling?”