Blind to the Bones (31 page)

Fry sat back, staring at the windows of the CID room without seeing them. At one time, that gallery of missing children on the NMPH website would have included Angela Fry, aged sixteen, last seen in Warley, West Midlands.

Diane had been fourteen in 1988, when Angie had left the foster home they were living in. It had been the year of the Lockerbie bomb, the year Salman Rushdie went into hiding and George Bush Senior had become president of the USA. But it had also been the year that Angie had left the foster home where they lived, and she was never seen again. Not by her sister, anyway.

Other kids remembered that year for Mutant Ninja Turtles and
Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure
, for Cagney and Lacey, and the Goss brothers with their mascara and lip gloss. Some of Diane's friends had been such huge Bros fans that they had worn black puffa jackets and ripped jeans, and Doc Martens with Grolsch bottle tops attached to the laces. But Diane had been fourteen then, and her foster parents hadn't allowed her to wear ripped jeans. She had made do with a Garfield toy with sucker pads on its feet that she had stuck to the window of the car when they had gone anywhere. Garfield had been helping her look for Angie in the Black Country streets they drove through.

But even Garfield had failed her. At nights, she had sat in her room and listened to pop music, wondering where Angie might have gone. Angie had mentioned Acid House raves, taking ecstasy and KLF. But Diane was listening to Belinda Carlisle ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth' and Bobby McFerrin – ‘Don't Worry, Be Happy'. The world had seemed a grey place. School had lost any interest for a while. West Bromwich Albion had been swilling around in Division Two, changing managers nearly every year. Ron Atkinson was the manager the boys had been talking about.

The small details were impressed on Fry's mind as if they might have been immensely important for capturing the memory. The last memory that she had of her sister, unusually excited as she pulled on her jeans to go out that night. She was going to a rave somewhere. There was a boy who was picking her up. Diane had wanted to know where, but Angie had laughed and said it was a secret. Raves were always held in secret locations, otherwise the police would be there first and stop them. But they were doing no harm, just having fun. And Angie had gone out one night, with their foster parents making only a token attempt to find out where she was going. Angie had already been big trouble for them by then, and was getting out of control.

Looking back, Fry knew she had worshipped her older sister, which was why she had been unable to believe anything bad of her. Every time they had been moved from one foster home to another, it had been their foster parents' fault, not Angie's.

And when Angie had finally disappeared from her life, at the age of sixteen, the young Diane had been left clutching an idealized image of her, like a final, faded photograph.

W
hen he got home to 8 Welbeck Street that evening, Ben Cooper found Mrs Shelley standing in the tiny hallway shared by the two flats. She was clutching something in a paper bag with mauve stripes, and she looked a bit surprised to see him.

‘Oh, it's you, Ben.'

‘Yes, I still live here, Mrs Shelley. Were you waiting to see me?'

‘No. I'm going upstairs.'

‘Oh, I see.'

‘She's very nice. You'll like her.'

‘Will I?'

‘Oh, yes.'

‘Who will I like?'

‘Peggy,' said Mrs Shelley, raising her voice a bit, as if she thought he might have gone deaf.

‘I don't know any Peggys. Wait a minute … is this somebody who's moving into the upstairs flat?'

‘Of course. I told you it was all arranged.'

‘No, you didn't.'

‘Well, it's all arranged anyway.'

‘Who is she, Mrs Shelley?'

‘Quite by chance, I have a friend who lives in Chicago. She emigrated to the USA with her family nearly thirty years ago.'

‘That's nice.'

‘We're old schoolfriends. I was very sad when she left. But her husband lost his job here during the seventies when the company he worked for went out of business, and they wanted to make a new life for themselves. I can't blame them really. He's in research.'

‘Very interesting.'

Cooper had learned just to make neutral noises while Mrs Shelley was speaking. Eventually, she might get round to telling him what he wanted to know, with a bit of nudging. But it was best to let her talk and get there at her own speed, otherwise she felt harassed and got irritable.

‘And this is the lady who's taking the upstairs flat?'

‘No, of course not. Peggy is her daughter.'

‘I see.'

‘Now, Ben, I don't want you to be rude to her.'

Cooper raised his hands. ‘Why on earth should I do that?'

‘Well, she's American, you know.'

‘There's nothing wrong with Americans.'

Mrs Shelley looked doubtful. ‘I'm not sure about that. She seems rather, well … exuberant.'

Cooper smiled. ‘I'm sure she'll be fine.'

‘She doesn't seem anything like my old friend, considering she's her daughter. I don't know what could have happened to her in Chicago. I suppose she must have got it from her father's side. What do you think of this? I bought it in a craft gallery in Buxton, near the Crescent.'

Mrs Shelley opened the striped bag and showed him the contents.

‘What on earth is it?'

It looked like an empty wooden shuttle from a cotton mill, but with dozens of little openings along its length, like tiny mouths with pouting lips. There was something slightly obscene about it. But maybe that was just his own imagination.

‘It's an Australian Banksia nut,' said Mrs Shelley.

‘A what?'

‘Well, that's what the label said. An Australian Banksia nut. It cost me £4.'

‘A bargain.'

‘Do you think she'll like it?'

Cooper raised her eyebrows. ‘Is this for my new neighbour?'

Mrs Shelley hesitated. ‘It's a house-warming present. I thought it might make a talking point.'

Cooper looked again at the object. The tiny mouths pouted and smirked, as if they were forming lewd words.

‘Well, I suppose that'll work,' he said.

A
s soon as he had settled in at Welbeck Street, Ben Cooper had asked Mrs Shelley if he could have bolts put on the front and back doors of his flat. The locks were OK, but they didn't give much security on their own. Diane Fry had warned him about living too close to the patch where he was so well known, and had advised him to have a spy-hole fitted on the front door, too, so that he could never be surprised by a caller. But that seemed to be going a bit too far; it was a little too paranoid. This was only Welbeck Street, Edendale, after all.

When the ring came on his bell, Cooper almost jumped with surprise. He had not thought a spy-hole was necessary. Now, though, he experienced a strange reluctance to open the door without being able to see who was on the other side. He couldn't call it foreboding exactly, more a need to be careful, a suspicion that opening the door could change his life.

The woman who stood on the doorstep was a complete stranger. She was in her thirties, thin, with straight fair hair. A battered blue rucksack was slung over the shoulder of her cotton jacket.

‘Oh, I think you rang the wrong bell,' said Cooper. ‘You'll be for the upstairs flat, won't you?'

She looked confused. ‘Are you Ben? Ben Cooper?'

‘Yes.'

‘Then, it's you I've come to see.'

‘Aren't you my new neighbour?'

‘I don't think so.'

‘Sorry. You're not Peggy, then?'

The woman shook her head. With each moment that she stood on his doorstep, she was starting to look more and more familiar. Each movement rang a bell in the back of Cooper's mind. Yet he was sure he had never met her before.

‘No, I'm not Peggy,' she said, ‘whoever she is.'

‘I don't really know who she is,' said Cooper. ‘Just that she's supposed to be moving into the flat upstairs. Are you sure you're nothing to do with her?'

‘Sure.'

‘So you must be selling something?'

‘No, not that either. My name's Angela. They call me Angie.'

‘I'm sorry, but I really don't know you.'

She laughed. ‘Angie Fry. Does that help?'

Gradually, Cooper began to recognize the resemblance around the eyes, the slim shoulders, and the way she stood, all the things that had rung so many bells. But he was still completely unprepared for the shock when she finally explained.

‘I'm Diane's sister,' she said.

H
oward Renshaw turned off the TV set when the news had finished. He and Sarah sat in silence for a few moments.

‘That chief inspector seemed a very sincere sort of man,' said Sarah. ‘He gives you the impression that he'll get things done.'

‘Yes,' said Howard.

He played with the remote control for a while, switching the power on and off, so that the red light on the set blinked and the static hissed.

‘Perhaps we should have talked to Neil Granger,' he said.

‘He's dead. It's too late.'

‘He might have mentioned Emma to someone.'

Sarah lifted her head and looked at her husband with interest. ‘There's Lucas Oxley. That's his uncle.'

‘I was thinking of the brother.'

‘Oh. Philip.'

‘That's him. I'm not sure where he lives now, but I could find out.'

‘Why not?' Sarah hesitated. ‘In fact, I'm surprised we haven't thought of it before.'

‘It was just this business of him getting killed that put it into my mind.'

Sarah stood up and moved towards the bookshelves, as if drawn by some force to caress the spines of the books, as she had so often.

‘I seem to remember you saying that the Grangers and the Oxleys weren't people that Emma would have bothered with. You said she would never have kept in touch with Neil Granger.'

‘Did I say that?'

Sarah frowned at one of the books, straightened a bookmark, then picked it up and held it to her face to smell it.

‘I'm sure you did.'

‘I might speak to this Philip anyway.'

With a sigh, Sarah leaned to rest her forehead against the wood of the bookshelf, closing her eyes as if in meditation or to see an internal vision more clearly.

‘I wonder what Emma is doing now,' she said. ‘What do you think?'

Howard turned away when she couldn't see him. He switched on the TV again, but turned the volume right down as he saw the adverts were still on.

‘I can't picture it,' he said.

‘I can. I picture it all the time, trying to see what she's doing at each hour of the day.'

‘Sarah,' said Howard, ‘have you ever thought it might be better if we knew that Emma wasn't alive any longer?'

His wife froze. Her eyes remained shut, but she was watching her internal vision shatter.

‘How can you say that?'

‘It was just that, listening to the chief inspector on the news talking about Neil Granger, it occurred to me that at least Granger's family would know what had happened to him and could say, “That was where it ended, this is where we start the rest of our lives.”'

‘I don't want to hear you talking like that again,' said Sarah, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘You know as well as I do that Emma is alive.'

‘Of course,' said Howard. ‘I'm sorry.'

Sarah turned and looked at him. But she could only see the back of his head, and his growing bald patch. Beyond him, the television screen was flickering into the opening credits of a wildlife programme. In the branches of a tree, a hook-beaked predator swivelled its head and stared with unblinking yellow eyes at the camera, ignoring the struggles of a small lizard that writhed in its talons.

B
en Cooper remembered the first time Diane Fry had mentioned her sister to him. It had made him feel guilty, as if he had dragged something painful out of her that she would rather have kept to herself. And he knew that Fry had been searching for that missing sister ever since she'd transferred to Derbyshire from the West Midlands. In fact, she had told him herself that it was the only reason she'd come to Edendale, desperately following a rumour that Angie was somewhere in one of the big cities to the north.

Cooper felt sure that it was desperation and hope that had driven Fry this far. Desperation to find the one remaining link to her own past, and therefore perhaps the confirmation she needed of her own identity. And hope that she might find her sister before it was too late.