Off Minor (21 page)

“What is it? Lorraine, what?”

Michael reached for her as the tears suddenly sprang, but she twisted away from his hand and off the bed where they had been sitting, out through the partly open door and along the landing to the bathroom, leaving him alone. The clock on the chest read 13.22. Tomorrow, if nothing had happened, he would go back into work: anything was better than being here, breath catching each time a car slowed near the house, waiting for the inevitable walk towards the door, the ringing of the bell.

As Resnick walked along the corridor, yet another conference in the super’s office, the door to one of the interview rooms opened and Vivien Nathanson stepped out followed by Millington, a rare smile, broad as Divine’s shoulders, lighting up the sergeant’s face. Resnick wondered what had passed between them, those moments before leaving the room, and was surprised by jealousy, sudden and sharp, between the ribs, below the heart.

The paintings around the walls were boldly colored, figures all head and little body, trees whose foliage was a mass of leaves, purple and green, suns blazing so fiercely they threatened to send whole landscapes up in flames. In one corner of the room books were collected in plastic bins or stacked, face out, on shelves that were in the middle of reconstruction. Opposite, a Wendy house offered sanctuary, a place to rest, to act out the already half-mastered rituals of family. Small tables and matching chairs stood in clusters, facing inwards. Flowers. Shells. Fossils. Toy cars. Dolls. Hamsters with pouched cheeks asleep in a cocoon of straw.

Naylor had arranged to meet Joan Shepperd before the start of afternoon school and she looked up from where she was pasting color supplement pictures on to card, two or three words of vocabulary clearly written below each one.

She smiled readily as Naylor introduced himself, but then she hesitated, uneasy, uncertain what to do next, remnants of the smile stranded across her broad face.

She was a large woman, motherly, Naylor supposed, brown hair tied back, though wisps folded towards her eyes at intervals and she brushed them automatically away. She was wearing a long cardigan over a print dress: surprisingly, to Naylor, new-looking trainers instead of shoes.

“I still haven’t taken it in, not properly. None of us have.”

Naylor mumbled something suggesting understanding, leafing through his notebook for the next blank page. The sounds of small children rose shrill through the building as someone opened a door to the outside.

“How well did you know Emily Morrison?” Naylor asked.

“Oh, just the term. She was here before that, of course, nursery, but, no, I’d not taught her before this term.”

“But you would have seen her around? In the building?”

Joan Shepperd shook her head. “No, you see, I only started myself at this school in September. Supply. I’m what’s called on supply.” Hammering started up somewhere beyond the classroom door. Joan Shepperd smiled. “Sit at home waiting for the phone to ring. Well, exaggeration I suppose. If you’re lucky it’s a term’s work at a time. Filling in, you know.” She glanced around. “Regular teacher taken sick, that’s the usual. Or time off to have a baby. That’s what I’m doing here, somebody having a baby.”

“They could ask you to work anywhere then?” Naylor said.

“They could. Inside the authority. Yes, they could. But I like, you know, I don’t like to go too far from home.” Another smile, more dimpled than the last. “I don’t drive. And, well, there are buses, but with a job like this there always seems to be so much to carry.”

The hammering stopped and started again. A ball cannoned off one of the classroom windows; a child’s face pressed up against another pane until he was shouted away. Naylor went through his questions, never believing it to be any more than routine. At the point where she was asked about strangers waiting outside the school, anyone she might have seen talking to Emily, Joan Shepperd hesitated long enough to give Naylor some expectation, but it was nothing. Once or twice, I seem to remember she was one of the last to be collected. I think, yes, her mother had been held up, perhaps the traffic or she hadn’t been able to leave work dead on. But Emily was good about waiting, inside the cloakroom, I think. Or she would come back in here and help me tidy up. She would never go out on to the street.”

The door opened and a man came in wearing brown overalls, a canvas tool bag over one shoulder. “Oh, sorry, Joan …”

“That’s all right,” Joan Shepperd getting to her feet. “This is the policeman, come to talk to me about poor Emily.”

“Ah, yes.”

“Constable, this is my husband, Stephen.”

Stephen Shepperd and Naylor nodded in each other’s direction.

“Come around sometimes and lend a hand, odd jobs, you know. These shelves, got into a right state. Wait for council to come along and fix them be like waiting yourself into an early grave. Eh?”

“I do believe the school had been waiting a long while,” Joan agreed.

Stephen dropped his tool bag on to a group of tables. “Couple of afternoons and it’s all shipshape. Course, got to know what you’re doing in the first place.”

“Stephen was a joiner,” Joan said.

“Not so much of the was. Still am.”

“He’s not working full time,” Joan said to Naylor.

“Redundant,” Stephen explained. “Me and a few thousand others.” He pointed towards Naylor. “Nothing as’ll likely happen to you. Growth industry, to believe what you hear, crime.”

“Don’t get on to one of your hobby horses, Stephen.”

“If I did, this young man’d tell you I’m right, don’t mind betting he would. But I’ll not. I’ll just leave this lot here and come back when you’re through.”

“I think we’re that already,” Naylor said. “Unless there’s anything else you’ve thought of, Mrs. Sheppard?”

Joan Shepperd shook her head. “I only wish there were.”

“All right, then. Thanks for your help. Mr. Shepperd, you can get on with your shelves.”

In the playground a whistle blew and the clamor of voices stilled.

“Look,” Stephen said as Naylor was almost at the door, “I don’t want to be pushy, but if there’s ever any work you need doing at home, you could do worse than give me a call.”

“Thanks,” Naylor said, “I’ll keep it in mind.”

Walking between the lines of children coming back into the school, thinking it would take a lot more than a few nails and a strip of four by two to put his home back together again.

Lynn Kellogg called round at the Morrisons’ late in the afternoon and told them of the day’s developments. The waste land adjacent to the canal had been searched a second time, as had the railway sidings where Gloria Summers had eventually been found, neither with any success. One sighting of a youngster said to resemble Emily in Skegness had proved incorrect, as had another on the South Coast. There had been three reports as to the probable owner of the black Sierra that had been left for several hours in the crescent on Sunday, but none had checked out. The good news was that a woman had come forward with a description of the jogger observed by the Morrisons’ neighbors and this would be released to the media at any time.

Lynn thought that Lorraine looked the more fragile of the two today, as if maybe she had been letting Michael shelter behind her strength and now it was going to have to be reversed. They were to appear on national TV news that evening to make an appeal for Emily’s return; Lorraine had tried and discarded five outfits already and was about to do the same to a sixth.

“For heaven’s sake!” snapped Michael. “It’s perfectly fine.”

A cream trouser suit with a pale pink blouse and white, low heel shoes; it contrasted with Michael’s navy jacket and dark gray trousers, highly polished black brogues. To Lynn they looked more like the kind of clothes you would wear to a christening, but she wasn’t about to make them any more nervous than they already were. Besides, what exactly was the dress etiquette for occasions like this? She remembered her father turning up at a family funeral tieless and in grubby brown boots, dark speckles of chicken shit unmistakable on his trouser legs. Had it meant that he cared any the less?

Lynn volunteered to accompany them to the television studio and they seemed truly grateful.

Make-up did what they could with the shadows around their eyes, teased some life back into Lorraine’s hair. After a few minutes with the producer, they were shown the settee where they would be filmed, side by side. The news report opened with the artist’s impression of the runner who had collided with Vivien Nathanson close to the Morrisons’ home. Then it was Michael and Lorraine, a photograph of Emily inset over Lorraine’s shoulder. “Whoever has taken my daughter and is holding her against her will,” Michael said, blinking at the camera, “I’m begging you not to harm her. Whoever you are, please, please, let her go, let her come back home.”

Sweat ran visibly down Michael’s face, the producer worried that a blob was going to fall from his nose in close shot, not the effect he wanted at all. The moment Michael finished talking, Lorraine put one of her hands over his and squeezed. Pulling back fast, adjusting focus, the camera operator just got it in frame.

“Right!” said the editor, smiling. “There’s our out.”

Thirty

All day they had been getting after Raymond, chasing him from loading bay to loading bay with their shouts, from cutting room to cutting room, pillar to post.

“Raymond! Here, catch a hold of this, will you?”

“Raymond, why don’t you learn to move your bloody self!”

“Raymond, ‘en’t you got that order ready yet?”

“Raymond!”

“Ray!”

“Ray-o, damn you!”

“Ray!”

Hathersage caught him by the neck of his overalls and spun him round, Raymond’s boots slithering on the blood-strewn floor, legs going under him, only Hathersage’s hand, like a ham, holding him aloft. “The Good Lord alone knows what you’re thinking about half the time, you Godforsaken excuse for a human being, but on my old mum’s life I know one thing that it ain’t and that’s what I’m sodding paying you to sodding do. Here. See here!”

Half-dragging Raymond, half-pushing, he urged him out into the yard, barging him through the hollowed-out carcasses of meat that hung in line and throwing him, finally, hard against the open end of a delivery van.

“Lookit!” Hathersage bellowed. “Look in there and just you tell me what you see? Loin chops, you see that? Freezer packs, wrapped and ready? Chuck steak, best chuck steak? Pork belly? Well?”

Raymond leaned heavily against the van, wanting to rub his hip where it had struck metal, wanting to raise his voice back at Hathersage, tell him take your job and stuff it, tell him he didn’t fucking care.

“Look at you, you pathetic specimen!” Hathersage shook his bull-like head. “Christ, if you could see what you looked like, you’d crawl away under a stone and die.”

Raymond, still leaning, was breathing unevenly, snot dribbling down his face, the faint few hairs that grew along his upper lip.

“Here! Take a good look at sodding this!” Hathersage pushed the copy of the order towards Raymond, who caught at it clumsily, tearing it almost in two.

The manager stepped away, disbelieving; two butchers walked by in white headgear and rubber boots, overalls that had been white at the beginning of the day. “Ray-o,” they chanted, softly in unison. “Ray-o, Ray-o, Ray-o.”

“Get this unloaded. Check that order, make it right. If you’re lucky, I won’t be standing at the gate as you dock off, ready with your cards. But don’t sodding bank on it.”

Raymond spent the time until close of his shift praying that Hathersage would be there, giving notice, true to his word. That would be an end to it: this much, at least. But all he had seen of the manager was a reddened face, mouth wide with laughter, glimpsed through the office window as Raymond slunk past.

Tonight was the night, more often than not, he went back home, round to his father’s, where they would eat sausages and onions, mashed potato, baked beans and tomato sauce. Tea strong enough to stand a spoon in. “One thing your mum could never seem to get the knack of,” his dad was like to say, “mashing a good cup of tea.”

Never mind, there had been other things she had mastered; getting the measure of his father, for one. Five years married and Raymond rising four, she had realized his dad had already amounted to what little he was going to be. She had latched herself on to a salesman who went from village shop to village shop, small-town store to small-town store; his special lines were household wares, brushes, clothes lines, pegs, three-in-one dustpan sets in hard red plastic. When he wasn’t on the road, he lived in a caravan at Ingoldmells. Raymond’s mum always had liked the smell of the sea.

The first few years she had sent him cards at Christmas and his birthday. Raymond had kept them for ages, took them out from time to time and ran his hands across the lightly embossed lettering, the fading biro messages,
Love from your Mum, Love, Mum, Love, Mum.
When he was fourteen he carried them into the back yard and tore them into tiny pieces and left them for the wind to carry away. Even now there were times when he would look inside the drawer, lift out the clothes, expecting them to still be there, safe and flat at the bottom.

Raymond made up his mind: he wasn’t going home. No more of his father’s and his uncle’s jostling, himself caught in the middle. Sara, he knew, was staying in to help her mother wash her hair. He didn’t care. After his bath, he could sit in his room, watch TV, play with his knife.

Michael Morrison pushed his dinner around the plate until Lorraine lifted it away and scooped the contents into the rubbish. She gave him two scoops of his favorite ice cream, raspberry ripple, straight from the freezer, and he sat there, watching it slowly melt. Since the television appearance, any remaining energy seemed to have been drained from him, little more than twelve hours and they had changed places again, Lorraine finding the resources somewhere to carry him through what remained of the day. Another since Emily had disappeared, a scattering of dolls in her wake.

Of course, she could still be safe.

Of course.