The Various Haunts of Men (37 page)

‘But he might come back. Don’t give up hope. Dogs run off, they lose their scent of home,
he might have been picked up by someone … Have you tried the dog rescue? Or you could put an advert in the free paper, have you thought of that?’

Jim shook his head. ‘I might have done,’ he said. ‘Not now. Not now I’ve heard that.’ He looked up at the medium.

She was standing behind one of the others, holding her teacup, chatting. As if it was all normal, as if nothing had happened and her face
had never turned into that of an evil old woman, and there had been no yapping dog. If it hadn’t been for Jim, Iris might have thought she was going mad. She’d given up hope of hearing from Harry now. He wouldn’t come with all of this going on.

‘My husband died,’ she said to Jim. She hadn’t known she was going to say it. He patted her hand. ‘Just before Christmas. It was a merciful release, he’d
been so ill, only … well, it’s still hard, isn’t it? Still really hard.’

‘Have you heard from him? She gets a lot of people coming through … sometimes there’s four or five. Don’t give up, like you said about Skippy. He might come, you know.’

‘Do you come every week?’

‘Mostly. Well, it’s interesting. I find it interesting. And it’s company. I read a lot of books about the spirit world. I’ve
made quite a study of it.’

But it hadn’t prepared you for hearing Skippy bark, she thought. He seemed better; his tea was finished without a spill, and his face looked quite cheerful. She imagined coming every week, just out of interest and for
the company. She’d rather sit at home for a month without seeing a soul.

‘How are you, Mrs Chater? I do hope we hear from your loved one in the second
part of the evening. I’m sure several will be waiting to come through now. I use the board this time. I get very good results.’

Iris stood up. ‘I’m afraid I have to go, I have to be back for … my neighbour. She isn’t well. I promised I wouldn’t be out for long, you see.’

Sheila Innis put her hand out and placed it on Iris’s arm. It felt warm. Soothing. Iris stared at her face, trying to see
the old woman again, but there was no resemblance, none at all.

‘Don’t worry, Mrs Chater. Sometimes things are a bit strange, perhaps even worrying, when you’re new … Of course, I don’t know what happens, I’m in trance, I don’t have control over any of it. It’s very different from the individual sittings – well, you’ve gathered.’

But Iris had her handbag over her arm. The room felt hot and something
in it smelled strange, sickly sweet and unpleasant in her nostrils.

‘I’m sorry.’

Jim got up, pushing his chair back. ‘I hope you come again. I hope you like the company.’ His eyes were watery and they pleaded with her.

‘And I hope you find your little dog. You try putting in that advert.’

People were talking together. No one else took any notice of her going except the young man with the bitten
nails and bad skin, who looked up and stared, out of pale, vacant eyes.

The hall was empty. There was no sign or sound of Mr Innis.

Iris opened the front door, slipped outside and when she had closed it quietly, leaned on it for a second, trembling, as Jim Williams had trembled, but with a great wave of relief. The air was mild and cool and smelled of hedgerows and car exhaust. It smelled wonderful,
Iris thought, as wonderful as anything she had ever smelled in her life.

As she turned into the road, she saw that the light behind the drawn curtains in the front room had suddenly dimmed.

She realised that, in leaving the house so hastily, she had not asked to phone for a taxi, but because the evening was pleasant, she didn’t mind the thought of walking on into town. Taxis for hire never came
down roads like this but perhaps she would be lucky and a bus might appear.

She began by walking fast, but after a few yards, she was so breathless, she was forced to stop. When she began to walk again, her legs felt watery and the breathlessness was worse. Iris sat down on the low stone wall of a house. There were lights on. If she felt no better, she would ring the bell and ask them if they
would phone a taxi for her. People never minded being helpful in that way.

Yes. That was what she would do. She stood up, but then two things happened at once. She was afraid, quite suddenly, with an awful sense of foreboding and doom. It was not fear, it was mortal dread, it was the certainty that something appalling was about to happen to her. At the same time, a pain in her chest gripped her
in metal pincers and crushed the breath from her. A second surge of pain. If she could get to the front door of this house, if she could make them hear. Iris struggled with the pain, struggled to stand, struggled against the wave of fear,
tried to call out, but then she was safe, someone was coming. She managed to stand, even lifted her right arm a little to wave to the car, and it was all right.
It was coming nearer and as it came, it was slowing down. She felt the brightness of the headlamps envelop her in warmth and light and safety. She looked up and saw the car stop beside her. The light was beautiful.

‘Harry,’ she said. But no more.

DS Freya Graffham had spent most of a long cold day with Nathan Coates and DC Gary Walsh, alternately hanging about an underpass of the Bevham road to the Sir Eric Anderson High School, Lafferton’s comprehensive, and visiting addresses on two housing estates.

For the rest of the time, they had sat in parked cars, watching, waiting and drinking paper cups of coffee. The drugs operation
was in its fourth week and it was known that suppliers were using the underpass to target high school pupils. Also, though the heart of drug dealing in the area was in Bevham, the Hartfield Estate at Lafferton contained a major artery. Several characters had been picked up in the underpass, but they were next to nothing. It was the leading operators they needed to find and someone at Bevham had
decided the Hartfield might yield one or two of them. It was unlikely. Large old houses at Flimby and Woodford Poins, detached executive homes on Mill Road were where the bosses would live, with private schools for their kids, Jaguar 3 litres for themselves and Gucci handbags and charity lunches
for the wife. But there was no hard evidence. Without it, the rich and well connected of Lafferton
and district would not welcome a knock on the door and a warrant card flipped open in their faces.

Freya was cold and full of the pent-up irritation that a pointless day without anything to show for it always brought on. Drug ops were the worst of all, and the next day looked like being equally frustrating as she trawled through more records, attempting to link thefts of white goods from newly
built houses. Someone was working a clever scam, but trying to find out who by spending six hours or so at her computer was a depressing prospect.

The kids had long gone, the cleaners were in the school buildings and the underpass was deserted. The housing estate calls had turned up plenty of foul-mouthed residents and a dead cat. No one had even answered the door at most of the addresses they
had.

‘OK, that’s it. Operation home time.’ Nathan gave a thumbs up and started the car happily. As they moved off, the one parked a few yards away flashed its lights and pulled out to follow.

‘Thought for a moment you was going to offer overtime, Sarge.’

‘Waste of police resources, Constable.’

‘Yeah, like the rest of the day. You going out anywhere special tonight?’

‘You sound like the girl
who does the washes at my hairdresser’s.’ Freya imitated: ‘Got anything special planned for the weekend, then? Going somewhere nice for your holiday, are you?’

‘Well, are you?’

‘No. Choir tomorrow.’

‘Night in with the cat and the telly then. You should live a bit more, Sarge … come clubbing with me and Em one Friday.’

‘Sure, gooseberry really suits me.’

‘Nah, we’ll fix you up first. Some
really nice young doctors at Bevham General.’ Nathan gave her a quick sideways glance. ‘Unless you’ve got your own arm candy lined up.’

‘That will do, DC Coates.’

‘Blonds, isn’t it?’

‘I said don’t push it, Nathan.’

‘Sorry, that was a bit out of order.’

‘More than a bit.’

‘Only, I like you, Sarge. I don’t want you pining away.’

‘I am not pining away.’

‘There’s a poem … dunno who wrote it,
not my thing really, only Em heard it on the radio. It’s about how to cure love, know what I mean?’

Nathan screeched to a halt as the traffic lights in the town centre turned red.

‘Go on.’

He turned to her, his monkey face cheerful in the light of the street lamp. You get away with murder, Freya thought, and you probably always will.

‘See, this poem says there’s two ways. You can spend hours
by the phone, pining, waiting and hoping, counting the minutes …’ He put the car into gear and raced satisfyingly ahead of a BMW that had been pulled up beside them in the next lane. ‘Yeesssss.’

‘Or?’

‘Or. A better way is you get to know him better.’

Freya laughed. ‘OK, very good. Now let’s hear about you, Constable.’

‘Me, well, you know. Very happily shacked up with my Em.’

‘Exactly.’

‘What?’

‘Shacked up. For God’s sake. And how long is it?’

‘Be two years.’

‘Time you did the decent thing then.’

‘What decent thing would that be, Sarge?’

‘How like a man can a man be? Marry the girl, Constable Coates, propose to her, go down on bended knee, spend your overtime money on a diamond. They had some lovely ones in the window of Duckham’s in Bevham last time I looked.’

‘Prospecting
was you?’

‘Seriously. Your Emma is lovely. She deserves more than “shacked up”. If she’d be mad enough to say yes, of course.’

‘Yeah, yeah.’

‘Don’t you
want
to settle down?’

‘I am settled.’

Freya shook her head. ‘It’s different.’ She had meant it. Her own mistake had not made her disapprove of marriage in general and the pretty, delightful and eminently sensible Emma was what Nathan needed.

Nathan slewed the car neatly into a space in front of the station, and they went inside.

Freya entered the emptying CID room and looked round. It had the usual seedy, end-of-the-day air, bins overflowing with screwed paper and empty plastic coffee cups, desks littered with computer printouts, chairs anyhow. Her own was not much of an example and she spent five minutes clearing, tidying and sorting
it out so that she would not feel too depressed at the sight of it in the morning.

Her computer was still switched on and for a moment she hesitated over spending another hour going through the drug data, or even going back over the stuff that had come in – what little of it there was – on the missing women.

But she was tired and irritable and hungry and the hour would more than likely be wasted.
Home, she said, taking her suede jacket off the back of the chair and knotting the cream pashmina round her neck; home, a piece of fillet steak with mushrooms and tomatoes, two or three glasses of red wine and half an hour going through the score of the B Minor Mass ready for tomorrow evening.

She switched off a couple of lights, said goodnight to the only other person left in the room, pattering
away at his keyboard, and went out and down the corridor.

A light was on in Simon Serrailler’s office and the door was slightly ajar. Freya hesitated. Don’t do it, don’t do it, leave it. If Nathan had noticed, how many others might have done so? Don’t do it, where’s your pride?

She tapped on the door.

‘Come in.’

He had his jacket off, tie loosened, blond hair all over the place. The files
on his desk were a foot thick.

‘Freya – thank God, an excuse to stop. Come in, please, please come in.’

‘Don’t tell me this is all drug stuff.’

‘A ton of it. Any joy today?’

She shook her head. ‘There was never going to be.’

‘I know what you think about all this. It’s not the minnows we want and it’s only minnows who are going to be hanging about the road tunnel to the Eric Anderson and nobody
but minnows are going to live in flats on the Hartfield Estate. But first of all, the minnows can and
do lead us to the sharks, and secondly, there have been enough public complaints, especially from parents, about drug pushing to the school children, that we have got to be seen taking it seriously. And as you know, there’s not a lot of point in putting cars full of uniform out to warn the dealers
off until the fuss dies down. Grin and bear it, Freya. It has become pretty serious recently and we might well get somewhere. We’ve half the county’s forces on drug ops.’ He looked at her for a second. ‘But that isn’t why you’re here is, it?’

Freya went still. What did he mean, what was he going to say? What had he noticed?

Then the DCI stood up and pushed his chair back. ‘I’ve had enough. I’m
absolutely bushed. So are you. How many cups of takeaway coffee have you had today?’

Then it was easy. ‘Enough to know I don’t want another for a week.’ She turned to go, remembering the steak and the glass of wine and the Bach score. There were worse things to have waiting for you at home.

‘Sandwiches? Bags of crisps, KitKats …?’

‘I passed on the crisps.’

‘Right, we both need a decent dinner.
Do you know the Italian place in Brethren Lane?’

The floor lurched beneath Freya’s feet.

‘If we go in my car, we can leave it in the close and walk to Giovanni’s, it’s five minutes. You can keep yours here and get a taxi home. That way we can enjoy a bottle of wine.’ Simon was at the door, tie pulled straight, jacket over his shoulder. He glanced round. ‘Or – not?’

These are the times you remember
until you die, these ordinary, unplanned, astonishing, joyful things, these spur-of-the-moment, unexpected things. You remember every word, every gesture, the colour of the tablecloths
in the restaurant and the smell of the liquid soap in the cloakroom, so that for the rest of your life, when you smell it again, you are there and you are the person you were, on that day, at that time, thinking
what you thought, feeling as you did. These are the times.