Flesh And Blood (8 page)

‘And this lad, the one all the fuss had been about, was she still seeing him, do you think?’

‘No, I’m pretty sure. She would have said.’

‘Did she talk about anybody else? Boyfriends?’

‘Not really, not in as many words. Some bloke there was, maybe fancied her, something to do with this drama club. I don’t think they’d ever, you know, done anything about it. Susan waiting for him, most like, to make the first move. You know what girls are like.’ She grinned. ‘Some girls.’

‘And you can’t remember his name?’

Kelly stared at her long fingers holding the cigarette. ‘No, I’m sorry. I don’t know if she ever said.’ She smiled and shook her head. ‘Not being a great deal of help, am I?’

Elder shrugged. ‘You can’t tell what you don’t know.’

‘I suppose not.’

Elder left his coffee half finished and thanked her for her time, told her where he was staying in case something occurred to her later. It was always possible, once things got stirred up freshly in your mind.

‘Her poor mum,’ Kelly said, ‘not knowing like that, for certain I mean, it’s not fair, is it?’

‘No, it’s not fair.’

Passing back through the shop Elder realised it wasn’t that they were playing the same song, more that all the songs sounded the same. Just the sort of remark, he realised, his dad would have made about the Beatles and the Stones.

♦

Christine Harker was still working in the holiday park, behind the counter in what was now the Everydays Convenience Store. ‘Just helping out. You know how it is, once in a while. Otherwise, I’ve got a nice little job down in town. Fruit and veg. Afternoons. Puts a few bob in my pocket. Mind you, I do miss
Countdown
.’

She was a short woman, generously built, late fifties, Elder guessed, with the sort of all-purpose permed grey hair that would suit for another twenty years or more. Her eyes had lit up the instant he had mentioned Susan’s name.

‘She’s turned up, then?’

Hope turning to disappointment as she read the expression on Elder’s face.

‘I always thought she would, you know. Daft really. Against all, you know, the odds, but it’s what I’ve always wanted to hear. How she’d run off somewhere, London perhaps. Settled down. Kids of her own.’ She smiled. ‘See it on the telly, that Sarah Lancashire, someone like that, her daughter’d disappeared, it’d all turn all right in the end. Hugs and tears. Only life’s not like that, is it? Real life. Sometimes you forget. Life, they just bloody go and that’s an end to it.’

Elder stood aside while several small purchases were made: cigarettes, a can of Coke, tissues, a plastic ball. Listened to Christine Harker joking with her customers, he wondered about the bitterness she’d just shown and what had happened to her own children when they were fully grown.

‘When you talked to the police,’ Elder said, the shop quiet once more, ‘you said that Susan seemed different that afternoon.’

‘I know. And she were. I’d swear to this day. Preoccupied. As if her mind was somewhere else. Sort of day-dreaming, I suppose.’

‘And you’ve no idea…?’

‘No.’

‘Nothing she said?’

‘That was it, she didn’t say a thing. Not really. Just handed me the chocolate bar and her money, waited for the change. I must have made some remark, something about her going back soon. Back home, you know. She just sort of nodded and then she was on her way. I wondered if she’d had another falling out with her dad, but I never liked to ask. Besides, it would have been too late then, she’d gone.’

‘Another falling out?’ Elder said.

‘Oh, it was nothing special, I don’t suppose. Not compared to some of what you get up here. But no, a couple of days before it’d been, the pair of them going at it right outside here, hammer and tongs. Crying she was and telling him to leave her alone. “You got no right to talk to me that way. No right.” And him coming back to her, “Yes, I have. As long as you’re under my roof, I’ve every right.” I don’t know what it were about, something she should or shouldn’t have done, I dare say. In the end she run off, back towards the caravans, and he went after her, cursing and swearing. Next day I saw them, they was right as rain.’

For a moment she looked away. ‘It never does any good, does it? Carrying on. Get to a certain age, no matter what you say, they’ll do what they’re going to do and you just have to let them get on with it. Hope for the best.’

Half-smiling, she shook her head. ‘You got any kids?’

‘One. A girl.’

‘How old?’

‘Sixteen.’

‘Then you’ll know.’

Elder thanked her for her trouble and bought a Mars Bar to keep him company on the way back into town. Where the path angled away from the spur of cliff beyond Saltwick Nab, a few iris petals showed blue among the grass.

Helen Blacklock’s house was tucked away in a part of the town Elder didn’t really know. A small terraced two-bedroom on one of the narrow streets feeding off the hill that climbed steeply up towards the main Scarborough to Whitby road. From the upstairs window he guessed there would be a partial view of the estuary, the marina, the dock where ships from Scandinavia until recently had unloaded their timber.

Helen was standing outside the front of the house, bucket by her feet, rubbing a cloth back and forth across the living-room window. A small transistor radio, resting on the ledge, was quietly tuned to Radio 2.

He stood on the pavement, waiting for her to become aware of his presence and turn around. When she raised her head she saw his reflection, clear in the newly polished glass.

‘What are you doing here?’ No hostility, just surprise. ‘Probably not just passing, eh?’

‘Probably not.’ He smiled and it earned him nothing in return.

She was wearing black trousers and a loose-fitting black top, her hair pulled off her face and held by a narrow band of cloth, blue-black. Traces of dark make-up smudged her eyes, as if left over from the night before. The hand that held the cloth was broad and raw, fingernails bitten back.

‘How did you know I’d be in?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘I do work, you know.’

‘I’m sure you do.’

‘One of them places on the quay. Doughnuts. Sticks of rock and candy floss.’

‘You’re not working today.’

‘Not unless you count this.’

‘I thought we might talk,’ Elder said.

‘I thought we were.’

‘No, I mean…’

‘I know what you mean.’

An elderly woman wearing a winter coat despite the temperature, went slowly past pushing a wicker shopping trolley and Elder stepped closer to the house and out of her way. ‘Susan’s disappearance, I’ve been going through the files.’

A strand of hair had worked its way loose and Helen reached up and pushed it back into place.

‘I’m not saying I’ve found anything new, startling. I don’t want you to think that. I may not come up with anything significant at all. It’s just that sometimes when you go back over things, I don’t know, I suppose you read them in a different way.’

She was staring at him, waiting. The last thing he wanted was to get her hopes up again without reason.

‘I thought if we talked, if I could ask a few questions… if you didn’t mind. It just might help.’

‘Here,’ she said, holding out her free hand towards him.

‘What?’

‘Take hold of that hand. Go on.’

He did as he was asked: the bones were firm, the skin less than smooth, the grip strong.

‘You don’t have to tiptoe round me,’ she said. ‘I’m not made of glass.’

No, Elder thought, flesh and blood. He followed her inside the house.

♦

The interior was small and snug and crowded with furniture that had most likely come with her from where she had lived before – the three of them, Trevor and Susan and herself – pieces she’d not wanted to part with, couldn’t afford to replace. Dark orange curtains at the window, a patterned carpet on the floor, muddy brown. The faint, pervasive smell of tobacco.

‘You’ll have to take as you find, isn’t that what they say? Just let me get shot of this stuff and I’ll get kettle on. You’ll have a cup of tea?’

‘Yes, thanks.’

‘Sit yourself down, then. I’ll not be long.’

There were two small views of Whitby on the wall, watercolours, dried flowers in a vase; a photograph of Susan, framed, above the fireplace, another, showing her standing between her parents, on top of the TV. In the first she was wearing a purple top, long legs in tight white jeans. Pink flip-flops on her feet. A bright day, she was squinting a little against the light, eyes averted from the camera, angled away. The edges of her auburn hair afire.

There would be others, Elder was certain, preserved carefully, chronologically arranged; school reports, too, certificates and thank-you notes and birthday cards and pieces of artwork going back to those on which Susan could only just write her own name: hand prints and potato prints, smudges of now fading colour, butterflies with broken wings. Bits and pieces of a life.

‘Here we are.’

Helen walked slowly into the room, a mug in each hand, and Elder took one from her, a view of the Abbey with a hairline crack down through the glaze.

‘Thanks.’

He smiled and she responded, just a little, with her eyes.

‘It’s cosy,’ he said, sitting back down.

‘Cramped, you mean.’

She had taken the band from her hair and now it fell almost to her shoulders, framing her face. Crow’s feet etched quite deep, a slight puffiness beneath the eyes. The vestiges of make-up, he noticed, had been wiped away.

‘What was it you wanted to know?’

The tea was weak, as if the bag had been removed too soon. ‘That last day,’ Elder said, ‘anything you can remember. Up to when Susan left the caravan.’

‘Anything?’

‘Yes. Take your time.’

Helen cradled her mug in both hands. ‘We got up late that morning, I remember that. Trevor was always like a bear with a sore head when that happened, even on holiday. Liked to be up and doing things – even when there were nothing special to do. He went out for a walk, I think. Picked up a paper on the way back,
Express
most likely, once in a while the
Mail
. I had breakfast waiting when he got back.’ She drank some more tea. ‘After that we went to Robin Hood’s Bay. In the car, you know. Just for an hour or so. Trevor, he used to like mooching round in rock pools when the tide was out, which it must have been, I suppose, and Susan and me, we sat on a bench up above the beach. Chatting, I dare say.’

‘Can you recall what about?’

‘This and that. Could’ve been anything. Most anything. Susan’s college, where she was going, we talked about that a bit, I know.’

‘And was she worried about it? Starting college?’

‘No, not a bit. Looking forward to it. Siobhan and Lynsey, her friends from the drama group, they were going there too. She’d not made friends easily, you see, Susan, not all the way through school. I mean, she rubbed along, but that was it really. Then when she got involved in all this drama stuff, things seemed to start going better for her. They’d be going off to plays. All over. Leeds. Manchester. London, once. Newcastle-on-Tyne. Four in the morning, near enough, that time, by when they got home. Trevor had been all for calling out the police, he were that worried.’

‘But everything was all right?’

‘Oh, yes. One of them Shakespeare plays, went on for hours. And then they had a puncture on the way back down.’

‘And Susan…?’

‘Oh, she’d loved it. Had a wonderful time. An adventure. You could see it in her eyes.’

‘And these friends of hers, they’d have been there as well?’

‘Siobhan and Lynsey. Yes, I imagine. They were pretty inseparable, that last year.’

Both girls had been interviewed, Elder knew. Probed about any relationships Susan might have had with boys, relationships she might, for whatever reason, have kept from her parents. A few tales of parties and underage drinking aside, momentary crushes and the usual furtive fumbling, all of the questioning had yielded nothing.

‘When you were talking,’ Elder said, ‘the two of you, that morning, she didn’t seem as if there was something troubling her?’

‘No. No. Why d’you ask?’

‘The woman in the park shop, she said she’d seemed a little – what was it? – preoccupied.’

Helen looked down at her hands and then up again. ‘I don’t know what about. I really don’t.’

‘She also said she heard Susan and her father having a tremendous row, just the day before.’

Helen looked at him steadily. ‘It’s news to me.’

‘But you’re not surprised?’

‘Not really, no…’

Elder waited.

‘They were always really close, Susan and Trevor, when she was young. Mummy, let Daddy do it. Let Daddy. Daddy. I’ll be honest, I used to get jealous sometimes. I mean, I’d be the one lugging her round the shops in the buggy, pushing her on the swings. Reading the same stories over and over again. Putting up with her moods. What? Seven, eight hours a day. And then he’d come breezing in at supper time and she’d be all over him. How’s my little girl then?’

Ash fell from her cigarette and, without looking, she brushed it from her skirt.

‘It all changed when she went up to secondary. She seemed to pull away. And Trevor resented it, you could tell. The way he looked at her sometimes, as if – I don’t know – as if he felt betrayed. As if she’d turned against him.’

‘And do you think this was all a part of her growing up, puberty if you like?’

‘I suppose so.’

‘It wasn’t due to any difference in him? The way he was with Susan? Something he’d done?’

‘Done?’

The word hung between them, inexplorable.

‘No,’ Helen said. ‘It was Susan who changed. She became closer to me, for one thing. Almost like we were, well, sisters, I suppose.’