Ash & Bone

Karen leaned closer and put her arm around the other woman's shoulders.

Denison looked more embarrassed than usual.

'Listen,' Karen said. 'Vanessa. If she was right, if someone was following her, intending to do her harm, it would have happened anyway. And if it was something else, pure chance, there's nothing you or anyone else could have done. Okay?'

'Yes. Yes, I suppose so.'

'Good.'

Vanessa blew her nose loudly.

'Here,' Karen said. 'Drink up.'

At which moment Karen's mobile started to ring and she stepped out on to the street.

Mike Ramsden's voice was indistinct.

'Is this a crap line or are you whispering?'

'It's a crap line.'

'Listen, Mike. I want to know the name of Maddy Birch's ex. Address too, if you can get one. Anything else about him. How things were between them. Threats. Animosity. Anything. All right?'

'Do what I can.'

'Okay, soon as you get a name, call me back.'

Karen broke the connection.

***

In the hallway of the small terraced house in Louth, Mike Ramsden slipped his phone back down into his pocket and looked for a moment at the photograph, framed and hanging on the wall, of a young Maddy Birch at her passing-out parade. Behind him, in the living room, there were more photographs, a scrapbook full to overflowing, open on the low table beside Carol Birch's chair. For the best part of an hour he had been sitting opposite her, balancing an empty cup and saucer in the palm of one hand, pretending to listen. 'I only moved up here to be near her and then she up and moved to London.'

Ramsden sighed and turned back into the room. 'What about boyfriends?' Karen was asking Vanessa. 'Good-looking woman, not old, there must have been someone?'

'I don't think so. No one special. I mean, if we were out, blokes would try it on, you know, giving her the chat, but she didn't seem interested. It was more like, if anything was going to happen, she wanted it to be more than just a one-night stand, you know?'

Karen knew: only too well.

'So, no one at all?'

'Oh, one guy maybe. This roofer she met.'

'Roofer?'

'Yes, you know.' Vanessa gestured vaguely upwards. 'One of those blokes always up scaffolding, doing a lot of shouting, replacing tiles. Steve was his name. Steve Kennet.'

'How long ago was this?'

'Few months back, maybe more.'

'And this was serious?'

'Not really.'

'You know where he lives, this Steve?'

Vanessa shook her head. 'Archway somewhere.'

Karen made a note of the name; if it came to it, he shouldn't be all that difficult to find.

Less than ten minutes later Ramsden rang her back. 'Name's Patrick. Terence Patrick. I've got an address in Prestatyn: 15 Sea View Terrace.'

'Current?'

'I'm not sure.'

'Shouldn't be too hard to check. Listen, Mike, if I don't get back to you inside the hour, I want you to meet me there tomorrow morning. Prestatyn. Eight. Eight thirty. I'll catch an early flight to Liverpool or Manchester and drive over.'

'And how am I supposed to get there from the wilds of fucking Lincolnshire?'

'Leave early.'

Karen pressed 'disconnect' and looked at her watch. She needed to get back to the office, make some calls. She thought they'd got as much out of Vanessa Taylor as they were going to get for now. They could always talk to her again. She was thinking about Terry Patrick, how he might have heard the news of his ex-wife's death. If and when and what he'd felt. If he hadn't known already.

Thinking about Maddy's mother, trying to imagine how you began to come to terms with what had happened. If you ever did. Children were supposed to outlive their parents, wasn't that the way it was supposed to be?

11

Whoever had named Sea View Terrace was either possessed of an ironic sense of humour or a very tall ladder. It wasn't even a terrace any more, but a street of seventies semi-detacheds, each with its own garage, right or left. The pebble-dash frontage of number 15, once white, was now a sour, yellowing cream. Wooden planks and sundry pieces of scaffolding littered the front yard. The garage door was partly open.

Karen drove slowly past in the hire car she'd picked up at the airport, reversed into a three-point turn and stopped several doors down. Mike Ramsden's Ford Sierra, showing every sign of having battered along a succession of minor roads in heavy rain, was parked further along on the opposite side, Ramsden catnapping behind the wheel.

Karen got out of the car, wearing a sort of faded green today, almost certainly a mistake, popped a mint into her mouth and turned up the collar of her coat; the rain had dwindled to a steady drizzle, grey out of a grey sky.

She rapped the keys against the Sierra's window and Ramsden was instantly awake. Several lidded coffee cups and an empty Burger King box were on the passenger seat alongside him, an orange juice carton on the floor.

'I thought you said eight?' he said, winding down the window. 'Eight thirty?'

'I did.'

Ramsden looked at his watch and grunted. It was coming round to twenty past the hour.

'What time did you get here?' Karen asked.

''Round seven.'

Karen nodded in the direction of the house. 'Anything happening?'

'Patrick's been in and out the garage a couple of times, fiddling with stuff in his van. Had on his white overalls second time, off to work soon I don't doubt.'

'Anyone else around?'

'Face at the window. Wife, girlfriend, someone.'

'Well,' Karen said, 'let's go and introduce ourselves.'

The woman who came to the door was plumpish, shortish, a smoker's mouth and mid-length straw-coloured hair, breasts that, underneath a pale cotton top, seemed to have a life of their own.

'Mrs Patrick…?'

Her glance moved from one face to the other and back again. 'Sorry, I'm afraid I don't have time…'

But Karen was holding up her warrant card. 'We're police officers,' she said.

The woman looked past them to the empty street outside. 'Terry,' she called over her shoulder. Then, stepping back into the hallway, 'You'd best come in.'

The central heating was turned up high. A radio was playing in another room, the cajoling voice of some near-desperate DJ. Terry Patrick appeared at the end of the hall. His fair, almost sandy hair was in need of a comb, dried patches of plaster and specks of old paint clung to his overalls and the work boots on his feet. Fifty, Karen thought, if he was a day. Around the same height as herself. One of those men who become more wiry with age, rather than gaining weight.

'What's all this then?'

But from his eyes he already knew.

'It's about Maddy, isn't it?'

'Just a few things,' Karen said. 'Routine, really.'

'Come on through,' he said. And then, 'Tina, get kettle on, will you?'

The sigh was practised, automatic. 'Tea?'

'If there's any chance of coffee?' Karen said.

'It'll be instant.'

'That's fine,' Karen said.

'That'll be for the both of you, then?'

Ramsden nodded.

'Suit yourselves.'

The living room was overburdened by furniture and dark. Wherever the radio was playing it wasn't here. The kitchen, probably. Karen could just recognise the Delfonics' 'Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time?' Going back.

'Sit yourselves down,' Patrick said.

Karen sat at one end of a settee that had seen better days, Ramsden on a high-backed chair near the window. Patrick settled himself into what was obviously his chair, creased leather opposite a large-screen TV.

'It must have come as a shock,' Karen said, 'what happened.'

'Course it bloody did. All over the news, like. Couldn't believe it at first.' He made a small derisive sound, somewhere between a snort and a laugh. 'What they say, isn't it? When something happens. Couldn't believe it. But it's true. Someone gets, you know, killed – accident, whatever – you never expect it to be someone you know.'