'Yes. If you want it to be.'
'Sometimes I wonder,' Maddy said, 'if you know you're even born.'
'Fuck off,' Vanessa said, laughing. 'And pass us over that aubergine thingy if you're done with it.'
Shortly after midnight, the two women emerged from the raucous glitter of a late-night extension and set off, arm in arm, along the Holloway Road. Vanessa had talked Maddy into a duet version of 'Dancing Queen' which had been fine until Maddy had lost it two-thirds of the way through and faltered to a halt.
'What got into you?' Vanessa asked. 'We were going great.'
'I don't know. Suddenly realised what I was doing, I suppose. Up there in front of everyone. Looking a right prat.'
'Come on,' Vanessa said, 'I'll walk you to the end of your street.'
'You're sure? No need.'
'No, do me good. Walk off some of that beer. Nothing worse'n waking up of a morning, feeling bloated.' She laughed. 'Less it's not waking up at all.'
'Not funny, Nessa.'
'Sorry.' Vanessa gave her arm a squeeze. 'Really got to you, hasn't it? What happened.'
'Last night,' Maddy said, 'when I got home, getting ready for bed, I saw these specks of mascara here, alongside my eye. Except it wasn't mascara, it was blood.'
Vanessa didn't say anything else until they reached the corner of Maddy's road. 'Take care,' she said, giving Maddy's arm a squeeze. 'Get some sleep, eh? Try not to think about it too much. And give me a call tomorrow.'
'Okay,' Maddy said, 'if I can. You take care too.'
Maddy watched for a moment as Vanessa quickened her pace, and then turned towards home. The click of her low heels on the pavement as she walked. Here and there, lights faint behind drawn curtains or lowered blinds. Of course, what had happened had got her rattled. Grant, Draper. It stood to reason. Only now that wasn't all. Her key stiffened for a moment in the lock, then turned. She knew she should never have said anything to Vanessa about being married, about Terry, fetching all that up from where it lay buried, started herself thinking about him after all this time. Terry. All abs and promises. She allowed herself a rueful smile. North Wales, the last she'd heard from him. Married again and good luck to the pair of them.
Maddy poured the last of the orange juice into a glass and carried it into the living room. No way that would have been him, skulking mid-week round a North London boozer, staring at her from the back of the crowd. His face stopping her in her tracks, mid-chorus. Everyone clapping, laughing. 'Dancing Queen'. Just someone who looked a bit like him, that was all.
The curtains were drawn fast across the French windows to the garden, shutting out the night. The glass was cold in her hand. She sat there until her legs began to numb, willing her eyes to close, her mind to still.
4
At first, Elder had wondered if he would ever get used to the weather in this part of Cornwall. Mostly, like a delinquent five-year-old, it was unable to make up its mind five minutes at a time. Sunshine followed by fierce lashings of near-horizontal rain and then sunshine again, and through it all, sun and rain, the near-inevitable wind. 'Keeps you on your toes,' the locals said when he complained. When they said anything at all.
Then, one late, dark afternoon towards the end of October, he realised there'd been three days solid in which the fog had rolled in off the Atlantic, met and mingled with the mist veiling down off the hills, and never lifted, pressing down an immovable grey, and through it the rain had continued to fall, harsh and unyielding, and he had barely noticed.
Sitting in the deep corner of the kitchen, illuminated by a single bulb, he had read steadily – Priestley currently, a threadbare edition of The Good Companions - rising occasionally to make tea or switch on the radio for the sound of a voice other than his own. Sometimes, setting Priestley aside, he closed his eyes and listened to one of the few pieces of music he possessed, a cassette of some
string quartets he had picked up at the local village bring-and-buy. Local meant a good two miles across fields by hedge and stile.
He had moved home twice since early summer, when the owner of the place he'd rented for close on two years had decided to put it up for sale. First, and briefly, he took a third-floor flat in a tall Victorian house in Penzance, with views across the harbour towards St Michael's Mount. It was not a success. Small, scarcely metropolitan, Penzance was yet enough of a town to remind him of what he'd willingly left behind: Lincoln, Leeds, Mansfield, Nottingham. After that, he had gone back across the peninsula to where he was now, a former farm labourer's cottage between moor and sea.
The downstairs was warmed by an oil-fired stove, which heated the water when it had a mind, and on which Elder gradually retaught himself to cook. Nothing spectacular: stews, casseroles, pasta, fish. What was the point of living so close to the sea if you didn't eat fish? Mackerel, red mullet, megrim, sea bass, lemon sole, occasionally shark. His favourite, mackerel, was, providentially, the cheapest by far.
The walls of the room in which Elder slept were bare stone save for one section on which plaster had been unevenly slapped. A second, smaller room held clothes he now rarely wore, boxes and bags, dribs and drabs of a life he scarcely chose to recognise. At some stage a bathroom had been added to the rear: the toilet seat rocked precariously when touched, the fitments bought cheaply at second- or third-hand; the bath itself, below its wide old-fashioned taps, was ringed with generations of overlapping reddish stains.
A short distance along a narrow lane was the farm to which the cottage had formerly belonged, now dilapidated and abandoned. Sacking at the windows, rough hasps and padlocks at the doors. Some story Elder had part-overheard, a family feud that had turned son against father, father against son. Other farmers pastured their cattle on the fields, paying dues. Stray walkers aside, Elder scarce saw a soul from one week's end to the next.
It suited him down to the ground.
Three years now since his marriage to Joanne had imploded and he had retired from the Nottinghamshire Force, off with his tail between his legs, almost as far west as it was possible to go. More than a year since his daughter Katherine had been abducted by Adam Keach. Abducted, raped and almost killed. Katherine, sixteen.
What happened to her, Frank, it's your fault. You nearly killed her. You. Not him.
Joanne's words.
Because you had to get involved, you couldn't let things be. You always knew better than anybody else, that's why.
Of course, he had dreams.
But none so bad as Katherine's.
You'll get over this, Frank. You'll come to terms, find a way. But Katherine, she never will.
In the spring, before the trial, she had come to visit him, Katherine. They had talked, walked, sat drinking wine. In the night, he had been woken by her screams.
'These dreams,' she'd said, 'they will go, won't they? I mean, with time.'
'Yes,' Elder had replied. 'Yes, I'm sure they will.'
He had lied.
Wanting to protect her, he'd lied.
Now she refused to speak to him, broke the connection at the sound of his voice. Changed the number of her mobile. Didn't, wouldn't write.
Your fault, Frank…
Well, of course, in a way it was true.
Adam Keach had killed another girl, a young woman, Emma Harrison, only weeks before taking Katherine. Elder had been back working for the Major Crime Unit at the time, a civilian consultant attached to the investigation. Found fit to stand trial and hoping for a lighter sentence, Keach had pleaded guilty and Elder had breathed relief. It saved Katherine from going into the dock and giving evidence, being cross-examined.