“The renovators?”
“Yes.” The kettle boiled. Mrs. Tattersall disappeared for a few minutes and returned with the tea service on a tray, which she set down on the low table in front of the electric fire. “You haven’t told me why you’re asking,” she said.
“It’s just a routine check. Nothing to do with the fire, really. It just seemed like an easy place to start.”
“Routine? That’s what you always say on telly.”
Annie laughed. “It’s probably about the only realistic thing about TV coppers, then. It’s Ruth we’re interested in. The daughter.”
“Is she in any trouble?”
“Not as far as I know. Why do you ask?”
Mrs. Tattersall leaned forward and poured. “Milk and sugar?”
“Just milk, please.”
“You wouldn’t be asking about her for the good of your health, would you?”
“It’s to do with a friend of hers,” Annie said. Like most police, she was loath to give away the slightest scrap of information.
“I suppose that’ll have to do, then,” said Mrs. Tattersall, handing Annie the cup and saucer.
“Thank you. Did you know the Walkers well?”
“Pretty well. I mean, as well as you could do.”
“What do you mean?”
“They weren’t the most sociable types, weren’t the Walkers.”
“Standoffish? Snobbish?”
“No, not really. I mean, they were polite enough. Polite to a tee. And helpful if you needed anything. Lord knows they didn’t have much themselves, but they’d give you the shirt off their backs. They just didn’t mix.” She paused, then whispered, “Religious,” the same way she had whispered cancer.
“More than most?”
“I’d say so. Oh, it was nothing strange. None of those weird cults or churches where you can’t have blood transfusions or anything. Straight Methodist. But strict observers. Against Sunday shopping, drinking, pop music, that sort of thing.”
“What was Mr. Walker’s occupation?”
“Wages clerk.”
“Did his wife work?”
“Pauline? Good heavens, no. They were as traditional as you get. She was a housewife.”
“You don’t get many of those in this day and age.”
Mrs. Tattersall laughed. “You’re telling me you don’t, lass. Me, half the time I couldn’t wait to get out of the house and to work. Not that I had such a wonderful job, myself, I was only a receptionist at the medical center down the road. But you get to meet people, chat, find out what’s going on in the world. I’d go barmy if I was stuck between four walls day in, day out. Wouldn’t you?”
“I would,” said Annie. “But Mrs. Walker didn’t seem to mind?”
“She never complained. But it’s against their religion, isn’t it, complaining?”
“I didn’t know that.” Annie would have been the first to admit that she didn’t know much about religion except what she had read, and she had read mostly about Buddhism and Taoism. Her father was an atheist, so he hadn’t subjected her to Sunday school or any of the usual childhood indoctrination, and the people who came and went in the commune carried with them a variety of ideas about religion and philosophy. Everything was always up for debate, up in the air.
“I mean, if whatever happens to you is God’s will, good or bad, then you’ve no call to be complaining to God about God, if you see what I mean.”
“I think I do.”
“They were just a bit old-fashioned, that’s all. People used to laugh behind their backs. Oh, nothing vicious or anything. It was mostly good-humored. Not that they’d have noticed. That was another thing that wasn’t in their religion. Humor. I did feel a bit sorry for young Ruth sometimes.”
“Why?”
“Well, there wasn’t much fun in her life. And young people need fun. Even us old ’uns need a bit of fun from time to time, but when you’re young…” She sighed. “Anyway, the Walkers’ values were different from other folks’. And they didn’t have much money, with only him working.”
“How did they get by?”
“Parsimony. She were a good housekeeper, Pauline, I’ll give her that. Good budgeter. But it meant that young Ruth could hardly stay up-to-date with fashions and whatnot. You’d see her in the same outfit year after year. A nip here and a tuck there. And shoes. Good Lord, she’d be clomping around in the most ugly things you could imagine. Pauline bought her them because they were durable, you see. Sturdy, sensible things with thick soles so they’d last a long time. None of these Nike trainers or Reeboks, like the other kids were wearing. Like it or not, love, fashions are so important to children, especially in their teens.” She laughed. “I should know; I’ve brought up two of them.”
“What happened?”
“The usual. The other girls at school laughed at her, called her names, tormented her. Children can be so cruel. And they’d no time for music or telly, either – wouldn’t have a record player or a television set in the house – so poor Ruth couldn’t join in the conversations with the rest. She didn’t know all about the latest hits and the popular television programs. She was always a bit of a loner. It wasn’t as if she was a great beauty, either. She was always a rather pasty-faced, dumpy sort of lass, and that kind are easy to pick on.”
It was starting to sound like a pretty miserable household to grow up in, Annie thought. The artists’ colony where she had grown up herself didn’t have a television, either, but there was always music – often live – and all sorts of interesting people around. Some nights they would sing songs and recite poems. She could hear them from her bedroom. It was all mumbo-jumbo to her then, of course, none of it rhymed or anything, but they seemed to enjoy themselves. Sometimes, they let her sing for them, too, and if she said so herself, she didn’t have a bad voice for traditional folk music.
Still, she thought she could relate to Ruth’s feeling of being an outsider. If you’re different in any way – no matter whether your family’s too strict or too liberal – you get picked on, especially if you aren’t up on the latest styles, too. Children are cruel; Mrs. Tattersall was right about that. Annie could remember some of their cruelties of her own childhood very well indeed.
Once, when she was about thirteen, a gang of classmates had waylaid her in the lane on her way home from school, dragged her into the trees, stripped her and painted flowers all over her body while they made remarks about filthy, drug-taking hippies and flower power. They had then run off with her clothes and left her to make the rest of her way home naked. Cruel. You could say that again. She had found her clothes hanging on a tree by the side of the lane going to school the next day. And that was in 1980, when hippies were history and the sixties was something her classmates could only have read about in books or seen on television documentaries. The people who lived at the commune were artists and writers, free thinkers, yes, but hippies? No. Annie’s only sin was to be different, to wear the kind of clothes she wanted to wear (and that her father could afford, artists never having been among the richest members of society). Yes, in an odd way, she could sympathize very easily with Ruth Walker: two sides of the same coin.
“Ruth went off to university, didn’t she?”
“Yes. That’s what changed everything.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, they wanted her to go to Manchester, like, and keep on living at home so they could keep an eye on her, but she went to London. They thought university was a den of iniquity, you see, full of sex and drugs, but they also knew you don’t get very far in this day and age without a good education. It was a bit of a dilemma for them. Anyway, she got her student grant or loan or whatever they get, so she had a bit of money of her own for the first time, and in the holidays she usually got a job. It gave her her first taste of independence.”