“CID. DC Kellogg speaking.”
Vera Barnett was fifty-eight and looked twenty years older; thinning gray hair was sticking to her scalp with perspiration and her facial skin was loose and sallow. The knuckles of her hands were purple and swollen. She sat in a tall armchair, high-backed, high-sided. One of her feet rested on a cushion.
“The children…” Lynn asked.
“I’ve told you, they’re in my bed, sleeping. Poor lambs!”
“But how old…?”
“Luke’s just seven and little Sarah, she’s four.”
“They’re all right?”
“Nothing’s going to happen to them while I’m here.” Lynn glanced round at the uniformed officer, standing patiently to one side.
“Your daughter has left them with you before?” Lynn said.
“Every week.”
“The same evening?”
Vera Barnett nodded and Lynn winced as she heard bones creak and grate.
“Do they often stay the night?”
“Never.”
“Not even for a special occasion? I mean…”
The mouth tightened. “She’s their mother and they’re her children. She’s no right. No right.”
“So you were expecting her to collect them?”
“Always.”
“What time would that be, Mrs Barnett? Usually, I mean.”
“Half-past eleven.”
“But the children would already be asleep…”
“They’re no trouble. Wake up without a fuss. Go off when she gets them back home again, fast as anything.”
“So your daughter comes to collect them at half-past eleven…”
“Or earlier. Makes me a bedtime drink, helps me into the bedroom, and off she goes till the next time. Brings them over on the bus, two buses really, but she always gets a taxi home. Phones through for it the minute she arrives.” She dabbed at a damp patch of hair. “I’ve known her have to ring back two, oh, three times; give some excuse like they couldn’t find the number, rang the bell and nobody answered. I’ve got nothing against them, of course, but they’re all, you know, these Asians. I don’t know if I should like to be driving home with them, last thing at night.”
There was a lot worse, Lynn thought.
“I rang the hospital,” Vera Barnett said. “In case, you know, she’d been in an accident. Well, you hear about such things.”
“Why are you so certain something’s happened to your daughter?”
“What else could it be?”
“It is only…” Lynn checked her watch.
“Two fifty-two,” said the constable.
“It isn’t three yet. If she’s with friends. A party.” Lynn tried to smile reassuringly, but more and more she had a sense that the woman’s fears were grounded. Cold was starting to seek out her stomach. “There’s plenty of time for her to turn up.”
“She’s only once been late, really late, and then she rang.”
“Maybe, wherever she is, she was having such a good time, she forgot.”
“With the children here?”
Lynn rubbed the palms of her hands along the slightly rough wool of her skirt. If the woman was right, then all they were doing here was wasting time. Trying to reassure her wasn’t working anyway: her mind was too firmly set on disaster.
“You’ve phoned round her friends?” the constable asked.
“It’s the middle of the night.”
“Even so. If you’re worried.”
“Besides, she doesn’t have friends. Not like that. Not that she goes out with. People to talk to at work, but that’s all.”
They had already had the story of a marriage gone wrong, blame liberally sprinkled, one thing they could be sure of, wherever Mary was she wouldn’t have gone gallivanting off to see him.
“And you’ve no idea where she was going this evening, Mrs Barnett?”
Again the set mouth, eyes narrow with disapproval. “None whatsoever.”
“Where she usually went on her evening out?”
“She didn’t tell me her business and I never asked.” With effort she shifted round in her chair, arms resting along the wings, fingers gripped. “Though I knew what she was up to, of course.”
Lynn looked at her expectantly.
“She was with a man.”
“Getting really worked up about it, wasn’t she?”
“Her daughter gone missing? Hardly surprising.”
“Her daughter having it off.”
“Is that what you think this is about?”
“Don’t you? If you’ve only got one chance a week.” Lynn blinked and gave a quick shake of the head: another bloke whose ideas about sex were based upon the letters pages in Penthouse and mutual masturbation sessions in the showers after games.
“What would your mum say, then? You and sex.”
“Not a lot.”
“How’s that then?”
“They don’t believe in sex in that part of Norfolk.”
The house was in a short road, cars parked close at either side. A light was on inside number 7, probably the stairs. All of the other houses in the street were dark.
“What d’you reckon?”
Lynn shrugged, tightened the wool scarf across her neck, and rang the bell. It sounded, off-key, inside the house. Through the letter-box there was nothing speciaclass="underline" a plastic ball on the carpet, most of the air gone out of it, a piece of Lego.
“Want me to try the back?”
Lynn took from her coat pocket the key Mrs. Barnett had given them. “Why bother?”
“Look, you’re sure about this?”
The backs of her legs were sure; her arms, all the places where the chill touched her, tensing the nerves beneath the skin. The key fitted the lock almost too easily and the door swung open with the first pressure of her hand. Lynn stepped around it and looked-it had been held on the catch, but the lock had not been slipped down.
The light that had been left on was on the landing.
With her gloved hand she depressed the switch on the wall, close by a line of pegs bunched with coats.
“Hello!” The constable called. “Anybody home?”
Lynn opened the door to the first room on the left, turned on the light. Somebody had gone round in a hurry, tidying up. Papers and magazines, Ladybird books, scooped up and set down again in uneven piles; toys squashed up into a corner. Clear across the top of the television, the curve of dust left after a single sweep with the duster.
“Shall I check upstairs?”
“Yes.”
She did not want to go upstairs. Not first.
“Careful what you touch.”
The back room led into the kitchen. Mugs on the table, plates stacked on the draining board, a pan soaking in cold water in the sink, rimed with orange. She heard him coming down the stairs too fast and turned to face him.
“This Mary-houseproud, would you call her?”
“Not exactly. Why?”
“That bed up there’s a proper tip.”
“She’s not…?”
The constable shook his head.
“The bathroom?”
“Not anywhere.”
For several seconds, neither spoke nor moved.
“What d’you reckon?” the constable asked, anxious to be doing something.
“Hang on a minute.”
She walked back into the front room, remembering something she’d only half-noticed. On the floor in the corner alcove, close by the drawn curtains, a handbag. Lynn used finger and thumb to ease it open. Makeup bag, purse, a pair of black flat-heeled shoes, bent double and squashed down. She gave the bag a slight shake. A packet of contraceptives, Durex Elite. Thought about taking it to the table and emptying it out then thought against it.
“Reckon we should phone in?”
She nodded, setting the bag back down where she had found it. Going through the hall, past the crowded pegs, something stopped her. Underneath matching yellow plastic children’s coats, different sizes, hung two pairs of blue and yellow Wellington boots, threaded together at the top with string. Muddy at the bottom.
“Wait here a minute.”
“What’s up?”
“Just wait.”
Back in the kitchen, a step down from the rest of the house, Lynn remembered the cold and knew it had been more than the cold of anticipation. The door to the garden had not quite been pulled to. She touched it open and stepped outside. Stray ends of cloud moved gray across the moon. A bicycle without a rear wheel leaned against the wall. Her toe touched against something and she bent to pick it up. A high-heeled shoe, black, new.