They were silent for a moment.
“And Chris Wells?” said Melrose. “You think she’s dead, don’t you? Isn’t it the rule that every hour she goes missing points in that direction?”
“It points to her being missing one more hour.”
“Very funny.”
“I’m not trying to be,” said Macalvie. “I go on the assumption there are no rules.”
Someone had slotted money into the jukebox. “When You and I Were Young, Maggie” is what came up. At the first baleful words of this old song, Melrose looked anxiously at Macalvie, but Macalvie was looking at nothing, the pint he had lifted frozen in air as if he were toasting the three of them. He put the glass down, rose and went over to the jukebox, and with the line The sunshine has gone from the hill, Maggie, he yanked the plug from the socket. To the protestations of the few who had been listening and now even the ones that hadn’t, he walked to the table where sat the man who had played the three songs and slapped a ten-pound note on the table. The customers there looked up, surprised.
Years ago, in an old pub on Dartmoor, Macalvie had put his foot through the jukebox.
He was improving.
35
In the kitchen of the Woodbine Tearoom, Johnny sat at the small desk Brenda used for doing her accounts. He was shuffling his deck of cards, fanning them out, scooping them up, and reshuffling. The only thing that could keep his mind off Chris was going through his repertoire of tricks.
Brenda was taking cookie sheets out of the oven. Like Chris, she did most of her baking at night. “I know it’s hard, sweetheart, and gets harder to believe she’ll be back, but she will, I know it. I know she will.”
He hadn’t been able to keep the anxiety out of his face. He’d never make much of a hand-is-quicker-than-the-eye fellow. “No, you don’t. You’re just trying to make me feel better.” When she turned from the oven to protest, he smiled and held up his hand. “It’s okay, Brenda; it’s okay.” He went back to laying out cards and she went back to the gingerbread men she was decorating with currants.
“Pick one.” Johnny held out the fan of cards.
Brenda ran the back of a floured hand over her temple to get the hair out of her eyes. “Is this that old trick? Haven’t I seen you do this a thousand times?”
“At least.” She took a card; she put it back. He shuffled, picked out her card.
“Surprise, surprise,” she said, pressing a currant into dough.
“You needn’t dismiss this trick, especially since you still don’t know how I do it.” He put the cards aside and looked at the things that covered the desk, the big checkbook, the envelopes, and on its top surface the pictures, the snapshots of Brenda’s dead daughter. He lowered his eyes; the daughter only made him think of Chris. How could she have disappeared so effectively when she’d done it so hurriedly, without time to really think? He asked Brenda.
She stopped and picked up her mug of coffee. “Maybe it’s not being able to see the forest for the trees, love.” She looked over at him. “Maybe it’s something really simple. What happened, I mean.”
“Come on, Brenda, police aren’t stupid. The one who’s in charge is a commander. That’s one of the highest-ranking officers in the whole Devon and Cornwall force.”
She sighed what sounded like a long and pent-up sigh. “I expect you’re right.”
Johnny went back to looking at the snapshots of Ramona. They showed her at different ages over the years, as if she had magically been whisked from childhood to adolescence. A toddler, a schoolgirl, a teenager. Chris had told him Brenda rarely talked about Ramona; the sadness was too overwhelming.
He could remember Ramona, beautiful as a young girl, who in the last months of her life had all but faded away, as if she were vanishing right before everyone’s eyes, like the beautiful woman in a magician’s act disappearing into the locked trunk, empty when it was open. Now you see her, now you don’t. He crossed his arms and lowered his chin to rest on them, his eyes still on the pictures. “She was really pretty, Ramona was.” His own voice startled him slightly, for he had not meant to say it aloud, reminding Brenda of her daughter.
As if-you arse-the poor woman could ever forget. He felt the weight of her silence. Then she came to stand behind him and put a hand on his shoulder. “She was, wasn’t she?”
Johnny heard such woe in her voice, he thought he might cry himself. Instead he reached his own hand around and covered hers. He thought he almost knew how she must feel. It probably wasn’t possible to really know unless you had children and had lost them. It made him think of those poor little Bletchley kids. God. It hardly bore thinking about.
Brenda said, “Remember she used to baby-sit for you when you were eight or nine?”
“Too old to need a sitter, that’s sure.”
“Oh, go on. You would have thought the same thing when you were two.”
“I did. I was.” What Johnny remembered about Ramona was how much of a golden girl she had seemed to him. Her hair was flaxen, her skin with a sheen like sunlight. She had had bright amber eyes and her mouth was naturally pink. She never needed anything to enhance those colors. She’d gone off to some public school and then to London. When she’d come back, how pale she’d looked. As time went on her eyes looked hardly darker than water, her lips silvery. Some kind of leukemia that leaches color from you. The swinging door over there made a space she had walked through; the pavement outside sent up echoes of her footfall; the window reflected her image.
Brenda’s hand still rested on his shoulder, though his own hand had slid away, for he thought of it as cold comfort for her. He tried to imagine what the world after Ramona must be like for Brenda. Here was this space, this chair, Ramona had inhabited. Ramona had filled this room, now empty. How could Brenda stand it, the lack of her? The unfilled space, the silent pavement, the unreflecting window, the empty door? He put his head in his hands and thought of the lack of Chris, and the Gilbert and Sullivan tune went through his mind:
If anyone anything lacks,
He’ll find it all ready in stacks-
He got up; he had to go; he told Brenda he’d see her tomorrow and avoided looking into her eyes.
She called something after him, probably just Good night, sweetheart.
Passing the chestnut tree, Johnny stumbled over the big root he’d managed to avoid tripping over for years and went tumbling down, not hard, just in a stupid praftall. Embarrassing had anyone been around to see. He fell on his face and just lay there for a while.
Finally, he turned over, brushing earth and grit from his face to look at the dead white moon casting its beautiful, useless light across the pavement.
After a bit, he got up, swept some dirt from his jeans, and trudged on home.
36
PC Evans, when he’d received the call at midnight, decided that the presence of the Devon and Cornwall higher-ups had its sunny side. Let them handle it had been his second thought; his first had been blind disbelief.
He’d been pulling up his trousers when Mrs. E had half woken and mumbled a question as to where he was going. He’d answered by saying it was just a bloody cat up a tree. God knows he didn’t want to say “murder” and have her sit bolt upright in her cloth curlers and start firing questions at him. He tugged on his blue jacket, shoved some hard candy into his pocket-root beer barrels, his favorite-and went out, climbed on his bike, and wheeled along at a good clip to the Drowned Man.