Karen looked back towards the counter.
"She said if you wanted to come back then all you had to do was pick up the phone."
She stirred the mint tea slowly. "Was my sister there?"
"Shelley? Yes."
"She should be at school. What was she doing at home?"
"She said she was ill."
Karen looked up from her tea.
"She didn't look ill," I said. "She looked like she'd blagged a day off."
"She should be at school," she repeated. "But maybe my parents think education is not such a good thing any more, when you can have ideas, friends of your own, people from outside." She looked again at Ahmed. "What did my dad say?"
"Your dad wasn't there."
"Did he call Ahmed a wog again?"
"He wasn't there, Karen. I only met your mother."
"Pity."
"I didn't come to persuade you to come back either. Only to find out what happened to you."
"Did Mum ask you to do this?"
"No. Your mum said that if you meant to come home then you'd find a way."
"Then who?"
"I came on my own. Greg Makepeace told me where I might find you."
"The vicar? What for? What does he get out of this?"
"He wants me to leave it alone, to stop looking for missing girls. I think you were meant to persuade me to let sleeping dogs lie."
"That still doesn't give me a reason."
"Sorry?"
"You still haven't told me why you came looking for me. If it wasn't for anyone else then why?"
"I'm writing a story, if I can find enough material. It might sell to the Sundays, or a magazine."
"A journalist?"
"Perhaps – when I'm not doing private security."
She looked again at Ahmed. "It's not much of a story. I met my husband at college. Everyone else wanted to get in my knickers but Ahmed saw me as a person. We talked and spent time together, we got to know each other. We were friends long before anything else. Last year his father died, suddenly. An aneurysm, they said, leaving him and his mum to run the cafe. I started helping out and we got to know each other better."
"You helped in the cafe, and he asked you to marry him?"
"You make it sound mercenary. It wasn't. He told me that if he could, he would ask me to marry him, but that it could never be. He had the cafe, his mother, his religion. There were too many barriers. I didn't hesitate. I said yes, even though he hadn't asked. We had to wait until I was eighteen and I'd converted, but the answer was always yes." She hadn't taken her eyes off him the whole time. I didn't need to ask whether she loved him.
"And your family don't approve."
"You're joking, aren't you? Little brown grandchildren?"
"You're pregnant?"
"No. We'll wait a while; not too long, but a little." She smiled wistfully. "So that's my story. Not exactly Anna Karenina, is it?"
"It might make part of a larger piece, if I can get your parents' view."
"I wish you luck. They won't even talk to me. My father won't have my name spoken in the house." She retied the knot on her headscarf. "It doesn't matter now. I have a new name, Zaina, and a new life. Ahmed said it means beauty. Will you change the names for your story?"
"I can if you want me to. I thought you didn't care what your parents think."
"Ravensby's a small place. Everyone knows everyone else. I don't see why I should be a source of amusement for them."
"I thought you were proud to be where you are? Shouldn't they be allowed to know that there is happiness in the outside world, beyond the harbour and the call centre?"
"As in Christianity, pride is a sin for Muslims. And I don't want to be held up as an example for anyone else. I love my husband, but I still miss my family. Even my dad."
"Do you want me to carry a message to them?"
She stared at her tea for a long time. Then she lifted her eyes to mine. "No."
I drank down the remaining tea and stood, collecting my umbrella from beside the chair.
"Sure?"
"Too much has been said already."
"As you wish. Thanks for the tea. Please give my apologies to your husband. I didn't intend to provoke him."
I turned and nodded to Ahmed, who watched me to the door. She stood to clear the glass teacups and crossed back to the counter.
As I was closing the door, she called back to me, "Please?"
I put my head back around the door.
"Tell my sister I miss her." There was a pensive tension in her expression. I think she would have said more if she could.
I nodded and left.
As I walked back through the centre to the bus station, my mind circled around Karen and her family. I could see why Greg wanted me to leave this alone. If the disappearances were all this messy then they were better left as they were. I couldn't help feeling, though, that there was more to it, that Karen was only part of a larger picture. When Garvin had given me the mission and said it was up my street, he must have meant more than elopement, surely?
Having used the Ways twice already that day, I did not trust myself to use them again without becoming distracted and lost. Instead, the nearby bus station offered me a ride that would eventually carry me back to Ravensby. I would arrive late, but despite the interrupted sleep of the previous night I felt restless, not tired. A daughter I couldn't find, a pregnant girlfriend somewhere on the road, an enemy returned and a puzzle I couldn't fathom. I let my mind chew on all those as the bus rumbled over the Yorkshire wolds and down to the coast, the twilight creeping up the hillsides as shadows slid into the valleys. When it finally hissed to a stop in Ravensby, it was dark.
The pubs along the seafront spilled drinkers out on to the pavement. The wind died leaving the evening cool but not chilly. The chip shop was open so I bought cod fried in batter, fresh cooked, so I had to wait. I asked if the fish were locally caught. The answer was terse: not likely. Was there so little support for local industry?
I took my paper-wrapped parcel down to the bench at the end of the harbour wall where the green and red lights gleamed to guide returning boats and the scents of diesel and seaweed were replaced by salt and ozone. I watched the waves trying to undercut the steep bank on the other side of the harbour and ate until my fingers were greasy with chip fat and my lips gritty and sore with salt. I dropped the paper in the bin and walked slowly back along the harbour wall, counting the boats and noting that there were too many to moor at the wall. Some were tethered to others, in places three deep. Was this the consequence of fishing quotas: no reason to work the boats any more? Or did the call centre have its attractions compared to the waves, the weather and the dark?
The dock wall ran in a long seashell spiral, punctuated with iron rings every few yards. I followed it round, watching the lights reflect off the water. I had caught fish from such a harbour, years before, using a line weighted with lead, hooks hanging off the side, baited with bread. I thought Alex would be delighted to catch the wriggling slivers of silver, but she was only concerned that they be released unhurt. When one swallowed the hook and I had to kill it to get it loose, she cried and would not look at me for the rest of the day. I didn't catch any more.
At the end of the harbour the road kinked around the headland, leaving it without pavement and rising to look over the harbour at one side and a shingle beach at the other. Below, massive blocks of concrete tumbled out into the water at the promontory, breaking up the waves, but you could already see that the water was winning. Sooner or later the road would crumble into the sea.
The road curved around and followed the line of the hill above the beach, each house perched above the next to get a better view. The lights dwindled until there were only the pale ghosts of gulls riding the updraft from the cliff. A path dropped away from the road on to the beach and I crunched my way down, my boots sliding on stones until it levelled out into shingle, shifting with the sea.