Blind to the bones bcadf-4 Page 23
But even Garfield had failed her. At nights, she had sat in her room and listened to pop music, wondering where Angie might have gone. Angie had mentioned Acid House raves, taking ecstasy and KLF. But Diane was listening to Belinda Carlisle ‘Heaven is a Place on Earth’ and Bobby McFerrin - ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’. The world had seemed a grey place. School had lost any interest for a while. West Bromwich Albion had been swilling around in Division Two, changing managers nearly every year. Ron Atkinson was the manager the boys had been talking about.
The small details were impressed on Fry’s mind as if they might have been immensely important for capturing the memory. The last memory that she had of her sister, unusually excited as she pulled on her jeans to go out that night. She was going to a rave somewhere. There was a boy who was picking her up. Diane had wanted to know where, but Angie had laughed and said it was a secret. Raves were always held in secret locations, otherwise the police would be there first and stop them. But they were doing no harm, just having fun. And Angie had gone out one night, with their foster parents making only a token attempt to find out where she was going. Angie had already been big trouble for them by then, and was getting out of control.
Looking back, Fry knew she had worshipped her older sister, which was why she had been unable to believe anything bad of her. Every time they had been moved from one foster home to another, it had been their foster parents’ fault, not Angie’s.
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And when Angle had finally disappeared from her lite, at the age of sixteen, the young Diane had been left clutching an idealized image of her, like a final, faded photograph.
When he got home to 8 Welbeck Street that evening, Ben Cooper found Mrs Shelley standing in the tiny hallway shared by the two flats. She was clutching something in a paper bag with mauve stripes, and she looked a bit surprised to see him.
‘Oh, it’s you, Ben.’
‘Yes, I still live here, Mrs Shelley. Were you waiting to see me?’
‘No. I’m going upstairs.’
‘Oh, I see.’
‘She’s very nice. You’ll like her.’
‘Will I?’
‘Oh, yes.’
‘Who will I like?’
‘Peggy,’ said Mrs Shelley, raising her voice a bit, as if she thought he might have gone deaf.
‘I don’t know any Peggys. Wait a minute … is this somebody who’s moving into the upstairs flat?’
‘Of course. I told you it was all arranged.’
‘No, you didn’t.’
‘Well, it’s all arranged anyway.’
‘Who is she, Mrs Shelley?’
‘Quite by chance, I have a friend who lives in Chicago. She emigrated to the USA with her family nearly thirty years ago.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘We’re old schoolfriends. I was very sad when she left. But her husband lost his job here during the seventies when the company he worked for went out of business, and they wanted to make a new life for themselves. I can’t blame them really. He’s in research.’
‘Very interesting.’
Cooper had learned just to make neutral noises while Mrs Shelley was speaking. Eventually, she might get round to telling him what he wanted to know, with a bit of nudging. But it was best to let her talk and get there at her own speed, otherwise she felt harassed and got irritable.
‘And this is the lady who’s taking the upstairs flat?’
‘No, of course not. Peggy is her daughter.’
‘I see.’
‘Now, Ben, I don’t want you to be rude to her.’
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Cooper raised his hands. ‘Why on earth should 1 do that?
‘Well, she’s American, you know.’
There’s nothing wrong with Americans.’
Mrs Shelley looked doubtful. ‘I’m not sure about that. She seems rather, well … exuberant.’
Cooper smiled. ‘I’m sure she’ll be fine.’
‘She doesn’t seem anything like my old friend, considering she’s her daughter. I don’t know what could have happened to her in Chicago. I suppose she must have got it from her father’s side. What do you think of this? I bought it in a craft gallery in Buxton, near the Crescent.’
Mrs Shelley opened the striped bag and showed him the contents.
‘What on earth is it?’
It looked like an empty wooden shuttle from a cotton mill, but with dozens of little openings along its length, like tiny mouths with pouting lips. There was something slightly obscene about it. But maybe that was just his own imagination.
‘It’s an Australian Banksia nut,’ said Mrs Shelley.
‘A what?’
‘Well, that’s what the label said. An Australian Banksia nut. It” cost me 4 pounds pence
‘A bargain.’
‘Do you think she’ll like it?’
Cooper raised her eyebrows. ‘Is this for my new neighbour?’
Mrs Shelley hesitated. ‘It’s a house-warming present. I thought it might make a talking point.’
Cooper looked again at the object. The tiny mouths pouted and smirked, as if they were forming lewd words.
‘Well, I suppose that’ll work,’ he said.
As soon as he had settled in at Welbeck Street, Ben Cooper had asked Mrs Shelley if he could have bolts put on the front and back doors of his flat. The locks were OK, but they didn’t give much security on their own. Diane Fry had warned him about living too close to the patch where he was so well known, and had advised him to have a spy-hole fitted on the front door, too, so that he could never be surprised by a caller. But that seemed to be going a bit too far; it was a little too paranoid. This was only Welbeck Street, Edendale, after all.
When the ring came on his bell, Cooper almost jumped with
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surprise. He had not thought a spy-hole was necessary. Now, though, he experienced a strange reluctance to open the door without being able to see who was on the other side. He couldn’t call it foreboding exactly, more a need to be careful, a suspicion that opening the door could change his life.
The woman who stood on the doorstep was a complete stranger. She was in her thirties, thin, with straight fair hair. A battered blue rucksack was slung over the shoulder of her cotton jacket.
‘Oh, I think you rang the wrong bell/ said Cooper. ‘You’ll be for the upstairs flat, won’t you?’
She looked confused. ‘Are you Ben? Ben Cooper?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then, it’s you I’ve come to see.’
‘Aren’t you my new neighbour?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Sorry. You’re not Peggy, then?’
The woman shook her head. With each moment that she stood on his doorstep, she was starting to look more and more familiar. Each movement rang a bell in the back of Cooper’s mind. Yet he was sure he had never met her before.
‘No, I’m not Peggy,’ she said, ‘Whoever she is.’
‘I don’t really know who she is,’ said Cooper. ‘Just that she’s supposed to be moving into the flat upstairs. Are you sure you’re nothing to do with her?’
‘Sure.’
‘So you must be selling something?’
‘No, not that either. My name’s Angela. They call me Angle.’
‘I’m sorry, but I really don’t know you.’
She laughed. ‘Angie Fry. Does that help?’
Gradually, Cooper began to recognize the resemblance around the eyes, the slim shoulders, and the way she stood, all the things that had rung so many bells. But he was still completely unprepared for the shock when she finally explained.
‘I’m Diane’s sister,’ she said.
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Howard Renshaw turned off the TV set when the news had finished. He and Sarah sat in silence for a few moments.
‘That chief inspector seemed a very sincere sort of man/ said Sarah. ‘He gives you the impression that he’ll get things done.’
‘Yes/ said Howard.
He played with the remote control for a while, switching the power on and off, so that the red light on the set blinked and the static hissed.
‘Perhaps we should have talked to Neil Granger/ he said.
‘He’s dead. It’s too late.’
‘He might have mentioned Emma to someone/
Sarah lifted her head and looked at her husband with interest. ‘There’s Lucas Oxley. That’s his uncle.’
‘I was thinking of the brother.’
‘Oh. Philip/
‘That’s him. I’m not sure where he lives now, but I could find out.’
‘Why not?’ Sarah hesitated. ‘In fact, I’m surprised we haven’t thought of it before.’
‘It was just this business of him getting killed that put it into my mind/
Sarah stood up and moved towards the bookshelves, as if drawn by some force to caress the spines of the books, as she had so often.
‘I seem to remember you saying that the Grangers and the Oxleys weren’t people that Emma would have bothered with. You said she would never have kept in touch with Neil Granger.’
‘Did I say that?’
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Sarah frowned at one of the books, straightened a bookmark, then picked it up and held it to her face to smell it.
‘I’m sure you did.’
‘I might speak to this Philip anyway.’
With a sigh, Sarah leaned to rest her forehead against the wood of the bookshelf, closing her eyes as if in meditation or to see an internal vision more clearly.
‘I wonder what Emma is doing now,’ she said. ‘What do you think?’
Howard turned away when she couldn’t see him. He switched on the TV again, but turned the volume right down as he saw the adverts were still on.
‘I can’t picture it,’ he said.
‘I can. I picture it all the time, trying to see what she’s doing at each hour of the day.’
‘Sarah/ said Howard, ‘have you ever thought it might be better if we knew that Emma wasn’t alive any longer?’
His wife froze. Her eyes remained shut, but she was watching her internal vision shatter.
‘How can you say that?’
It was just that, listening to the chief inspector on the news talking about Neil Granger, it occurred to me that at least Granger’s family would know what had happened to him and could say, “That was where it ended, this is where we start the rest of our lives.”’
‘I don’t want to hear you talking like that again,’ said Sarah, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘You know as well as I do that Emma is alive.’
‘Of course,’ said Howard. ‘I’m sorry.’
Sarah turned and looked at him. But she could only see the back of his head, and his growing bald patch. Beyond him, the television screen was flickering into the opening credits of a wildlife programme. In the branches of a tree, a hook-beaked predator swivelled its head and stared with unblinking yellow eyes at the camera, ignoring the struggles of a small lizard that writhed in its talons.
Ben Cooper remembered the first time Diane Fry had mentioned her sister to him. It had made him feel guilty, as if he had dragged something painful out of her that she would rather have kept to herself. And he knew that Fry had been searching for that
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missing sister ever since she’d transferred to Derbyshire from the West Midlands. In fact, she had told him herself that it was the only reason she’d come to Edendale, desperately following a rumour that Angie was somewhere in one of the big cities to the north.
Cooper felt sure that it was desperation and hope that had driven Fry this far. Desperation to find the one remaining link to her own past, and therefore perhaps the confirmation she needed of her own identity. And hope that she might find her sister before it was too late.
Now he thought about it, Cooper knew he had never really believed that Diane’s hope would ever be justified. Too many possibilities awaited someone who had been a heroin addict by the age of sixteen - as Angie had been, according to her sister. Yet that desperate faith had actually been strong enough to produce Angie herself, right here in the flesh, in the sitting room of his flat at 8 Welbeck Street.
Cooper was so surprised by the fact that for a few minutes he could only stare at his visitor stupidly. He sat down on the arm of the sofa, suddenly feeling so disorientated that he was afraid his knees might otherwise crumple and leave him sprawled on the floor in an undignified heap. Then he stood up again immediately and opened his mouth to speak. But the only questions that came into his mind were ‘Why here?’ and ‘Why me?’, which sounded too discourteous to be uttered to a visitor.
‘How did you find out where I live?’ he said at last.
Angie Fry brushed a strand of hair from her forehead in a familiar gesture that he saw almost every day. ‘Oh, they told me at the police station.’
‘I see. They gave you my address?’
‘Yes. I hope you don’t mind. It’s important, or I wouldn’t have come here bothering you.’
Cooper realized his mouth was hanging open. He could neither believe what he was seeing, nor what he was being told. But the person standing in the middle of his rug was too like Diane Fry to be anybody except who she said she was. And his upbringing prevented him from blurting out what was in his mind.
Angie looked at him and smiled briefly. Cooper thought for a moment that it was a mocking smile, but it disappeared from her face too quickly for him to be sure.
‘Well, aren’t you going to offer me a coffee or something?’ she
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said. ‘You might even ask me to sit down, rather than leaving me standing here.’
‘Of course. Would you like coffee? Or would you prefer tea?’
‘Coffee would he great/ she said. ‘White, no sugar.’
‘Just the way Diane has it. No sugar.’
‘Like they say, we’re both sweet enough already.’
‘Maybe.’
The kitchen of the flat was near enough for Cooper to continue holding a conversation with Angie while he made the coffee and lifted down a pair of Simpsons mugs from the dresser.
‘Did you call in at the station, or did you phone?’ he said.
‘Oh, I phoned.’
‘Who did you speak to?’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Just wondering. Did you get put through to CID, or did you talk to someone on the enquiries desk? Male or female?’
He got no answer. Eventually, he went back into the room with two mugs of coffee and found Angie Fry sitting on the floor with her back against his sofa, staring at the ceiling. She’d taken off her rucksack and jacket, and he could see she was wearing an old sweatshirt with lettering that might have been the name of a university or a rock band, but was too worn to read.
‘Are you all right?’
‘Questions and more questions,’ she said. ‘I knew you’d treat me like this. You are a copper, after all. Suspicious lot, aren’t you?’
‘We’re trained to be. But, whether as a copper or just as another human being, I prefer to be told the truth.’
‘I am telling you the truth,’ she said.
‘I don’t think so.’
She said nothing, but sat and looked at him for a moment. He was relieved that she didn’t try to bluff it out, to bluster and lie barefaced, as he had heard so many people do in the interview rooms at West Street. So he didn’t hesitate in explaining what he meant.
‘They would never give out a police officer’s home address at the station,’ he said. ‘It’s the number one rule. You really ought to have known that.’
For a second, he thought she might laugh. But that mocking half-smile flitted across her lips again, then vanished. She nodded, lowering her eyes. Her shoulders slumped a little inside the sweatshirt.
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I’m not a very good liar/ she said. ‘I should have known not to try to lie.’
‘We get plenty of experience of hearing good liars/ said Cooper.
‘So?’
‘So what?’
‘Are you going to tell me the truth?’
‘Perhaps I’d better/ she said. But Cooper, listening carefully to the intonation of her voice, thought she might as well have shaken her head and said ‘no’. Unlike some of the regular customers they had to interview at West Street, Angie Fry had learned to lie only through her words. She hadn’t mastered the techniques of controlling her voice and the expression on her face, of disguising the tension in her body and the look in her eyes. He had listened to scores of much better liars than Angie Fry. Much better.
1 heard you were a farm boy, Ben. So I looked in the local Yellow Pages for farmers called Cooper. Though I can’t imagine Di ever having any interest in farming.’
‘Di?’
The mocking smile was there this time, definitely. Cooper felt himself go a little pink in the neck. ‘Of course. Diane.’
‘We were always Di and Angie to each other, when we were little.’
Cooper nodded. ‘Go on.’
‘Well, I was lucky for once. The first number I tried was the wrong Cooper, but the second was right. Bridge End Farm, was it?’
‘Yes.’
‘And was that your dad I spoke to?’
Taken by surprise, Cooper tensed painfully, his fingernails stabbing into his palms as his hands clenched. The physical reaction to any unexpected mention of his father never failed to embarrass him.
‘I think it would have been my brother/ he said.
‘Oh, right.’ She raised an eyebrow slightly. ‘An older brother, is he? Interesting.’
That smile was starting to become annoying. Each time it appeared, it seemed to linger a bit longer, and looked a little more openly mocking.