Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and the Dead

‘No,’ he said quickly, seeing that he had offended her. ‘It won’t be. I didn’t mean…’

The businessman came back to the bar. He held out his glass to her. She saw that his hand was shaking.

‘Your mum’s all right,’ Joe said. ‘We were being stupid.’

Rosie served the customer and let it go.

His burger came. He ate it quickly, holding it in his hand and tearing away at it as if he were ravenous. He stood still when he’d finished and she thought he was going to say something else about Mel. Perhaps he wanted to enlist Rosie’s support in finding out what lay behind the paranoia. But he just nodded.

‘See you in a week then. If I don’t catch up with you before we go.’

And he was gone.

That evening at a different pub, Rosie’s local, it was still warm enough to sit outside. She’d eaten the veggie lasagne her mother had cooked for dinner, had a shower and changed into a sleeveless frock. The beer garden was at the back, away from the road, though there was still a far-off hum of traffic. A row of conifers separated the pub from playing fields. There were tubs on the terrace and shrubs under the trees, a faint exotic smell of flowers and pine.

‘Melanie and Joseph are going away,’ Rosie said, using the full names as if it were a formal announcement. As in ‘I, Melanie, take you, Joseph’. That wouldn’t surprise her either. Joe was besotted enough to do it and he’d always been into crazy gestures. Melanie’s parents would be delighted. Melanie would have a full-time minder and they could go back to the real business of making money.

‘Isn’t Melanie’s name Gillespie?’ her mother asked.

Rosie hardly heard. She was imagining Mel’s dress, the church, the flowers. Her as chief bridesmaid. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Melanie Gillespie.’

‘And her dad’s the businessman?’

‘That’s right.’

When she’d first asked Melanie what her father did she’d said he ran a chip shop. Computer chips, it turned out. He’d set up a huge plant on the site of a derelict factory, was a major local hero because of all the jobs it provided.

‘He was on the television again tonight,’ Hannah said.

Mel’s dad was always on the television.

‘They’re going to the Algarve,’ Rosie said. ‘Mel and Joe.’

‘Will you be at a bit of a loose end then?’

‘I have got other friends!’

For a while she had been watching a small, plump man hovering just out of her mother’s line of vision. She thought he had been listening in, waiting for them to finish their conversation. Now he was approaching and Hannah stood up to greet him. Rosie thought, She planned this all along. She knew I’d not come if she warned me.

‘This is Arthur,’ Hannah said.

Rosie could tell her mother was nervous and decided to be gracious. ‘Hi.’

‘Arthur works with me at the prison. He’s a psychologist.’

Rosie nodded. What could you say?

‘Rosie was just telling me that two of her friends are going on holiday.’ Hannah shot her the look Rosie remembered from Sunday-afternoon tea at her grandma and granda’s house. A pleading look which said, Please behave, please don’t show me up.

Rosie said nothing. Arthur smiled. It would be easy, Rosie thought, to be taken in by that smile.

Hannah continued, ‘I was just going to tell her about my trip.’

‘What trip?’

‘There’s a school reunion. I thought I should go…’

‘Great. Can I come?’ It was a malicious offer. She didn’t want her mother to go off with this little round man with the beguiling smile. She wanted to pay Hannah back for treating her like a six-year-old.

‘Do you really want to?’

Hannah looked so pathetically grateful that Rosie couldn’t say she didn’t mean it. Anyway, what was wrong with running away for a couple of days?

‘Why not?’

Arthur smiled again as if this was what he’d been planning all along and he went to the bar for drinks.

Although Hannah had avoided Sally since she’d left the town to go to university, she had kept in touch with her friend’s news. Sally had gone up in the world since they’d first become mates in Cranford. At school she’d lived with her parents on a small council estate, a couple of streets which ran down the hill to the west of the town. Her father had been a barber. Her mother had worked in the chemist’s in the high street. There’d been a younger sister, a pretty child called Joanne. Hannah’s dad had worked in the only bank in the town and they’d owned their own home, but the families’ lives had been very similar. There’d been an emphasis on good manners and tidiness. Of course, after Hannah’s father had died things were never the same again. Then she’d loved spending time with Sal’s family. Everything in their little house had seemed safe and respectable.

Sally didn’t go to university. She’d had no academic ambition though she’d been bright enough. Instead she’d got a job as office junior on the local paper. She was still there in a more glorified form, writing features and running the women’s page. She’d sent Hannah a cutting when she first got the post as features editor. There had been a photograph at the top of the page and she’d put on a lot of weight. Hannah thought she made the job sound grander than it was. The paper had turned into one of those free weeklies which are seventy per cent adverts. She did write back to congratulate Sally about the promotion. She hadn’t wanted to appear mean spirited.

When she was nineteen Sally married Chris, a lad they’d knocked about with. A baby arrived soon after. Chris worked for a printer and on summer evenings ran a disco in the caravan site near the lake. There was one more baby then Hannah heard that they’d separated. Much later she saw a piece in a Newcastle paper saying Chris had been sentenced to twelve months’ imprisonment for selling drugs. She wondered if he would turn up at the prison, but if he had she’d never met him. Not so far as she knew. Would she have recognized him after all this time?

When Sally wrote to say that she was getting married for a second time to a local businessman, Hannah had imagined a shopkeeper or someone running a small unit on the business park near the river. A barber even, like her dad. But it turned out that Sally’s new husband was an hotelier. Hannah might have gone to the wedding – in fact had been building herself up to it – but in the end she was never invited. Sally said it was a very small affair because she and Roger were busy preparing for the holiday season. The hotel was close to the lake and attracted tourists.

On the drive to Cranford Rosie fell asleep before they’d left their estate and didn’t wake until they’d nearly arrived. She sat with her head tipped back, snoring slightly through an open mouth. Hannah didn’t mind. It was a reminder of what she’d looked like as a small child.

She had only been back to Cranford once, for her mother’s funeral, and that was in her third year of university. Because she was so far away – she had been at university in Exeter – the funeral had been organized by Hannah’s aunt. Hannah had stayed with her for one night then returned to the West Country, glad of the excuse of exams.

Jonathan couldn’t understand her refusal to return to the place of her birth. In the beginning at least, he had been interested in going. ‘For Christ’s sake, H, it’s only fifty miles away. We could be there and back in an afternoon. Show me the scenes of your wild youth.’ He’d thought he was being funny. Hannah had made no attempt to explain her reluctance.

They came upon the town almost before she realized, and then she saw with a start that it had hardly changed at all. It felt as she remembered it: stately, quiet, seductive; a place which was hard to leave, very different from Millhaven, the town on the coast which was now her home. That was rakish and full of people passing through – students, hotel workers, yuppies using it as a staging post. And affluent businessmen like Richard Gillespie who lived there to show they had a certain style and personality. Though no doubt he would be moving on too.