Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and the Dead

‘I don’t know what Sally has told you…’ she said. She wanted to take the initiative, to appear purposeful, to let them know she couldn’t be browbeaten.

Porteous, the younger, answered. He seemed diffident, almost apologetic. The voice was educated, but somewhere behind the polish there was a Midland whine.

‘She said that you and Mr Grey were close at the time of his death.’

Stout interrupted briskly. ‘We think it’s possible, Mrs Morton, that you were the last person to see him alive. That, at least, is the information we’ve been given.’

Hannah stared at them. Trust Sally to stir things up. Trust her to turn this into the plot line of a soap opera. Hannah thought her judgement had been right all along. She should never have been persuaded to come back.

‘I know it’s a long time,’ Porteous said. ‘But if you could just take your mind back…’

‘How did he die?’ Hannah demanded. ‘You must have done a post-mortem if you know he was murdered. You pulled him out days ago.’

They seemed shocked and the words sounded callous even in her own head, but Hannah needed to get the facts straight, neatly catalogued like books on a shelf. Stout looked at Porteous who nodded imperceptibly. She realized then that Porteous must be the superior and was glad to have another fact sorted.

‘He was stabbed,’ Stout said, ‘with a sharp, wide-bladed knife.’

Hannah had an image of Jenny Graves at a school play rehearsal. It must have been a dress rehearsal because she was in costume. Her dress had been hired from the local amateur-dramatic society and was scarlet, laced at the front, daringly low cut. She had fake blood all over her hand. Mr Westcott had been so pleased with her performance that he had clapped. Hannah realized that the detectives were staring at her, waiting for her to speak.

‘Have you told Michael’s family?’ she asked, not putting off answering but fishing again for information. She was still curious about Michael’s family.

Again Stout and Porteous looked at each other. Again, it seemed Stout was given permission to answer.

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Well, we seem to have come up with a bit of a problem there. We’re having some difficulty tracing them. He seems to have been a real mystery your young man, a real mystery. That was one of the reasons why we were so keen to talk to you.’

They looked at Hannah expectantly. At last she felt obliged to tell them at least something of what she knew.

‘When we were at school together Michael Grey lived with foster parents. His mother had died and his father had worked abroad a lot. Or was ill. I’m not sure.’ It had seemed to Hannah even in the beginning that Michael had made himself up as he went along. He changed his story to suit his audience. She had caught him out a few times and at first it had seemed to disconcert him. Later, when he realized how she felt about him, he had only grinned.

‘What did the father do?’ Stout asked. ‘Work, I mean. The boy must have said.’

‘I got the impression that he was employed by the Government. Some high-powered diplomat or civil servant. Something that took him away a lot.’

‘He must have come back sometimes to see his son.’

‘No. Never. Not that I remember. I never met him.’

‘Didn’t that strike you as odd?’

Hannah didn’t answer. Michael’s strangeness had been part of his attraction.

‘What about the foster parents?’ Porteous asked. His voice was gentle. Hannah thought he had set out to win her round. ‘You must be able to tell us about them.’

She knew he would have got that much at least from the school records, but decided to play the game.

‘Their names were Brice. Stephen and Sylvia. An elderly couple, more like grandparents than parents. They’d never had children of their own. Stephen was a retired vicar. They were devoted to each other, kind to everyone, into good causes. They lived in one of those terraced houses near the school.’ She looked up at him sharply. ‘You must know all this.’

‘Part of it. I haven’t been able to speak to anyone who knew them.’

‘I didn’t really know them,’ she said quickly. ‘I only met them once or twice.’

They had come to the performance of Macbeth . From her position as prompt, Hannah had seen them sitting proudly in the front row. At the end they had stood up and cheered, more like elderly eccentrics on the last night of the Proms than the audience of a school play. She could imagine them dressed up and waving a Union Jack. They had seemed to her then very old and even now, looking back from middle-age, she thought they must have been in their late sixties or seventies. They both had silver hair. Sylvia wore hers long, pinned back with a tortoiseshell comb. Their house was the quietest Hannah had ever been in. There was no television or radio. She remembered a ginger cat which purred and a clock which chimed the quarter-hour. She presumed this was not the sort of information which would be of interest to Porteous or Stout.

‘They never reported him missing,’ Stout said in a slightly aggrieved way, as if he took the Brices’ failure to make a fuss personally. ‘Nobody started looking for him until they died. Then the solicitor tried but couldn’t trace him.’

Hannah wondered what had happened to the small, tidy house. It seemed unfeeling to ask. She had gone there first for tea. Michael had asked her. Although the Brices hadn’t been expecting her they were thrilled to see her. ‘We’re always telling Michael he should invite his friends in.’

His attitude to them was delightful. He was thoughtful and playful. He called them Sylvie and Steve. But as they sat in front of the fire in the tiny drawing-room, eating seed cake and crumpets, the thread of the conversation had led Hannah to think that they knew little more about his past than she did. It seemed that Stephen had been invited to a theological college in Idaho to give a lecture on the Psalms. They had been discussing flight plans, when Sylvia asked suddenly, ‘Have you ever been abroad, Michael? I can’t remember your saying.’

It was as if they had depended on what he told them for their knowledge of him. Hannah struggled to explain that to the detectives. ‘I don’t think they were relatives. They probably didn’t think there was anything sinister in his disappearance. They’d be sorry he hadn’t kept in touch, but they wouldn’t see it as their affair to meddle.’

‘What was he doing with them then?’ Stout demanded. ‘You wouldn’t just invite a strange teenager into your house.’

‘I think they were the sort of people who might.’ She paused. ‘They called him their gift from God.’

She’d always thought it was a strange thing to say. Michael had spoken of it in a slightly shamefaced way. ‘Look, Steve, that’s a big thing to live up to, you know?’ But the detectives remained impassive and unsurprised. She continued talking, trying to give an explanation they would accept as reasonable. ‘He arrived with them out of the blue, then disappeared in the same way. Perhaps that’s why they never reported him missing. They felt they had no claim on him.’

‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away,’ Stout said. ‘That’s all very well, but they must have met up with him somewhere. He wouldn’t just have knocked on the door.’

‘Perhaps it was arranged through a charity,’ Porteous suggested. He looked at Hannah hopefully. ‘Was anything like that mentioned, Mrs Morton? Can you remember the name of any organization which might have put Michael in touch with the Brices?’

She shook her head. ‘He wouldn’t have told me,’ she said. ‘He liked being a mystery.’

‘All the same he must have said something. When you asked about his family, his previous school, he must have given some scrap of information.’