Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and the Dead

Despite her resistance, memories were already clicking into her brain, jerky images like an old home movie.

‘He told me a lot of things,’ she said. ‘Not all of them were true.’

‘But..?’ Porteous prompted.

‘But I really think his mother died when he was little. He was quite specific about that. She died of leukaemia and he could remember the funeral. Nobody had explained to him properly what was going on. He couldn’t understand where his mother was. When a black car turned up at the house, he thought it was to take him to see her.’ Hannah stopped, then continued hesitantly, ‘It was early spring. There were crocuses on the lawn. I don’t know if that’s any help.’ She thought: Unless that was one of his fictions too.

Porteous said, ‘At present everything is helpful.’

‘There is something else.’ She paused. She didn’t want to make a fool of herself and she had a sense too that she was betraying Michael. But it was a matter of self-preservation. She had to give the detectives something to get them off her back. ‘He resat the lower sixth. He was a year older than the rest of us.’ Again she saw she was telling the men something they already knew and wondered what other secrets they were keeping to themselves. ‘He made up a tale about his having been ill, but it was quite similar to his story of his mother’s illness. I was taken in by it at the time. Why wouldn’t I be? But now I work as a prison librarian and it’s occurred to me that there might be another explanation for his missing year. I wondered if he might have been in trouble. Youth custody. Borstal, I suppose it would have been then. That would be something he wouldn’t want to admit to the Brices or to me. That wouldn’t fit into the Michael Grey myth.’

She realized she sounded bitter and to hide her confusion poured herself another cup of coffee, though by now it was cold. Porteous jotted a few lines in his notebook but gave no other indication of what he thought of the theory.

‘Was he the sort of lad who might have been away?’ Stout asked.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You work in the nick, Mrs Morton. There aren’t many well-read, nicely spoken blokes in there.’

‘More than you’d realize.’ She thought of Marty, whose consideration had led to her being there.

‘But you know what I mean,’ Stout persisted. ‘Most of the men will have been brought up with some degree of physical and emotional deprivation.’

It seemed an odd thing for a policeman to say. She took his point more seriously.

‘Michael was a brilliant actor. And he was quick and bright. He could be whatever anyone wanted him to be. Do I think he was brought up in the west end of Newcastle or on a council estate in Wallsend? Probably not, but I wouldn’t be astonished if that turned out to be the case.’

‘Where was he brought up then?’

‘West Yorkshire. At least that’s where he said he went to school.’ Hannah waited for another question: And before that? But it never came. Besides, she had told them the truth. On Michael’s first day a girl from the upper sixth had asked which school he’d come from and he’d answered, without pausing a moment, giving her a smile: ‘A place in West Yorkshire. You won’t have heard of it.’

When Hannah told Porteous that, he wrote it down and said seriously to Stout, ‘It seems a strange thing to make up, that, off the cuff. Check out approved schools, borstals and detention centres for that period in Yorkshire. Or perhaps that’s where his family lived. We might find his mother’s records.’

I don’t think you will, Hannah thought, and wondered why she didn’t speak the words out loud. Porteous turned to her with his diffident smile, which wasn’t very different from one of the expressions in Michael’s repertoire. ‘Is there anything else you remember from that first meeting, Mrs Morton?’

She didn’t answer. She thought she’d given him enough.

‘You don’t know how much this is helping us. We’re very fortunate to have found a reliable witness at this early stage. What about his voice? Could you believe that he came from Yorkshire?’

‘It depended to whom he was talking.’

‘Sorry?’

‘It was a habit. I explained he was an actor but I don’t think this was self-conscious. He didn’t realize he was changing his voice to suit the occasion. But he was. When he was speaking to us he spoke as we did. With the Brices it was old-fashioned English. We had a biology teacher from Edinburgh. She thought he came from there too because when he spoke to her he had something of the accent. It wasn’t imitation or that he was trying to impress. He was a sort of verbal chameleon.’

Hannah sipped cold coffee. She thought she had nothing left to tell them. Surely now they would let her go. But Porteous shifted uncomfortably in his very comfortable chair.

‘Tell us about you relationship with Mr Grey,’ he said gently. He was more like a counsellor than a police officer. ‘In some detail if you wouldn’t mind, Mrs Morton. If you could cast your mind back.’

‘We were friends,’ Hannah said.

‘More than friends surely.’

‘Not at first.’

The men waited for her to say more.

‘What are these questions about?’ She’d had enough. ‘You know who he is. Sally told me you found the dental records. There must be more efficient ways of finding what you want than listening to my ram-blings.’

Porteous gave another little apologetic smile. ‘Unfortunately not. Apart from your ramblings we’ve very little. We know that the body in the lake was that of a young man known as Michael Grey. One day he had toothache and Mrs Brice took him to her dentist. We’re lucky that the practice kept records, but it hasn’t provided us with a conclusive identification. It hasn’t helped us to trace the victim’s family. Because no birth certificate was issued to Michael Grey on the date he gave as his date of birth. There are no medical records or child-benefit records for him. There is no record of his having existed before he started school with you.’

They looked at her. It had been a long time since anyone had given her their full attention. She found it flattering. No doubt it was a technique they often used. She was taken in by it. She dragged her memory back almost thirty years.

Her father died the summer Michael arrived. He committed suicide. He rigged up a hose-pipe from the exhaust of their Austin and the fumes killed him. Hannah didn’t find him. He had timed it so her mother would do that when she went into the garage to fetch potatoes to peel for their supper. Mr Meek had an allotment. He kept the potatoes in the garage in wooden trays in the dark to stop them sprouting.

Looking back, Hannah thought her father and mother had never got on. He was nervy, quick to snap. Any noise or disruption to his routine threw him. She thought perhaps she’d inherited her own intolerance of change from him. He was a chain smoker. Every evening he came home from work, threw down his briefcase and would sit for an hour, sucking on cigarette after cigarette, going through the imagined slights of the day. He felt he was much undervalued at the bank. No one appreciated the work he put in. The only time he was anything like content was in the allotment. Perhaps the physical activity helped him to relax. Perhaps in the mindless routine of digging and weeding he could forget his troubles.

Hannah’s mother didn’t like the idea of the allotment. She pretended it didn’t exist. She had been pretty as a girl and could have had her pick of the lads in the town, the ones who came back after the war. She had chosen Edward Meek over the plumbers and bricklayers because he worked in the bank. He wouldn’t have to get his hands dirty. It put her on a par with other professional wives. Perhaps she imagined dinner parties and coffee mornings, but in fact she was awkward in company and if the invitations had ever come they soon dried up. When Hannah was a child Audrey Meek seemed to have no friends at all. She confided in her daughter, shared her loneliness and her disappointment with her. She had spent her life being disappointed.