Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and the Dead

One Saturday, at about the time of the Macbeth auditions, Michael and Hannah took a trip to the coast. Occasionally they wanted to get away from home and homework and explore the surrounding district. Hannah liked to have Michael to herself. On this day they went to Millhaven, the seaside town where Hannah would end up living. Where Rosie would be born. Where her husband would fall in love with a PE teacher called Eve. They caught a bus into Newcastle, then another to the coast. It was the longest trip they had made and she wasn’t sure how they came to decide on it. On the bus Michael said he liked seaside towns in winter.

When they arrived, however, she could tell that he had been there before. It was a freezing day. Flurries of snow blew in from the sea, gathered like piles of confetti against the lampposts and wrought-iron benches. They walked shoulder to shoulder, hands deep in coat pockets, heads bowed against the wind. But not in an aimless way. Michael knew where he was going, where he wanted to be. He found his way immediately to the sea front, knew which way to turn for the funfair, closed and deserted for the winter. He stood there for a moment, looking in over the padlocked gate at the entrance to the ghost train and the helter skelter, at the still and tarnished horses under their gaudy awning. Hannah guessed he had been taken there as a child, though it didn’t seem to hold any happy memories for him.

‘A penny for them,’ she said lightly.

‘Sorry?’ He turned to her, still preoccupied.

‘What are you thinking about?’ She had to yell above the wind and felt a bit ridiculous. They weren’t ideal conditions for a deep and meaningful discussion.

‘My mother,’ he said. ‘Actually.’

She sensed that he was ready to talk, took his arm and pulled him into a pub.

Talking to the detectives, she was aware on a number of occasions of coincidences, links between her life as an eighteen-year-old and her life as a mother. Often she caught herself thinking, What would Rosie have done if that had happened to her? Certainly she would have been more assertive. She wouldn’t have waited for almost a year, content with a kiss and a fairly chaste grope. She would have wanted to know what was going on. The pub was the most obvious coincidence. When Rosie first started work in the Promenade, Hannah thought the name was familiar. She called in occasionally to collect her daughter from a late shift but the place stirred no memories. By the time Rosie worked there the Prom had become one big room with long windows painted white. One evening, when she wasn’t quite ready for her lift home, Hannah looked at the old photographs on the walls. They hadn’t been bought as a job lot by the brewery; they showed the place as it had been before it had been taken over. With a start she realized it was the pub where she and Michael had sat on that winter’s day. Then, the Promenade had two small bars separated by a gloomy corridor. The walls were half panelled in wood covered in a sticky yellow varnish, wrinkled like custard skin. They had sat all lunchtime in the corner of the snug, with their half-pints in front of them, and nobody disturbed them.

That was the time he told her about his mother’s funeral, the story Hannah passed on to the detectives, without giving them the context, without telling them where she sat to hear it. He talked in short phrases, not trying to call attention to himself this time, but trying to get it right. He described the big car whose purpose he could only guess at. The stern people in black clothes. The crocuses on the lawn.

But the funeral hadn’t taken place in Yorkshire. Hannah was sure of that. It had taken place in the windswept town on the coast. Why hadn’t she passed on that particular gem of information to Porteous and Stout? She had her reasons. Because they had irritated her with their insinuating questions. Because Michael wouldn’t have wanted them to know.

In the pub it was cold, so cold that she found it hard at first to concentrate on what Michael was saying. At one point she put her hand on the radiator and pulled it away because it was freezing, almost literally, so she felt her skin might stick to the pipe. They sat, huddled in jackets with the hoods still pulled up, Michael talking in spluttering fits.

‘I don’t remember much of the time she was ill. A visit to the hospital with my father. He was holding flowers – orange lilies, I think – and when we got to the bed he pushed them into my hand. The smell. In hospital and at home. Disinfectant, I suppose. Her face. I think I remember her face, but I’ve struggled too much to hold that in my mind and I’m not sure how accurate it is. You lose something, don’t you, if you try too hard?’

‘You must have photographs,’ Hannah said. Even after just a couple of years her memory of her father seemed to come from family snaps. There was one of him, taken at Christmas, with a paper hat on his head and a forced smile on his face, which she’d have been glad to forget.

But Michael shook his head. ‘I don’t know where they all went.’

‘Doesn’t your father have them?’ He shook his head again. He was so upset that she didn’t feel she could push it. Later she knew that to be a mistake.

‘Did she take you to the fair?’

‘I think she must have done. It’s one of the pictures I have in my head. We went down the helter skelter together. I sat between her legs. She wore tan nylons. I remember the mat we sat on. I was wearing shorts and it was prickly like coconut fibre. The sun was shining.’ He paused. ‘I chose the wrong day, didn’t I, to re-create the atmosphere?’

‘We can come back in the summer.’

‘She was buried here,’ he said suddenly. ‘In the cemetery by the lighthouse.’

‘Shall we go to look for the grave?’

He shivered. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’ve had enough now. Let’s go home.’

He placed an emphasis on the last word as if he’d come to a decision. Home was the Brices’ house. It wasn’t this place.

Rosie stood behind the bar of the Prom with her back to the punters and took a moment to catch her breath. It had been a crazy evening. Friday nights were always busy, but this had been wild. On Friday night the locals came out and trippers and people from the city. They dressed up and paraded along the sea front from one pub to another, ending up after closing in the clubs. On Friday nights every pub along the sea front had a bouncer outside. The clubs were heaving. Scantily dressed waiters and waitresses pranced between the tables with trays held high above the customers. The Prom wasn’t really part of this circuit, but some people who did the Friday-night gig as a bit of a joke started off there, because the beer was cheaper, and to show that they weren’t really taking it seriously.

Early on, a visiting rugby team had arrived and taken up residence in front of the widescreen television.

‘Isn’t rugby a winter thing?’ Rosie had asked vaguely.

They had explained it was a special tournament but she had already lost interest. She had never seen so many similar-looking men before. They were like clones, she thought. They wore matching sweatshirts with a sponsor’s logo on the back. All had square jaws and squat, square bodies. All drank the same brand of lager. As the evening wore on they grew more raucous. They bought two pints each to save queuing at the bar. They whistled and shouted at the female images on the television, but when Rosie went to clear the tables they seemed not to see her.

Tonight was even busier than usual because they were one person down. Lindsay, their most experienced barmaid, had called in sick. Frank was grumbling. Rosie, preparing to dive back into the fray to collect glasses, heard him muttering to himself. She grinned. It’ll be his age, she thought. Poor old thing. He can’t stand the pace.