Ann Cleeves - The Sleeping and the Dead

Eleanor gave a little whimper. Rosie felt sorry for her though she’d never much taken to her before. She’d been friendly enough, but in a desperate way. She tried too hard to be one of the girls.

There was a knock on the door. Richard touched Eleanor’s hand, extinguishing the hope before it was lit. ‘That’ll be Joe.’

Joe looked shattered. He was still wearing his uniform from the supermarket. It had been one of his nights for work. Any other time Rosie would have teased him about the shiny grey trousers, the blazer with the company logo on the breast pocket.

Now she just said, ‘You must have had time to change.’ His night shift finished at seven thirty.

‘It’s been a nightmare. I borrowed my mum’s car. It broke down on the bypass on my way home. It took the AA an hour and a half to get there and then they couldn’t fix it. By the time they’d got it to the garage…’ He stopped, shrugged, turned to the Gillespies. ‘Anyway, I got your message.’

Richard seemed to have forgotten about the coffee. Rosie tipped some into a mug, waved the jug towards the others.

‘Yeah,’ Joe said. ‘Thanks.’ She poured one for him and replaced the jug on the hotplate.

‘Mel’s gone missing,’ Rosie said. ‘She came to see me at the Prom but I wasn’t there. She didn’t come to your house? It would have been between ten thirty and eleven.’ She felt the need to take charge. Even Richard seemed to have given in to lethargy. He was staring out of the window.

‘It was one of my regular work nights,’ Joe said. ‘She might have forgotten and gone to the house but no one would have been there. Mum and Dad were at the theatre and Grace spent the night with a mate.’ Grace was his thirteen-year-old sister.

They sat round the table looking at each other. Eleanor had moved away from the Aga to join them. Richard was at the head. He dragged his attention away from the garden. The chairman of the board, Rosie thought, trying to hold his team together.

‘She has other friends,’ he said. ‘She’ll have wanted to teach us a lesson. That’s what this is all about. It would be best if the kids phoned around.’ He looked at Rosie and Joe. ‘You know the names and the numbers and they’d be more likely to tell you the truth.’

They started with a pretence of enthusiasm, but soon it was obvious to them both that Mel wasn’t with any of the usual gang. Eleanor would have had them phoning all day. It was Joe, hollow-eyed and fraught, who said, ‘Look, I think you should go to the police.’

Eleanor and Richard shot a look at each other which Rosie couldn’t interpret.

‘This evening,’ Richard said. ‘I promise. If she’s not back this evening…’

Soon after, they left – Rosie to town to check on some places Mel might be and Joe to sleep. They were standing, talking together on the corner of the street before going their separate ways, when the Volvo pulled out of the drive and accelerated away. Richard Gillespie off to do some other deal. Rosie imagined Eleanor Gillespie curled up again in the wicker chair waiting for the phone to ring or the door to open.

Hannah’s father had been cremated. Her mother had wanted the whole business over quickly, without any fuss. Hannah remembered the undertaker coming to the house to discuss arrangements. He was young, with impeccable clothes and a nervous cough. Perhaps Edward had been his first suicide.

‘No fuss,’ Audrey said immediately, before he had a chance to sit down. ‘No show.’

‘Nothing in the papers then?’

‘Certainly not.’

‘Flowers?’

‘No!’ She spoke very fiercely and he asked no more questions.

Hannah and her mother stood alone in the crematorium and watched the flimsy coffin slide behind the curtains. Afterwards they went home for tea and Battenberg, a cake Edward had always particularly disliked.

Michael’s mother, however, had been buried. There had been mourners dressed in smart clothes, a black limousine which had taken Michael from wherever he had been living as a child to a church and then to the cemetery by the lighthouse. Had he mentioned a church? Hannah thought he had. The crocuses on the lawn, a church filled with weeping people, then another ride in the car to the cemetery.

Hannah had felt lousy all day. The encounter with the detectives had left her with a thick head and a jumpiness verging on paranoia. She was frightened that they’d turn up at any time to ask more of their questions. In the prison Marty saw at once that she wasn’t well and had the kettle on before she asked him. She was tempted to seek out Arthur at lunchtime but something stopped her. More pride. She didn’t want to admit to a hangover at her age. She didn’t want him analysing her problems, coming to conclusions about her weakness and loneliness. She’d always been a person to give support, never to need it.

When Hannah got home, the house was empty. There was a cryptic note on the table from Rosie saying something urgent had come up and she’d be back by eleven. Hannah’d had nothing to eat all day but she couldn’t face supper. She couldn’t settle. So she went for a walk to the cemetery to look for Michael’s mother.

Michael hadn’t started school when his mother died. She was sure of that. It was the way he’d spoken of the wrench of her going into hospital. She must always have been around before. So, Hannah thought, when his mother died Michael would have been five at the oldest, three at the youngest. His memories had a clarity and sophistication which would have been unlikely in a toddler. The death would have occurred between forty to forty-two years previously. Even then it would have been unusual for a woman to die so young. Perhaps on the headstone there would be mention of a child. At the very least, Hannah thought, she should be able to provide Porteous and Stout with a short list of possible names. Information for the team to check, to get them off her back.

She walked along the sea front towards the lighthouse. The salty breeze and the smell of seaweed cleared her head for the first time that day. The car ferry from Bergen slid past on its way to the dock further up the river. Hannah remembered a family holiday in Norway. Rosie had been six. She’d been sick on the boat. Jonathan had sulked all week because the food in the farmhouse hadn’t lived up to his expectations and he hadn’t been able to get hold of a decent bottle of wine. Even before the arrival of Eve the temptress it hadn’t been much of a marriage. ‘You’ll be better off without him,’ her friends said. Until now it had been too much like admitting failure to agree.

The cemetery was almost empty. In the distance a workman was mowing the grass paths but the sound of the machine hardly reached her. At first she wandered aimlessly, her attention caught and held by unusual names, ornate carvings, simple messages of bereavement. Then, as the shadows lengthened she brought more order into the search. The modern graves – those dug within the last twenty years – were at the far end, the furthest inland. Those could be ignored. The remaining plots were in a more random jumble. There seemed to be no chronological order. The space was divided occasionally by a high cypress hedge or a stone arch. Rooks were gathering in the trees which separated the graveyard from the road. She walked up and down the lines of headstones to the jarring sound of the rooks, moving on quickly if the deceased were a man or too old, only stopping for a woman and if the date was right.

Most of the women had been elderly when they died. Most, it seemed, had been widows. The Elsies, the Mays and the Maggies had all joined dear departed husbands. She had almost given up hope when she came across one which fitted her dates. The grave had been planted with ivy and she pulled the plant away from the headstone to read the letters. Frances Lumley, aged thirty, daughter of Elizabeth and Miles. Hannah crouched on her heels to clean the rest of the text, convinced that her search was over. But Frances Lumley had been drowned at sea and there was no mention of a husband or child. And she had died in September, not a season for crocuses.