John Harvey - Cold Light

“Hello?”

It was Nancy’s mother, calling from Merseyside to wish her daughter a merry Christmas. From the background noises, the rest of the family were waiting to do the same.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Phelan, she’s not here now.”

“But we thought she was spending Christmas Day with you. She said …”

“She is, she is. It’s just …” It’s just that she’s not back yet from getting laid. “She’s popped out. A walk. You know, clear her head.”

“She’s not ill?”

“Oh, no. No. Just last night, we went to this dinner-dance …”

There was a silence and then, indistinctly, the sound of Mrs. Phelan reporting back to the family. “Be sure to tell Nancy I called,” she said when her voice came back on the line. “I’ll try again in a little while.”

Which she did several times over the next few hours. And on each occasion the questions were increasingly anxious, Dana’s responses increasingly vague. When she was fast running out of excuses, Mr. Phelan spoke to her himself. “Enough of this pissing about, right? I want to know what’s going on.”

Best as she could, Dana told him.

“Why on earth didn’t you say that before?”

“I didn’t want her mother to be upset.”

“The minute she drags herself back in,” Mr. Phelan said, “you tell her she’s to call us, right?”

Right. At the far end of the line there was a sharp swerve of breath before the connection was broken.

Dana looked at the turkey taking up most of the refrigerator, the black plastic vegetable rack overloaded with several weeks’ supply. She pulled a frozen broccoli lasagna, only two days past its use-by date, from the freezer and put it in the microwave. In the time it took to cook, she had looked at her watch, at the clock on the kitchen-diner wall half a dozen times. When Nancy’s father next phoned, she had the directory open on her lap and was about to try the casualty department at Queen’s.

“Is it like her?” Mr. Phelan asked, no attempt to disguise the anxiety he was feeling. “Not to let you know where she is?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re living with her, girl.”

“Yes, but I mean … Well, it’s not as if there’ve been a lot of occasions …”

“So being down there hasn’t turned her into a tart, her mother will be pleased. Now have I to get in the car and drive down there or what? Because it seems to me you’re not treating this as seriously as you should.”

“I really don’t think we have to worry, I’m sure she’s fine.”

“Yes? That’s what you’d want our Nancy thinking if you were the one not come home, is it?”

A pause. “I was about to phone the hospital when you called,” Dana said.

“Good. And the police, I dare say.”

Christmas morning or no Christmas morning, Jack Skelton had been for his normal four-mile run, setting off while his wife was still apparently sleeping, returning, lightly bathed in sweat, to find her staring at him accusingly in the dressing-room mirror.

“Have fun last night, you two?” Kate asked disarmingly at breakfast.

Skelton pushed the back of the spoon down against his Shredded Wheat, breaking it into the bottom of his bowl; carefully, Alice poured tea into her cup.

“Like to have seen it,” Kate went on into the silence, “the pair of you, dancing the light fantastic. Bet you were a regular Roy Rogers and Fred Astaire.”

“It’s Ginger …” began Alice, sounding her exasperation.

“She knows,” Skelton said quietly.

“Then why doesn’t she …?”

“Can’t you tell when you’re being wound up? It was a joke.”

“Funny sort of a joke.”

“Isn’t that the usual kind?” Kate said, no disguising the malicious glint in her eye.

“Katie, that’s enough,” Skelton said.

“Your trouble, young lady,” Alice said, “you’re altogether too smart behind the ears.”

“It’s what comes of having such clever parents,” Kate replied.

Half out of her chair, Alice leaned sharply forwards, about to wipe the smile from her daughter’s face with the back of her hand. Kate stared back at her, daring her to do exactly that. Alice picked up her cup and saucer and left the room.

With a slow shake of his head, Skelton sighed.

“Did you have a good time last night?” Kate asked, this time as though she might have cared.

“It was all right, I suppose.”

“But not great?”

Skelton almost smiled. “Not great.”

“Neither was mine.”

“Your party?”

“All so boring and predictable. People getting drunk as fast as they were able, chucking up all over someone else’s floor.”

“Tom there?”

Tom was Kate’s latest, a student from the university, a bit of a highflier; in Skelton’s eyes a welcome change from the last love of her life, an unemployed goth who wore black from head to toe and claimed to be on quite good terms with the Devil.

“He was there for a bit.”

“You didn’t have a row?”

Kate shook her head. “He hates parties like that, says they’re all a bunch of immature wankers.”

Skelton managed to stop himself reacting to her choice of word; besides, it sounded as if Tom had got it pretty right. “Why on earth stay? Why not leave when he did?”

“Because he didn’t ask me. And besides, they’re my friends.”

The same friends, Skelton was thinking, you used to take E with at all-night raves.

“I hope you’re not expecting,” Kate said, “me to hang round here all day. I mean, just ’cause it’s Christmas.”

The day wore on in silent attrition. The turkey was dry on the outside, overcooked, pink, and tinged with blood close to the bone. Alice accomplished the moves from sherry to champagne to cherry brandy without breaking stride. Kate spent an hour in the bath, as long again on the phone, and then announced she was going out, not to wait up. As it was beginning to get dark Skelton appeared at the living-room door in his navy-blue track suit, new Asics running shoes.

“In training for something, Jack?” Alice asked, glancing up. “Running away?”

Before the front door had closed, she was back with her Barbara Vine.

When Skelton returned almost an hour later, Alice was sitting with the lights out, feet up, settee pulled close to the fire. She was smoking a cigarette, a liqueur glass nearby on the floor.

“Why are you sitting in the dark?” Skelton asked.

“There was a call for you,” Alice said. “From the station.” And as he crossed the room. “Don’t hurry. It wasn’t from her.”

The pavement outside the police station was littered with broken glass. Crepe paper and tinsel hung, disconsolate, from nearby railings. In the waiting area, a young woman with half her ginger hair shaved to stubble and the remainder tightly plaited, was nursing a black mongrel dog bleeding from a badly cut ear.

“What’s this, the Humane Society all of a sudden?” Skelton said to the officer on desk duty.

“Every day except Christmas, sir.”

When Skelton went close to the dog it barked and showed its teeth.

Upstairs in his office, door to the CID room open, Resnick was talking to a well-built woman Skelton took to be in her early to mid-thirties. Friend of the girl who’d gone missing, he assumed. Not a bad looker in a blousy sort of a way. At opposite sides of the room, Lynn Kellogg and Kevin Naylor were on the phones.

“When you’ve a minute, Charlie,” Skelton called from the doorway, “all right?”

He was tipping ready-ground decaf into the gold filter of his new coffee machine when Resnick knocked and walked in.

“So, Charlie, where are we? Not throwing up panic signals too soon?”