Стивен Бут: Black Dog

‘I don’t think that would be a good idea, Charlie. Leave it to the police.’

‘They know about him, don’t they?’

‘Of course. They’ve got him on their records anyway. Over that stolen car.’

‘What?’

‘You remember. The car that was taken from the car park at the top of the cliff. It belonged to some German people. Laura told us about it.’

‘Did she?’ said Charlotte vaguely.

At last she allowed him to lead her back into the room, where she began to touch familiar objects — a cushion, the back of a chair cover, the piano stool, a series of gilt-framed photographs in a cabinet. She opened her handbag, touched up her lipstick and lit another cigarette.

‘Who else is supposed to be coming tomorrow night?’ she said.

‘The Wingates. Paddy and Frances. And they’re bringing some friends of theirs from Totley. Apparently, they’re building up a big computer business, installing systems in Doncaster and Rotherham. Paddy says they’ve got a really good future. They’d make an ideal account, but I need to get in quickly and make the contact.’

‘I’d better see to the food then.’

‘Good girl.’

As she turned towards Graham now, her eyes showed no sign of any tears. Graham was glad — she was not a woman given to tears, and he would not have known how to deal with it. Instead, she fiddled with the front of her wrap, letting him glimpse her brown thighs and the gentle slope of her belly above the edge of her bikini briefs.

‘You like Frances, don’t you?’ she said.

Graham grinned, recognizing the opening. ‘Not as much as I like you, Charlie.’

He took a step towards her, but she turned suddenly and picked up one of the photograph frames from the cabinet and began to stroke its edges.

‘Won’t you go and see the Sherratt boy, Graham? To help get Laura back.’

‘Leave it for now, Charlie.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the police will find her.’

‘Will they, Graham?’

The photograph frame she was holding was bare and empty. The picture had been given to the police to enable them to identify Laura when they found her. Graham took the frame from her and replaced it in the cabinet.

‘Of course they will,’ he said.

The old woman’s burst of anger was over, but her thin hands still jerked and spasmed on the floral-patterned arms of her chair. Helen watched her until she was calm, and pulled her cardigan closer round her shoulders from where it had slipped.

‘I’ll put the kettle on, Grandma.’

‘If you like.’

‘Do you want your Special Blend?’

‘The bags’ll do. But make sure you put an extra one in the pot. You know how I like it.’

Helen stood at the narrow window of the kitchen of Dial Cottage while she waited for the kettle to boil. The electrical appliances that her father had bought for his parents-in-law left hardly any room in the kitchen to turn round. There was certainly not enough space for two people between the cooker and the oversized pine table crammed in lengthwise to the sink.

The table was scattered with cooking equipment, place mats with scenes of a North Wales seaside resort, sprigs of mint and thyme tied with bits of string, a jar of marmalade, a jar filled with wooden ladles and spatulas, a potato peeler with a wooden handle, a chopping board and half an onion soaking in a bowl of water. By the back door a pair of wellington boots and a walking stick stood on the blue lino, and a dark-green waxed coat with a corduroy collar hung from the hook where Harry’s cap would normally have been. The coat had been Helen’s present to him on his seventy-fifth birthday.

‘He was never like this before,’ said her grandmother from her chair, not needing to raise her voice over the short distance to the kitchen. ‘Never this bad. Now he can’t speak without biting my head off.’

‘Have you asked him what’s wrong?’

‘Asked him? Him ? I might as well talk to the wall.’

‘Perhaps he’s ill, Grandma.’

‘He had a cold the other week, I suppose.’

Helen could see that her grandmother thought that Harry was just being a bad-tempered old man, that she had done something to annoy him. But Helen’s thoughts were running on some serious illness troubling him, something he was keeping to himself, an awful secret he wouldn’t want to inflict on his wife and family.

There were so many possibilities when you were in your late seventies, when you smoked, when you had spent most of your working life in a lead mine, when you had fought your way through a vicious war. Her grandmother, Gwen, would not think of these things. She would believe that Harry had a bad cold right up to the moment they put him in the ground at St Edwin’s.

‘But if he’s ill it doesn’t stop him going off down there with Jess. It doesn’t stop him going off with those friends of his, either.’

‘No, Grandma.’

Helen put hot water into the teapot and emptied it out again, dropped three tea bags in and poured on the boiling water from the electric kettle.

While she waited for the tea to brew, she looked out of the window, across the back garden towards the valley. The garden itself was bright with beds of petunias and violets, rows of potato plants with white and yellow flowers, and canes wrapped round with runner beans. But beyond the garden, the woods that ran down the valley looked dark and brooding. Helen could see the police helicopter hovering over the tops of the trees half a mile away. They were still looking. Still hoping.

‘They’ve changed him. He thinks more of his cronies than he does of me. More than he does of his family.’

‘Granddad thinks the world of his family.’

‘They’ve changed him. That Wilford Cutts and the other one, Sam Beeley.’

‘Them? They’re just Granddad’s friends. His old workmates. They’re nothing to do with it.’

‘It’s them that’s done it.’

‘I’m sure they haven’t done anything, Grandma. They’re just his friends from Glory Stone Mine. He’s known them for years.’

‘Not like now. It was different before, when they were working. But now they’ve led him away, filled his head with thoughts.’

‘I don’t know what you mean,’ said Helen.

But she had wondered herself, sometimes, about what the three old men got up to when they were together out on the hill, or up on Wilford’s untidy smallholding with the flock of hens and the odd little collection of ageing animals. Sometimes Harry brought home a capful of speckled brown eggs from the Cuckoo Marans or a bag of potatoes from the disused paddock that he and Wilford had converted into a huge vegetable patch. At other times, the three of them just went to the pub, where Sam Beeley came into his own and bought the drinks.

‘Since he’s had no work, he’s been different,’ said Gwen. ‘All of them have. It doesn’t do for men to be at a loose end. Not men like them. The devil makes evil work.’

‘You’re talking nonsense now, Grandma.’

Helen found a carton of long-life milk in the fridge and dropped a tiny amount into a cup. Then she poured the tea, making sure it was good and strong.

Her grandmother had kept her old lino on the floor in the kitchen. She had protested so much when they had laid the new fitted carpet in the sitting room that her son-in-law, Andrew, had been forced to give in on this one point. She had said it was easy to keep clean. For Helen, looking at the blue lino now, it also seemed to be inseparable from the dark oak panelling and the bumpy walls and the whitewashed stone lintels over the doors.

‘He thinks more of them than me, anyway. That’s what I say. He’s proved it now.’

‘Let’s forget about it for a bit, Grandma. Enjoy your tea.’