Стивен Бут - Blind to the Bones

And now Fry thought she could guess the answer to her next question, but she asked it anyway.

‘Have you kept Emma’s room as it was?’

‘Yes,’ said Sarah.

‘May I see that, too?’

‘I’ll show you,’ said Howard, and jumped up, as if relieved to have an excuse for moving around again. Perhaps the atmosphere had become that little bit too cloying for him. Fry was certainly glad of the cooler air in the hallway and the light from the big picture window at the top of the stairs. In the kitchen, she glimpsed a despondent-looking black Cocker Spaniel — presumably the source of the dog hairs on Sarah Renshaw’s skirt.

‘How long have you lived here, Mr Renshaw?’ asked Fry.

‘More than twenty years. Before that we lived in Marple, over in Cheshire.’

‘Nice place?’

‘It’s a very nice place, yes. We had a lovely house, too, and lots of friends there.’

‘But Emma always lived here, until she went to the Black Country?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you like it here?’

‘Certainly. The only problem we’ve ever had was a burglary a few months ago. But everybody has had them around here. We didn’t lose very much. The sad thing is, we wouldn’t even have been out of the house at the time, but we’d had some guidance on where we should look for Emma. Sarah was a bit upset about that.’

‘Of course.’

As Fry had expected, Emma’s bedroom was a shrine, complete in itself. There were pictures on the wall and stacked on a desk, and there were framed photographs of Emma as a girl, from a toddler of about two through to a teenager with long hair. A small dressing table contained bottles of scent and pots of make-up, and a bathrobe hung over the chair, as if it had just been draped there a few minutes ago. No doubt the wardrobe was packed full of Emma’s clothes. The bed was neatly made and ready for use, apart from the fact that the duvet and pillows were partly occupied by teddy bears of various colours and sizes.

‘By the way, I’m sorry about Edgar,’ said Howard.

‘Oh, the bear?’

‘At first, Sarah used to hide him when people came to the house. She was embarrassed to be asked questions about it. But it was more embarrassing for visitors, when she saw the look on their faces and could see they didn’t know the right words to say. After a while, though, we decided to leave the bear where it is. Now, it would seem like an insult to Emma to hide it away. It’s just our way of coping. I hope you don’t mind.’

‘No, of course not.’

‘I thought your colleague looked a little uncomfortable.’

Fry was going to explain that Gavin Murfin didn’t do sensitive, but she held her tongue and asked instead about the items the Renshaws had brought back from the house in Bearwood.

‘These are the pictures on her desk, here.’

‘Do you mind if I take a look?’

‘Not at all.’

Fry flipped through the pictures. Some were pencil or charcoal drawings; some were done in watercolours or gouache. There were landscapes and abstract designs, and some of them seemed to be sketches of fashion models in bizarre clothes, or simply fancy typefaces with 3D effects. Others were computer graphics in odd colours, like photographic negatives. Fry didn’t consider herself any kind of expert, but she saw very little that she would have considered talent.

‘Those are the best ones,’ said Howard. ‘We’ve been sorting them out ready for bank holiday Monday. We’re holding an Emma Day.’

‘You’re doing what?’

‘We’re holding an Emma Day. We’ve found all Emma’s drawings and her poems, and we’re going to display them for everyone to see, so they’ll know what she is like. We want to share her with people. Share her talent. We’ve advertised it in the local paper, and in the shops, and we’ve put posters up in the village hall and at the pub. We’ve phoned all our friends and sent invitations out. We’re going to make all Emma’s favourite food, and play her favourite music, so that it will be a complete experience. And then people will be able to know her, almost as we do. It’ll be wonderful.’

‘Yes, I’m sure,’ said Fry, cringing inwardly and trying not to show it. She stared at a drawing of a hillside with a full moon coming up behind it. In the middle foreground was a figure in a floaty dress and with floaty hair, walking up a long, winding path towards the top of the hill. The picture was done in watercolours, with carefully toned blues and greys. But it looked as though it hadn’t quite been finished, as if the artist might, perhaps, have lost interest in the idea. The journey towards the rising moon had never quite been completed.

Fry saw that there were poems too, written out carefully on pages taken from an exercise book and mounted on coloured card. She took in a few lines, felt her stomach clench in reaction to their sentimentality, and couldn’t bring herself to read any more.

But Mr Renshaw had picked one up and was reading it himself. As he read it, the tears were already starting to form in his eyes.

‘It’ll be wonderful,’ he said.

‘Yes.’

He turned to Fry. ‘Will you be here on Monday?’

‘Er, no, I don’t expect to be on duty next Monday,’ said Fry.

‘If you aren’t working, you can come. You will come, won’t you? The house will be open all day.’

Howard handed her a hardback diary, of A5 size. Fry glanced inside and saw it was a day to a page, and Emma had found a lot to say.

‘Thank you. You’ll have it back safely.’

Although the bedroom contained so much of Emma’s, it was obvious that there were also things of hers dispersed all around the house. A pair of her shoes stood next to one of the chairs in the sitting room. Another of Emma’s teddy bears sat on one of the spare chairs at the kitchen table, where the Renshaws usually ate breakfast. And as they walked from the sitting room to the dining room, they passed a bookcase, full of books in perfectly neat rows.

‘These are Emma’s books,’ said Howard, though it was unnecessary by now.

Fry was starting to see the way the Renshaws’ minds were working. They were trying to convince themselves that Emma still lived with them, every moment of the day. For them, each teddy bear contained a lingering fragment of Emma’s personality, just like the shoes and the books, and the scent bottles on her bedside table. And perhaps they were right. Perhaps each of their daughter’s possessions retained faint strands of her spirit, her essence and her memories, locked inside their plain physical reality. And no doubt the Renshaws prayed that all these small parts of Emma might one day be brought together to re-create her, in the same way that scientists could bring extinct animals to life from the DNA traces in their bones. Fry felt sure that Sarah Renshaw believed it could happen. She believed with all her heart that it could happen.

‘Mrs Renshaw, do you really still believe Emma is going to come home one day?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you, sir?’

Howard laid a hand on his wife’s shoulder again. ‘No one has shown us any proof otherwise,’ he said.

Sarah nodded. ‘People seem to think that we should give up hope. But how can we? We’d be letting Emma down, if we did that. We have to do everything we can for her. We have to keep trying all the ways we can think of. Because if we stopped trying, we might miss the one little thing that would lead us to her. I couldn’t bear the thought of that.’

Gavin Murfin had been very still for a while. Fry looked at him to make sure he was awake. She was amazed to see that he was surreptitiously trying to wipe moisture from his eyes with his finger. Sarah Renshaw had noticed, too, and passed him a box of tissues from the side table without a word.