Val McDermid: A Darker Domain

‘I don’t let my junior officers waste their time making tea,’ Karen said drily. ‘I just happened to be the one who answered the phone.’ She half-turned, looked back and said, ‘If you’ll come with me?’

Karen led the way down a side corridor to a small room. A long window gave on to the car park and, in the distance, the artificially uniform green of the golf course. Four chairs upholstered in institutional grey tweed were drawn up to a round table, its cheerful cherry wood polished to a dull sheen. The only indicator of its function was the gallery of framed photographs on the wall, all shots of police officers in action. Every time she used this room, Karen wondered why the brass had chosen the sort of photos that generally appeared in the media after something very bad had happened.

The woman looked around her uncertainly as Karen pulled out a chair and gestured for her to sit down. ‘It’s not like this on the telly,’ she said.

‘Not much about Fife Constabulary is,’ Karen said, sitting down so that she was at ninety degrees to the woman rather than directly opposite her. The less confrontational position was usually the most productive for a witness interview.

‘Where’s the tape recorders?’ The woman sat down, not pulling her chair any closer to the table and hugging her bag in her lap.

Karen smiled. ‘You’re confusing a witness interview with a suspect interview. You’re here to report something, not to be questioned about a crime. So you get to sit on a comfy chair and look out the window.’ She flipped open her pad. ‘I believe you’re here to report a missing person?’

‘That’s right. His name’s -’

‘Just a minute. I need you to back up a wee bit. For starters, what’s your name?’

‘Michelle Gibson. That’s my married name. Prentice, that’s my own name. Everybody calls me Misha, though.’

‘Right you are, Misha. I also need your address and phone number.’

Misha rattled out details. ‘That’s my mum’s address. I’m sort of acting on her behalf, if you see what I mean?’

Karen recognized the village, though not the street. Started out as one of the hamlets built by the local laird for his coal miners when the workers were as much his as the mines themselves. Ended up as commuterville for strangers with no links to the place or the past. ‘All the same,’ she said, ‘I need your details too.’

Misha’s brows lowered momentarily, then she gave an address in Edinburgh. It meant nothing to Karen, whose knowledge of the social geography of the capital, a mere thirty miles away, was parochially scant. ‘And you want to report a missing person,’ she said.

Misha gave a sharp sniff and nodded. ‘My dad. Mick Prentice. Well, Michael, really, if you want to be precise.’

‘And when did your dad go missing?’ This, thought Karen, was where it would get interesting. If it was ever going to get interesting.

‘Like I told the guy downstairs, twenty-two and a half years ago. Friday 14th December 1984 was the last time we saw him.’ Misha Gibson’s brows drew down in a defiant scowl.

‘It’s kind of a long time to wait to report someone missing,’ Karen said.

Misha sighed and turned her head so she could look out of the window. ‘We didn’t think he was missing. Not as such.’

‘I’m not with you. What do you mean, “not as such”?’

Misha turned back and met Karen’s steady gaze. ‘You sound like you’re from round here.’

Wondering where this was going, Karen said. ‘I grew up in Methil.’

‘Right. So, no disrespect, but you’re old enough to remember what was going on in 1984.’

‘The miners’ strike?’

Misha nodded. Her chin stayed high, her stare defiant. ‘I grew up in Newton of Wemyss. My dad was a miner. Before the strike, he worked down the Lady Charlotte. You’ll mind what folk used to say round here - that nobody was more militant than the Lady Charlotte pitmen. Even so, there was one night in December, nine months into the strike, when half a dozen of them disappeared. Well, I say disappeared, but everybody knew the truth. That they’d gone to Nottingham to join the blacklegs.’ Her face bunched in a tight frown, as if she was struggling with some physical pain. ‘Five of them, nobody was too surprised that they went scabbing. But according to my mum, everybody was stunned that my dad had joined them. Including her.’ She gave Karen a look of pleading. ‘I was too wee to remember. But everybody says he was a union man through and through. The last guy you’d expect to turn blackleg.’ She shook her head. ‘Still, what else was she supposed to think?’

Karen understood only too well what such a defection must have meant to Misha and her mother. In the radical Fife coalfield, sympathy was reserved for those who toughed it out. Mick Prentice’s action would have granted his family instant pariah status. ‘It can’t have been easy for your mum,’ she said.

‘In one sense, it was dead easy,’ Misha said bitterly. ‘As far as she was concerned, that was it. He was dead to her. She wanted nothing more to do with him. He sent money, but she donated it to the hardship fund. Later, when the strike was over, she handed it over to the Miners’ Welfare. I grew up in a house where my father’s name was never spoken.’

Karen felt a lump in her chest, somewhere between sympathy and pity. ‘He never got in touch?’

‘Just the money. Always in used notes. Always with a Nottingham postmark.’

‘Misha, I don’t want to come across like a bitch here, but it doesn’t sound to me like your dad’s a missing person.’ Karen tried to make her voice as gentle as possible.

‘I didn’t think so either. Till I went looking for him. Take it from me, Inspector. He’s not where he’s supposed to be. He never was. And I need him found.’

The naked desperation in Misha’s voice caught Karen by surprise. To her, that was more interesting than Mick Prentice’s whereabouts. ‘How come?’ she said.

Tuesday 19th June 2007; Edinburgh

It had never occurred to Misha Gibson to count the number of times she’d emerged from the Sick Kids’ with a sense of outrage that the world continued on its way in spite of what was happening inside the hospital behind her. She’d never thought to count because she’d never allowed herself to believe it might be for the last time. Ever since the doctors had explained the reason for Luke’s misshapen thumbs and the scatter of café-au-lait spots across his narrow back, she had nailed herself to the conviction that somehow she would help her son dodge the bullet his genes had aimed at his life expectancy. Now it looked as if that conviction had finally been tested to destruction.

Misha stood uncertain for a moment, resenting the sunshine, wanting weather as bleak as her mood. She wasn’t ready to go home yet. She wanted to scream and throw things and an empty flat would tempt her to lose control and do just that. John wouldn’t be home to hold her or to hold her back; he’d known about her meeting with the consultant so of course work would have thrown up something insurmountable that only he could deal with.

Instead of heading up through Marchmont to their sandstone tenement, Misha cut across the busy road to the Meadows, the green lung of the southern city centre where she loved to walk with Luke. Once, when she’d looked at their street on Google Earth, she’d checked out the Meadows too. From space, it looked like a rugby ball fringed with trees, the criss-cross paths like laces holding the ball together. She’d smiled at the thought of her and Luke scrambling over the surface like ants. Today, there were no smiles to console Misha. Today, she had to face the fact that she might never walk here with Luke again.